Adolescent Ofelia and her pregnant mother travel to a remote area of Spain in the summer of 1944 to join the girl’s stepfather, Captain Vidal, whose unit is hunting down resistance fighters holding out in the surrounding mountains.
As soon becomes apparent, Vidal isn’t just a functionary of Francisco Franco’s Falangist regime, but someone who takes both pride and pleasure in doing his job as cruelly as possible.
Although Ofelia’s mother pleads with the girl to call Captain Vidal “father,” she pointedly refuses. Instead, the girl plunges into a world of fantasy, imagining that she is doing the bidding of supernatural powers who repudiate the temporal authority of Franco’s regime.
First, she spies a praying mantis-like insect, which turns into a winged fairy. Then the fairy leads her to the ruins of a nearby stone labyrinth, where she meets a large faun who informs her that she is really a princess of the underworld who must complete three tasks before the moon starts to wane in order to reclaim her rightful place alongside her father.
Characters in Pan’s Labyrinth tell Ofelia that growing up will require forsaking her belief in fairy tales. Her mother and the sympathetic housekeeper, Mercedes, speak ruefully of their own disenchantment, while Captain Vidal wants his stepdaughter to experience it as soon as possible.
This disenchantment is identified with a personal loss of innocence, when young people must submit to the reality principle instead of continuing to indulge childish fantasies. However, it also correlates with the historical passage from pagan beliefs to a modern world where only Christian faith is permitted.
There are many obvious similarities between Pan’s Labyrinth and Victor Erice’s 1973 film Spirit of the Beehive, which also focuses on a girl in the early years of Franco’s regime. But those are offset by some crucial differences.
Making his film while Franco was still alive, though weakened, Erice had to tread carefully. Even in the small town where the story takes place, the power of the state is palpable. Characters who reject Falangism must communicate that aversion obliquely, lest they be punished.
In Pan’s Labyrinth, by contrast, Del Toro has free rein to depict the captain in detail, turning him into a villain so extreme that he almost feels allegorical, like the Judge in Cormac McCarthy’s novel Blood Meridian.
Whereas Voice of the Beehive represents Franco’s regime with negative space, reminding us of the role it plays in everyday life, even though its emissaries are largely absent from the narrative, Pan’s Labyrinth confronts it head-on,
This makes Del Toro’s film less politically ambiguous than The Spirit of the Beehive. It’s very clear what side he wants us to take.
Pan’s Labyrinth repeatedly contrasts the richness of the faun’s underworld with the poverty of life on the surface, where everyone is subordinated to Captain Vidal’s single-minded quest to purify Spain.
Ofelia’s resistance to her stepfather’s authority aligns her with the rebels hiding in the forests above her new home. Although they are sober-minded partisans straight out of Ernest Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, their presence in the wilderness places them on the side of the nature deity.
This reflects the character of Spanish fascism, which promoted a reactionary Catholicism rather than the modern paganism that informed its Italian and German equivalents.
It also makes Pan’s Labyrinth a particularly apt allegory for our own dark times, in which the forces warring on “woke” culture throughout the developed world mobilise public sentiment against its neopagan underpinnings.
Although the faun has a dark side and the underworld is frequently scary, Pan’s Labyrinth clearly wants us to perceive them as resources in the struggle against fascism.
That message resonated much differently when the film came out in 2006 than it does today.
Back then, the retrospective aspect of Pan’s Labyrinth was dominant. Spain was still emerging from a decades-long struggle to heal the wounds inflicted by Franco’s regime. Now, after the spectacular rise of the country’s far-right party Vox, the film feels like a message in a bottle that has been floating towards a future as dark as the past.
That also goes for the rest of Europe and the New World.
What has changed in the two decades since the film came out, however, is that the increasingly powerful and diverse far right makes room for reactionary forms of both Christianity and paganism.
We can’t simply root for pagans because they are underdogs. First, we have to figure out which political master they serve.
Examining Pan’s Labyrinth from a contemporary vantage point, it’s also worth noting that Ofelia’s resistance, just like that of the Spanish Maquis who continued to fight Franco’s regime after the Civil War had ended, does not lead to a neat-and-tidy victory. Only her infant brother survives the events of the story.
Nevertheless, as we face the bleak prospect of a new world order in which the “unfinished project of Enlightenment” seems to be running in reverse, plunging us headlong into darkness, discerning political and cultural resources in the realm of fantasy is a valuable complement to the disenchantment of Realpolitik.
After all, there may soon come a time when everything identified with “woke” has been so thoroughly suppressed by political reactionaries that we can only access that legacy by descending into the underworld.
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Screenshot courtesy of Film Studies Fundamentals. All rights reserved.
