When the Mexican-Spanish film El Laberinto del Fauno (Pan’s Labyrinth) was released in 2006, director and writer Guillermo del Toro had just established himself as an important force in Hollywood film with the release of the comic book adaptation Hellboy (2004). He had also written and directed other interesting films, including El Espinazo del Diablo (The Devil’s Backbone, 2001), which serves as something of a direct predecessor to Pan’s Labyrinth in its use of supernatural elements to investigate the extreme horrors of fascism in Spain. And his direction of the vampire film Blade II (2002) made that film easily the most visually interesting in the Blade franchise. One could argue, however, that it was with Pan’s Labyrinth that del Toro was first able completely to transfer his dazzling visual imagination onto the big screen, while also combining supernatural elements, human drama, and historical events in ways that anticipate The Shape of Water (2017), which would bring him an Academy Award for Best Director, while itself winning the Oscar for Best Picture.
Perhaps what is most important about Pan’s Labyrinth, though, is not its dazzling visual imagery but its effective use of fantasy as a mode of political commentary. In this, the film participates in a contemporary re-evaluation of the potential of the genre in this respect, overcoming a decades-long tendency to see fantasy as politically inert or even retrograde. Pan’s Labyrinth derives its fantasy material largely from fairytales, perhaps the most politically problematic of all fantasy forms. Yet its central fantasy figure, the goatlike “faun” of the title, draws upon a variety of age-old mythic associations with goats, and the film uses the complexity of these associations to enhance the effectiveness of its own political message. By interweaving its fantasy story with a real-world story involving Spanish fascism, Pan’s Labyrinth undercuts the notion that fantasy is an escapist genre incapable of encouraging the reevaluation of real-world political views. Pan’s Labyrinth does not simply oppose fantasy to reality; it is constructed in a way that consistently undermines simplistic binary oppositions of a kind that have plagued the fantasy genre, often making it difficult to make nuanced political statements within the genre.
Reality vs. Fantasy in Pan’s Labyrinth
After opening on-screen text that establishes the setting of the film as Spain in 1944 and reminds us that Spanish resistance fighters were still opposing the fascist regime that had taken power in the Spanish Civil War, Pan’s Labyrinth begins with a shot of what might be a dying girl, lying on her back with blood oozing from her mouth. Then, however, the film reverses the flow of blood and seems to suggest that perhaps the girl’s death is not inevitable. It then shifts to a sort of prologue that relates the fairy-tale-like story of a long-ago underground realm, free of lies or pain, in which a young princess nevertheless dreamed of the above-ground human world, to which she eventually escaped. Once there, the unaccustomed bright sun erased her memory of her former life, and she eventually fell ill and died. However, her father, king of the underground realm, remained convinced that her soul would one day return to his underground kingdom, perhaps reborn in another body.
The film then rather jarringly shifts back to the present time of the film, in which a convoy of two cars and a truck approaches a remote castle-like outpost that will turn out to be the headquarters of the fascist Captain Vidal (Sergi López), who has been assigned to battle the Maqui rebels who remain in the nearby mountains[1]. In one of the cars is the young girl from the opening scene, ten-year-old Ofelia (Ivan Baquero), who is traveling with her pregnant and ailing mother Carmen (Ariadne Gil), to join Vidal, who is Ofelia’s stepfather and the father of Carmen’s soon-to-be-born son. Carmen is far too frail to be traveling in this way, but Vidal has demanded that she travel to join him anyway, so that his son can be born in the presence of his father. This demand demonstrates Vidal’s adherence to a rigidly patriarchal view of the world, as does his confidence that the infant will be male. We will eventually learn, though, that Vidal goes far beyond any simple notion of the patriarchal oppressor. He is an embodiment of pure evil reaching almost supernatural levels, while still visiting very real, physical suffering on those around him. He is, in short, a fascist, and fascism, this film tells us (as do both The Devil’s Backbone and Hellboy), is an almost supernatural evil that goes far beyond any traditional notion of the evil that men do.
The innocent Ofelia is clearly established in the film in opposition to Vidal, in keeping with the good-evil binary that often obtains in fairy tales—a binary that this film will otherwise disrupt considerably. This characterization begins in this opening convoy scene, in which the convoy is forced to stop to allow Carmen to throw up, while Ofelia wanders off and encounters a large, flying stick-bug that she immediately parses as a fairy, indicating the power and whimsical nature of her imagination. We also see in this opening sequence that she is carrying a number of books of fairy tales, suggesting the source of her imaginary vision, a source that even her relatively sympathetic mother views as full of nonsense. Carmen, after all, has had to give up all hope of a magical life in favor of the material survival she believes will best be guaranteed for herself and Ofelia by her practical liaison with Vidal.
