Pan's Labyrinth: The Fantasy and Reality of Good and Evil

    So here’s a question I’m sure no one’s asked yet: what is the point of fantasy?

       Ask your resident D&D enthusiast or aspiring fantasy writer what it is about the fantasy genre that excites them so much, and you’re bound to get a variety of answers, but the topic of escapism tends to be a common thread. Sometimes the trash compactor of the real world just stinks so much, and you just need to vacation in someone else’s world. You can only stew in real world politics for so long before you just have to unwind by tracing the Jedi lineage or memorizing the rules of alomancy. 

This is where you commonly run into thoughts that fantasy nerds are just incompatible with reality and are deliberately shirking any responsibility from participating in it. This mindset has a lot in common with the nostalgia stigma we discussed with “Roger Rabbit” and “Detective Pikachu.” It is also a very elitist perspective born out of the same attitude that believes we should just get rid of the English major as a field of study. There’s no consideration for the social or intellectual muscles exercised when mindfully engaging with the fantasy genre. In researching for his starring role in the Dungeons & Dragons film, Chris Pine shared his experience in participating in real life D&D games, saying, 

“I think it is so important to know, why I think it should be played in schools is that it immediately teaches cooperation. It exercises the imagination. It’s joyous, it’s improvisational. And within a matter of minutes, everybody’s on the same page. You’re not arguing about whether or not you’re cool or not. You’re arguing about whether or not you should have gone over the boulder to kill the dragon. I think it’s about the coolest thing I’ve encountered in a long time.” 

But we’ll have to save discussion on “Dungeons and Dragons” for another day. Today, I want to discuss the purpose of fantasy as seen through Guillermo Del Toro’s 2006 masterpiece, El Labyrinto del Fauno, “Pan’s Labyrinth.”

    This is quite simply, an amazingly well-crafted film with a lot of impressive moving parts. The leading role of Ofelia originally called for an eight-year-old actress. Ivanna Baquerro was eleven when she auditioned, but Del Toro was so impressed with her performance that he cast her anyways. She is fantastic in the role and absolutely sells the audience on Ofelia’s innocence and vulnerability while also giving her that little spark that makes you believe she could stand up to a dictator. The film has a very unique aesthetic that sets it apart from a lot of Hollywood fantasy faire. Del Toro opted to use puppets and tangible set pieces whenever possible, implementing CGI only when strictly necessary. This is a well-made film.

It is also an essential document on the fantasy experience. Stephanie Zacharek wrote of the film for Salon,

    "'Pan's Labyrinth' works on so many levels that it seems to change shape even as you watch it. It is, at times, a joyless picture, and its pall of sadness can begin to weigh you down. But that's part of del Toro's intent, and of his technique ... Memories are carried in myths and stories; that's one way they survive. All those dragons slain and stepparents defied: None of it has been in vain. If fairy tales were all simply pretty, they wouldn't have stuck with us, awake and asleep, for so many centuries."

    The dreamer at the center of this film is Ofelia, who is moving with her mother to her new stepfather’s estate in the middle of the forest. Her stepfather, Captain Vidal, is a high ranking official under Spain’s fascist regime, and he is even less patient with Ofelia’s affinity for fantasy than her mother is. When the fairies fly into her bedroom inviting her to join them in the labyrinth outside her house, Ofelia answers the call. There, an ancient faun, "Pan," appears to her and tells her that she is the reincarnated daughter of the king of this fantasy world, and her father would have her return home to him if she can prove herself still pure.

         Ofelia makes various forays into this underworld, all while Ofelia’s earthly world grows more and more volatile. Vidal’s campaign to crush the rebellion grows more and more ruthless, and Ofelia’s mother dies giving birth to Ofelia’s brother. Ofelia is given her final test the same night that the rebellion storms Vidal’s estate. Per the faun’s instructions, Ofelia retrieves her baby brother from Vidal’s grip and takes him to the labyrinth, Vidal chasing after her. In the heart of the labyrinth, Ofelia is given the instruction to allow the faun to use his knife to draw a single drop of blood from her infant brother for a sacrifice to open the portal to her father’s kingdom, but Ofelia refuses to allow her brother to be harmed, forfeiting her chance to be rescued from her prison and return home. The faun disappears, and Vidal closes in on her, stealing back her brother, and shooting Ofelia.

