Pan's Labyrinth, By Guillermo Del Toro

Approximately five years into Francisco Franco's regime, Pan’s Labyrinth takes place in Post-Civil War Spain as it reveals a beautiful childlike fantasy film with terrifying wonderment and curious delight. Directed by Guillermo Del Toro, the film depicts a dark fantasy that tells the story of our young protagonist, Ofelia and is told through this child's perspective. In the beginning of the film, Ofelia and her very pregnant mother travel to a military base near the mountains to live with her new stepfather, Captain Vidal, who is stationed there to fight against the rebels with his troops. One day, Ofelia wandered into the nearby forest and discovered an old, forgotten labyrinth, where she encounters a faun. The faun [Pan] tells her she is

the lost princess of the Underworld and gives her three specific tasks that will enable her to return back to the Underworld, but not without testing her will and determination. Guillermo Del Toro, created this fantasy that appeared to be about this girl's journey of self discovery; nonetheless, the underlying tones reveal that the film appears to be a metaphor for the nature of Spanish Fascism during this time period. The film is constructed within two parallel worlds: reality and fantasy. By analyzing the interactions of these two worlds and the characters that inhabit, one can see the modern perspective of the Spanish Fascist regime that Del Toro has created. The fantasy world is a metaphor for the life she leads in the world we know. The film itself as a whole is simply another metaphor for this movement that overtook the country and the expression is seen through the violent scenes, the lullabies, and the characters.
While a bond between mother and child is unshakable, Ofelia appears to have a closer kinship to Mercedes, through character.

The characters almost appear to represent the same character in different versions of themselves with the same struggle; accordingly, Ofelia is the child version and Mercedes is the adult version of the character. Ofelia is the child version of the character that attempts to carry out the child's struggle of conserving Pan's world and the Underworld, while Mercedes resistance towards Spanish fascism is her adult struggle. Just like there are parallels between the world, there are obvious parallels in the characters' actions. This can be can be seen in the scene of Ofelia's second task. Ofelia creates a magic door by using chalk in order to open a vault for the second task. Flashing back to the world we know, the adult version, Mercedes is in the kitchen, clearing away dirt off the floor to reveal a secret vault that filled with supples and messages for the rebels. The parallels are seen again as Mercedes signals the rebels with the two moons of her lantern and Ofelia is preparing to undertake her second task under the two moons in the bathroom. Just as Mercedes gives a copy of a key to her brother, which opens the secret vault mentioned earlier, Ofelia must also use a golden key in the second task that she retrieves in the first task. The symbolism of these characters suggests that they are both fighting the same, if not similar, battle. A battle to

