Abstract
This chapter explores the implications of privileging the child protagonist’s perspective in Guillermo del Toro’s film, El laberinto del fauno (Pan’s Labyrinth), a film that embeds itself in the history of children’s fantasy narratives. Ofelia, the protagonist, poses a radical challenge to the (adult) viewer in her response to human and nonhuman nature and the existence of evil. Ofelia moves between two juxtaposed but increasingly intertwined worlds: 1944 Spain and a nonhuman immortal realm. The ambiguous ending gives viewers the opportunity to either suspend belief in a rational world or to negate the child’s perspective. Bringing together ethical philosophy (Badiou), literary theory (Todorov), and aesthetics (Rancière), this chapter explores the stakes in the viewer’s visual stance.
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Notes
- 1.
There is a striking similarity between the oldest and largest surviving baroque theater in Italy, the Teatro Farnese in the Palazzo della Pilotta in Parma, and the underground court in the film.
- 2.
As Levy and Mendlesohn (2016) remark, “the wild countryside was fundamentally magical, its magic part of the archaeology of the landscape, and it belonged to all” (119). Del Toro also notes the incorporation of local beliefs that entire underworld kingdoms existed in the hills of Northwestern Spain and that the pit in the center corresponds to “pits in Portugal that have great alchemical and occultist symbolism” (del Toro and Zicree 2013, 207).
- 3.
In discussing the significance of this shot, Miller (2011) says that it is “in a sense, undoing the tragedy, because the tragedy points elsewhere, to fantasy, story, art” (40).
- 4.
Rancière’s discussion of the “child as director” in Fritz Lang’s Moonfleet makes use of the Schillerian concepts of naïve and sentimental poetry. This essay is absolutely of relevance to del Toro’s vision, especially in Pan’s Labyrinth . However, it exceeds the scope of this chapter. See Friedrich von Schiller, “Naïve and Sentimental Poetry” (1795).
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Varsamopoulou, E. (2019). Entering the Labyrinth of Ethics in Guillermo del Toro’s El laberinto del fauno. In: Hermansson, C., Zepernick, J. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Children's Film and Television. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17620-4_13
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