Of course, Ofelia’s imagination is partly so vivid simply because her real life is so spiritually impoverished. She would have been born in 1934, during the buildup to the Spanish Civil War, and would have been a very small child during the peak civil war years of 1936 to 1939. Meanwhile, her mother’s marriage to Vidal has hardly made things better for her, and her mother serves as a very ineffective barrier between her and the brutish fascist, partly because she is so ill (and eventually dies in childbirth, partly due to the captain’s order that the baby be saved at her expense if necessary). The film does, however, feature one strong woman character who provides more support for Ofelia in the person of Mercedes (Maribel Verdú), Vidal’s household servant (who turns out secretly to be in league with the local rebels, whom she feeds both information and supplies from Vidal’s headquarters).
Pan’s Labyrinth is perhaps best remembered for its many striking visual images, perhaps the most striking of which is the sinister Pale Man, a white-skinned demonic figure with eyeballs in the palms of his hands that loves to munch innocent fairies that he plucks out of the air with those hands. Slightly less visually striking (but more central to the narrative and its themes) is a faun that serves as a generalized embodiment of natural forces, with its goatlike head calling special attention to the long and complex history of the symbolic role played by goats in cultures around the world. In particular, this faun is a complex figure that draws special energy from the doubleness of goat symbolism, building on the Roman and Celtic figuration of goats as images of vitality and fertility but also nodding to the Christian tendency to associate goats with Satanic forces. Indeed, the doubleness of the goat figure is key to the complex rhetoric of the film and to its deconstruction of most of the binary oppositions upon which it, at first glance, seems to be built. This goatlike figure is part of an array of symbols that enacts a complex dialogue between the magical world of the childhood imagination and the imaginatively impoverished world of fascism, while at the same time thoroughly undermining any attempt to see fantasy and reality as polar opposites. This film grants that fascism contains important fantasy elements, while also reminding us that the fight against fascism requires not just magical goats but physical guns.
Gómez L-Quiñones emphasizes that Pan’s Labyrinth associates its fantasy world with childhood and Ofelia, while associating the real world of fascism with the world of adults. Ofelia, after all, is removed almost entirely from the world of adults, retreating into her fairytale books and her fairytale imagination in a manner that is almost completely independent of adult supervision. Meanwhile, the adults around her, living in the harsh reality of fascist Spain, have turned their backs on the kind of thinking represented by fairytales. Even Mercedes, the most sympathetic of the film’s adult characters, admits to Ofelia that, while she once believed in fairies and such things as a child, now she no longer does. However, the opposition between Ofelia’s childhood world of fantasy and the grim real world of the film’s adult characters is complicated, as Gómez L-Quiñones notes, by the way Ofelia is also subtly associated with the political point of view of the rebels, who, in their direct fight against fascism, are presumably meant to be seen as part of the real world. Yet, in addition to Ofelia’s general opposition to Vidal (and to her specific agreement not to inform Vidal when she discovers that Mercedes is working with the rebels), Gómez L-Quiñones argues that Ofelia “summarizes the logic of the republican cause, which, despite being condemned to failure, and despite having already failed in one war, persists in doing what is morally right.”[2] In the “real” world of the film, Ofelia is killed, but in her fantasy world she triumphs, returning to take her rightful place as the princess of the underground fairytale kingdom. However, the Maquis actual triumph in the “real” world of the film, as they did not in historical reality[3], suggesting a fantasy element to this triumph and undermining any attempt to see reality and fantasy as strict polar opposites in this film.
While certain elements of the film make it almost impossible to see the faun and the underground kingdom as anything other than the projections of Ofelia’s fantasy throughout the film, one might argue that the ending, in which she is resurrected in the underground kingdom, cannot be her fantasy because she is already dead. Here, though, I agree with Easterbrook that this resurrection occurs in the viewer’s fantasy, introducing an element that further complicates the opposition between fantasy and reality in the film (205). I would also suggest that the ultimate triumph of the Maquis over Vidal can also be read as the realization of the viewer’s fantasy wishes, thus completely collapsing the boundary between fantasy and reality.
