What is it about Spanish culture that enables their film-makers to create such masterly evocations of other-worldly states? We recently watched Panʼs Labyrinth (El laborinto del fauno), the award-winning 2006 film by Guillermo del Toro that opens and closes with the beautiful and bleeding image of a dying girl. It made me remember the 1970’s classic, Spirit of the Beehive, which I learn has been an abiding influence on del Toro. In Panʼs Labyrinth, we begin with a death, then double back to explain how it came about.
Models of masculinity and the challenge of the feminine
The film takes place at the end of WW2 when Franco, though in power, faced pockets of resistance. Captain Vidal, a small-scale dictator of the army troop he commands, has brought his pregnant wife, Carmen, to a house in some woods where Francoʼs soldiers are opposing socialist guerillas. Here she is to give birth to their son. (It must be a son: ”Donʼt fuck with me,” he tells the doctor who questions how he can know.) For Vidal, only the masculine has value, and his interpretation of the masculine is the ruthless, uncompromising wielding of power.
But Carmen is a widow and the mother of Ofelia, a young girl who sees fairies and follows their invitation to enter the otherworld of the Labyrinth. A narrator tells us that really Ofelia is the daughter of the King of the Underword, and repeatedly we see her disappearing into the woods to descend stone steps, where she meets an otherworldly goat/man, who says he is a faun. Earthy and fey, he is an entirely different representation of masculinity from that of Captain Vidal. But is the faun to be trusted? Ofelia asks this question as he presents her with challenges that test all her reserves of courage and strength.
What price obedience? What price disobedience?
Obedience and disobedience is a powerful theme running through the film. The Captain demands obedience, and is ready to torture or kill anyone who dare thwart him. The faun demands it too. At first, Ofelia complies. But as his demands become more and more extreme, they reach the point where, first, she makes a minor digression, and at last holds firm, refusing to comply with what she sees as an unacceptable demand. Her resistance leads to her death, the same death with which the film opens. But this becomes the portal through which she enters the underworld and is reunited with her true father, the king.
I was told a few years ago about the narrative of ‘the long defeat,’ which I interpret as the truth that if you behave in a Christ-like way—with disinterested courage, free from the bondage of fear and its compromises—you will be crucified in this world in one way or another. Yet through the willingness to stand, silent but uncompromising, for what is of greatest value, something that cannot be killed is born: it rises, freed from its moorings, sailing beyond the reach of the everyday world of self-interest and heartless calculations. Surely this is the essential meaning of the resurrection.
Duende
Spanish culture holds the idea and active influence of Duende, a spirit that resides in both death and beauty. Every work of art worthy of the name is shot through with Duende, wrote playwright, Garcia Lorca, in his essay on this theme. Every work of art is held in a tension between apparent opposites.
Head and Heart
This being human is a balance. The Sufi poet, Rumi knew this. (Iʼve borrowed the phrase from a translation of his poem, The Guest House.) Itʼs a balance, at times precarious and difficult, between alternative ways of being, the way of the head and the way of the heart. To embrace either to the exclusion of the other is psychosis. To hold both together is a tension that can sometimes seem unbearable.
Gillian PB
Gillian Paschkes-Bell
Editor, Pantolwen Press – bringing out a small number of high quality books
PUBLICATIONS TO DATE
The Seaborne and The Priest’s Wife by A G Rivett
first books of the time-slip fantasy, the Isle Fincara Trilogy
PUBLICATIONS PENDING
Vu an experimental novel by Kenneth Sinclair
The Shareg by A G Rivett
Heart Explosions the poems of Barbara Loveland
Gillian is also working on her own novel, inspired by the phrase the long defeat.
