Mini-Cast #4 - Pan's Labyrinth by Guillermo del Toro - Rough Draft

Two or three weeks ago I saw Pan's Labyrinth for the first time in twelve years. It has existed in my mind since 2006 as one of the very greatest movies I've ever seen, maybe the best movie I've seen since 2000. But upon reacquaintance, I wonder if I've underestimated it. It is so good, in fact, that it exists on the kind of plane to which a once-or-twice-in-a-generation movie can ascend: Citizen Kane, The Godfather, Pan's Labyrinth... It's that great.

I have never seen it except in the movie theater. The first time I saw it, I was a tear-stained wreck, and when we emerged under the lights, I saw that a friend of mine was even more of a wreck than I. The second time I saw it, I dragged a bunch of friends, who seemed to agree with me that it was incredible. I also made my father see it, and he liked it but didn't like it nearly as much as I because he didn't think Pan's Labyrinth was realistic....

It always comes back to these questions of the real versus the not real. Consuming sci-fi and fantasy is like playing a game in which you see how long it takes audiences to cry betrayal over a series which obsessed them for years but can't possibly meet all of their expectations. Nearly the whole point of conceptual fiction is that you can do literally anything with it, and because all manner of series take the series through every conceivable narrative permutation, there eventually comes a point where there is no conceivable trick left. The author has exhausted every possible option, and like George R. R. Martin, has already taken the story in so many directions that there is no way to tie it all together to create an ending that's both satisfying and surprising.

A few months ago, before Game of Thrones ended, I wrote a piece on my Times of Israel blog which was not my best, where I charged Game of Thrones of being frivolous in part because it's fantasy. Well, in retrospect that's obviously a frivolous accusation, and one that I'm not even sure how much I believed when I wrote it. My distaste with Game of Thrones isn't with the fantasy per se, my distaste is with how fantasy so often panders to an audience's need for overstimulation, and how the need of so many millions around the world for overstimulation like you see in Game of Thrones becomes a narcotic whose requirement they can't help bringing to their real lives, where they seek experiences well beyond what an ordinary life promises; and if they can't find good experiences they'll pursue bad experiences - like electing fascists president or trying to overthrow capitalism forever.

I honestly don't know if that's any more true than the idea that the insane might get violent ideas from consuming violent video games and movies, or that men will be more likely to treat women badly if they consume media that demeans women. All three notions are simultaneously true and false down to the level of each individual at every moment.

But while Game of Thrones became a cautionary tale about the problems of fantasy, Pan's Labyrinth is a supreme examplar of its glories. The minefields of fantasy literature are so easy to step on, that when an artist gets it right, the achievement is that much greater, and by having used the world of infinite imagination, the artistic sublimity reverberates that much further into the infinite.

I don't think it gives anything away to tell of the end of Pan's Labyrinth because the end of the movie is also the beginning. It is not only Ofelia, the Anne Frank-like young heroine of this doomed era, who is caught in this Labyrinth, it is Captain Vidal, and more even than they, it's us. By the end of the movie, we have absolutely no idea what is real and what is fantasy. The movie begins and ends with Ofelia's death in 1944, a year when so many children faced the same fate. And in Ofelia's final reel, what are we seeing? Is this all the doings of an anthropomorphic faun with supernatural powers - or of a supernatural being even higher than the faun? Or is it the final imaginings of a dying girl whose brain was dangerously imaginative on her best days? Or is it the drugged mind of Captain Vidal who is caught in the middle of a battle in a compromised state - and is the battle even real or is he hallucinating it? Or is it all of the above and many more, or is it just a movie?

...A few weeks ago, a particularly provocative acquaintance tried very hard to trap me into drawing parallels between Pan's Labyrinth and our contemporary political world in a manner that made me deeply uncomfortable. My problem was not with the idea that Pan's Labyrinth is a political movie with things to tell us about today, it obviously is and a searingly angry one, and in the context of 1944 Spain its anger is obviously directed at the Right rather than at the Left. But the movie is about things far more elemental than mere politics. The movie is about how humans require the world of fantasy to come to terms with its barbarity.

There is no question, art is political, but politics are far more complicated than most artists give it credit for being, and the political aspect of art is merely one arm on a Hecatoncheire-like entity with a hundred arms or more. The purpose of art is not beauty, as so many conservatives allege, nor is the purpose of art empathy, as many leftists allege. Nor is its purpose emotion, as I'm sure many people believe who don't think much about art believe it to be, and its purpose is most certainly not the message the work conveys, though that is closer to the mark, and because it's closer, it's correspondingly more dangerous in how it simplifies the truth. All four of those concepts are mere tools at art's disposal.

The purpose of art is meaning, and meaning is very personal. It comes to us in an infinity of forms - forms intellectual, emotional, and spiritual, and it always evolves upon reacquaintance. Nearly thirteen years ago, I was deeply moved and fascinated by it, indeed I was in awe. But watching it again, completely different aspects of the movie jumped out at me. Only a great, cosmic, eternal work of art can renew itself on reacquaintance in a completely different way than the way it used to. I have no doubt that as the years go on, I'll find very different things in this movie still. May we all avoid the situations it describes and live to see it again.