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To cite this article: Kam Hei Tsuei (2008) The Antifascist Aesthetics of Pan's Labyrinth ,
Socialism and Democracy, 22:2, 225-244, DOI: 10.1080/08854300802083422
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08854300802083422
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Were the first potential parents who can contain the ancestral house.
Wilson Harris, The Whole Armour
rests at number 50. Next to the other 49, My Big Fat Greek Wedding is like an evolutionary biologist forced to sit through a Billy Graham sermon at a sold out football
stadium: in front of it is a spectacular religious monolith. Most of these films
feature swashbuckling humans with superpowers fighting back rampaging forces
of catastrophic evil (Spider-Man, Batman, Men in Black, The Incredibles, Transformers,
Star Wars, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, The Matrix), while the rest are about rampaging catastrophic evil getting the better of the humans (Jaws, Titanic, Jurassic Park,
Independence Day, Twister), or animals who have replaced humans in this eternal
battle between good and evil and turn out to be more successful at it (Shrek,
Finding Nemo, The Lion King, Toy Story 2, Monsters, Inc.).
6. Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 6f.
specific political ends. Fascism for del Toro is much more than an
individual lust for totalitarian social control this has been the selfserving bourgeois interpretation. Rather, it is a systematic attack on
nature, in particular on the relationship between mother and child.
As del Toros camera begins following a young girl through the
woods (the fascist cavalcade has stopped so that the girls pregnant
mother can vomit by the side of the road), the fascists are left behind
to guard their vehicles. From this point forward the fascists scurry
around like rats on the margins of del Toros narrative he never
allows them any centrality. So we realize right away that this will not
be a movie about the fascist mentality or how everyday people
become fascists. This liberatory feeling dawns on us the deeper the
young girl, Ofelia, moves into the forest. For there she meets a fairy,
who will soon take her to the fauns labyrinth which is in a different
place in the woods. Like all of del Toros mythical figures in the film,
the fairy is strikingly concrete. Always gender-free, his fairies avoid
the typical sort of crude Hollywood anthropomorphism whereby
immortal mythical characters are loaded with mortal human attributes,
a tactic aimed apparently to make them less alien, but which usually
has the opposite effect: it closes off the imagination to everything
which is not immediately recognizable or that lacks instant human
potentiality. Del Toros fairy in this opening scene is tiny, and is seen
fluttering around like a butterfly, incapable of human speech but
gifted at physical gesturing. His fairies will play a central part in the
tale he tells.
Before we meet the faun, we meet the fascist. He is Captain Vidal,
dispatched to the mountain village of Navarra by Franco to exterminate
the antifascist resistance there. He is Ofelias stepfather, and Ofelias
mother Carmen implores her young daughter, who has yet to meet
the man (the cavalcades purpose is to deliver the pregnant Carmen
to Captain Vidal so he might personally secure his heir, for he has convinced himself that Carmens unborn child is a boy), always to address
him as father. Ofelia flatly refuses, and for the rest of the movie we
witness the consequences of her lucid intuition, that Captain Vidal is
nobody any decent human being would ever call father. That her
mother has fallen in love with such a monster does not, however,
concern Ofelia. Her mind is always in another place.
This utopian place in Ofelias mind is constructed by del Toro in
two ways: through a lugubrious lullaby that begins and ends the
film, and by overlaying the films main story of historical fascism in
Spain with an ancient resurrection myth. In del Toros use of the
myth, based on the Mother Goddess archetype, a young princess
note another compelling connection to Freuds theory of mass psychology: that it took a non-European to recall for the masses of Spain its
traumatic past. To judge by the lack of any mainstream Spanish films
on the subject, the Spanish peoples failure to murder Franco the fake
father (whose brutal fascist regime was allowed to persist until 1975)
is a deeply disturbing memory that they are still unwilling to bring
into the light. This helps explain del Toros double narrative and the
character-doubling which drives his plot. Since Francos fascism has
been given in Spain a kind of unchallenged hegemony at the level of
official national memory, in which both the historical crimes of his
regime and the heroic antifascist resistance to them are kept in
psychic limbo, the only way to unravel this masquerade of appearances is through recourse to ancient myth, in this case the resurrection
myth. It is a simple idea but a rare one in Hollywood cinema.