The Fairytale Sources of Pan’s Labyrinth
Kristine Kotecki notes the wide range of fairytale sources that del Toro employs in his film—including previous films with the texture of fairytales, such as The Wizard of Oz (1939) and Disney’s Alice in Wonderland (1951). However, she notes that, as opposed to Disney’s use of fairytale sources in films such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), del Toro does not simply accept the ideological authority of his sources but challenges them in a number of ways, adding to the antifascist orientation of his film. For one thing, the sheer multiplicity of del Toro’s sources means that no one source can exercise the kind of monological control that fascism seeks. Moreover, the Pan’s Labyrinth also offers multiple interpretations of its relationship with each individual source, which, for Kotecki, is crucial to the way the film “can not only resist fidelity to the imagined authority of an original tale but can also create the space for the audience to bypass that authority” (251).
Her imagination stirred by the ruins of an ancient labyrinth on the grounds of Vidal’s headquarters, Ofelia finds her new home to be a very hostile place otherwise, though Mercedes does what she can to protect and comfort the girl. The hostility of Vidal and of her surroundings in general drives Ofelia further into her imagination, which quickly produces a whole troupe of fairies who turn out to be the minions of a large and somewhat imposing faun, played by famed creature mimic Doug Jones, with some help from CGI. This faun then drives much of Ofelia’s activity in the remainder of the film, activity that is generally presented to us as if real even when it takes place in a clearly magical context. In particular, in good fairy-tale fashion, Ofelia is assigned (by the faun) a series of tasks that she must complete in order to prove that she is the incarnation of the princess of the underground realm, allowing her to return to her rightful home in the underground kingdom. She succeeds, though not without difficulty, and not without having to overcome some trickery on the part of the faun.
Meanwhile, Ofelia also has to negotiate difficulties in the real world, especially as Vidal has so little use for his stepdaughter, given her gender. All we are told about Ofelia’s biological father is that he was a tailor who was killed in the “war.” In seems natural to assume, though, that this war was the Spanish Civil War and that he was fighting on the side of the Republicans, or at least sympathizing with them. Though it is not clearly indicated in the film, del Toro has suggested, in an interview with Diestro-Dópido, that he meant to imply that Ofelia’s father might have been Vidal’s tailor and that he might, in fact, have been murdered by Vidal, presumably in order to gain possession of Carmen (and “possession” clearly is the word that describes Vidal’s own sense of the nature of this relationship). This suggestion adds a new element of horror to the domestic drama of the film, with Carmen and Ofelia essentially held as prisoners of the fascist monster who murdered their husband/father.
Fantasy notwithstanding, del Toro has carefully constructed his film to mirror the reality of Spanish fascism. Though the project was long hidden, the phenomenon of the “niños robados” (“stolen children”) of fascist Spain has now been extensively documented[4]. In this program, around 30,000 children of Republicans killed or imprisoned by the fascists were given to Franco’s supporters to be raised as little fascists, all memory of their real family backgrounds erased[5]. As Diestro-Dópido points out, this program provides important background to Pan’s Labyrinth. In particular, she argues that the end of the film (in which Ofelia’s newborn baby brother is taken in by the rebels as they prepare to kill Vidal) can be seen as a sort of rejoinder to and reversal of this project (83). As Vidal lies dying, he grasps the cracked watch that has been so important to him throughout the film and asks his executioners to tell his infant son what time his father died. Instead, the rebels assure Vidal that his son will have no memory of him whatsoever or even know Vidal’s name, the name that he had been so terribly anxious to pass on to his son.
This watch is one of the key symbols of the film, serving (among other things) to indicate Vidal’s as his obsession with time, regimentation, and control. There is some question about the origin of the watch, but Vidal has clearly endowed it with a sort of fetishistic magical quality. This image of a would-be magical timepiece is something that had been seen before in the work of del Toro. In his early vampire film Cronos (1993) an alchemist develops a mechanism that can give eternal life, which is then rediscovered in the modern world, where it is found essentially to work by infecting its bearer with vampirism. Both the device of Cronos and the watch of Pan’s Labyrinth gain mythological power from association with the vaguely-related stories of Chronus, the Greek god of time, though the title of del Toiro’s vampire film more directly suggests Cronos, a Greek titan who castrated and deposed his father Uranus but was then eventually deposed in turn by his own son Zeus. In a sense, both the device of Cronos and the watch of Pan’s Labyrinth represent attempts to defeat mortality, and both to some extent indicate a horror of the death that is inevitable to all physical creatures. In the case of the watch, this horror is especially clear as a key characteristic of fascism, which is presented as a soulless and inhuman force disgusted by all that is abject about human existence. However, the watch is not truly magical and it therefore does not give Vidal the power to escape death; in fact, its power is easily broken by the rebels in the film.
