If you are
looking for cutting edge commentary on the culture, you have come to
the wrong place. I don’t get out much, and anything I say about a film
is said after it has been released on DVD (Children of Men was the rare exception, and I saw that after it had been out in theatres for weeks).
And so last weekend I rented Pan’s Labyrinth,the critically acclaimed fantasy by Mexican director Guillermo del Toro. "Pan’s Labyrinth" is an unfortunate paraphrase; the literal
translation from the Spanish is "The Labyrinth of the Faun", a far more
evocative and accurate title; the filmmaker has stated emphatically the
Pan is not one of his characters.
The tale is
set in 1944, in fascist Spain. The heroine is Ofelia, a young girl of
11 or so, whose widowed mother Carmine has married Captain Vidal, a
fascist leader whose battalion is stalking the resistance that has
persisted in the forest. Carmine is carrying the Captain’s child in her
womb, and as the film opens Ofelia and her mother are on their way to
live at the fascist camp in the woods. Along the way fairy tale-reading
Ofelia encounters a strange sculpture in the forest and a mysterious
insect, which she calls a fairy.
Upon arriving
at the camp the insect transforms into a real fairy and leads her to an
ancient labyrinth, which is a portal to the underworld, where she
encouters a faun.
Now, when I say "a faun" you
may think of CS Lewis’ Mr Tumnus, or Disney’s dancing furry children,
but this is quite a different creature. Lewis’ fairy world was a
prettified and genteel English version of pagan myth. Toro’s creatures-
no doubt more accurately- are darker, otherworldly, ambiguous and
dangerous. Even the fairies are carnivores. This faun hails from the
deep Earth, and his bones creak and groan when he moves, like old wood
or stone grinding far underground.
The faun, in
true fairy tale fashion, reveals to the girl that she is a lost
princess, and assigns her three tasks she must accomplish to return to
her kingdom.
Captain Vidal proves to be cold and cruel, as much an incarnation of evil as Ophelia is of innocence.
As so the tale unfolds, a classic story of good and evil, skillfully and beautifully rendered. This is filmmaker’s art finely tuned. It was so
visually rich on my small TV screen, I can only imagine how it was on
the big screen.
While this is a fairy tale, it
is not for children: it is dark, often literally as much of the action
takes place at night or in the underground realm. Evil is portrayed
graphically and the violence is brutal. There are creatures that appear
to have arisen from a nightmare and the film is rich in imagery rooted
in mythical and psychological archetype.
This
isn’t exactly a Christian fable; the faun could no more be called good
or evil than a thunderstorm or a mountain. And the only representative
of the Church that is seen is a profascist cleric shown stuffing his
face as he dismisses the hunger of the poor.
It
is, however, a profoundly moral and redemptive film, one that touches
the imagination and the heart as deeply as any good fairy tale. In the
truest sense it is more a Christian film than some of the sanctimonious
movies I have seen.
–Daniel Nichols
Like Children of Men, this is another film of which I’ve heard a good deal but haven’t seen. The opinions I’ve heard, both published reviews and comments from friends, have been pretty much all over the place.
I think I read somewhere years ago that “fairies” and “elves” were increasingly domesticated over centuries of Christianity. There is an English folk song, memorably rocked-up by Steeleye Span, called “700 Elves” in which the elves seem to be something like Grendel:
Seven hundred elves from out the wood
Foul and grim they were
They’re coming to take vengeance against a farmer for cutting down trees:
We’ll make him rue the day he’s born
And taste of shame and pain
Complete lyric here. Note how the farmer saves his life.
Then there’s Alice Thomas Ellis’s novel Fairy Tale, in which the fairies are very much not domesticated.
See C. S. Lewis’ book, The Discarded Image (on medieval literature) for how real medieval authors portrayed fairies and like sorts. Not usually nice creatures, violent, sexual, etc.
Well, “fairy” does rhyme with “scary”.
It is interesting to note that while the faun is sort of submoral, he is in the service of a good king…
Incidentally, I think fairies are probably the same kind of being – if in fact they exist- as poltergeists. Cf. Herbert Thurston, S.J., Ghosts and Poltergeists, reprinted by Roman Catholic Books. Some of the behavior that Fr. Thurston chronicles corresponds pretty well to what Lewis describes from medieval literature.
A Thomist once laughed at me because I said I believed in fairies and not in poltergeists. He said he believed in poltergeists and not in fairies. An highly rational fellow, whose office was filled with unsecured stacks of books, papers and magazines, he came at one time convinced that the collapse of certain of these pyramids was due to the action of a poltergeist (and not, for instance, gravity).
