So if you saw a few posts back, my internet
friend by the name of Pitt Crawley created a blog of his own. He
did his own review of a movie and I like the idea of getting some
diversity on here. I'm sure no one wants to read the same style
of review 365 straight times. If anyone else wants to post
their own thing on here, go ahead and let me know. I only
require one thing, that it isn't as good as any of my reviews. This
one is better but I give it a pass because the style is way
different. I can't be looking bad on my own blog! So read
the review and then check out his blog which can be found under "My
Blog List". Enjoy.
Pan's Labyrinth (2006)
When one enters a labyrinth, it can be easy to
be turned around, confused, and possibly lost along its twisting
paths. Once inside a labyrinth, things may not appear as they
truly are. Light is bent in odd directions. Sound
resounds off the walls in confusing ways. Reality itself
appears twisted and beyond comprehension. And several people
can enter the same labyrinth and meet very different ends. All
this and more can be expected when one dares to enter Pan’s
Labyrinth.
Spain, 1944, during the end
of a civil war, Ofelia, a young and imaginative girl, and her
pregnant mother travel to the country to be with her stepfather, the
cold and calculating Captain Vidal, as he finishes his brutal
campaign to crush the remnants of a rebel force in the surrounding
countryside. The captain is a viciously efficient man who
detests anything that wastes his time and anyone who does not obey
orders immediately and without question. He is a slave to
routine and discipline. The consequences of failure to meet his
expectations are met with graphic violence dealt out personally by
the captain. Beyond himself, the only other thing Vidal is
concerned with is the birth of his son who he sees as an extension of
himself.
In contrast to her
stepfather, Ofelia is a free spirit who does not allow her life to be
dictated by such things as time and material possessions. She
is obsessed with books of fairytales and stories that contain the
hope of eternal life. Ofelia carries around a sense of independence
and does not require a playmate or constant companion in lieu of a
good book and her imagination. While she has no love for the
captain, Ofelia does value human life and has no desire to see anyone
hurt or dying.
During
her first night’s stay, a faerie appears to Ofelia and leads her to
an ancient faun that resides in the center of a nearby labyrinth.
The faun reveals that Ofelia is a lost princess of a magical,
underground realm and has a chance to obtain immortality. All she has
to do is complete three tasks that will prove whether or not her
immortal soul has remained pure and intact. These tasks include
the restoration of nature, resisting of temptation, and ultimately
self sacrifice which, despite a failure in one of her previous tasks,
allows Ofelia to move on to the underground realm and reign for
eternity with her parents.
All the while her stepfather
attempts to purify Spain via death and destruction and tries to
obtain a small amount of immortality by passing down his name and
memory to his son. But in the end Captain Vidal is denied even
that.
Near the beginning of the
film, Ofelia whispers a haunting tale of immortality to her brother.
The tale begins with a rose that grows on the peak of the
mountain. The rose blooms every night, and will bequeath
eternal life to anyone that plucks it. But no one dares to try,
because the rose’s thorns that grow around the entirety of the
mountain carry a deadly poison. Deterred by the thorns,
humanity allows its incessant fear of death to rule over them, and
eventually they forget about the rose and about the hope of eternal
life.
This story sets the tone of
Pan’s Labyrinth, and allows the differing views on reality, realism
and nominalism, to run along together through its depths. Realism
is the belief that universal or abstract ideas such as nothingness
and immortality actually exist outside of the mind. This
metaphysical ideology is held up by the young and hopeful Ofelia.
Ofelia takes a dualist approach to interpreting reality. She
believes that both the physical realm and the magical realm exist and
are important. This is shown in the way she worries and cares
for the wellbeing of those around her and in the way she trusts the
faun’s promises and places her hope in eternal life. Nominalism
is the belief that such ideas are only constructs of the mind and do
not actually exist in reality. This philosophy guides the life
of Captain Vidal. The captain is most likely a materialist. He
is obsessed with time and does not believe it should be wasted,
because one is only given a limited amount of time upon this world.
His obsession with time is symbolically shown by his
ever-present pocket watch. The extreme importance the captain
places on time is also revealed in the way he brutally but quickly
kills two men suspected as rebel spies. After he executes the
two men, it is proven that the men were actually innocent. The
captain’s only reaction is to impress upon his officers that if
they had properly searched the men to begin with that he would not
have had to waste his time dealing with them.