         When Vidal emerges from the labyrinth, the rebels are there to greet him. He hands his child over to them, before the rebels shoot him. Just as Ofelia succumbs to her injuries, she is overtaken by a shower of light and finds herself in the throne room of her father’s palace, where her parents, her baby brother, and the faun welcome her back to her kingdom. In choosing not to harm her innocent brother, she passed the most important test of all, and her reward is life in the fantasy kingdom of her dreams.

The film really puts a dial on this whole idea of dreaming, fantasy, and escapism. It puts a face to the idea that maybe people who waste away daydreaming might know more than society is willing to give them credit for. The film’s observations about the practicality of fantasy coincide a lot with his observations about innocence as well as good and evil–Del Toro has listed The Night of the Hunter as an inspiration for his work, and once you see the connections, they are impossible to miss. This film has a lot in common with what we discussed with that film and its exploration of childhood and goodness.

  I want to spend a moment to unpack what it is the film says about the nature of fantasy and those who choose to engage with it. Because believe it or not, my thoughts here emerge as much from my frustrations with the film as my admiration for it. Because while fantasy as a genre builds things that are not real, it does become a mirror for real life, and we ought to be both vigilant and deliberate in how we decide to use that mirror, especially as it pertains to such things as the origins of good and evil.

Believers

Ofelia comes from a long line of young fantasy heroines: (Peter Pan's Wendy, Alice of Alice in Wonderland, Dorothy of The Wizard of Oz, etc.) She is at that ripe age for staring out the window after closing the book on a captivating fantasy book. She is also at that age when where the older generation is anxious to close that window and put that book on the shelf.

The film draws a dramatic irony between Ofelia and her mother, Carmen. Ofelia’s mother berates her for her obsession with the fairy-tales she reads about in her books, yet Carmen is obsessed with her own kind of fantasy, and it leaves her far more out of touch with reality and far more vulnerable.

    Carmen sees her life with the Captain as a kind of happily ever after, the kind adults dream about, that of security and safety. Carmen explains, “I was alone too long.” To which Ofelia responds, “I’m with you. You were never alone.” While we are meant to believe that though Carmen has genuine love for her daughter, she does kind of see Ofelia as an extension of this happily ever after, a doll that she can dress up in pretty dresses and show off to her society friends.

    Again, drawing a parallel to The Night of the Hunter, Carmen emerges as the sort of Willa insert, the wife figure who is drawn into a union with a powerful figure in her community because she is told this will provide her with security, all while it is abundantly clear to the audience that she is trapped in a demeaning marriage.

In submitting to Vidal’s authority, she is resigning to a life of subjugation. She is not treasured or even respected by her new husband. The moment she sets foot into her new estate, she is demoted into a wheelchair in which she can be carted around. Vidal does this insisting it’s for her own good, yet he also forced her to travel at such a late stage in the pregnancy, which we are to believe eventually contributed to her death later on. We also see this in how he talks down to her in front of his associates. This is not a happy or healthy arrangement.

    Vidal, meanwhile, is an all-around bad guy. He is callous, unfeeling, and domineering, speaking over his wife at social gatherings and shaming Ofelia for her love of fairy-tales. None of this is meant to surprise us because he is also a literal fascist. We don’t even necessarily believe he delights in the subjugation of others; it appears to just be a part of his programming.

The presence of Vidal within this story stokes many of the film’s bedrock questions. Are the monsters of Ofelia’s underworld actually any more horrific than real-world monsters like this man? And is Ofelia really so out of touch in imagining a better world? Watching this film we come to appreciate that it’s people like Ofelia, the dreamers, who see possibility. They are those who can imagine a way out of the darkness. As with John in The Night of the Hunter, the thing that distinguishes Ofelia from Vidal, and from the adults in the world, is that she does not care for her own advancement. She is dedicated to the principles and morals laid down to her in the stories she reads.