The faun and his fairies, on the other hand, are truly magical and indicate a genuine intrusion of the underground realm into above-ground reality. Indeed, a crucial concern of Pan’s Labyrinth is the sharp contrast between the fascist fascination with false magic and myth and Ofelia’s fascination with the real magic of the faun, who comes equipped with an array of folkloric and mythological associations. Thanks partly to the English-language title, it is natural for viewers to associate the faun in some way with the Greek god Pan, which seems appropriate given that Pan is vaguely associated in the popular imagination with the kind of life-affirming and celebratory revels that would be anathema to humorless fascists such as Vidal. Del Toro, however, has insisted that the faun in his film is not Pan: the translated title was chosen purely for marketing purposes. As Diestro-Dópido puts it, “Using the name Pan—the Roman equivalent of the Faun, but in fact a completely different mythological entity—was a commercial decision made by the sales agent based purely on the best-sounding title” (66). And, surely, this decision also had to do, not just with sound, but with the fact that modern Western viewers have some familiarity with Pan but probably think a faun is a baby deer.
Most modern viewers are probably also not aware that the ancient Celtic traditions that are typically associated with Ireland and parts of the United Kingdom traveled through Northern Spain on their way to Britain and Ireland. And Pan’s Labyrinth includes a liberal dose of Celtic symbology that broadens its mythological background. For example, the faun itself is not particularly linked with Chronus or Cronos, but it can be associated with the nearly homophonic Cernunnos, the Celtic god of nature and a symbol of fertility and virility, often associated with goats, stags, and deer and usually depicted with horns and other goat-like features. He thus has much in common with the fauns of Roman mythology, whose lusty, lively nature stands in stark opposition to virtually everything that would normally be associated with fascism.
Nor is the film’s “faun,” strictly speaking, a conventional faun, as suggested in the original Spanish title. Fauns are traditionally envisioned as half-human and half-goat mythological creatures that seem to have been envisioned as physically resembling Pan. The faun of the film, however, has almost no clearly human physical characteristics. However, he retains a number of goatlike features (especially his head) and thus partakes of the long tradition of mythological associations between goats and the supernatural. Otherwise, though, the faun of the film is a sort of generalized nature creature, seemingly composed of elements drawn from plants and from the earth in the building of his vaguely animal-like body. This faun, incidentally, lacks most of the Satanic associations often attributed to goats in Christian lore, but he is nevertheless a thoroughly pagan, pre-Christian figure, a reminder that Christianity could not serve as a magical alternative to fascism in Spain, given the strong alliance between the Spanish Catholic Church and Franco’s fascists.
Pan’s Labyrinth and the Radicalization of Fantasy in the Twenty-First Century
In its use of fantasy to deliver an anti-fascist message, Pan’s Labyrinth participates in an important twenty-first-century trend (begun at the end of the twentieth century by British novelists such as Philip Pullman and China Miêville) toward the use of fantasy as a progressive political genre, a trend that runs in direct opposition to what had been a decades-long tendency among progressive (especially Marxist) critics to see dismiss fantasy, going back to the 1970s, when Darko Suvin established the hugely influential notion of science fiction as the literature of “cognitive estrangement.” For Suvin, science fiction places readers in a world different from their own (made so by specifically identifiable drivers of change, or “novums,” such as technological advance) and then challenges them to examine and critically analyze those differences. Crucially, for Suvin, this cognitive process has a potentially powerful political impact in that it encourages readers to reexamine assumptions about their world and to realize that even the most fundamental things about their world might have been different. Science fiction thus emerges for Suvin as a key utopian form that helps readers to formulate challenges to the status quo and to imagine the possibility of alternatives. On the other hand, Suvin saw fantasy as a genre that creates estrangement of a noncognitive kind by placing its readers in unfamiliar situations without asking them to think critically about the differences between the world of the fantasy and the readers’ own worlds. For Suvin, then, fantasy is apolitical at best and reactionary at worst, with the specter of Tolkien’s notoriously conservative Lord of the Rings (1954-1955) looming over the genre to prove his point.
