in celebration of The Shape of Water coming out, we're looking at Guillermo Del Toro's dark fantasy masterpiece, Pan's Labyrinth!
PAN’S LABYRINTH (2006)
Director & Writer: Guillermo del Toro
Starring: Ivana Baquero, Doug Jones, Sergi Lopez
Summary: In the falangist Spain of 1944, the bookish young stepdaughter of a sadistic army officer escapes into an eerie but captivating fantasy world.
In the lead-up to The Shape of Water, we’ve watched another of del Toro’s films: Pan’s Labyrinth!!! We’re incredibly excited about this, because tbh Pan’s Labyrinth was really hard to break down. Take note though: This is going to be more analysis than review, so spoiler alert :) ++ We have lots of content! so this analysis will be split up into three parts for you :)
Monsters have always been a hallmark of del Toro films, but out of all the movies he’s made, we’re sure everyone at least knows about the Pale Man, or even the Faun (swipe to see them!). His movies are fantastical, but they’re dark as well — the lighting is dim, and his creatures are almost always shrouded in shadow. That’s because del Toro films are never only about fantasy and imagination: his are worlds of /dark/ fantasy, dealing with gritty, realistic subject matter that can benefit from the unique lens of childlike imagination.
(DONT PANIC but the following parts will sound complicated. We’ll explain!)
Juxtaposition: Clear morality in fairytales vs the moral ambiguity of war
The first thing we want to talk about is: the juxtaposition of clear morality in fairytales, and the moral ambiguity of war.
Our key message here: Pan’s Labyrinth uses the apolitical nature of a fairytale to highlight the apolitical character of Ofelia, struggling through the violence of political conflict and oppression, in order to convey the fate of the innocent in war.
We’re talking about the 2 sub-plots that run parallel in Pan’s Labyrinth: Ofelia’s adventure as she fights to complete the tasks and find her true self + the rebels’ fight against Vidal. Ofelia’s story — being told that she’s the princess of a mysterious kingdom, being helped by mysterious creatures — reads like a quintessential fairytale. And in fairytales, there’s always a clear line between “Good” and “Bad”. Like how in Snow White, the titular heroine and her animals and the prince are Good, and the evil stepmother is Bad. Ofelia and the faun and the fairies are Good, and the Pale Man and the toad are Bad. On the other hand, in the violent chaos of a rebellion, moral lines are blurred, and when both sides are killing each other, you can’t tell who’s good or bad.
What’s so interesting about this juxtaposition is: including these two storylines both 1) blurs the distinctions between them and 2) highlights their irreconcilable differences.
1) The black-and-white morality of fairytales bleeds over into the ambiguity of the political conflict, and vice versa. The presence of the fairytale element enforces an association between rebels and Goodness, and fascist, sadistic military and Badness (more on associations in part 3!!!). This is mostly important as a political statement on del Toro’s part, in that he’s denouncing the Franco dictatorship. Similarly, in the political conflict, we are at first unsure of who to support, with Mercedes -- a maid in Vidal’s house — both a double agent and someone explicitly capable of cruelty. This transfers over to Ofelia’s arc, with the faun taking on increasingly grey shades as she progresses in her tasks. At the end of the film, the faun demands that Ofelia bring her baby brother to sacrifice him so she can enter the underworld. The only reason why this is believable is because we’ve seen another character as a double agent, and we’ve seen the cruelty that the first and second acts were saturated with (mostly Vidal being violent). Without that element of moral ambiguity, the final act wouldn’t have worked, and we wouldn’t have been as invested in the choice that Ofelia was forced into making.
2) In other ways, these two storylines contradict, and show us how they can never be reconciled. Ofelia’s arc is one of self-actualisation and the realisation of her place in the world, and like all fairytales, there needs to be a happy ending. In real life, though, especially in the midst of political conflict, things don’t end so cleanly. In the end, del Toro offers up one last juxtaposition in the ending scene. We see Mercedes sobbing over Ofelia’s dead body, and right after we see Ofelia approaching a throne room, ready to reclaim her rightful place. In real life, the rebels have triumphed, but Ofelia is dead — there was a cost, like in all realistic conflicts. In the fairytale, Ofelia is a princess, and she is happy, and she knows who she is. Perhaps, in the end, Pan’s Labyrinth concluding statement is that, sometimes, the world just doesn’t have the capacity for the happily-ever-afters of the innocent.
