10 Mar 2010, Posted by Asher Emmanuel in Drama,Film Reviews,OP-ED, 0 Comments

Op-Ed: The Masked Grotesque

Op-Ed Contributor
By: Ben Hodges
Email: bun@stygian.net

“There is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre.”
— Vonnegut/Billy Pilgrim, Slaughterhouse-Five

A few weeks ago, I got a call from Stefan around 11 p.m. Neither of us had any pressing tasks to tackle the next morning, and Stefan realized he had never shown me one of his favorite films, Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth.

I watch few movies these days. Before I returned to Georgia late last November, I think I had sat through 6 new films in all of 2009. I haven’t lost my taste for film — far from it: I just haven’t had many opportunities to see new movies lately. I rarely go to theatres, and my family’s video store here in Dunwoody recently closed down. My longstanding antipathy for everything “Blockbuster” has yet to be mollified by circumstance, and I still don’t have an account set up there, now the only rental store available in our area. Oh, curse suburbia.

I had heard nothing but warm acclamation for del Toro’s work, and I’m always down to throw back a few with the Gosey, so I decided to drive over and watch it.

By the end of the movie, I sat on the sofa largely immobile, a visceral disgust seething in my belly. Nausea pricked my innards, and my legs had turned wobbly. I had gagged several times during the movie, and even now that the spectacle of evil and pain I had just witnessed had concluded — what, with the blood of a dying, beautiful young girl running out of her mouth, down her arm, and dripping off her wrist blotch by splotch into a deep, dark well fed with the soft, black rain of a night thick with the spirits of innocent dead — I felt more queasy than ever.

Stefan couldn’t believe my reaction, but it was true: I was sick, and I didn’t feel comfortable moving lest I vomited. We decided to talk the movie over; an hour and a half later, I felt restored and drove home.

Overall, Pan’s Labyrinth is a masterful admixture of fable and fascism — a conflicted and strange brew of magical realism and postmodern aesthetics. But it’s also disgusting and revolting, in no way edifying, and largely a waste of some of the best craft I’ve ever seen.

Starting with Pan’s opening narration of a fairytale about a lost princess who was foretold to save a fallen race — a magical tale that may or may not serve as the film’s framework narrative —, del Toro invites the viewer from the very beginning to accompany Pan on a journey that seems to possess the all the standard traits of magical realism, a product of postmodern genre destruction, as pioneered by authors like Eco on the one hand, and Vonnegut on the other, where artists blur the lines between reality and fiction, text and author, work and process, usually with an eye to lead the viewer or reader to reevaluate preconceived notions of the relationships between these and other components of life.

I was pumped. It seemed clear at the time where the film was going. Circa 1944, the 12-year-old protagonist, a lover of fairytales, accompanies her mother to the mountains of fascist Spain, where a military encampment neighbors an ancient and mysterious labyrinth, overgrown and dilapidated. With her widowed mother “claimed” by the sadistic Captain Vidal of the fascist army, then occupied with rooting out the last vestiges of resistance, hungry and ill-equipped, she has no choice but to live with this demon stepfather of hers until her mother gives birth to Vidal’s son, after which, the viewer is led to believe, both mother and daughter will be discarded along with the rest of the bodies Vidal’s carnage routinely stacks and burns.

The film never apologizes for its ambiguity. Del Toro weds magic and reality onscreen unlike any other director I’ve seen. The Terry Gilliam influence shows strong, but del Toro takes his film down paths that not even Gilliam’s twisted and cracked mind trod. While unresolved tensions guide the film along its way (e.g., Ofelia’s use of the chalk to rescue her brother from Vidal’s office), del Toro is palpating the depths of human depravity with his bare hands, creating grotesques who embody in their very form the sickest forms of evil men set their hands to. The key-hoarding, bug-devouring glutton of a toad showcases sloth, avarice, exploitation and selfishness, while del Toro’s finest work yet, the so-called “eye monster,” fills viewers’ minds with the horrors of child abuse, molestation, and murder — both fey, vivid metaphors of man’s self-destructive drive toward perversion and death.

The fairytale-like atmosphere tricks the viewer. Before the film’s final shot, I could only make sense of Vidal in the context of the fairytale I thought was shepherding the film: He had to be a fairy monster, a fable villain. Following the reasoning of fairytales, nothing else could explain such sadism and malevolence: He’s an exaggerated figure, I thought, a caricature — albeit graphic and unnerving — of evil, just like the eye monster.

I was wrong.

Del Toro bombards his viewer with pleas to wrestle with the reality of evil throughout: Is Captain Vidal just as real as the monsters Ofelia fights, or are the monsters just as real as Captain Vidal? This is a great question, but unfortunately, del Toro answers that question for us in his own film, and that makes me furious — and sick.

With Ofelia’s death in the last scene, del Toro reveals her magic universe to be nothing more a child’s subconscious reaction to her environment, an involuntary narrative abstraction informed by her love for fable, which only serves to make sense of her demon-ridden reality, from which there is no escape. In that moment, del Toro beckons the viewer inside Ofelia’s dying mind, where her magic-filled subconscious is frantically trying to explain her imminent death by turning her failure into victory in her own magical universe — a world she must have, must possess for herself, for Vidal cannot touch her there. There is no magical realism here; no, this is all too real, and the onscreen meld of fantasy and fascism is nothing but a metaphor, hamstrung and captive under Vidal’s spell. We’ve been had.

All at once, the viewer understands why Ofelia can never accomplish the missions Pan gives her. As she’s trapped at Vidal’s base in reality, so the magical tale unfolds in such a way that she can’t do what she’s told, can’t succeed — i.e., can’t escape: As she can’t let Pan sacrifice her brother, neither can she leave Captain Vidal’s fortress. The impossibility of the latter leads her mind to create the impossible scenario of the former. The hopeful ambiguity of her failed attempt to abstain from the eye monster’s table — where she still escapes with her life — dissipates into dark mist. Now she’s dead.

At this point, del Toro eviscerates the hearts of his viewers, and you too can see him standing onscreen as the credits start to roll, the beating shadow of your heart squirming in his crimson hands as he digs his eye monster’s long, black blood-encrusted fingernails right into a chamber of warm, flowing plasma, now decanting like spilled wine on the cold earth below.

In the last scene, he shows Ofelia’s only victory, only happiness to be artificial — and he’s okay with that. Because maybe that’s all there is, he suggests. Maybe magical happiness is no less legitimate than real happiness. Sure, Pan may be an artificial consequence of her imagination’s interaction with brutish reality, but that doesn’t mean Vidal is any better, more powerful, or important than Pan – right? Oh, curse his name.

It is true that her magical world leads her to heroism: Without Pan’s guidance, she would have never tried rescued her brother, never attempted an escape, never drugged Vidal’s drink, never challenged the devil himself to a duel. And yes, she dies with a smile on her face: She finds happiness in her own murder. But there’s nothing beautiful in that. Del Toro takes an uncanny and perverted pleasure in asking his viewers to equate “true” beauty and happiness with those of dying Ofelia. It’s true that her manufactured reality was all that she had, and that it led to her, a unassuming child, to buck adversity; but it couldn’t change reality, couldn’t save her. She still loses, still dies in this world. Nothing could be more tragic.

In her death dies also the dream of living as a human. Ofelia’s real body perishes along with the mandrake root’s wish, and she doffs her humanity in both worlds once and for all to redeem her perishing race that does not exist.

What rot. How couldn’t you vomit?