Perhaps Suvin’s most important direct influence on Marxist discussions of science fiction was on the work of Fredric Jameson, who, as the 1980s arrived, was already beginning to formulate his now-famous notion of the loss of utopian energy in postmodernist culture while at the same time suggesting that science fiction might retain a vital utopian power, even if it is only through a demonstration of our waning ability to imagine a genuine utopian alternative in the postmodern era (“Progress” 153). In the meantime, Jameson published his influential The Political Unconscious (1981), a vigorous defense of the power of Marxist theory for the analysis of literary texts that also marked the beginning of the emphasis on the importance of utopian thought that would characterize Jameson’s career from that point forward. A key chapter in that book discusses “magical narratives,” otherwise generally referred to in the chapter as “romances,” but also closely related to what is generally called “fantasy.” In particular, Jameson explores the ongoing popularity of such narratives in our modern, rationalized, high-tech world, concluding that they remain popular because of, rather than in spite of the stripping of all vestiges of magic from everyday life thanks to the ongoing progression of capitalist modernization. For Jameson, the “most authentic vocation” of romance is “its capacity, by absence and by the silence of the form itself, to express that ideology of desacralization by which modern thinkers from Max Weber to the Frankfurt School have sought to convey their sense of the radical impoverishment and constriction of modern life” (135).
Fascism, of course, is the ultimate example of this “impoverishment and constriction,” and so genres such as fantasy would seem to provide the kind of utopian alternative to the reality of fascism that Jameson is talking about here. However, Jameson does not suggest that fantasy or other “magical narratives” can necessarily provide a politically effective counter to fascism or to other forms of routinized capitalist life. Indeed, despite his belief that fantasy is rooted in utopian longings for a richness in life that is denied by modern capitalism, Jameson remained among those most dismissive of the political potential of fantasy through the next decades, seeing it as a sort of substitute for genuine critical thinking. By the time of Archaeologies of the Future (2007), though, Jameson was basing his rejection of fantasy less on its difference from science fiction in terms of estrangement and more on the reactionary implications of such structural features as “the organization of fantasy around the ethical binary of good and evil, and the fundamental role it assigns to magic (Archaeologies 58).
At first glance, one might suspect that Pan’s Labyrinth falls into the very trap that Jameson indicates here, with Vidal and the fascists representing pure evil and the underground realm and its magical denizens representing pure goodness. However, among other things, Pan’s Labyrinth provides an important reminder that some things in life (such as fascism) really are pure evil and that even the utopian elements of fascism (which is built on certain notions of community that are clearly designed as a sort of compensation for all that is lost under fascist rule) serve an evil purpose because fascist community is built on the radical exclusion (or even extinction) of the Other. Thus, couching fascism itself in terms of good vs. evil is not necessarily a simplification, while magic can potential play the “good” role as a reminder of all the things in life that fascism destroys. Indeed, the underground realm of Pan’s Labyrinth—represented most vividly by the faun that plays such a central role in the film—does serve this function to some extent.
At the same time, Pan’s Labyrinth avoids the simplistic good-evil dichotomy indicated by Jameson in two ways. First of all, the opposition between the film’s fascist-dominated real world and its magic-dominated underground kingdom is not binary but dialectical. It is well known that Hitler and the Nazis were fascinated by the occult, and historical fascism quite frequently appealed to the magical and the supernatural in a variety of ways—something that is central, for example, to the concerns of del Toro’s Hellboy. In the case of Spain, the convergence of fascism and the supernatural occurred primarily in the alliance between Franco and the Catholic Church, which leaves the pagan magic of the faun outside fascist control. But, even though the faun is the agent of the king and queen of the underworld, the rightful parents of the magic version of Ofelia, he is hardly a figure of sweetness and light on the order of Peter Pan, his Disneyfied counterpart. The faun, in fact, can be quite frightening, even dangerous and sinister, and I think that Diestro-Dópido is quite right in seeing him as a complex trickster figure who can play a variety of different roles, including not only presenting the tasks for Ofelia to complete but also participating in those tasks.
