Abstract
Focusing on Pan’s Labyrinth (Guillermo del Toro, 2006), this chapter explores the interweaving of a fantasy world of monsters, gothic ambiguities and fairytale tasks, faced by the heroine, Ofelia, with a ‘real’ world representing her stepfather’s brutality, pertaining to horrors endured after the Spanish Civil War, and specifically referring to the pervasive violence of Francisco Franco’s regime. Fairytale structures, roles and narratives of the ‘real’ world help to universalize the historically specific, while the elasticity of the fantasy world enables unspeakable subject matter to be addressed. Gothic elements allude to confusions that contributed to Francoist dictatorship, advocating disobedience in the face of adversity. Ambivalences remain at the film’s end; hope rests alongside extreme pain, terror, horror and real-life atrocities that never finally fade.
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- 1.
An earlier, shorter version of this chapter was previously published: Laura Hubner (2010). ‘Pan’s Labyrinth, Fear and the Fairy Tale’, in Stephen Hessel and Michèle Huppert (eds.), Fear Itself. Reasoning the Unreasonable (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi Press), pp. 45–62.
- 2.
Archibald cites as an example La lengua de las mariposas / Butterfly’s Tongue (José Luis Cuerda, 1999). He suggests that the film depicts Republican Spain with “rose-tinted spectacles,” consigning the Civil War to the past: “The stress that La lengua de las mariposas places on the transformative powers of education suggests that in contemporary Spain, with a generation of young people brought up free from the constrictive dictatorship and educated in the world of liberal democracy, it is a nightmare that need no longer haunt contemporary Spanish society” (Archibald 2004: 81).
- 3.
One of the few exceptions, noted by Stone, Sé quien eres / I Know Who you Are (Patricia Fereira, 2000), can be seen to reflect on the dualities and complexities of Spanish identity. This romantic thriller centres on a female psychiatrist who locates the traumas connected to her patient’s loss of memory, by unearthing the hidden violent episodes of history blotted out by an entire nation. As Stone (2002: 131) argues, “Thus, in this film’s honest look back at recent Spanish history, there is, perhaps, the beginning of a cure for social amnesia and a recognition of its necessity.”
- 4.
Ellis and Sánchez-Arce (2016: 216, footnote 1) elaborate, “The gaze of the grandchildren no longer respects the pact of oblivion. While Spain’s political class remains cautious about breaking the silence, a significant section of civil society is ready to remember the past and restless to tell and be told its almost-forgotten stories. Since the new millennium a series of civil pressure groups, most notably the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory, has petitioned the government for financial assistance to locate and recover the bodies of all those who were killed by Franco’s forces both during and after the Civil War.” The Civil War remains a talking point in current disturbances including those related to the violent intervention by Spanish police attempting to suppress the independence referendum held in Catalonia on Sunday, 1 October 2017 on the grounds that it was not legal.
- 5.
El Bosc/The Forest (Óscar Aibar, 2012) is a noteworthy Spanish film set in the 1930s about the ravages of the Spanish Civil War on a family, as factions struggle for territory. Close to the family’s farmhouse, strange lights shine as an entrance to another world. The difficult and ambivalent relationship with the past is something that is also relevant to Mexican culture. In addition, Mexican cinema has a rollercoaster history controlled by varying levels of censorship.
- 6.
This is all the more brutal due to Vidal’s complete lack of empathy for the father–son relationship, despite the concept of the male bloodline being crucial to his own sense of identity. Time is clearly valued over human relationships.
- 7.
In this sense, the treatment of the fighters is reminiscent of abandonment in fairy tales, such as ‘Hansel and Gretel.’
- 8.
Presumably here del Toro refers to young heroines in fairy tales like ‘Little Red Riding Hood,’ ‘Snow White’ and ‘Rapunzel.’
- 9.
Franco wore the uniform of a Captain General (a rank reserved for royalty), seeing his position as assigned by God, and he ruled with a conservative, authoritarian conviction. However, his vision was far from ideologically coherent, forged out of an amalgamation of what Campos (2004: 348) sees as “two contradictory ideological and nationalist agendas” (a National-Catholic agenda meeting a fascist one): “Having long debated the nature of Francoist ideology, historians now tend to agree in their assessment of the Franco regime as a National-Catholic one, whether one views that label as referring to an ideology or a mentality.”
- 10.
