Mini-Cast #6 - Pan's Labyrinth: Final Draft

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

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

(pause)... It always comes back to questions of real versus not real. Consuming sci-fi and fantasy is a matter of time beforeaudiences to cry betrayal over series which obsessed them for years but can't possibly meet all their expectations. The whole point of conceptual fiction is that you can do literally anything, and because all manner of series take us through every conceivable narrative permutation, there inevitably comes a point when no trick is left. The author exhausts every possible option, and like in George R. R. Martin, it becomes an arms race of storytelling, so many spectacular scenes going in so many directions that every new scene has to one-up the shock of the last. What is left for the ending? There's no way to tie it all together to create an ending both satisfying and surprising.

But my biggest distaste with Game of Thrones isn't with the fantasy per se, it's 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 know that's a dubious claim. I don't know if it'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.

But while Game of Thrones became a cautionary tale about Fantasy-lit's problems, Pan's Labyrinth is an examplar of its glories. Fantasy's minefields are so easy to step on that when an artist gets it righ, the achievement is that much greater, and by using the tools of infinite imagination, the artistic sublimity reverberates that much further into infinity.

I don't think it gives anything away to tell of the end of Pan's Labyrinth because the end of the movie's also the beginning. It's not only Ofelia caught in this Labyrinth, the Anne Frank-like doomed heroine, it's Captain Vidal, and more even than they, it's us. By the end of the movie, we have no idea what's real and what's fantasy. The movie begins and ends with Ofelia's death in 1944, a year when so many children faced Ofelia's fate. And in Ofelia's final reel, what do we see? Is it the magic of an anthropomorphic supernatural faun - or of a supernatural being even more powerful? Is it the final imaginings of a dying girl whose brain was always dangerously imaginative? Or is it in the mind of Captain Vidal, caught in the middle of a battle in a drugged state - and is the battle even real or is he hallucinating? 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, and it made me deeply uncomfortable. My problem was not with the idea that Pan's Labyrinth is political with contemporary relevance, it obviously is. But the movie is about things far more elemental than politics. It's about how humans require fantasy to come to terms with the world's barbarity.

There's no question, art is political, but politics are very complicated, and the political aspect of art is just one arm on a Hecatoncheire-like entity with a hundred arms or more. Many conservatives allege that art's purpose is beauty. Many progressives allege that art's purpose is empathy. Many think that art's purpose is emotion, and ideologues of all stripes think art's purpose is its message. The last one is closer to the mark, but because it's closer, it's correspondingly more dangerous in how it simplifies. All four of those concepts are mere tools at art's disposal.

The purpose of art is meaning, and artistic meaning is simultaneously universal and very personal. Meaning comes to us in an infinity of forms - forms intellectual, emotional, and spiritual, it always evolves upon reacquaintance, and the meaning is different for every person. But how you know that a work like Pan's Labyrinth is that great is that it seems to make that stunning impression on so many different people, who take so many different meanings from its content. This is art.