Diestro-Dópido suggests that the notorious Pale Man is actually the faun in disguise, while Kam Hei Tsuei suggests that the Pale Man is the “mythical double” of Vidal. That this strikingly sinister figure can be a manifestation of both Vidal and the faun suggests the complexity of the relationship between fascism and fantasy in this film. In particular, if fascism is figured within the film as pure evil, one of the ways in which it is evil is its attempt to conscript fantasy for its vile purposes. Meanwhile, fantasy is figured as a realm of both good and evil, with the two so thoroughly intertwined that they cannot possibly constitute a pair of polar opposites of the kind excoriated by Jameson.
In addition, the physical political reality of 1944 Spain in the film is represented, not just by Vidal and the fascists, but by Mercedes and the Maquis. Imagination such as that displayed by Ofelia is important as a means of keeping alive the hope for a better life, and Pan’s Labyrinth contains important reminders of the importance of the creative imagination, while positing the products of that imagination as potential counters to the colonization of the imagination by fascism. But del Toro is far too sophisticated to believe for a moment that the magic of a child’s imagination is enough in itself to overcome the imaginative impoverishment and material oppression that result from fascism. For that, one needs people with guns, willing and able to fight. But the Maquis of this film are not just armed rebels able to stand up to the fascists on their own terms. They also provide an imaginative alternative by providing a vision of community that is not built on repression and exclusion.
There is no doubt that this good-bad binary so common in fantasy comes about largely because the genre of fantasy, through the second half of the twentieth century, was dominated by the conservative Christian fantasies of Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, though that domination was broken at the end of the twentieth century by radical British novelists such as Philip Pullman and China Miêville, who have deployed fantasy in the interest of progressive politics. The three volumes of Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” trilogy (originally published in 1995, 1997, and 2000) feature an anticlerical representation of the church as an oppressive, dystopian force in the alternative world that dominates the first volume and challenge the ideology of Christianity throughout, using John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) as its most crucial subtext. Even more powerful a challenge to the supremacy of the Tolkien tradition in fantasy fiction was the publication of Miéville’s Perdido Street Station (2000), the first volume of his “Bas-Lag” trilogy, which would ultimately also include The Scar (2002) and The Iron Council (2004). In this astonishing and spectacular sequence, Miéville employs a wide range of generic currents to produce a powerful, politically charged fantasy world.
Miéville has played a leading role in the recent critical reevaluation of the political potential of fantasy, with Jameson himself (inspired by the work of Miéville) leading the way by declaring that works such as Perdido Street Station suggest the possibility of “radical” or “materialist” fantasy, of a fantasy form “capable of registering systemic change and of relating superstructural symptoms to infrastructural shifts and modifications” (“Radical” 280). Miéville, a sophisticated Marxist theorist in his own right, has become perhaps the leading critic of the Marxist tradition of seeing fantasy as the feeble other of science fiction, at least in a political sense. For example, in his essay “Cognition and Ideology,” Miéville directly addresses Suvin’s influence on the Marxist reception of fantasy fiction, arguing that science fiction and fantasy are actually quite similar genres that can both produce cognitive estrangement in useful ways.
Pan’s Labyrinth nicely accords with Miéville’s view of fantasy. Miéville himself has said in an interview with Jeff VanderMeer that he thought Pan’s Labyrinth was “terrific” because “it was so merciless about fantasy.” In particular, Miéville felt that the political message of the film was made much more effective by the fact that fantasy does not save Ofelia in the end. Yet the film still contains a strong utopian dimension in its treatment of Spanish fascism and the resistance to it, encouraging viewers to imagine what might have been historically different. The film specifically asks viewers to imagine what Spain might have been like had the Maquis (or the Republicans before them) defeated the fascists, but such thoughts almost inevitably, given the history involved, lead to thoughts of what might have been had the American and British provided appropriate aid to the Spanish Republicans in the Civil War, thus averting the fascist takeover in the first place. Granted, the elements of the film that seem to offer a utopian resolution might be purely imaginary, but the imaginary status of the film’s magical elements or its political resolution in no way makes them less important. In fact, it is precisely because they are not real that the film’s magical elements serve as an effective counter to fascism, which furthers its power through the extinction of the ability even to imagine alternatives to present reality, a reality that is much like the “boot stamping on a human face” that is embodiment of the ideology of the Party in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Finally, Pan’s Labyrinth avoids simplistic good vs. evil oppositions—and, indeed, binary oppositions of all kinds—in everything from its complex mixture of representations of reality and fantasy to its reliance both on the fantasies of the girl Ofelia and of likely viewers of the film. Perhaps most effective of all of these deconstructions of binary oppositions is the film’s visually striking goatlike faun figure, whose importance is emphasized by the fact that he is the title character of the film. This figure serves as an effective demonstration of the potential for purely imaginary images to make powerful points about the real world of politics, especially the politics of a movement such as fascism, which depends so centrally on suppressing the imagination.