A fascinating character in this conversation is Mercedes, the cook in Vidal’s estate who is covertly aiding the resistance alongside house doctor, Dr. Ferrero. Mercedes signals herself as a sort of maternal figure for Ofelia early on, and after Carmen dies, Mercedes steps into this role full time. Her goodness reveals itself in how she enables the resistance fighting against the tyrannical rule of the Vidals and in how she takes Ofelia under her wing.  

Ofelia asks her early on if she believes in fairies, to which Mercedes replies that she used to as a kid but has since moved on. Mercedes does not share Ofelia’s belief in the fantastical, but she nonetheless sees the beauty in how Ofelia chooses to see the world. Unlike Ofelia’s mother, Mercedes does not shame Ofelia for her love of fairy-tales or insist that she shed that mindset to live in the “real world.” She kind of treats it all like a perfectly logical phase that this girl is fine to participate in while she can: she’s the cool aunt who hasn’t actually seen Avatar: The Last Airbender but will help you knit your Appa plushie anyways. And she ends up becoming a sort of moral authority in the film.

I spotlight Mercedes largely because she emerges as the most nuanced element in this network. She is unambiguously on the side of the heroes, but she does frustrate the normal fairy-tale/good-guy synchronicity that defines the rest of the characters in the film.

For Ofelia, it almost feels like she is escaping into this fantasy world as some sort of coping mechanism, trying to daydream her way out of prison. This further begs the question of whether or not this is real in the context of the film itself. But I think it's first worth acknowledging that basically all of her escapades into The Upside Down have her confront some otherworldly threat. This underworld is dangerous and requires her to muster all her bravery. In facing off against these fantasy monsters, she trains herself in the courage required to defeat the real-world monsters—her vile stepfather.

  If this all is truly happening in her head, then it only brings up more questions. How did Ofelia acquire the magical root that was curing her mother, and was it really a coincidence that she started hemorrhaging the moment it was thrown into the fire? How did she escape her prison bedroom without the use of the magic chalk? How did she make it to the heart of the Labyrinth so far ahead of Vidal if the walls didn’t actually open up for her magically?

    The film does seem secure in the idea that this other world is real and is affecting the real world, even if Ofelia is the only one who gets to directly interact with it. If her Underworld adventures have been real all along, it follows also that her ultimate fate, her ascension to royalty and reunion with her mother and father, is also real.

And that’s ultimately the bedrock of the fantasy experience. These fantastical other worlds and the adventures contained within become training grounds the readers or viewers who entertain them. In learning how to slay demons in the space of fantasy, we learn how to defeat them in real life.

That’s all explored within the space of the film itself. But there are other aspects of the film’s treatise in good, evil, and fantasy that are perhaps worth examining. Mostly, what does fantasy say about where demons come from in the first place?

 

Evil in Fantasy

Fantasy author, George RR Martin, spoke on the tendency that some fantasy writers have to having clearly labeled heroes and villains in fantasy, saying, “The world is not that simple. ‘Good guys and bad guys’ is fun when you’re seven, but you should look around and see what the world is like and try to grow more than that.”

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975)

         It is kind of a truism within writing that you want your protagonists and your antagonists to be well developed. The intricacies of their relationship and their motivations—particularly how they differ—are how you reveal your story’s attitude toward the values it is examining. Maybe good always does save the day, but why? And how? And what even makes a good guy anyway? Isn’t everyone the good guy in their own head in their own story?

         This is where a story has the opportunity to use its characters and its scenario to explore the ideas that build this better world that audiences are presumably fighting for. Even in cases where the bad guy is a literal animal or monster (e.g. Jaws or Alien), there is often some antagonistic human character whose philosophy must be exposed or disproven.  This is something fantasy is uniquely equipped to explore, using larger than life scenarios and worlds to describe real world questions.

    There can be an impulse to shy away from humanizing your supervillain because then you run the risk of making them too sympathetic. This can complicate the attitudes the author and audience have for both this super villain and the systems that punish them. Moreover, with the internet being hot for controversy, you can risk condoning or even celebrating morally disturbing behavior. But there are fences one can put in place to explore the chemistry of wickedness without endorsing unrighteous action.

