Pan's Labyrinth: Disobedient Fairy Tale

SUPPORT THE NERDWRITER HERE AND HELP ME MAKE MORE VIDEOS: http://www.patreon.com/nerdwriter

TUMBLR: http://thenerdwriter.tumblr.com TWITTER: https://twitter.com/TheeNerdwriter

Email me here: [e-mail]

SOURCES:

http://www.filmquarterly.org/2007/06/pans-labyrinth/

http://www.vision.org/visionmedia/society-and-culture/moral-of-the-story/153.aspx

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