The Future: Beef

There is exactly one moment in Phantom of the Paradise that works for me, without any kind of reservation or qualification. It’s the press conference where our villain Swan introduces the world to his new performer. “Ladies and gentlemen, I bring you the future: Beef.” The camera pans over to a coffin, which is opened to reveal a curly-haired glam rocker in makeup, who looks to the camera and snarls.

Paul Williams plays it completely straight-faced — as does the movie itself — and even though the previous scene went through a line-up of possible replacements for the nostalgia band that the new act was replacing, the revelation of Beef still came as a surprise to me. It’s a weird, genuinely funny moment that still works over 50 years later.

My enchantment with Beef didn’t last long, since the very next scene shows him to be a stereotype of a queer man that honestly feels too lazy to be offensive. I was going to include a YouTube clip I’d found of Beef’s introduction, but I hadn’t noticed that the description of the video itself has the f-slur. Is it just homophobic, or is it a queer fan of the movie “taking it back?” I don’t care!

I did find an interview with Gerrit Graham talking about the process of coming up with the character, where “process” meant Brian De Palma trying to find euphemisms for what he wanted without actually saying “gay”1, and Graham doing the first thing he could think of, and then sticking with that for his entire performance.2

It felt gratifying to hear that from someone who was involved in the production — instead of someone writing about the movie long after it’d achieved whatever “cult classic” status it has now — because it fit in with the overall impression I had of the movie: ultimately, it doesn’t really warrant all the re-interpretation and analysis it’s gotten over the years, because it’s just hell of corny. It feels like a comedy made by people who don’t have a very sophisticated sense of humor, that happens to include queer characters without actually knowing any queer people.

Beef’s big musical number seemed to me to be what you get if a bunch of extremely straight people tried to make The Rocky Horror Picture Show.3 I’d initially thought it was derivative, but Paradise came out a year before Rocky Horror, but a year after the stage production that became the movie. So instead of going too far down that rabbit hole to figure out the specifics, I’m content to just conclude that they were two projects drawing from a lot of the same inspirations, made with very different mindsets.

The most obvious is that the musical in Paradise is on a set inspired by German expressionist movies, while Rocky Horror pointedly bases itself on more modern B-movies. Brian De Palma was a movie fan making movies filled with references to his favorite styles and directors, making a goofy slapstick comedy musical version of Faust. The glam rock elements were included not because of any higher-minded agenda, but simply because that was the flavor of the moment in 1974, just like Sha Na Na-style nostalgia bands had been previously.

Really, the whole idea of my trying to categorize everything into groups of Gross And Offensive, Fun But Dated Camp, or Genuinely Funny Absurdism is itself a post-Twitter phenomenon. That’s when I started trying to analyze whether I was enjoying stuff at the expense of other people, which most often takes the form of being offended on other people’s behalf.

This is the Sleepaway Camp phenomenon: I feel like there’s a really gross transphobic undertone to that whole movie, even though there are trans people (and plenty of allies) who can acknowledge its problems and still enjoy it. I’d probably have a much better time with camp and exploitation movies if I could resist the impulse to make sure I’ve unpacked everything before I enjoy it. (Even with “permission” to like Sleepaway Camp, though, I still think it’s too gross and amateurish to be fun).

I should acknowledge the sweet transvestite elephant in the room and admit that I’ve got a huge pop-cultural blind spot when it comes to Rocky Horror, since I’ve never actually seen the movie. I’d bet that I’ve seen every scene of it by now, out of order. And I know enough about it to make references and get the overall gist of it. But every time I’ve tried to actually watch it, I bounce off within minutes. I’m just frustratingly unable to connect with any of it (besides “Time Warp”), and have to settle with the fact that, like The Goonies, it’s simply lost to time because I waited too long to watch it.

And there’s probably a past version of myself that would’ve eaten up Phantom of the Paradise as so-bad-it’s-good camp. I know that past version of me would be in good company, because there seems to be a sizable Beef fan club out there, with T-shirts and posters and cosplay and such. But now, even when I try to put everything in the right context and acknowledge that this was just after the age of Laugh-In, and people had a different sense of humor back then, I can’t get past how corny it all is. It doesn’t have the spark of self-aware creativity that makes glam rock itself interesting; it feels more like when The Flintstones would do a gag about surf rock or Bug Music.