        Voldemort of Harry Potter, for example, is a literal Dark Lord, and he has both the resume and screen presence to match. The actions he takes are horrendous and irredeemable by design. Voldemort is an archetypal supervillain who is beyond sympathy, which in theory puts him beyond the identification of the audience. But some things to note ...

Voldemort isn’t just evil for evils’ sake. Voldemort has a specific objective and a specific ideology, both of which emerge from the society he is a part of. His belief is that wizards who are of “pure blood” ought to hold dominion over those who are not. Likewise, his followers hang around him not just because they like wearing black hoods, but because they share this belief and want him to mold the world in this image.

Even Voldemort targeting Harry in the first place plays into his own feelings about blood status. Both he and Harry are half-blood in this society, and Voldemort selected Harry as his ultimate threat because he saw himself in the child who shared his heritage. Even at his most maniacal, Voldemort's motivations derive naturally from the systems of the world he is a part of.

    Something that is frequently commented on by all the characters is that Harry actually has a lot in common with Tom Riddle, the kid who would become Voldemort. As orphans who were basically dumped into a space where no one loved them, they come from a very similar background. They also have very similar personality traits, like their casual disregard for the rules and an indisputable desire for recognition. A key thread through this whole ordeal is this idea that Harry absolutely has the capacity to follow the same road as Tom Riddle. But Harry doesn’t because he chooses to be motivated by love, not by power as Tom Riddle did. That is what makes his rivalry with and victory over Voldemort so satisfying.

In addition to the Voldemort figurehead at the top, you also have characters like Snape, Malfoy, and Pettigrew, regular folks occupying this world who make choices across the series based on their own personal motivations, and their stories end up revealing the complexities by which a person might choose to indulge in or reject evil. There are very clear avenues to evil in this world that have nothing to do with inherent wickedness.

         Is that the only valid way to represent villainy and heroism in fantasy. I don’t know. Does all real-world evil or terror have an agenda? Does a hurricane or a plague have "reasons" for mowing you down? Maybe not, but that doesn’t mean we don’t try to understand our relationship to this kind of phenomena. This is where more broadly defined villains tend to make their appearance.

        On the far end of the spectrum, you have someone like the Mistress of Evil herself, Maleficent, as she appears in 1959’s Sleeping Beauty, and there aint nothing subtle about her. Not from her draconic wardrobe to her manic cackling to her literally cursing a child to die. The film sets up a stark conflict between Aurora and Phillip and this wicked sorceress who will do anything to keep them apart for no other reason than she hates happiness.

         But Sleeping Beauty is a film that coasts almost entirely on archetype and symbolism–much moreso than Harry Potter. Maleficent here is less a reflection of any specific character failing or ideology and more a face to evil itself, and that can have a lot of applications. In 1950s America, I don’t think that the fear of some all-consuming evil threatening the rising generation was totally unanchored. I don’t, for example, think it’s some wild coincidence that the animation of Maleficent transforming into a dragon happens to look a lot like a nuclear explosion.

         Mind you, we did get an attempt to situate the Maleficent character in a more psychological story with systems what need critiquing and all that fun. There’s a passing suggestion of cleverness with 2014’s Maleficent, in using her as the face of a feminist revenge tale; but in execution, the attempts to use the character to comment on gender dynamics wind up being surface level. The film becomes less about exploring the nuances of why people do what they do and more about appeasing a very specific sect of internet activists, which I wrote about extensively when I compared that movie to the Wicked Broadway show. I spotlight the Maleficent situation to highlight that, no, adding backstory and “reasons” to your bad guy does not always make for a better story.

         Face-of-evil monsters can also work in more psychological features when done mindfully. A good example of this would be Pennywise from Stephen King’s IT. This carnivorous clown doesn’t have “reasons” for eating the children of Derry, and it doesn’t need them. Pennywise is the personification of childhood trauma, any dark or evil thing that either consumes or scars any child it can get its claws around. The Losers overpower It not by addressing their own capacity to become like Pennywise, but in working through their traumas and finding strength in each other until Pennywise has no power over them.