Works Cited
Diestro-Dópido, Mar. Pan’s Labyrinth. London: British Film Institute, 2019.
Easterbrook, Neil “The Shamelessly Fictive: Mimesis and Metafantasy.” Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies18, no. 1/2 (2012): 193-211.
Ellis, Jonathan, and Ana María Sánchez-Arce. “‘The Unquiet Dead’: Memories of the Spanish Civil War in Guillermo Del Toro’s Cinema.” Millennial Cinema: Memory in Global Film. Edited by Amresh Sinha and Terence McSweeney. New York: Wallflower Press, 2012, pp. 173–91.
Gómez L-Quiñones, Antonio. “Fairies, Maquis, and Children without Schools Romantic Childhood and Civil War in Pan’s Labyrinth.” Translated by Amber Gode. Representing History, Class, and Gender in Spain and Latin America: Children and Adolescents in Film. Edited by Carolina Rocha and Georgia Seminet. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, pp. 49-62.
Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. London: Verso, 2007.
Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981.
Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism; or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991.
Jameson, Fredric. “Progress versus Utopia; or, Can We Imagine the Future?” Science-Fiction Studies 9, no. 2, (1982): 147–58.
Jameson, Fredric. “Radical Fantasy.” Historical Materialism 10, no. 4 (2003): 273–80.
Kam Hei Tsuei. “The Antifascist Aesthetics of Pan’s Labyrinth.” Socialism and Democracy Vol. no. 2 (2008). Available on-line at https://sdonline.org/issue/47/antifascist-aesthetics-pan%E2%80%99s-labyrinth. Accessed 28 February 2022.
Kotecki, Kristine. “Approximating the Hypertextual, Replicating the Metafictional: Textual and Sociopolitical Authority in Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth.” Marvels & Tales 24, no. 2 (2010): 235-54.
Miéville, China. “Cognition as Ideology: A Dialectic of SF Theory.” Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction. Edited by Mark Bould and China Miéville, Wesleyan University Press, 2009, pp. 231–48.
Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979.
Tremlett, Giles. Ghosts of Spain: Travels through Spain and Its Silent Past.” New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2008.
VanderMeer, Jeff. “God, That’s A Merciless Question”: China Mieville’s Interview from Weird Tales.” JeffVandermeer.com, 16 June 2009, https://www.jeffvandermeer.com/2009/06/16/god-thats-a-merciless-question-china-mievilles-interview-from-weird-tales/. Accessed 3 March 2022.
Notes
[1] After the fascist victory in the Spanish Civil War in 1939, the Spanish Maquis carried on the fight against the fascist via guerrilla activity well into the 1960s, scoring a number of surprising successes, though they were never quite as successful as they appeaer to be in Pan’s Labyrinth.
[2] Antonio Gómez L-Quiñones, ‘Fairies, Maquis, and Children without Schools Romantic Childhood and Civil War in Pan’s Labyrinth’, trans. by Amber Gode, in Carolina Rocha and Georgia Seminet(eds.), Representing History, Class, and Gender in Spain and Latin America: Children and Adolescents in Film (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 55.
[3] As Ellis and Sánchez-Arce put it, del Toro’s films about the Spanish Civil War are not narratives of what occurred so much as creative narratives of ‘what might have occurred, and at least as convincing as many of the myths propagated during Franco’s dictatorship’ and insufficiently challenged ever since. Jonathan Ellis and Ana María Sánchez-Arce, ‘“The Unquiet Dead”: Memories of the Spanish Civil War in Guillermo Del Toro’s Cinema’, in Amresh Sinha and Terence McSweeney (eds.), Millennial Cinema: Memory in Global Film (New York: Wallflower Press, 2012), p. 174.
[4] Diestro-Dópido
[5] As Tremlett points out, the fascists also executed many pregnant women suspected of sympathy with the Republican cause, simply because they judged it too inefficient to wait for the women to give birth before being killed (68).