Now that you mention it, Tom (11:06), C. S. Lewis may have been where I read that observation about the domestication of fairies and elves. Although I haven’t read The Discarded Image, he may have mentioned the idea elsewhere.
Ellis’s fairies are decidedly spooky, although not directly malicious. Just completely Other. But then she was Welsh.
On an ancillary point:
The Franco regime was authoritarian and made use of cartelistic economic institutions of the sort which were in vogue in the 1930s, but it was largely free from the sort of revanchism which was the salient feature of the regimes of Hitler and Mussolini (and Gamal Abdel Nasser, while we are at it). “Fascist” is a misnomer.
I saw El Laberinto del Fauno in the theatre in Spanish (with subtitles) and was also very impressed with its imagination and morality. Also, I found it ironic that the movie portrayed the Marxists as heroes, and seemed to be consciously Marxist in its politics, yet it ended by idealizing monarchy. The narrator tells us at the end that Ofelia ruled her kingdom with peace and justice for many years. One wonders if del Toro realized that he was contradicting his heroes’ ideal of a classless society. He seemed to me to have let slip an inchoate longing for an ordered, hierarchical society, which values majesty, filial devotion, and obedience. Now, if only he would articulate that longing and make an explicitly pro-Christendom film.
Mr. Douglass:
You seem to hit the nail on the head, to my view. The main problem that I had with the movie (aside from the absurd caricatures of the Franquistas and the overt Marxist partisanship) was that its attempts at a greater message (authoritarianism vs. freedom/free thought, or whatever you want to call it) were ultimately incoherent.
An “ordered, hierarchical society” is as inimical to a Lockean capitalist society (such as ours) as it is to a Marxist one. Which is why I reject both of these latter.
Ben- I think you are reading a political agenda into the film that does not really exist.
That there were noble rebels and cruel tyrants is undeniable, whether in Franco’s Spain or Czarist Russia or wherever. I don’t really think this amounts to some sort of ideological bias.
I actually heard an interview with del Toro on WHYY’s Fresh Air last.. December? in which the director sounded not so much as if he had an overt ideological bias, as if… it were just OBVIOUS that Franco’s side was wildly evil. If I get a chance, I’d like to see the movie, then go back and listen to the interview again :)
he came at one time convinced that the collapse of certain of these pyramids was due to the action of a poltergeist (and not, for instance, gravity)
This is something of a point in favor of the fairies, as G. Macdonald noted that fairies dislike untidiness. When gravity and fairies combine, watch out!
Daniel,
I agree whole heartedly with your review. I watched it with the commentary last night. Very interesting. A disturbing yet beautiful movie.
On the question of the ideology: The Nationalists were a coalition, and only the core of the movement (the Falange) could properly be called fascist. The rest were monarchists of several stripes, Integralists, land owners small & large, Federalists, & Catholics (excepting Basque Catholics who generally supported the Republic as seperatists..)
Franco himself was of Jewish descent, and would have ended up in Auschwitz had the SS gotten its talons on him. Still, no one visiting Escorial & seeing his tomb could deny its fascist aesthetic.
So I’ve always seen the Civil War as wrapped in paradox.. the undeniable tragedy though for us as Catholics, is that we – as a Church – generally came down on the side of vicious right wing authoritarianism, and then 20-30 years later collapsed before the left wing variety: communism, & bought into things like liberation theology. We yoyo-ed, one side of the authoritarian spectrum to the other.
Del Toro idealizes the communists, and makes the Franquistas too evil, over- lurid.. Many “conservative” Catholics & Orthodox I know resented this, but I found it true enough to life. Both sides had its thugs & idealists, after all.. and the Falange- like all fascists- did idealize violence..
I agree with you though, the film is odd enough (in a sea of undifferentiated crap) to warrant seeing – despite its bias, inconsistency and pagan soul..
You know, despite all the good things y’all have said about this movie, my motivation to see it remains low. And the reason is that everyone seems to agree that to the extent it deals with the Church it portrays her as part of the evil. Sounds like it’s not all that big a deal in the context of the entire movie, but I’ve grown inexpressibly weary of this stuff in popular art. At a minimum, it sparks an argumentative reaction in me that substantially interferes with my appreciation of whatever else the work has to offer.
I think some of you are missing the point and getting distracted by perceived slights.
The fact is that there were too many clerics who cozied up to the Nationalists. It is no insult to the Church to portray one in a passing scene.
As for idealizing the rebels, may I note that not all of them were Communists?
In the context of the film, which is mythic and needs clear lines between good and evil, the portrayal of the rebels as noble is rather apolitical.
Nor do I concede that the soul of the film is pagan. The climactic scene is one of sacrifice, of a refusal to harm an innocent, even slightly, to achieve a great good.
I’d say that is hardly a pagan notion.