    A lot of the monsters in Pan’s Labyrinth fall more along this vein. Del Toro has drawn explicit links between some of the monsters and real-life historical events and figures. You have something like The Pale Man, this monster who sees with his hands, who has been specified as a reflection of the child sexual abuse scandals within the Catholic Church, though the image of piles of children’s shoes also recalls the gas chambers of the Nazi Concentration Camps. But these connections are also vague within the text itself, and the film doesn’t wind up making a lot of commentary on these real-life monsters within the story.

        Its commentary is much more overt as it relates to the central villain: Captain Vidal.

 

Vidal and Movie Fascism

         Basically all epic fantasy bad guys--be they imperial stormtroopers, orcs of Isengard, or Death Eaters--are heightened representations of fascism. Makes sense. Fascism is the strongest manifestation of evil in our world, and so it becomes the natural allegory. And this makes for a charged equation where you have a fantasy movie with fantasy monsters in a world that also has literal, historical fascists.

         The film’s proper antagonist occupies a fantasy story, but Vidal is not really a fantasy villain. He does not stand for our shared fear of death, he represents an actual social phenomenon that can and does occur within real life. But the film chooses to characterize him more along the lines of a broader fantasy villain with little psychology or motivation besides fulfilling the bad guy function he is programmed for by his writer. As a result, Vidal ends up being the least complicated character in the story. And this is where the story starts to lose me a little.

       When I say that Vidal is the least complicated character in the film, I'm mostly referring to episodes like him explaining to his cohorts that, "These people [the rebels] hold the mistaken belief that we are all created equal," which sounds more like something you'd heard from Lord Zed of Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers than anything you'd hear from your cousin who thinks that JD Vance, "Makes some good points, actually." I'm surprised they didn't have Vidal saying this twirling his mustache while the "castle thunder" sound stock played in the background ...

     Inserting character complexity onto your Nazi antagonist can feel counterintuitive–who wants to humanize a real-world monster?--but attempting to situate these attributes within regular character psychology represents a chance to try to understand the real source of these problems, and film absolutely has the capacity to do this.

    One of Sidney Poitier’s more underrated films, Pressure Point, sees him playing a black doctor tasked with diagnosing a Nazi. The film was made in 1962 at the front end of the Civil Rights movement but set in the forties when Hitler's regime was really taking off, and the film was pretty forward thinking in the conclusion it came to: disgruntled white dudes flock to these kinds of systems in part out of a direct response to … basically feeling left out. Their fragile egos can’t handle being forgotten as society starts paying attention to groups who are actually marginalized.

    These men certainly can’t ever acknowledge their feelings of helplessness—that would compromise their manlitude. And so they dive headfirst into bigotry and primal displays of dominance. Groups built on hatred of other groups, believe it or not, somehow provide a sense of stability for people insecure with their own feelings of displacement. American History X does something similar, outlining how no one is born a racist, it is internalized through your environment.

         Does Vidal experience anything like that? Not really. There’s some context about his father dying in the war, but in this way the film takes it as a given that Vidal is just another fascist on the assembly line, and this only seeks to further distance him from the audience. Vidal is often seen connected to machinery, especially the wristwatch he has on hand, essentially likening him to a robot, lacking in human capacity for emotion or empathy.

    This film sort of has the same-but-opposite problem as Raya and the Last Dragon. That film entertains the idea of social utopia, but paints over certain environmental realities, like what it means to put in the labor of building a world with people who want different things than you. Pan’s Labyrinth is unwilling to afford that same kind of consideration toward the baking process for the real-world monsters we hate so much, only the assurance that they probably don't read Lord of the Rings.

While the film rebuffs the common attitude that people who entertain fantasy are somehow out of touch with reality, it does end up building its own kind of fabrication: that the real-world monsters have some kind of bad seed, and because that genetic difference deprives them of their humanity, it also excuses us from any responsibility in how we respond to them--they will deserve anything we have to give them.

