Lee Falk was a literature student when he came up with his first comic strip about the illusionist Mandrake. He had turned into a theatre man (producing writing, directing, as well as running) when he came up with the idea for the Phantom. And yes, the Phantom is quite theatrical, with many references to that other skull reader, Hamlet. The Phantom is all about secrets and quite aptly Falk soon found himself at the Department of Secret Intelligence as World War II broke out.
The Phantom is in Falk’s narrative known as the wandering ghost, the one that can not die; century after century the same fit muscular man in his thirties. The Phantom hides his face behind a mask and “no one can see his real face and live”. The mask makes his face seem a dead skull, the same mark left on all his enemies. The reference to death is as clear as it is a mystery of what hides behind this mask of eternal life. The reader is presented a story of an origin going four hundred years back to the first Phantom, who as a boy witnesses the killing of his father by pirates on their ship. This original father destroys the ship and the fatherless first phantom is washed ashore in a foreign land sparsely populated by pygmies and with no turning back. He swears on a skull to eradicate all evil and starts building the myth of a phantom that punishes bandits. In a cave inside his secret skull-shaped cliff he keeps a crypt with all his twenty-one dead ancestors and their written chronicles.
The Hungarian psychoanalysts Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok in a series of texts present a transgenerational Freudian theory of crypts, secrets and phantoms. A subjects inner crypt is formed with the loss of a loved object before it has been verbalised and understood as such: As when a parent actually dies early on (like Lee Falk’s father). Instead of introjection of the loss of love of an object that is still there this is a real loss of the object and not just the fantasy of love. By the magic of hallucinatory wish fulfilment (Mandrake!) the lost object is now incorporated. By thus trumping the real loss hallucinatory the road is closed to mourning and the impossibility of speaking it coupled with the shame of not experiencing the loss as such, the object becomes a secret buried in, and for, the subject. The resulting diagnosis is often that of melancholia, a constant dialogue with the object (talking to the skull). According to Freud the subject, in melancholia, wears the features of the object as a mask. Furthermore the need to preserve this traumatic and shameful secret of the presence of a dead ancestor in the living ego creates what they call a phantom. With the encrypted secret transformed into a phantom, designed to mislead its haunted subjects the subject is very difficult to treat. Like Lee Falk’s Ahasveruslike Phantom they are deemed to walk the streets never to be forgiven. Taking of their masks and socialising with ordinary people is like the Phantom turning into his alter (not real) ego “Mr Walker”.
Lee Falk’s Phantom keeps the secret and becomes a superhero (Superman, Spiderman, and Batman all carry similar secrets involving loss, incorporation and shame). That is why they can not disclose the secret, they must remain different from ordinary humans. Abraham and Torok claims, not only that the secret can transfer from unconscious to unconscious but that the phantom inside is a liar, whose only wish is to keep the secret. In their reading of the Wolf man case (yes the Phantom’s dog is really a wolf) Abraham and Torok follows that line of thought showing how the Wolf man spun all kinds of interesting myths on his history for Freud and other analysts (how can the Phantom’s “secret” be the secret when it is repeated so many times for us readers?). So, behind all talk on killing bad guys and the endless revenge of an original father (Lee Falks real father died early) what is the Phantom’s secret?
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