Word: swanning
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...slot and pile of mail." L.A. has long been the culture capital of suspense fiction. Boston may now be moving up. In Parker's God Save the Child, kidnapers instruct that the ransom be put in a green book bag - a touch as evocative of Boston as the swan boats in the Public Garden...
...version of The Phantom of the Opera. This time the maimed and maddened musician, haunting the theater whose owner has stolen his composition, has been transformed into a pop composer. His plagiarist in Brian De Palma's film has become an evil, omnipotent promoter of rock music named Swan. The theater the Phantom haunts is no longer an opera house but a rock palace on the order of the old Fillmore. Phoenix (Jessica Harper), the woman he hopelessly loves, is now an aspiring pop singer. The organ the Phantom used to pound away on down in the sub-subbasement...
Dorian's Wrinkles. The work filched from the modern Phantom (William Finley) is a rock-cantata retelling of the Faust legend. In order to hear it properly performed, the Phantom, as well as his dream singer, must strike similar bargains with Swan, juicily played by Paul Williams, who also composed the film's good score. Swan in turn owes his power to an earlier Faustian deal of his own, a pact that borrows a few wrinkles from Dorian Gray's compact. This repetition reduces contemporary middlebrow mythomania to absurd shambles...
...like the split screen. De Palma's axiom is that in popular culture, today's wow is tomorrow's cliche and the next day's nostalgic treasure. The corollary is that our opinions in these matters are more often the product of cynical manipulators like Swan than of genuinely informed intelligence...
Indeed De Palma is particularly tough on the youths who invite people like Swan to swindle them. They are observed to grow as hysterical over a talentless transvestite swinger named Beef (played in the film's gaudiest comic turn by Gerrit Graham) as they do over the pure loveliness of Phoenix's voice. A wedding onstage turns them on, but so does an assassination. "That's entertainment!" Swan cries, and no one challenges his all-purpose definition of the term. The terrible possibility exists that he is right-that nowadays all turn-ons are equally transitory...