    And I think there's something there that's worth thinking about.

    Blind Obedience and Complicity

  Something to note is that the film does put a specific behavior on trial here: that of blind obedience, like those demonstrated by the Nazis who willingly carried out Hitler’s bidding. We understand that Vidal’s entire chain of soldiers is upheld by this same attribute. Del Toro literally sold his film as a "parable of disobedience and choice." The trouble is, this film’s thesis on this topic doesn't really accord with what we know about the nature of evil.

The Milgram experiments of 1961 revealed that average individuals were willing to administer lethal shocks to pretend test subjects under the direction of persons with authority. The basic takeaway from this was that many under the Nazi regime were not unspeakably awful people. They were not human machines lacking in basic emotional faculties. They were just average joes following orders. Turns out, evil doesn't demand any special conditions in order to manifest itself. Anyone is capable of it.

    Blind obedience is also the thing on the table when Ofelia is faced with her final task to draw blood from her infant brother to open the portal to the other world. Pan is testing her to see if she will willingly afflict harm to a baby out of the same kind of obedience by which fascists are enabled. Ofelia refuses to do this, knowing that doing so will cost her the chance to not only reclaim her throne but also keep her confined to this hell on earth. Our assumption is that if Ofelia had gone through with what her superior had commanded her to do, she would not have been allowed to return home to her fantasy kingdom and would not have been rescued at the very end.

    The throughline reads, but I also feel like there are some wrinkles that go weirdly unacknowledged in the film, which is where the weaknesses of the film’s treatise continue to reveal themselves. 

Pan’s conditions are not “kill your infant brother if you want to get out of here.” It’s not even, “cut deep enough that he cries.” The conditions are, “Just a drop of blood.” That’s it. This doesn’t exactly feel like some mark of a terrible person, even when we are talking about an infant. Babies are more traumatized by vaccination shots (but absolutely #vaccinateyourkids). Speaking as a diabetic of over twenty years, believe me when I say that no one is going to miss a singular drop of blood.

Moreover, there is precedent within the film itself for equal or worse afflictions against “the innocent” going completely unexamined, including the horrors Ofelia is expected to face on both sides of the veil in order to be allowed to return home. “Two drops of blood a day” is all it takes for Ofelia to offer the magical plant baby to heal her mother, and that wasn’t framed as too steep a price then. (Then again, the games of this world have been consistently, weirdly strict throughout. Ofelia is punished for taking two grapes from the table of The Pale Man when she’s been starving in her stepfather’s house.)

    And I get that the story is trying to draw a contrast, that Ofelia is so virtuous that even the slightest bit of harm is just beyond consideration because she's just that pure. But still, it’s a schematic that places the onus of sacrifice entirely on this preteen girl and allows for absolutely no place for any kind of self-preservation instinct: it doesn't feel at all comparable with the Milgram situation. I’m just saying, Pan could have given the girl a break instead of letting her get shot ...

We can go back and forth concerning the potential merits of fleshing out a guy like Vidal, but where this film runs out of rope for me is in a place like Dr. Ferrero’s confrontation with him. Ferrero mercifully kills the stuttering rebel after he’s been tortured for hours, and Vidal asks him why he couldn’t just listen to him, and Ferrero replies, "To obey just like that for the sake of obeying, without questioning... that's something only people like you can do, captain." That is the film’s treaty on the origins of evil. There are good guys, and then there are "people like you" who are just predisposed for evil, and it shows a complete lack of curiosity for the genesis and development of this evil.

To be clear, the incentive behind “humanizing” someone like Vidal isn’t in generating sympathy for him or in deflecting his own responsibility, but in exploring how ordinary people allow evil to take root in them. That is how we figure out the ways to inoculate a society against these things. But Pan’s Labyrinth isn’t interested in asking these questions. It’s content to believe that the dividing line between good and bad people is whether or not a person has read The Wizard of Oz. And this has kind of always been the thing that holds the film back for me, as much as I love it. 

