The Enduring Importance of ‘Pan’s Labyrinth’

Ten years ago today, Guillermo del Toro’s masterpiece, Pan’s Labyrinth, was unleashed upon a wide audience. The buildup was slow, but steady. The film spent months on the festival circuit, premiering first at Cannes in May the previous year, before getting a limited release in American theaters that December. Strong word of mouth helped propel the film as it made its coast to coast march, solidifying del Toro as a prominent force within genre filmmaking.

A decade later, Pan’s Labyrinth remains del Toro’s best, most enduring work. Essential among his catalogue, it’s the first of his films that feels completely his own, where he’s at the peak of his talents and knows exactly how to use them. No film has ever quite captured that del Toro feel—that del Toro joie de film—quite like Pan’s Labyrinth.

There’s also a certain relevance to Pan’s Labyrinth today that lends the film and its message more weight than it did just a decade ago. When we speak of Pan’s Labyrinth casually, we tend to remember the more magical elements of the film first and foremost. The Faun, the Pale Man, the fairies. Certainly those elements are full of del Toro’s neo-horror flair and penchant for the fantastic, but the heart of the story remains the struggle against the rising tide of fascist forces.

Told from the perspective of the 11-year-old Ofelia, Pan’s Labyrinth is a new kind of fairy tale. Grounded in the horrible reality of post-civil war Spain, a time of actual heroes and actual villains, the fairy tale conceit of the film becomes something grander and more alive than the arcane fables of our youth.

In classic fairy tale fashion, the bookish young Ofelia is subject to the whims of a wicked step-father, in the form here of a captain in Franco’s army, following the death of her birth father during the war. The first time we see her, in the car with her pregnant mother on the way to their new house in the woods, she is lost in books. She’s getting too old for fairy tales, her ailing mother tells her. Now is the time to grow up and to face reality, even if reality is a dark place.

There was no darker time and place in the 20^th century than Europe in the 1940s. The rise of fascism that begat World War II also begat a series of civil wars that further ripped apart and divided the continent. Ofelia would’ve had little memory of a world outside of war. From an early age she lived through the hardships of battle and witnessed the rise of fascist forces overtake the will of the people. Hers was a world filled with darkness and grief—not only over the life of her father, but of the life promised to her from youth. Ofelia has no escape, no refuge from the violent and oppressive state of the world around her, save for fairy tales.

It feels odd to say, but there are 11-year-olds in America today who’ve never known a life outside of war. The situations are vastly different, sure—as of yet, our country hasn’t had to suffer the horrors of war within our borders—but to those born around the year 2000, the idea of being at war is a concept they’ve grown up familiar with. Brothers, sisters, fathers, and mothers have all lost their lives in foreign lands, not unlike Ofelia’s father, whose death before the movie is an inciting event.

In this sense, Ofelia becomes a fairy tale heroine for the modern age—perhaps the first and most poignant fairy tale heroine since the time of the Brothers Grimm. In the Campbellian sense, fairy tales and myths are meant to guide humans along the path of life, filling the gaps of human understanding and providing light along otherwise dark trails. Del Toro tends to follow the Campbellian formula, laid out in The Masks of God, The Power of Myth, and Hero with A Thousand Faces, in a way that explores the purpose of story and creates a new fable for the modern era.

Our relationship to Ofelia, then, is not dissimilar to her relationship to the princes and princesses that populate her storybooks. Through her eyes, we, too, sense the evil in the midst, which serves as del Toro’s stance on fascists and fascism. This serves as a compelling starting point for del Toro to send the audience down a fantastical path of magic and horror, and Ofelia’s journey serves as a guide for how we should deal with an increasingly tyrannical society, just as her fairy tales give her the base understanding of good and evil, right and wrong.

In an ever changing world, it can be difficult to maintain that grasp. Where the adults that surround Ofelia in Pan’s Labyrinth have come to accept evil as the new good, Ofelia senses the patterns and knows something must be done. Sometimes, the morality of the real world is so muddled by shades of grey that we become like the adults whom Ofelia lives among. The new boss isn’t always the same as the old boss, but in the hustle and bustle of adult lives, we often form false equivalencies that shade out the nuance. Children, on the other hand, unjaded and still open to the idea of magic, can see so easily through the bullshit adults use to color their realities. Through Ofelia, del Toro dispels any notions of grey in Franco’s Spain, showing us its true colors.

Ultimately, that’s the power of Pan’s Labyrinth and what makes it resonate so clearly now, 10 years after its release. In a way, it almost feels like fate that we’re celebrating it today, of all days. Here in 2017, across the entire world, we’re once again seeing a rise in the kind of militant fanaticism that led to the horrors of 1930s and 40s Europe, and it’s disheartening to think that maybe we’ve forgotten the lessons we paid so dearly to learn. With Pan’s Labyrinth, del Toro wants to make sure we’ll never forget.

These times of ours are full of angst and fear, just as Franco’s Spain was and just as Hitler’s Germany was. In terrifying times, people tend to act rashly, make poor decisions, and exalt leaders who ought not be exalted. It’s difficult not to see the correlation between then and now, but as darkness once again threatens to descend on us, it’s important to remember the lessons—and the refuge—that story can provide us.

Beyond serving as a critique against fascism, Pan’s Labyrinth is a loving ode to the power of story. Story can provide us with a place to turn when there’s nowhere left to go, and the mythical traditions offers a tangible compass with which to realign our sense of right and wrong. The citizens of Spain fell too easy for the promises of General Franco, and his rise was bloody and terrible. That’s not a path we need ever walk down again. Right and wrong are both encoded within our psychology, even if we need a little help to find them in the darkness.

Pan’s Labyrinth is as detailed a map as we can be given, reminding us both that we can find solace in story as well as guidance. As a movie, it provides us with both. Its fantasy-woven tale of good and evil works as pure escapism, but on a deeper level it shows us what to do when faced with the coming of evil. Wicked men must never be given an inch; they can be defeated. All it takes is a little bravery. In terms of role models to show us our courage, we could do far worse than Ofelia. For that, del Toro won’t soon be forgotten, as either a filmmaker or story-teller.