i think its okay to start my analysis
of guilermo del toros Pan labyrinth
with a spoiler
ophelia - the main character...
she dies at the end
i feel fine doing that
because del toro does the exact same thing with his movie
the first shot of pan`s labyrynth
is the ending
and it`s also the first way in which Del toro
complicates that ending
but before we get into that
a few things about fairy-tales
for most of us the authoritative source
for fairy-tales is walt disney
and that`s no accident
disney set out to claim that authority
when he made films like snow white, cinderella
or sleeping beauty
by adapting folk tales in the public domain
and copywriting the adaptations
still, because film was a relatively new media
capturing tha authority he wanted required Disney
to remain faithful to the original versions
of these stories popularized by charles piero
and brothers grimm
he made the transition from print to cinema
as smooth as possible for the audience
even going so far as to begin his movies with
the oppenning of a book
Disney was smart
his films are now regarded as classics
and yet, by remaining so faithful to the stories
19-centure antecedents
he inherited and furthered their 19th century
morality
a conservative, patriarchal value system
in which the prince always comes to save
the helpless heroine
a value system that was antiquated even then
in this way, disney limited the kinds of things
a fairy-tale can do
in Pan`s labyrinth guilermo del toro attempts
to explode these limitations and he does so
by recontextualising the stories
instead of pulling from a single authoritative source
del toro pulls from a huge number of sources
giving non-precedence over the others
and letting them all play against one another
to create meaning
the film tells the story of the little girl
offelia and her mother Carmen
as they go to live a hyper-fashist captain Vidall
five years after the spanish civil war
vidall is trying to snugg out the last remnants
of rebellion in the mountains awaiting his childs birth
by carmen
while Ophelia becomes ensnared in a magical quest
after a faun tells her she is the lost princess
of an underground realm
from here the story spins out into two paralles narratives
the magical quest and the political drama
crucially, neither of these narratives becomes reducable
to the other
del toro makes a point of this
by entwaining them in ways, that makes
any totalizing explanation problematic
at the end of the film for exampe we get what seems to be
a nail in the coffin for the magical quest
vidall approachers ophelia speaking with the faun
and when the camera cuts to his point of view
the faun is not there
it appears to be solid evidence for those who read
ophelias quest as a coping mechanism for her sad life
but, if we back up, we can see how del toro
complicates that reading by remembering
that vidall has just been drugged with a heavy dose of sleeping medication
in other stories, drug induced gallucinations
are used to explain a way why people see supernatural
but in pans labyrinth it`s the opposite
del toro uses the device to destabilize our trust
in captain vidalls point of view