Time Spent Watching Movies

Time Spent Watching Movies 3 Days 14 Hours 23 Minutes

Saturday, April 14, 2012

Special Guest Review: Pan's Labyrinth


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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