Why Was I Not Made of Stone Like Thee? (Notes on the Hunchback of Notre Dame)

Charles Laughton as Quasimodo in 
The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939)

It's interesting to recall that when Victor Hugo wrote his great Gothic novel, Notre-Dame de Paris (1831), he was - as the title indicates - more concerned with celebrating the Cathedral and preserving medieval architecture from modern redevelopment, than with the romantic story of poor Quasimodo, a deaf, half-blind, inarticulate hunchback and Esmeralda, a beautiful young Gypsy with a heart of gold and the power to enchant handsome soldiers, lecherous clergymen, and monstrous bell-ringers alike.   

But modern movie-going audiences didn't give a damn about the work's magnificent setting or Hugo's views on the aesthetics and politics of building design; they paid to see a freak crowned King of the Fools and swing down on a rope in order to save the sexy Gypsy girl as she is being led to the gallows for a crime she didn't commit ...

As most readers will be aware, there've been many adaptations for the cinema over the years, including, for example, the 1923 version starring Lon Chaney as Quasimodo and Patsy Ruth Miller as the lovely Esmeralda - a production that became Universal's most successful silent movie. But probably the most famous film version was released in 1939, starring the classically trained English actor Charles Laughton and the Irish-born beauty Maureen O'Hara. It's certainly the case that whenever I think of Quasimodo, it's Laughton's pug-ugly mug that comes to mind.

Mention should also be made of the 1956 Franco-Italian version starring Anthony Quinn as a far less monstrous Quasimodo and Gina Lollobrigida as a far more voluptuous Esmeralda than previously imagined. It was the first film adaptation of the story to be made in colour and also one of the very few that remains faithful to Hugo's original ending set in the graveyard where Quasimodo goes to be with the body of his beloved Esmeralda - joining his corpse bride in a deathly embrace (an ending that the 1996 Disney version unsurprisingly chose not to go with).

For me, however, the attempt to downplay Quasimodo's deformity and disability in this production is fundamentally mistaken. For as Zarathustra says, if you taketh the hump from the hunchback, you rob him of his soul.       


See: Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Book II, section 42.

The Phantom of the Opera: Monstrous of Face, Monstrous of Soul

The Phantom with mask on the cover of a 1920 French edition of the novel 
and sans mask in the 1925 Hollywood film starring Lon Chaney

    

The Phantom of the Opera, written by Gaston Leroux and first published as a single volume in 1910, was partly inspired - so it's said - by real events at the Paris Opera.

It's essentially the tale of a queer love affair between a young Swedish soprano, Christine Daaé, and the masked Phantom whom she mistakenly believes to be the angel of music sent by her dead father to help nurture her talent. Things take a sinister and violent turn for the worse after the Phantom fails to secure Christine the lead role of Marguerite in a new production of Faust and extracts revenge upon the theatre managers by dropping a crystal chandelier onto the heads of several unfortunate members of the audience seated below.

The Phantom, whom we learn is called Erik, then forcibly abducts Christine from her dressing room and keeps her imprisoned in his creepy subterranean hideaway built beneath the opera house. Here, to her horror and his great embarrassment and shame, she unmasks him and exposes his grotesquely disfigured face.

In the classic 1925 film adaptation of the book, dir. Rupert Julian and starring Lon Chaney in the title role and Mary Philbin as Christine, this is a particularly lurid and sensational scene for which Chaney famously devised his own ghoulish make-up; darkening his eye-sockets, for example, to suggest a skull-like appearance.

Chaney also pinned back the tip of his nose and enlarged the nostrils with black paint to further this cadaverous impression. Jagged false teeth and a combover completed the look, as described by Leroux in his novel. Audiences were said to have screamed and fainted in terror when they first caught sight, like Christine, of the Phantom's face.

Crucially, it should be noted that this silent Phantom's facial disfigurements are congenital in origin and not the result of an acid attack, as suggested in later films that attempt to solicit a greater degree of sympathy for Erik and transform him into a more tragic and romantic figure; i.e., to break the link between criminality and ugliness, challenging the long held belief taken as a moral fact amongst the ancient Greeks that those who were monstrum in fronte were also - without question - monstrum in animo ...