obtain liberation from the tyranny of masculine symbols imposing themselves on feminine symbols of a more natural, spiritual, and humane existence. The two characters may even be seen as alter egos.
The movie begins with Mercedes' humming in background, introducing the audience to the film with a haunting childlike framework. Lullabies were utilized throughout the film. Mercedes, the housekeeper that was secretly a rebel spy, initially begun singing the lullaby for Ofelia when the girl had asked, haunting the audience and establishing a framework for the film with its melody. “During the Spanish Postwar Period of Franco repression, several poet-prisoners masterfully used the format of a lullaby addressed to a fellow prisoner or to a baby outside the prison in order to emphasize, by the contrast between the assumed innocence of the genre of the lullaby and the violence of the prison, the lack of hope of political prisoners and their families in the 1940s and 1950s in Spain.” (Gómez-Castellano, 2013). Mercedes' lullaby is similar to those of Marcos Ana or José Hierro, famous poets who were both imprisoned during this era. There poems were smuggled through guards or released prisoners that remembered them by heart. Their poems would combine elements of the world of fantasy associated with childhood with horrific images; the poem attempted to create this surreal method of comforting a fellow prisoner with poetry, sung like lullabies that contained also contained “alternative promises of rest, death, and pain.”1 In the final scenes, the rebels are finally able to shoot and kill Vidal, the victory is a temporary triumph that they relish in. In this scene, Ofelia also bleeds to death on the forest ground, while Mercedes hums her lullaby to her in the final moments. Her death represented the eventual death of all the rebels or their submission during Franco's Regime – a regime that lasted until his death in the early 1970's. Not matter how many small victories, the rebels were ultimately defeated. In “Lullabies and post-memory: hearing the ghosts of Spanish history in Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth”, Irene Gómez-Castellano argued that regardless of their defeat “we can count on the power of the lullaby to repeat this story without words and to secretly change and comfort those who sing or sleep listening to this musical form that is enacted in a familiar, intimate and confidential manner like the small acts of rebellion of the maquis.” The lullabies were a powerful form of expression that held a strength of rebellion within themselves whilst providing comfort as well.
According to an interview conducted by Mark Kamonde, del Toro based the first horrific acts of violence in the film off of an old oral telling of Post Civil War Spain event in a typical grocery store. A fascist official was said to have walked into that particular store and a defenseless civilian had not taken off his hat (a common sign of respect). The fascist official proceeded to beat the civilian senseless, smashing his face in with the back of his gun, and then walked out with his groceries. Del Toro felt the need to integrate this story into the film somehow, to demonstrate how inconsequential life was to the Fascist regime. The first act of violence in the movie, is seen within the first twenty minutes of the film. A father and son have been captured by Vidal's troops whilst they were hunting for rabbits for their hungry, poor, family. Vidal does not seem to care nor believe this story and proceeds to beat the son with a bottle of wine. In the scene, the action becomes more and more intense until the son's face is bashed in and then the moment becomes quiet with gun shots echoing our ears. The captain had shot and kill the father crickets and the sounds of trains faintly fill the air. A quietness lingers and represents the death of the men. Their lives meant nothing to the Captain. According to del Toro2, death and violence against citizens in Post Civil War Spain were completely inconsequential. The director wanted to incorporate the horrors that over 750,000 individuals had suffered (through either violence or death) by the hands of Spanish Fascism during Post Civil War Spain.
The connection between the “Pale Man” and Captain Vidal are chilling. The scenes and setting strengthen this connection as well as the actions between these two characters. The banquet hallf of the “Pale Man” had a striking resemblance to the dinging hall of Captain Vidal. A long rectangle banquet table with a bountiful fest in the middle of the room with a monster sitting at its head. In “Embracing the Darkness, the Sorrow, and the Brutality” by Michael Perschon, symbolism is used a variety of way and can be used to disguise aspects of human nature. The “Pale Man” can be argued to be another symbol of “the consuming aspect of Vidal’s nature”. The sickly albino looking creature sits upon a feast, but does not touch it, rather he waits for anyone tempted enough to eat off the table and horrifically dines on that poor unfortunate soul. Captain Vidal is similar in this aspect. He sits as head of his table, and discusses rations over a feast. He claims to limits the civilian rations in order to hurt the rebels, all the while he feasts comfortably in his home. In the scene where the “Pale Man” is introduced, Ofelia is meant to accomplish a task but is tempted by the juicy grapes that lay before the table. She is a young child, hungry and naturally lured by the delicacies on the lavish banquet table. She takes a few grapes, the “Pale Man” awakens, and she punished by witnessing the savage death of two of her companion fairies. Here, the “Pale man” acts as the eater and the destroyer of fantasy. Both characters take innocent lives, eat their food, and are blinded by their own monstrosity, figuratively and literally. The first act of violence proves this to the audience as the film demonstrates Vidal brutally murdering two innocent individuals, and eats the rabbits that prove their innocence. His title as the murderer of the innocent is solidified when he pulls the trigger to kill Ofelia in the end. Vidal policed the border of unknown and embodied ideas that scared the citizens into submissive that solidified with violence. As Marsha Kinder argued in Blood Cinema: The Reconstruction of National Identity in Spain, violence is the trait most frequently associated with Spanish national cinema. Kinder situates this violence in the films of this time period are in a tradition that traces back to Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son (a painting that depicts Saturn (Kronos) devouring his children); “a tradition fascinated with the idea of sacrifice that does not glorify violence, but exploits its power to shock audiences and to exert a political critique at a time of censorship.”3 Vidal in this instance is Saturn, and his children are not only his son and Ofelia, but also the citizens and the rebels of the nation.
The director subtly criticizes the Fascist movement that breeds individuals like Captain Vidal.

That society begets cruel patriarchs of the world who ‘eat’ their children while having ‘sumptuous’ banquets on their tables. Goya's painting introduces an interesting cycle that also occurs within the film. The ‘consumption’ of the innocent stretches to Ofelia’s mother and mother-like figure, Mercedes, whose lives are devoured as well; this is also known as the “The curse of Kronos” or the Kronos complex. “Both she and the Spanish resistance refuse to pass on the curse of Kronos/Franco to another generation”(Spector, 2013). In the end, where Mercedes was asked by Captain Vidal to let his son known of him, and she said no. By not passing on the name, the history, the tradition ends. The death of Vidal fulfilled the prophecy of Kronos dethronement by his

children.
Regardless if the fantasy elements were real or not, the symbolism through the film reflected the real nature of Spanish Fascism during this time whilst revealing the story about a young girl's journey of self discovery. The young female perspective enlightened the audience another dimension of this era. The story told through Ofelia's eyes will for always be memorable, from the music, to the scenes, and characters. Her heroic bravery against her struggle was refreshing, as she was not selfish, but brave even in the face of death. Guillermo Del Toro fabricated a mater piece that will be remembered for generations, with it's clever construction of the parallel worlds. I cannot wait to see what else this mastermind constructs.