For now it is enough to register two basic principles of artistic creation in relation to mass psychology. First, that to recall a deeply
repressed traumatic past can certainly be done by the artist without
recourse to ancient myth or aesthetic doubling, but that a rational
and scientific approach to the past will have little if any impact on a
political unconscious completely invested in unrequited love and in a
corresponding singular desire to see the real world in which we
live where the satisfaction of some participants requires the oppression of others totally abolished so that eternal happiness can spring
to life. It goes without saying that making this argument through
rational and scientific critique for example, by proving that the inherently destructive and radically alienating nature of capitalism more
often than not produces fascism has consistently failed to move the
masses of humanity. Whenever the working classes and the poor
have taken up arms against capital, it has been to avoid mass starvation
or another catastrophic war. And second, in the absence of such imminent real apocalypse that is, the visible presence of fascism the
masses of people are not thinking of proletarian socialist revolution
but instead are consumed with endless daydreaming and fantasy
about a totally different world, which under a capitalist-controlled
media usually takes the form of monotheistic religious belief, that Big
Daddy Capital will save us all hopefully in the form of an apocalypse.
Del Toros narrative of fascism is a rejection of the monotheistic
religious turn. His concept of religion comes not from Catholicism
but from Mexican spiritualism or the Obra Espiritual, as it is popularly
known. The Mexican novelist and anthropologist Elena Poniatowska
has written authoritatively of spiritualisms mass appeal to the
Mexican poor. Their cultural roots have been disturbed by television
and radio, she says, and for them, spiritualism is more satisfying
than Catholicism: the emotions are stronger, and they are treated like
people. Spiritualism makes men and women feel as if they were
chosen by God from among all the whirling souls on Earth. She
argues that in the Obra Espiritual, Men and women of all ages recognize the catharsis that occurs when they are spiritually possessed by
their protectors.19 This is clearly evident in El laberinto del fauno,
where the lost child Ofelia is spiritually possessed by her double the
Princess Ofelia, who with the help of the faun and his fairies protects
her from fascism. The fascists, in contrast, who carry out their massacres of the poor on behalf of monotheism and the Fatherland, are
left unprotected. Not only have they cut themselves off from the
ancient past, from spiritualism in the popular sense, as the religion of
the poor, but they have also committed themselves to eradicating all
memory traces of it from the land they are militarily occupying. And
this seems to be the underlying motive for Captain Vidals extermination campaign in the mountains of Navarra: to make sure the ancient
resurrection myth of the Mother Goddess never happens again.
Here the tragedy of El laberinto del fauno emerges in full view, the
tragedy of Ofelias mother Carmen, who has forbidden her daughter
to walk through the woods and who constantly admonishes Ofelia
for reading fairytales. And yet Carmens heart is not in it, thus Ofelia
is able to pursue the faun and the mission he has laid out for her
without constraint. Meanwhile Captain Vidal, being a misogynist, is
blind to the subversive activities of Ofelia and even more so to those
of Mercedes, a local villager whom he has hired to manage his household. Above all he is indifferent to the fate of Carmen, her sole purpose
on earth being to bear him a son. Mercedes is the real hero of the story
and a different side of the Mother Goddess archetype. Sister to the antifascist undergrounds commander, she also leads a double life, playing
the part of a docile peasant woman in the face of Captain Vidal, while
stealing from him medicines and supplies and delivering messages for
the resistance. All this doubling will come to a head when Captain
Vidal discovers, much too late for him as it happens, Mercedes antifascist activities and Ofelias support of them. The resistance prevails, but
it is not a happy ending, not by Hollywood standards: Carmen dies a
19. See Elena Poniatowskas masterpiece, Heres to You, Jesusa! (New York: Farrar, Straus
& Giroux, 2001), for a full description of the Obra espiritual, in particular her elegant
Introduction to the text, which is a memoir as told to Poniatowska by Josefina
Borquez, a working-class Mexican woman born and raised in Oaxaca, who spent
most of her life in the barrios of Mexico City.
As earlier alluded to, the general approach in Hollywood to historical fascism is non-mythical, even anti-mythical. Rather than liberating
fascism from the confines of a specific period, it does the opposite it
de-universalizes and then sublimates the bourgeois roots of fascism by
either making true stories about it (Sophies Choice, Marathon Man,
Schindlers List, The Pianist) or concocting freakish, thinly-veiled allegorical monster tales about invading foreign terrorists hell-bent on imposing fascism on democracy-loving Americans and destroying their way
of life (True Lies, Independence Day, 300).