         Now, thus far, I have examined the relationship between onscreen evil and real-world fascism solely through the lens of gleaning cause and effect. But that’s not the only motivation an artist or filmmaker may have in how they choose to represent evil or evil figures.

        Something to keep in mind is that Vidal bears a striking resemblance to a real-life historical figure in the Spanish Civil War and its immediate aftermath, Francisco Franco. Spain under Franco’s rule was a time of censorship including the suppression of entire languages, a time of the dictator in power executing his enemies. On paper, Spain was neutral in World War II, but under the table, Franco was absolutely supporting the Axis powers and Hitler’s regime. This time period is known as Francoist Spain.

Franco was in power for a considerable amount of time, such that he captured the imaginations and hearts of the people he was oppressing and manipulating. (Those of us in America know absolutely nothing about this …) For generations, children in Spain were reportedly taught that God himself ordained Franco to rescue the country from poverty. More than any broadly defined Nazi, Franco is the real-world figure with whom Vidal is most closely aligned, and I don’t think Del Toro was at all shying away from this allegory. Natalia Keogan observes for Paste Magazine, 

“Set five years after the official end of the Civil War and Franco’s ascension to power, the film is steadfast in its assertion that a strong faction of Spanish citizenry bravely resisted the shift to totalitarianism well after Franco was declared divine leader. Caught in the crosshairs of the conflict is the adolescent Ofelia ... who gradually retreats into a mythical (though often perilous) realm in order to escape the escalating violence of her surroundings.”

“… Though the film’s most captivating moments are certainly those which feature stunning make-up, prosthetics and computer effects ... these are never the most viscerally affecting. No inhuman entity in the film is more frightening than the uniquely human cruelty of Captain Vidal, the blank expression as he maims and slaughters those who stand in the way of a purified Spain more ghastly than a creature with sagging flesh and gaping eye sockets in its palms. His monstrosity is palpable in the force with which he bashes a young farmer’s face in with a blunt bottle; the tortured, mangled hand of a stuttering Maquis guerilla fighter; the sheer force with which he clutches Ofelia’s left hand, coldly reprimanding her for not having presented him with her right.”

         Franco also died peacefully and uneventfully, not at all befitting the monster that he was. And so displaying this Franco-insert as a total monster who dies a horrible, ugly death, that reads like Del Toro correcting history, trying to rob Franco of his legacy. And so, there is an additional agenda baked into Pan’s Labyrinth and its exposé of evil. He is looking at this man who was protected not just by literal armies, but by controlling the story of the country he lived in.

    Del Toro's motivation here, then, seems to be to forcibly pry the story out from the cold, dead fingers of history and turn the narrative against him. Vidal's characterization, or lack thereof, makes a lot more sense from the perspective of one trying to destroy any attempt history may have made to make a human monster "sympathetic" or even "complicated." This may be a fantasy, but it is at least a motivated one, and a proactive one at that.

Is oversimplifying the origin of evil acceptable where it robs the wicked of their mystique and their power? Honestly … I spent this whole essay thinking I would come to a satisfying answer, and I just haven’t found one yet.  

 

For Those Who Know Where to Look … 

The natural revulsion experienced when looking at the state of this world, and the impulse to try to correct it through some other constructed world, is a powerful one, especially since we live in a world that refuses to punish proven wickedness. But in a world where fascism continues to sprout, I do think it is worth asking whether we can use the fantasy mode as a tool to not just sort the wheat from the tares, but explore how these crops get planted in the first place, and how we save the harvest.

There may actually be just bad seeds spoiling the world, but such actors don’t ascend to positions of power “just because.” Ordinary people are left vulnerable by the ill-intended performances of people who have manipulated the systems they occupy, and so it becomes incumbent upon good-faith individuals to study how that ecosystem works.

Fantasy can be a powerful training ground for studying out what good and evil look like. Maybe there is use to having uncontaminated models of either good or evil if for no other reason than so we'll be prepared should we ever encounter them in their truest forms here on this side of the rainbow. But surely the mark of true goodness is learning to see past divisions and try to recruit everyone to the right side, whether or not they were lucky to have read The Chronicles of Narnia as a kid.

--The Professor