It’s not that any particular instance of Church-slamming is false, it’s the overwhelmingly hostile portrayal of Christianity by the entertainment industry over a period of decades. I’m seriously sick of it and have to have some pretty strong incentive to put up with it. It’s like having some obnoxious acquaintance who wants you to read his novels in which your father always puts in an appearance as a pedophile murderer. I’m like, dude, unless you can give me some reason to think you’re Dostoevsky, go bother somebody else.
I’m not saying I would never watch this movie, by the way, just explaining why I’m not more interested.
I would think an artist who wants to tell a mythic story would be better advised to keep more distance from real people and events.
The things that these folks object to barely registered with me; I was too entranced with the tale to take ideological offense, perhaps because I am less ideological than some. That the bad guy was the authoritarian and the good guys the rebels would have made sense in any historical era; say in Communist Russia. It was hardly central and the film is not political and I certainly don’t think the filmmaker is guilty of an “overwhelmingly hostile portrait of Christianity.” You really shouldn’t skip this film because of the comments some have made here.
The rebels are peripheral to the central tale at any rate: innocence vs evil, redemptive suffering and the power of goodness are what it is about.
No, I didn’t mean this film is “overwhelmingly hostile…” (especially since I haven’t seen it) but that the output, to use an appropriately sterile word, of the entertainment industry in general is. I may see this eventually, but I have a very long list already, and I’m just explaining why the recommendations haven’t sufficed to move it up on the list.
I remembered this being reviewed by Ross Douthat in National Review some months ago, but didn’t clearly remember what he said, and have been meaning to look it up. Someone sent it to me yesterday. Interestingly, Douthat ends up in more or less the same place as Daniel.
Unfortunately the piece is not online, but with the aid of cut-and-paste I will quote liberally. Apparently some left-wing critics have treated the movie as a political statement about fascism. In response to a critic’s remark that it “deepens our understanding of fascism,” Douthat says:
“The only thing such caricatures deepen is our
understanding of predictable left-wing
bias in Western cinema. The less you think about these weaknesses, though, and the more you treat the “real world” story as a fairy tale in its own right—with Vidal as a wicked stepfather, the housekeeper as a fairy godmother, and so forth–the better Pan’s Labyrinth gets.
The movie collapses if you take its adult characters and their politics too seriously, but succeeds if you give over to its moody atmospherics, its twisting trees and creaking corridors. It may not be a realistic depiction of life under fascism, but, like
any good fairy tale, it’s a gripping endurance test, with a happy ending waiting, perhaps, after all the trials are done.
More than that, it’s a reminder of the enduring power of the Christian story, which hovers over all the West’s great fairy tales, and hovers over this one too—even in a movie that associates religion with Vidal and tyranny, and seeks an escape from Franco’s Spain in the landscape of the great god Pan. Del Toro is dabbling in paganism, like so many of our artists, but he stays safely in the shallow
end, and the film’s ending, at once tragic and triumphant, is a rebuke to the bloody darkness of myth. Trapped between warring cruelties, natural and supernatural, Ofelia chooses neither, and her fate echoes the strangest tale of all—which claims that you can save your life by losing it, and gain a kingdom that isn’t of this world.”
The fact is that there were too many clerics who cozied up to the Nationalists.
There were in 1930 about 31,000 priests in Spain. By the close of the Civil War, north of 4,000 had been killed and perhaps an equal number had been driven into exile.
About half of Spain was in the hands of the Nationalist forces within two weeks of the commencement of Franco’s revolt and another fragment was under the control of Basque militias (who were allied with the Republic but were not anti-clerical). Those 4,000 dead priests were drawn from the minority of Spanish clerics that the Republic could get its hands on. The mortality rate among priests and religious in Barcelona was in the range of 80%.
It should also be noted that in that portion of the Iberian peninsula controlled by the succession of Republican ministries in 1936-39, Churches were closed as a matter of policy and any clerics remaining alive were forbidden from engaging in public ministry.
It is an exaggeration to say that the movie has a pagan soul. More like: the movie naively accepts commonplaces about who are the historical good guys and who are the historical bad guys. That those commonplaces happen to be anti-Catholic is accidental to the movie, not of its essence. In fact, I think the essence of the movie espouses some very good Catholic principles.
A minor correction to what Douthat says in an otherwise fine commentary: Del Toro has publicly stated that the faun is not Pan and has objected to the title used in US release; his title literally translated is The Labrynth of the Faun. The faun in question is the servant of the King, who if anything is a Christian archetype.
i´m from spain and faun is a mithologic creature. about the civil war was exactly like movie. in 1945 spain was divided in 2: republicans (includes, right and left) and nacionalism (fascims)