Pan’s Labyrinth.
Another retrospective post, and likely my last. I’m going to go all the way back to week one, here, and Guillermo Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth (2006). What hit me while watching this film was the increasing number of films that seem to be using the form of a child’s body in a fantastical universe as a canvas on which to paint political stories and commentary. Just thinking quickly, in the past few years, we have had the Harry Potter films, The Dark is Rising (which apparently was butchered unrecognisably from its source material), the Narnia films, the upcoming His Dark Materials adaptations, and that’s merely the beginning of a list. Why has it become so enticing to tell our moral stories from the vision of children?
An answer to this might come in looking at the political world around us. It has been over five years since the “War on Terror” has begun, over five years since we have been at war with an adjective that often lacks any corporeal substance behind it. It might be arguable, then, that our culture is longing for the naivete of the child’s body and the child’s views of the world. This is a return to innocence, in a sense, to a time when not only our own morals were far simpler, but so were our views of others’ morals. Fantasy, on the other hand, allows a space where anxieties we are experiencing in our own world can be depoliticised and represented.
In Pan’s Labyrinth the world around Ofelia is a political quagmire in which she has no agency, so she copes by creating her own fantasy world in which her moral choices come to be imbued with meaning. Is the trend towards child protagonists a similar attempt on our culture’s part to find some understanding and meaning in our own moral and political actions? Is our consumption of them a crutch in a time where we feel we have no agency, just as Ofelia’s secret kingdom is for her? There is certainly something escapist about these films, and this idea is quite conversant with Laplanche & Pontalis’s view that fantasy is a setting for desire, ‘a place where conscious and unconscious, self and other, part and whole meet’. (Quoted from Linda Williams, Gender, Race and World Cinema)
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Comparing Pan’s Labyrinth and Harry Potter.
I enjoyed Pan’s Labyrinth immensely, and I think it did an excellent job of posing questions of morality and asking the viewer, and the characters, to answer them. Particularly affecting was, I think, the choice the town doctor is forced to make, when he gives up his life in a stand to give a man in pain a peaceful death. The heroine of the piece is also given an strong emotional dilemma, and the lack of Hollywood ending is what gives the film its emotional resonance for me. It is for these reasons that I think Pan’s Labyrinth, though it is a fantasy film with a child protagonist, escapes the prism of pure political escapism. It acts as a commentary on the phenomenon even as it is a part of it. When you compare Del Toro’s film to the Harry Potter series, for example, I think the moral simplicity of the latter becomes starkly clear. In Harry Potter, the titular character never has any true moment of moral questioning: he is essentially a Jesus figure who does not seem to have to undergo any moral interrogation. I do think Pan’s Labyrinth succeeds, in many ways, where the Harry Potter series fails as a mature work. (The comparison of Harry‘s origin in a book series and Pan’s Labyrinth as an organic film might also be interesting to think on.)
I risk sounding like a curmudgeon, so I’ll disclaim that I enjoyed the first few books of the Harry Potter series very, very much. I do feel, however, that the ultimate moral lesson of the series was extremely facile and the ending revealed the books as “just a children’s series after all”. Pan’s Labyrinth, on the other hand, is far more a film for adults, even with its young protagonist, and so it’s through this film that we might achieve a level of self-awareness that we cannot in viewing purely escapist works.
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