LOTS OF BIIIG SPOILERY SPOILERS HEREIN...
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Wonderstarr sayeth:
The idea of a child escaping grim reality into a fantasy realm where he or she has to perform tasks and ascend to royalty doesn't seem especially new
Well no, it isn't - but isn't that the point? The idea of three tasks to prove one's secret royalty has mythic resonance precisely because it isn't new. It's an archetype, and arguably a particularly female archetype. In contrast to Narnia, there isn't an uneasily tacked-on Christian-flavoured bit; here, the fairytale seems to hark back to something more primal, pagan, determinedly pre-Christian.
Neil Gaiman briefly talks about the same phenomenon in A Game Of You: he posits that little girls' childhood fantasies are fundamentally different from little boys' in terms of the way power is 'packaged'. Boys, he claims, fantasise about being the strongest, fastest, etc., etc. whereas girls concoct elaborate fantasy lives in which they're secret princesses who must undergo tasks and/or ordeals before their princessness can be revealed/recognised.
I'm not sure I buy this theory, certainly not in its entirety, but I found it helpful in appreciating Pan's Labyrinth, which I reckoned to be about female fertility (or perhaps the 'lot' of being female in an aggressively male world) in the same way as Neil Jordan's (film of Angela Carter's) Company of Wolves was more explicitly about female sexuality. Both films feature young girls creeping into the earth via dark, damp holes in the ground...
In Pan's Labyrinth, the symbolism didn't seem to reflect female sexuality so much as pregnancy/childbirth, specifically the health and sickness imagery thereof. The twin-coiled Fallopian symbol is everywhere, from the faun's ramshorns to the blighted fig tree on the poster (figs themselves also, famously, being symbols of female genitalia):
Ofelia's tasks reflect her mother's perilous state as she struggles with advanced pregnancy. In the first one, she has to burrow through mud and dirt to the uterine depths of the fig tree where the toad sits, a bloated tumour preventing healthy growth and life. Ofelia symbolically eliminates the 'blockage' that is blighting proper growth/fertility within the womb-tree, and her mother's condition improves. Her role is that of antibiotic or perhaps surgical scalpel (both motifs that recur in the real life sequences, with the ill-fated doctor), getting to the heart of corruption in order to transform it. There's also something distinctly alchemical about her extracting gold (pure) from filth (impure) in the form of the key.
The second task is, I think, connected with miscarriage and abortion. The nightmarish hairless blind creature is reminiscent of dead animal foetuses whose eyes have yet to open, and the frescos seemed to depict it destroying children. Even the two grapes illicitly consumed by Ofelia could, at a stretch, be symbolic of ovaries (also eyes). I think it represents "miscarriage" in the way the toad represents "infection" or the old, non-specific usage of "cancer". There's something unpleasantly sterile, almost medical about the eyeless, sexless creature and its sharp pointy fingernails. The fact that Ofelia retreives a blade (scalpel?) from its lair is significant.
(When Vidal and his men subsequently go around their fallen enemies shooting them in the head, one man holds up his hand and is shot through it into his face - an echo of the blind abortionist's eyes-in-palms.)
The third task is harder to fathom but is, I think, connected to the idea that women will sacrifice rather than kill, harm themselves before others. This is perhaps borne out by the fact that, however cheap life becomes in the fight between Fascists and guerillas, the women do not kill. Even Mercedes maims Captain Vidal rather than doing away with him altogether (and Mercedes has hitherto been a healer figure, bringing food and medicine to those in need). The Mandrake Baby, bathed in milk and feeding on Ofelia's blood, is another potent image of female sacrifice for the next generation.
The nearest the film comes to females killing is when Ofelia poisons Vidal; even then, it's with a sedative which might simply have made him sleep (as opposed to lumber after her through the labyrinth like a dopey minotaur). When she herself is shot, she's shot through the pelvis, so her own blood sacrifice mirrors that of her mother's, in childbirth. It's also more distantly reminiscent of the traumatic 'coming of age' menstrual blood in Carrie.
Pan's Labyrinth was, for me, utterly outstanding. I really really want to see it again, as I suspect there's a whole lot more in it that I missed or absorbed on a more subliminal level. It's apparently the 'sister' film to The Devil's Backbone which I've never seen but have got on DVD now. I'm keen to see whether del Toro's handling of mythic male imagery is as deft. |