Pan’s Labyrinth briefly
wanders over an area of epistemology known as rationalism or innate
knowledge. According to the faun, Ofelia is supposedly the
reincarnation of the lost Princess Moanna. And the object of
the tests the faun puts her through is essentially to see if her
innate knowledge or soul remains intact. Throughout her tests,
Ofelia does show cleverness and sudden intuitions that a normal girl
would not have displayed. In two of the tests the faeries and
faun lie outright to her and try to manipulate her into making the
wrong decision. But in spite of that Ofelia is still able to
see through the deceit and make the right decisions.
The path upon which Pan’s
Labyrinth takes its viewers runs a very close parallel to the Cult of
Orpheus. Within the Cult of Orpheus, it is believed that human
souls once existed in a perfect realm. But when a soul commits
a sin in that realm, it is banished to the physical world, where it
experiences pain and suffering. Only by committing acts of good
can a soul once again return to the perfect and divine realm. Pan’s
Labyrinth begins with a tale about a perfect and eternal realm
underground where Princess Moanna ruled with her father and mother.
Things such as pain and lies did not exist there. But
Princess Moanna longed to experience the human realm, so she found a
way to reach it. Once there she forgot who she was and for the
first time experienced pain, sorrow, and death. In order for
Ofelia, the reincarnated Princess Moanna, to pass through the portal
to return to the perfect underground realm, she had to sacrifice her
life for another.
But despite her sacrifice
and involvement with faeries and fauns, one can still take the view
that all of Ofelia’s fantastical experiences are nothing more than
a by-product of her overactive imagination. As materialist
Thomas Hobbes would put it, she is just experiencing epiphenomena.
That these fantasies she is experiencing are caused by physical
reactions in the brain, possibly brought on by her fixation with
fairytales.
There are three subgroups
within this film that mirror the beliefs held in our modern age. One
group, represented by Ofelia, holds the belief that there is a
material world and another, possibly perfect realm beyond the
physical. Captain Vidal is the representative of the second
group that holds that nothing else exists beyond the material. To
the second group the only thing that matters is the hear-and-now.
The last group exists between the extremes of the previous two
groups. The most apparent representatives of the third group
are Ofelia’s mother, the doctor, and the captain’s servant
Mercedes. These three do not prescribe to one belief or the
other; they simply do not know what to believe. Within today’s
society exists the religious or spiritual, the atheist, and the
agnostic. At the end of the film, the viewer is given three
alternative exits. The viewer either chooses to believe that
Ofelia did actually reach eternal life, that Ofelia actually created
the fantasy world in her head as a way to escape the awful reality
surrounding her, or chooses to remain undecided.
Guillermo del Toro does a
fantastic job in comparing and contrasting three very different views
of reality. The characters he creates to champion the varying beliefs
are believable and relatable. They all carry out their roles in
such a convincing fashion that it makes it possible for the viewer to
come to three very different conclusions.
Although there was a certain
characteristic of Captain Vidal’s that did not seem to mesh with
the rest of his character. Several times during the movie,
Captain Vidal makes several decisions based solely on gut instinct or
intuition. For a man whose life is controlled by time, routine,
and discipline, instinct would not seem to be a valued character
trait.
Pan’s Labyrinth does put
more of an emphasis on the realism, dualist side of the story by
aligning it with the heroine’s point of view. It also puts
nominalism and materialism in a dark corner by affiliating it with
Captain Vidal. Because of this slight emphasis, the
philosophical implication of the film becomes clearer. Midway
through the movie, Ofelia asks the servant Mercedes if she believes
in faeries. Mercedes tells Ofelia that she believed when she
was a little girl but stopped when she grew up. At the end of
the film, Mercedes mirrors the despair that was seen in Captain Vidal
as he died when she finds Ofelia dying in the center of the
labyrinth. In the end, there is only one person who has found
happiness and that is Ofelia. She dies smiling because either
in her mind or in reality Ofelia has finally reached the place she
had placed her hope in. The main philosophical implication is
that man has lost hope in immortality or eternal life, and without it
he only finds despair within death.
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