Inside the Labyrinth, Term Paper Example

Pan’s Labyrinth is Guillermo Del Toro’s visionary depiction of the horrors and atrocities suffered in the fight against fascism towards the end of the Spanish Civil War during the Franco regime in 1944.  Guillermo spent five years in preparation for this very personal dark fairy tale which draws correlations to his own life experience.  Guillermo Del Toro was born October 9, 1964 in Guadalajara Jalisco, Mexico.  Del Toro was raised by his grandmother who he describes as a strict and devout Catholic with fanatical tendencies where he compares her to Piper Laurie in Carrie where “his grandmother would require him to mortify himself in self-punishment, in one case placing metal bottle caps into his shoes so that the soles of his feet were bloodied while walking to school. She also tried to exorcise him twice because of his persistent interest in fantasy and drawing monsters from his imagination.” (IMDb)  The painful recriminations suffered by his grandmother did not deter his ambitions.  Guillermo developed his interest in filmmaking in his early teens and garnered valuable experience learning makeup and effects from the legendary Dick Smith of Exorcist fame.  He spent ten years as a makeup supervisor, but directed his first feature film, Dona Herlinda and Her Son, at the remarkable age of 21.  Guillermo developed his own production company called Necropia in the early 80’s and his career began to skyrocket with his first big movie, Cronos (1993) which won nine academy awards in Mexico and the discerning International Critics Week prize at Cannes. The other movies to his credit include Mimic (1997), El Espinazo Del Diablo (2001), a Spanish Civil War ghost story, Blade II (2002), and Hellbox (2004).  Del Toro’s films present a surreal nightmare with haunting imagery and religious overtones that is all at once disturbing, yet strangely engrossing.  Remnants of Del Toro’s catholic upbringing permeate all of his films.  The darker imagery can be intrinsically linked to the violence that was prevalent in Mexico during Guillermo’s youth.  Guillermo explains “It would be a cliché to say that, because I am a Mexican, I see death in a certain way. But I have seen more than my share of corpses, certainly more than the average First World guy. I worked for months next to a morgue that I had to go through to get to work. I’ve seen people being shot; I’ve had guns put to my head; I’ve seen people burnt alive, stabbed, decapitated … because Mexico is still a very violent place. So I do think that some of that element in my films comes from a Mexican sensibility.” (The Observer)  Guillermo considers himself an exile of Mexico in part due to the tumultuous ordeal of having to endure the 72 day kidnapping of his father for ransom.  Much of Del Toro’s past translates into his films.  Guillermo’s fantasia of haunts rests in tortured, yet sublime, beautiful creatures that are plagued by ugliness, but through redemption transcend their limitations and eternal struggle to acquire a beautiful spirit.

Some critics may cite that Pan makes reference to the Greek God Pan who is not represented in the film, but the title in Spanish is El Laberinto del Fauno which translates to Faun’s Labyrinth. It just didn’t have the same lyrical quality in English. The labyrinth part of the title is apropos in that labyrinth is defined as an intricate structural maze of interconnecting passages through which it is difficult to find one’s way.  Guillermo creates a virtual world in the guise of a dark fable that mirrors the monstrous existence of the life of his 12 year old protagonist, Ophelia.  Guillermo states that Ophelia is a “girl who gives birth to herself into the world she believes in.” (The Observer) Ophelia’s widowed mother has recently married Vidal a tyrannical Captain in Spain’s Civil Guard charged with policing and exterminating anti-fascist Marquis resistance in the mountainous wooded northern region of a remote military post. Ophelia is deeply affected by the absence of her father and misses the uninterrupted affections of her mother.  She escapes the light of her dim reality and descends into the murky depths of the darkness of the labyrinth wallowing in fear, loss, and confusion with her own emotional state echoing the moody, desolate atmosphere of the labyrinth.  There she is met with the Lord of the lair; a fantastical myth-like faun that appears conniving and sinister. He offers Ophelia the desperate escape she needs in the story of her true identity as the long, lost princess of the Undergound Realm where her father has been desperately seeking his daughter since her self imposed exile and foray into the enchantments of the human world. The King has come to know that the princess’s memory was erased by the blinding light of the bright sun and eventually she died from exposure to cold, sickness, and pain.  The King has waited for the reincarnation of the princess’s spirit into the soul of another female child and Ophelia is believed to be that child, but she must prove herself through three tests.  Guillermo metaphorically asserts that Ophelia is a “princess who forgot who she was and where she came from”, who progresses through the labyrinth to emerge as a promise that gives children the chance never to know the name of their father – the fascist. It’s a parable, just as The Devil’s Backbone was a parable of the Spanish Civil War.” (The Observer)  Pan’s Labyrinth more so than any other film by Guillermo most closely parallels his own life.  The movie draws direct correlation to his ancestral and birth country of Mexico giving the viewer a near realistic view of the fight against fascism.  Ophelia leaves the Underground Realm in search of greener pastures in the human world just as Guillermo leaves his ancestral home of Mexico.  The Underground Realm at the onset of the film is described as a place where there are no lies or pain.  Ophelia braves chilling strange terrain with monstrous creatures which is decidedly more entreating than being in the presence of her menacing, cruel, and sadistic stepfather.  Ophelia is so fervent in her quest to overcome her three tests that she is even willing to risk punishment as she cast off her new dress to crawl in a muddy cavern of a tree with revolting bugs crawling all over her.  There she is met with a large toad that greedily gorges himself on these bugs “as the Fascists dole out meager rations to nearby villagers, brusquely declaring their bread to be the superior dictator’s bread.” (Flakmagazine) The next test presents a scene also symbolic of Ophelia’s present reality where she is met with a grotesque man who has a veritable banquet of delicacies much like Captain Vidal has a locked storehouse of food rations.  All is fine with the test as Ophelia follows the mandated rules, but when she breaks the rules and eats of the food that has been forbidden; the man picks up his eyes from the table and shoves them into the stigmata like piercings on his hands to see the transgressor and make her pay with her life.  Captain Vidal issues the same harsh punishment for those who would break the edicts of Franco.  There is no compassion.  There is only obedience or death.  Ophelia is scorned for her lapse in judgment and with her mother’s tenuous condition she only finds solace in her stepfather’s housekeeper Mercedes who is actually a spy for the resistance.  Ophelia’s mother dies in childbirth and it seems all is lost. She is eventually given another opportunity at redemption and is murdered by Captain Vidal, but finds rebirth through death into the home she once knew where she is returned to the welcome embraces of her lost father and mother.  Ophelia reigns as queen in the Underground Realm where her brother fosters in the human world.

Guillermo Del Toro’s beautiful monsters take us on a guided tour to the depths of a Hell like existence and back, and we are all the better for the trip.

Works Cited

Pan’s Labyrinth. Dir. Guillermo Del Toro. Perf. Ivana Baquero, Sergi López, Maribel Verdú, Doug Jones,.  Ariadna Gil Tequila Gang, 2006.

” ‘Pain should not be sought – but it should never be avoided’.” 5, November 2006.  guardian.co.uk./The Obsever 2010. < ‘Pain should not be sought – but it should never be avoided’>.

” Biography for Guillermo del Toro.” IMDb. 1990 – 2010. <http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0868219/bio />.

“Brenneis, Sara J.” Picturehouse. Flakmagazine – Film. <http://www.flakmag.com/film/panslabyrinth.html >. 1997 – 2007