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Character analysis: Vidal -- the legacy of an antagonist
We want to look at the main antagonist, Vidal, and how his beliefs colour the way the film deals with this idea of “children”. Ok, first we’re going to lay out what we know about Vidal. He’s a military officer under the Franco regime in charge of defending his base (a mill) from rebels in the woods surrounding it. He’s not afraid of death — there’s a scene where he’s shaving using a mirror, and reaches out to draw the blade across the throat of his reflection — he’s not just afraid of death, then, he taunts it, and he’s thinking about it constantly even in daily life. Why? We find later that his father was a military hero. He died in battle, and smashed his pocket watch on a rock to let his son (Vidal) know exactly when he died. In the first few scenes of Vidal, he’s repairing that very same watch, and looks at it often throughout the film. This tells us that Vidal is someone who associates a heroic death with masculinity (a real man dies in battle!) and sees that death as a legacy that he needs to pass on to a child.
And that reason is exactly why Vidal cares so much about Ofelia’s baby brother. Near the beginning, he specifically tells the doctor to prioritise the baby’s life over Carmen’s (Ofelia’s mother), if it comes down to it. The only thing he’s shown to care about is his father’s watch and his son. But why? Because, in Vidal’s eyes, his son is his legacy. He wants to raise his son the way his father raised him, as a continuation of himself.
And let’s bring in the METAPHORS!! In this respect, Vidal IS the Pale Man. The Pale Man that eats children. He’s blind, and his eyeballs ar
e embedded in his wide, grasping hands, a manifestation of his greed. In other words, children are his “sustenance”, or a way to ensure the continuation of himself. Sound familiar? del Toro has explicitly shown us the horrors of seeing your child as an extension of your own life, in a movie that compels us to see the world through a child’s eyes. We see Ofelia’s hunger for adventure, her imagination and inherent capacity for kindness, and we root for her through everything. We cannot deny that she is her own person, and she shouldn’t be beholden to another person’s decisions.
The only person who acknowledged that was Mercedes, who played mother figure to Ofelia as Carmen was bedridden, and after she died while giving birth to Vidal’s son. Mercedes works for the rebels, and she brought Ofelia with her when she tried to escape. One of the most powerful moments in the film was when the rebels caught Vidal just after he shot Ofelia when she refused to give him her brother. He passes the baby to Mercedes and raises his pocket watch, ready to break it. His last words are, “Tell my son what time his father died.” And Mercedes? She tucks the baby closer to her and says, “No. He will not even know your name.” And just like that, Mercedes erases what Vidal thought would be his legacy, because she believed that children should live free, free to explore and imagine, and free from the mistakes of their parents.
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The question we’re trying to answer next is: What can we learn from the way Pan’s Labyrinth was constructed?
First lesson: The transference of association to contribute to meaning
We’re talking about when you have a certain impression of a character, which is connected to a verbal or visual cue, and this cue is transferred to another character, lending the latter a greater, deeper impression. Why is this important? Just like how poetry is about the //economy of words//, films strive to convey as much meaning as they can with as little time and props&sets as possible. This is even more important as films have an unspoken time limit, because there’s only a maximum amount of time audiences will sit and watch without tiring. So we want to use efficient ways to convey meaning! Dialogue might be the most direct, but it’s not efficient (that’s why voice overs are usually avoided). Visual cues, though, like colour correction, character and costume design, etc etc, are subtle but super effective.
Example time! As said in the first part, del Toro wants us to denounce Franco’s regime and by extension, Vidal, and in doing so support the efforts of the rebels. How does he do this efficiently? In Ofelia’s first task, she kills a toad. She emerges mud-stained and filthy and dirty, but we know that she’s doing something right, and noble, because we associate heroines with positive feelings. Almost immediately after, we get our first glimpse of the rebels. They emerge from behind a hill, faces dirty, clothes torn. There’s a clear visual mirroring, that transfers our positive association with Ofelia to the rebels. So we get it without even being told: Rebels are good!
Pushing this further, del Toro uses this transference to reinforce negative associations with Vidal. Right after we see the rebels, we see Vidal hosting a dinner with the wealthy families from the area. Everyone is clean and tidy and are dressed in their finest — the inversion in appearance from Ofelia and the rebels already inspires us to take note of the inequality, and see Vidal in a negative light. We don’t even need the line that he says later: “These people have the mistaken belief that we're all equal, but there's a difference. The war is over and we won. And if we need to kill each one of those motherfuckers to agree on it, then we'll kill them all.”
