The great thing about summer...
After hearing about it and wanting to see it for at least a year, I finally got around to watching Pan's Labyrinth (or El Labarinto del Fauno, not to be confused with El Labarinto de David Bowie). First of all, it was not what I expected. For a fantasy story, a disappointingly large amount of it took place in the very grim real world. It was in this real world that most of the "R" rating came in as well. But the parts of it that did take place in the fantasy world were like "Wow."
I think the common perception is that the fantasy world of Pan's Labyrinth is a dark and twisted one. The film's a twisted fairy tale, in other words, at least according to popular belief. But I disagree. It (or at least the part of it that's fantasy) is a straight-up fairy tale.
I think many people know by now that the versions of fairy tales we grew up with are not the same fairy tales that originated hundreds or even thousands of years ago. Our fairy tales, while perhaps a little scary, always have happy endings (no thanks to Disney. Scoff, scoff). Hansel and Gretel escape, the Little Mermaid finds her prince, etc. All without too much bloodshed or real disturbance. The original versions, however, were much darker. The witch does, in fact, eat children. The Little Mermaid despairs and commits suicide. I'm pulling these details out of memory, so they may be sketchy, but it's definitely true that older fairy tales weren't populated purely by fairies and damsels and the occasional-but-not-too-unusual-dragon.
One of the scariest, most "twisted" parts of the fairy world in Pan's Labyrinth is a monster referred to as "the Pale Man." (spoiler ahead, be warned): He looks like an extremely old, decrepit man. His mouth is shriveled up, his skin is flabby and his limbs are stick-like and frail. He has no eyes, and his nose consists of two large holes in the dead center of his head. Wait, he does have eyes, but they sit on a plate next to him while he sleeps, and when something awakes him he places them in two holes in his hands so he can see. Oh, yeah, and he kills and eats children.
Right, so what's your point, James?
The Pale Man is probably the most twisted part of this "twisted" fairy tale. But I think he actually doesn't make the fairy tale twisted at all. I think a creature as weird and frightening as him would actually be very well placed in the older versions of fairy tales, which often featured young, innocent protagonists going up against mysterious, disturbing evils as the young heroine Ofelia does in Pan's Labyrinth. These older fairy tales have a sort of unsettling wonder about them, wonder that comes from seeing the strange things that hide in a world totally unlike and yet at the same time similar to our own. Pan's Labyrinth, I think, is full of that sort of wonder.
But if that's not a twisted fairy tale, what is? Just a thought: perhaps a fairy tale becomes "twisted" when the world it takes place in ceases to be filled with that simple wonder and simple fear so characteristic of children. A prime example of this would be Gregory Maguire's Wicked. As most readers probably know, in his story Maguire takes the familiar if fantastical world of Oz and turns it on his head. But he does more than that. He "adult-ifies" it. And, perhaps, adulterates it as well.
L. Frank Baum's Oz, like many fairy lands, is populated with all sorts of wondrous and terrifying things, but he never attempts to explain them. They remain as they would be to the eyes of a child; they just are. The Emerald City is just made of emeralds, never mind how. The flying monkeys just have wings, who cares if they're some freakish genetic accident or not? Or, to return to Pan's Labyrinth, the Pale Man just keeps his eyes in his hands. Who knows or really cares why? What's really important is that he's going to eat me!
Maguire's Oz, as I said, is adult-ified. We have to know why the Witch is wicked, why the Wizard does what he does, why Glenda does what she does, why the monkeys have wings, yada yada yada...And in attempting to explain all this, Maguire turns Oz from what it was--a world full of simple awe and simple fear, like that of a child--to something entirely different: a grown-up's world, full of complex explanations entailing political intrigue, flawed ideologies, sexual deviancies, and of course plenty of violence.
Pan's Labyrinth illustrates this dichotomy beautifully. We see both worlds in it: the fantasy world, populated with the likes of giant toads, fairies, hideous monsters and mysterious (and very weird-looking) fauns. A colorful world, filled with both beauty and terror, a world as one would imagine children see the world. Basically it's a child's world, but not necessarily a child-friendly world (the likes of the Pale Man are not what one would call "child-friendly"). Then we see the grown-ups' world: it's noticeably (and literally) darker and colder. It's confusing, fearful, and extremely violent. It's at war, but not a simple fairy-tale war between good and evil. It's a real war, the Spanish civil war of the 1940s, in fact. It's between clashing ideologies, and it's full of hiding, lying, spying, torture, murder, all of which directly involve grown-ups but don't pose an immediate threat to Ofelia (at least not until the wall between the two worlds starts to crumble).
But guess which world she prefers?