Armstrong shows that in the ancient world, a symbol became
inseparable from its unseen referent. Because likeness constitutes
some kind of identity, it makes the invisible reality present.20 In El
laberinto del fauno, the underlying invisible reality is a Mother
Goddess Utopia, where the mother child bond or the Eternal Feminine
is the foundation of all human happiness. Del Toro, who was raised by
a female community headed by his grandmother, is explicit about this
in the film: what enables the visible antifascist resistance to succeed are
20. Armstrong, A Short History of Myth, 69.
objectives. We see this early in the narrative when the captain seizes
from two local farmers, a father and son, a bag of wild rabbits they
have hunted and killed, after which he brutally murders them, and
later when he imposes on the villagers a strict food rationing
program. If the villagers do not collaborate with the fascists, they will
be starved to death. Prior to the Pale Man scene, we switch between
double actions: Ofelia carrying out her first task, which is to overthrow
a giant, grotesque and stupid toad that has occupied an ancient and
beautiful tree in the forest and, through its insatiable greed for the
trees nutrients, is causing it to die, and the dinner party, at which
are gathered all the members of Navarras ruling class, the priest, the
village magistrate, the local sheriff, the big landowners and their
wives, and the county governor. Without exception, each strongly supports Captain Vidals campaign to exterminate the resistance. While
Ofelia is slaying the mythical fascist toad, the real fascists are plotting
their repression of the villagers.
This narrative doubling technique structures every scene in the
movie, where the figures of historical fascism such as Captain Vidal
and the ruling-class members of Navarra are made inseparable from
their unseen referents, that is, the mythical symbols of fascism
such as the giant toad and the Pale Man. To put it another way, still following Armstrongs insight, the likeness drawn between the identity of
the grotesque and idiotic toad, as well as the deathly child-eating Pale
Man, and the historical fascist Captain Vidal makes the invisible
reality of fascism present. This invisible reality is the political unconscious or mass psychology: the way fascism uses our basic libidinal
attachments (self-love, parental and infant love, friendship, general
love of humanity, and even dedication to concrete objects as well as
to abstract ideas, in Freuds words) on behalf of concentrating economic power and putting down laboring-class resistance to bourgeois
oppression. In so doing, it also seeks to eradicate from popular
memory any and all myths that tell the story of an original crime: the
murder of ancient communalism by an emergent capitalist class.
In El laberinto del fauno, this idea is subtle and complex. For
example, not until the final scene does it become clear that Captain
Vidal murdered Ofelias father in order to replace him as Carmens
husband and steal from them the rights to their unborn son, by claiming the child as his own. For it turns out that the fauns final task for
Ofelia is to use the ceremonial dagger on her newborn brother. The
spilling of his blood, the faun tells her, will open the portal whereupon
she will be returned to the kingdom of eternal happiness. It is a clever
stratagem, of course: the final test is not the sacrifice of her brother but
proof of Ofelias purity of heart. She passes the test, choosing her own
mortality over taking the life of her brother to gain immortality. And so
there mortal Ofelia perishes, at the mouth of the portal, shot in the back
by Vidal in pursuit of Ofelias brother, whom she has taken to the
fauns labyrinth to hide him from the captain. He kills Ofelia, after
grabbing the child from her. But as mortal Ofelia dies, immortal
Ofelia is resurrected to her rightful place at the throne, next to her
mother the queen. Meanwhile, with the child clenched in his arms,
Captain Vidal emerges from the labyrinth, thinking he has prevailed.
Yet at its entrance he is greeted by the leaders of the antifascist resistance. Tell my son . . . Tell him what time his father died. Tell him
that I . . . he orders the resistance leaders, after Mercedes has taken
the child from him and begins preparing his execution. No, she
says plainly. He wont even know your name.
Perhaps the most striking example of cosmic doubling in del Toros
narrative is that between Ofelias unborn brother and a mandrake root.
Given to Ofelia by the faun, to aid Ofelia in the care of her deathly ill
mother Carmen, the mandrake root, through Ofelias nurturing,
comes alive: she feeds and protects the root as if it were her own
infant child. Kept in hiding under her mothers sick bed, the mandrake
root begins to flourish, and its growth and happiness cures Carmen of
her illness, baffling both her physician and Captain Vidal. The captain
is of course very pleased to see this development, for it convinces him
fate is working in his favor, that his heir will soon be born and in good
health. In a scene that leads to the films conclusion the resurrection
of Ofelia to the throne and the execution of Captain Vidal the captain
discovers the mandrake root and brutally murders it, provoking the
unborn childs premature birth and with it massive hemorrhaging in
the body of Carmen. Like every scene in the movie of violent death
caused by Captain Vidal and his fascist henchmen, Carmens death is
accompanied by the birth of new life, the birth of Ofelias brother.
Importantly, the mandrake root has cosmological significance in
many ancient religions, from the lands of China to Palestine. Its
magical, heavenly properties, given that the plant is both poisonous
and has a human semblance, tend to be alchemical in nature. In
ancient mythology the idea is that, if not treated delicately and with
special knowledge of its dynamic life-giving potential, the mandrake
root can take the form of a dangerous weapon, since it is believed
that if dug up without forethought and care the mandrake will
become murderously violent. In the Book of Genesis, the mandrake is
referred to as a love plant, and this view of the mandrake can be
found in other ancient religions as well that it stimulates conception.