Weirdly, though, watching and overthinking Phantom of the Paradise has given be a better appreciation for Brian De Palma’s movies. I still love The Untouchables4 and like Carrie an awful lot, but I started getting into movies right around the time the general impression of De Palma As Auteur started shifting into the negative. (I was around three years old when Paradise came out).

I was only in film school for a year, but I’ve spent decades trying to excise all the remaining aspects of Arrogant Film Student out of my personality. I had a really snobbish disdain for De Palma as overly-referential schlock5 whose best ideas were all stolen from Hitchcock movies. What I’d completely missed is the style and sensibility that De Palma was either inventing or keeping alive throughout the 1970s, while the rest of Hollywood, left unattended, might’ve descended into an irreparable bifurcation between maudlin and artless commercial films vs self-consciously naturalistic and realistic art movies.

But everything that makes the non-Beef scenes work is a result of Paul Williams and Brian De Palma.

Williams not even as much for the music as for the fact that he seemed to understand the tone of the movie better than anyone else involved, including De Palma himself. It’s probably hard for non-70s children to understand how ubiquitous Paul Williams was on TV and just in general back then — countless talk show appearances, variety shows, and appearances on The Love Boat. Seeing him taking an over-the-top villain here and deciding to underplay it with dead-earnest restraint, I can finally see the connection between the guy who wrote “Rainbow Connection” and the guy who said “Hell yeah, I’ll be an orangutan.”

And this is the first Brian De Palma movie I’ve seen where his love of movies really came through as a love of movies, instead of a bunch of references. In the early 1970s, he loved split screens — they were kind of his thing, although I don’t know if he kept it up throughout the rest of his career — and knew how to use them. The split screen moments in Carrie aren’t just affectations, but really sell the idea of a chaotic event seen simultaneously from multiple perspectives, much better than quick edits could have. It’s a style that I sincerely wish would come back more often, as more than just shorthand for “this is supposed to look like the 60s and 70s.”

That kind of thing is all over Phantom of the Paradise — a Rolling Stone cover that spins into view against a black background, an ominous control desk shaped like a giant gold record, a sinister record company office with a halftone logo of a dead bird, a phantom on the rooftop of a gothic New York City building in the middle of a lightning storm. It all feels like he’s just having fun exploring all the things that movies can do. Even when the slapstick doesn’t work for me, I can still appreciate the attempt to squeeze a classic style into what was otherwise a contemporary movie.

In case it’s not clear by now, my take on Phantom of the Paradise is still waffling between “I don’t like it,” “I don’t get it,” and “I would’ve liked this when I was younger.” (At the moment, “I don’t like it” is winning). Even if I don’t love it as the cult classic that I might have 20 or even 10 years ago, the most valuable thing to me now is the reminder to resist the urge to unpack, categorize, and encapsulate everything.

Not to be undiscriminating, but to be less eager to demonstrate that I’ve achieved some level of cultural literacy, by putting a rubber stamp of worthy/unworthy on it. After all, even calling something “so bad it’s good” isn’t nearly as open-minded as it would seem to suggest. It implies that you still need people to know that you can understand and appreciate that it’s bad, instead of not caring what anything else thinks, and just connecting with (or not connecting with) things in the spirit in which they’re given.

1
Including “like Little Richard,” which is almost charming

2
Don’t get too attached to Beef; he doesn’t last long (spoiler?).

3
So basically, I guess: KISS.

4
Although I haven’t seen it in at least 15 years, so I don’t know if it aged well.

5
Making me an enormous hypocrite, obviously

1 Including “like Little Richard,” which is almost charming

2 Don’t get too attached to Beef; he doesn’t last long (spoiler?).

3 So basically, I guess: KISS.

4 Although I haven’t seen it in at least 15 years, so I don’t know if it aged well.

5 Making me an enormous hypocrite, obviously