Furthermore, extending our character analysis on Vidal from before, we can also see another example of visual mirroring when we see the Pale Man. The image of Vidal sitting at the head of a table at a feast is mirrored by the Pale Man, who sits in the exact same place, making us see Vidal as a monster in human skin.
—> del Toro has masterfully conveyed layers and layers of meaning through visual cues, and this effectiveness of this method allows him to free up more screen time for other plot developments, allowing him to balance a complex plot with depth of meaning and emotion.
Second lesson: The art of setup and payoff
Some of you might already be familiar with this concept, because it features in lots of reviews and analyses on the internet heh, but we thought it would be cool to apply it here. A setup just refers to a seemingly irrelevant line or object that becomes pivotal later in the plot, in a moment called the payoff. What’s amazing about del Toro’s storytelling in Pan’s Labyrinth is that he manages to balance 6 (that we counted) separate instances of setup and payoff, all landing with all their meaning fully intact. And, well, just for the sake of substantiation, we’re gonna list all of them, because we want to highlight the fact that del Toro had the meticulousness to spend just enough time setting them up and then following up later that it’s just… beautiful:
1) The bottle of sleeping draught: it’s given by the doctor to Carmen early in the show, and Ofelia is shown to pick it up, look at it, and set it down again. This is paid off in the last act of the film, when Ofelia grabs the sleeping draught and then pours all of it into Vidal’s drink to disable him.
2) Antibiotics: We see antibiotics ampules several times — the rebels leave it behind at their campsite when they’re nearly caught by Vidal, and later we see them multiple times in the doctor’s medicine case. We see Vidal keep the empty ampule he finds at the campsite, and later when he sees them in the doctor’s case he takes one, and compares them in his study. He outs the doctor as a traitor in the end, realising that he had been secretly treating the wounded rebels.
3) Mercedes and her knife: Mercedes is shown (at least) 2 times, cutting vegetables with a knife that she later hides in the belt of her apron. Making us pay attention to the knife pays off later, when Mercedes is captured and uses it to cut out of her bonds and wound Vidal.
4) The only key to the storage house: Early in the film, a new shipment of food and necessities arrives at the mill, and they’re all brought into the storage house. Here, Vidal hands Mercedes the key, and says, very clearly, that it is the only key to the storage house. Later, after the rebels attack, Vidal summons Mercedes and informs her that the lock to the storage house wasn’t broken, and instead opened with a key. He asks her for the key to the storage house, and she can’t give it to him because she’d given it to the rebels to carry out the attack.
5) The stutterer: When we enter the rebel camp with Mercedes and the doctor, special attention is paid to this one rebel who has a stutter. A comment is made about him, the camera lingers. Later, he gets captured by Vidal, and tortured for information.
6) This one is more foreshadowing than setup and payoff, but still relevant: When Ofelia asks about the statue in the middle of the faun’s lair, he tells her it shows himself, her, and a baby. She asks why a baby, and he sidesteps the question. We find later that she was supposed to bring her baby brother to sacrifice him so she can enter the underworld.
Almost all of these instances have a character (or the camera) paying special attention to an object, without any dialogue needed. Do you see the brilliance of del Toro’s storytelling???? Most movies barely have 2 instances of such setup and payoff, but del Toro has pulled off 6! SIX! !!!! all concurrently and all paid off completely. Just…. Amazing screenwriting.
More than this, del Toro has the ability to tell two story arcs at the same time, and then bring them together in such a way that their consequences collide but still makes sense. A good example would be right after the doctor euthanises the stutterer and Vidal realises that he’s a traitor — he shoots the doctor. At the same time, Ofelia’s mother throws the mandrake root keeping her healthy into the fire, and falls into contractions. The consequences of these two arcs — that Carmen is in labour but the doctor is dead — results in the consequence of Carmen dying. Cutting in between these two arcs while still maintain the flow of the overall story is SOME FEAT !!!! Del Toro is an amazing storyteller!!!
Yes, this is the end of our analysis. If you still haven’t watched Pan’s Labyrinth, do it now!!!
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