This quick little commentary on the recently imported Spanish film Pan's Labyrinth is chock full of spoilers, so read at your own risk.
First, let me say that I now know why playwrights always identified their plays as comedies or tragedies in the title. Sure, it might give away the ending, but there are few things worse than buying tickets to what you think is going to be A Midsummer Night's Dream and then sitting down to find out that you are actually about to watch King Lear. That's precisely what happened when Isabel and I plopped down in the movie theatre last night.
Pan's Labyrinth is rated R, by which it means restricted to those over the age of 17 and not prone to depression...
It might sound like I am about to pan Pan's Labyrinth, when nothing could be further from the truth. It is extremely smart, provocative, and visually gripping...sometimes too visually gripping when its depictions of human depravity outstrip its visions of fantastic wonder. Indeed, the movie spends a lot more time in the realm of horror than it does anywhere else, and it's quite aware of its own frightening nature. Set in Spain under the facist regime of the 1940s, the story follows a little girl whose pregnant mother has just married a sociopathic sadist military captain on the outskirts of civilization. When the girl stumbles upon a magical labyrinth, she is told by the titular faun that she is the reincarnated princess of a painless and immortal Underworld. She is further instructed, in typical fairy tale fashion, that she must complete three tasks to prove her identity and reclaim her realm.
With the backdrop of war and human rights violations, a fantasy world looks like a pretty attractive option...until you find out that it is populated with gelatinous, evil toads and blind, baby-eating vampire creatures. Given the choice between imaginary monsters and real world fascists, one can hardly tell which is the worse reality or where one would rather reside.
As if it weren't clear enough by now, this is a very, very dark movie. But there were still darker elements that I would like to point out. First, the movie had (for this particular viewer) some unsettling religious questions. Evidently, one of the only priests in all of Spain is in cahoots with the fascists, and the fascist captain himself is fond of spouting off religious jargon. The only religious event we see is a funeral, which seems fairly empty, if not existential. The snippet of speech from the priest essentially talks about how God has left us here without explaining anything. The fascists are also utterly (and somewhat ironically) paranoid about communists, and accuse a farmer of athiesm before needlessly murdering him as a member of the resistance. And when the mother's pregnancy takes a turn for the worse, it comes as little surprise that it is the fascist who says that the baby's life is worth more than the mother's. What a big help to the prolife movement that was.
In the end, institutionalized religion always appears to be a puppet of oppressive and unjust government. Spirituality is only depicted in a positive light in terms of the girl's imaginary realm, which seems to parody Christianity. She is the daughter of the King of the Underworld, and her father will await for her return until the end of time, when she will be seated at his right hand.
(And the huge spoiler...
here it comes...
are you sure you want to read it...)
She dies when she refuses to offer her new baby brother in sacrifice to the faun, who then abandons her so that she can be shot by her fascist step-father. Shooting people is his form of granting a merciful death. Thus, her blood, spilt for the sake of an innocent, becomes the sacrifice that allows her to return to her father in the immortal realm. Of course, the movie ends with a question as to whether or not the fantasy world was real or totally made up, but I am far more concerned with the moral theology laden in her death. According to the movie, there can be no more nobler act than to die for the sake of an innocent. Really?
For all of its supposed seriousness and maturity, I feel like the movie has misstepped. In the far less terrifying and seemingly less "mature" Chronicles of Narnia, the most noble deed is not to die for an innocent, but to die for the guilty. Refusing to give your baby brother to a creepy looking faun is just common sense. Agreeing to be slaughtered by your worst enemy for the sake of someone who sold you out...well, that takes class.
But the girl's refusal to let her brother be sacrficed has a more troubling aspect in how Pan's Labyrinth deals with the issue of obedience. In the second quest that the girl is assigned, she (like Eve) disobeys an order not to eat a certain kind of food. This forfeits her rights to her kingdom, until the faun mercifully decides to give her a second chance...but only on the strict conditions that she obey him unquestioningly. This is a mirror scene to the real world where the fascist step-father kills a doctor in cold blood for disobeying orders. "Why did you disobey me?" the step-father asks. "Only men like you obey without questioning," the doctor replies before being shot in the back while walking away. Again, a merciful death when compared to other scenes. It should be noted that the doctor has just euthanized a prisoner that the wicked step-father has been sadistically torturing for information. Now, I hope I am never in the position to have to decide what to do if I encounter a mutilated, half dead prisoner asking to be euthanized, but I have to question myself whether or not killing him on my own is the most moral thing to do.
The movie, which claims to be so invested in questioning, seems less interested in overtly questioning its own heroes.
Obedience is consistently associated with evil. Disobedience is almost always rewarded. The girl eats the forbidden fruit, but she gets a second chance. She then disobeys the faun's request to take her brother, and discovers that it was only a test...that disobeying the faun in the third task was actually the right thing to do. Never are we shown a just authority whom it is just to obey. Disobedience is always rewarded (if only with a noble death); obedience is always rewarded with shame and dishonor. Indeed, all of the heroic figures, all of those who resist the fascist movement, at some point cross a moral boundary, whether it is revenge or euthanasia. Even the little girl tries to poison her step-father. But the movie never questions the justice of that. Rather, the greater evil of the step-father seems to excuse the morally questionable acts of everyone else. The audience must raise the questions on its own, but I'm afraid that it will be too busy looking at the special effects to ever bother thinking about whether its heroes can sin.
So, to wrap up this lengthy commentary, what disturbs me most about this movie is that the heroes do very bad things but go unpunished, and that proper obedience is never adequately defined. The film spends a lot of time promoting resistance to authority, but it never bothers to interrogate what it is that makes us able to identify injustice. That is, the movie misses the opportunity to show us heroes who resist evil because they obey a higher law. What greater mistake can a fantasy make than to refuse to show us something higher than us? But, then again, she is the princess of the Underworld...
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