Two Hundred Years of Solitude

So yesterday in our CI class we watched Pan’s Labyrinth. It was a rather creepy, disturbing, yet also entertaining film. I would have liked a warning that it would be spooky at times but I turned out fine. No nightmares or anything yet. Also, I want to watch more Spanish films now because it was much better than I expected.

What ACTUALLY defines a person’s perception of reality? To cope with the multitude of things that go on in life, people are created with defense mechanisms in order to lessen the stress put upon them. As innocence is lost, that perception of reality also is lost, and is replaced with the inevitable sense of despair and hopelessness.  In Pan’s Labyrinth, this perception of reality is tested through the eyes of Ofelia- a young eleven year old girl living in the middle of a war-torn Spain.

Ofelia finds solace in fairy tales, as a young girl should, but is struck with the awful reality that she lives in. When her mother marries a Spanish army captain, a ruthless and tyrannic man, Ofelia is forced to find her inner peace. Upon arriving at the captain’s residence, she is met by a fairy disguised as an insect, and follows it to a ruined labyrinth deep in the woods.

After meeting a faun by the name of Pan, Ofelia is tasked with completing certain tasks by the time the next full moon rises. As her trials in her fairy tale realm become more heinous and difficult, her reality is not much better. Her mother falls ill, as well as the rebel’s advances on the homestead and the surrounding woods. Her perception of the reality surrounding her only seems to blend with her fairy tale reality she wants to believe. Juggling between these two realities becomes quite a task for the young girl.

At the core of the film, it is about a girl who can’t seem to find any peace in her life. In turn, she puts herself inside her fairy tales. Instead of feeling safe, the reality only seems to seep into her fairy tale, reminding her that fairy tales aren’t all they are built up to be. Ofelia’s innocence and purity is lost physically, but even in the face of death she dies happy- reunited in her fairy tale with her mother and father in her kingdom.

Director Guillermo del Toro explores many themes throughout the movie, Pan’s Labyrinth. From the preservation of decency amongst humans facing dark circumstances to the focus on how a child’s innocence effects her reality, del Toro conveys these ideas in an ambiguous manner, leaving room for various interpretations of the movie. To expand on this, del Toro utilizes the magical, fantastical realm to illustrate Ophelia’s innocence. While some may view this realm as only a figment of Ophelia’s imagination, others may view it as a phenomena she truly experiences. From fairies to fauns, Ophelia’s fairytale-like fantasies help her cope with the bleak times that surround her. Additionally, Del Toro emphasizes the relationship between innocence and this other, abstract realm when Ophelia asks Mercedes, a grown woman, if she believes in fauns. Mercedes states that she use to but no longer does.

Pan’s Labyrinth  stands out mostly for its strong elements of fantasy. From a centuries old faun guarding a portal that leads to an entirely different world to The Pale Man, a gruesome creature that feeds on unsuspecting children, del Toro’s film interweaves the fantastical with the harsh reality of people struggling under the rule of a fascist regime. It’s hard to tell between what is real and what isn’t, especially as we see a lot of the movie through young Ofelia’s eyes- a world of fantasy that the rest of the adult characters seem to be oblivious to. It raises the question as to whether or not this world Ofelia experiences is truly real- or if she has been so affected by the traumatizing circumstances of her life that her mental state has been affected, forcing her to seek refuge in an imaginary world in her head, much like the books she spends so much of her time reading. Like Lisa Schwarzbaum wrote for Entertainment Weekly, “This is a tale within a tale within a tale, a chameleon creation in which the actual and the symbolic intermingle so intuitively that we’re happy to divest ourselves of logic…..”.

The 2006 film El laberinto del fauno by Mexican director Guillermo del Toro, known in most English-speaking countries as Pan’s Labyrinth, is a modern cinematic exploration of the style of “magical realism,” a literary element unsurprisingly associated with Latin American authors. It is set in Spain in 1944, five years after the end of the Spanish Civil War, and follows a young girl named Ofelia who acts as the bridge in the narrative between the fantastical world of the Faun and the bleak world of fascist post-war Spain.

Idealism played a central role in the film. The characters in this movie were all working to make their ideal worlds into a singular reality. Captain Vidal and Mercedes were on their own missions to create an ideal Spain. Each of them faced uncertainty of the future of their worlds and a desire to end that uncertainty; this was paralleled by the ambiguity of the different realities and by Ofelia’s quest to live only in the world of the Faun with her father.

The major takeaway of the movie, as is the case with much of magical realism literature, is that reality is an ambiguous, even unimportant concept. Truer, more romantic notions such as courage, selflessness, and right in the face of wrong are instead the focus of the movie and are demonstrated by Ofelia and by the Spanish rebels.

On Sunday night my CI class had dinner and watched a movie. The movie we watched was Pan’s Labyrinth. Pan’s Labyrinth was written and directed by Guillermo Del Toro, a Mexican screenwriter and director. The movie was set in 1944 Fascist Spain and told in the perspective of an eleven year old girl named Ofelia. Ofelia moved to a mill with her mother, Carmen, who was sick with child. Ofelia’s father had passed away a year before, and Carmen married Captain Vidal, a vicious, merciless man. On their way to the mill, Ofelia encounters a stick insect she believes to be a fairy, and that turns out to be true. The fairy leads her to a Labyrinth where she meets an old Faun. The Faun explains that she is mortal, but has his long lost Princesses soul. The Faun gives her a magical book that shows her three tasks she must complete before the full moon to go back to his realm. She completes the tasks with a few hiccups (some more dangerous than others), but completes them nonetheless. I believe she sees and believes these magical anomalies to get her through the difficulties of her time and the passing of her mother during the birth of her brother. She get’s shot by Captain Vidal in the end, but in her mind she is being welcomed by her father and mother to the realm she was working towards. Even if the fairytales weren’t real, she died happily and peacefully.

When comparing “Como Agua para Chocolate” by Laura Esquivel and “Pan’s Labyrinth” directed by Guillermo Del Toro. You have to identify your perception of Del Toro’s extremely ambiguous movie. In this case I am seeing the things Ophelia sees as being real. In this case we can call it an obvious case of magical realism. That is the central thing these two works share in common. They both utilize examples  of magical  realism in order to demonstrate an important theme. In Tita’s example the magical realism involving food externalizes her internal emotion such as her love for Pedro and anger towards her sister for marrying him and threatening her. This allows us to see the theme that true love eventually conquers all. In the case of “Pan’s Labyrinth” the magical realism involving the magical creatures allows us to see the theme on the importance of decency and believing.