Del Toro does not go on to address the fact that the rebels are not able to finally save Ofelia from dying, at least within the ‘real’ world. However, it is worth noting that Ofelia’s actions and decisions recall the girl’s disobedience and use of initiative in the early folk version of ‘Little Red Riding Hood,’ entitled ‘The Story of the Grandmother’ detailed in Chapter 5, in which the girl manages to outwit the wolf. The tale is reproduced in Jack Zipes (1993: 21–23).
- 11.
Although the stepmother is much more common in the fairytale canon than the stepfather, Pan’s Labyrinth is not the first to split the father in two. William Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Ingmar Bergman’s film Fanny and Alexander (1982) (which bears similarities with Hamlet) serve as two examples of this divide between the good ‘real’ father and the wicked stepfather.
- 12.
Del Toro (2007) speaking on ‘The Power of Myth,’ Pan’s Labyrinth 2 Disc DVD set, Optimum Home Entertainment, Disc 2. ‘The Labyrinth of the Faun’ is less concise and perhaps less memorable than ‘Pan’s Labyrinth.’
- 13.
A number of authors note that the pile of shoes is a reference to the Holocaust. See, for example: Atkinson (2007: 3); Walter Rankin (2016: 85); Ellis and Sánchez-Arce (2016: 200), Christopher Hartney and Sarah Penicka (2016: 227). Barry Spector (2009: 83) additionally observes, “The piles of children’s shoes, the semicircular fireplace, and the date (1944) all evoke the Holocaust.”
- 14.
Spector (2009: 83) observes that Ofelia resembles Persephone, who ate Hades’ pomegranate; like the Greek queen who was forced to spend half her time in the Underworld and half her time with the gods, Ofelia is also a resident of two worlds.
- 15.
Cochrane (2007) suggests that in this respect Ofelia is rather like Rosaleen from The Company of Wolves (Neil Jordan, 1984) adapted, as outlined in the previous chapter, from Angela Carter’s short story.
- 16.
See, for example, Del Toro (2007).
- 17.
As suggested earlier, these rounded interiors contrast with the sharp phallic angularity of Vidal’s world.
- 18.
It is worth noting that the female network is a strong feature of a number of films by Pedro Almodóvar, who significantly worked as one of the producers on del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone.
- 19.
Unlike Abraham’s agreement to hand over his son Isaac to God, in the Bible, Ofelia’s refusal to sacrifice the baby is evidence that she has passed the test by showing initiative.
- 20.
The mass suppression of republican sympathizers, leading to death or enforced departure, meant that Spain lost a huge number of its professionals (including doctors, nurses, lawyers, teachers and artists) in the aftermath of the Civil War.
- 21.
Del Toro (2007) attributes this sense of transcendence emerging out of pain to his Mexican roots. He relates it to the mythology of the Mexican people’s awareness and acceptance of death as a cyclical process and to his status as ‘lapsed Catholic.’ Speaking to Mark Kermode, ‘Guardian interview at the National Film Theatre with Director.’ The film embodies some of the tensions and ambivalences of ‘lapsed Catholic’ identification, challenging the Catholic Church as an institution, and for its complicity, while aspects of religion’s creed seep into the film’s imagery and sentiment.
- 22.
The theme of rediscovering the true path via a return to the real self that has been forgotten or lost can be seen across many Latin American folklore and fairy tales. This theme is evident in, for example, some of the recent incarnations of Brazilian folktales (folclore) in the series of short-film animations sponsored by the Rio de Janeiro City Council, called ‘Juro que vi’ (‘I swear I saw it’), which won national awards, such as the Grand Cinema Award of Brazil (2010) under the category of short film animation.
- 23.
This citation provides both an authorial reference to mid nineteenth-century Denmark and a universal quality, for home and international audiences. The association with Andersen’s fairy tale helps to extend the specific to a more timeless realm. The particular political issues of drug trafficking, prostitution and homelessness in Medellín are thus given a more universal understanding.
- 24.
It is worth noting Ofelia’s similarity with the teenage heroine Rosaleen, in The Company of Wolves (Neil Jordan, 1984), who also tells her own story (about the wounded she-wolf), providing insight into her visions, as explored in Chapter 5.
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Hubner, L. (2018). The Horror in Pan’s Labyrinth: Beneath the Rhetoric of Hope and Fear. In: Fairytale and Gothic Horror. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-39347-0_6
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