Oughts from the Aughts: Pan's Labyrinth (2006)

My favorite underrated gems from the 2000s, explained in under 2010 words

Author’s note: This article containers some spoilers for Pan’s Labyrinth, though nothing more than what Del Toro shows in the first 5 minutes, and you should 100% watch or re-watch it regardless.

“Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.”
-Hannah Arendt

“The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.”

-Bertrand Russell

My favorite line from the second best cinematic depiction of fascism is:

“I’m from Buenos Aires, and I say kill ‘em all!”

When hunky Johnny Rico played by Casper Van Dien says this to the camera in the 1997 cult classic Starship Troopers, his GI Joe machismo is so convincing that you immediately forgive all of the people who missed the fact that this Paul Verhoeven film is actually a satirical critique of fascism, not a paint-by-numbers war movie endorsing it. It’s a testament to this movie’s power. While the surface of Starship Troopers looks like a made-for-tv war movie, the substance of it is an immersive examination of how fascist regimes use manipulative advertising to make totalitarian rule and xenophobic militarism seem like the correct and in fact only worldview to have. This starts from the first frame. The entire film is cleverly framed as one big recruitment ad. The cinematography also literally seduces you. The camera gets intimate with young hot people living in a society where racial and gender differences don’t matter as long as every young person is ready to eagerly run into the meat grinder of war, without once questioning whether their enemies, a collection of intelligent arachnids, truly deserve to die. No one in the film ever wonders how “the bugs,” positioned at the opposite end of the galaxy from the humans, could have possibly sent an asteroid to destroy Rico’s hometown of Buenos Aires. We never see arachnid technology that looks up to the task. When a reporter broaches the idea that the bugs may only be acting in self defense after humans began colonizing their homeland, Rico cries “fake news” and shouts the reporter down with his iconic “kill ‘em all” line. The film is so devastatingly effective because you the audience, just like Rico and his friends, take the story it presents at face value. You see a broadcast that points out that the arachnids live next to an asteroid belt and says that they’re responsible for the attack, so therefore the bugs have to die. The news clearly shows that they have weapons of mass destruction, so invasion is the only course of action. Right?

Authoritarian and fascist regimes cannot survive without an ironclad dominance over which stories are true. It’s the mechanism they use to manufacture and propagate unquestioning obedience. This brings me to my favorite line from the best cinematic depiction of fascism, which is this:

“To obey, just like that, for the sake of obeying, without questioning, that’s something only people like you can do, Captain.”

This quote is uttered by Doctor Ferreiro in Guillermo Del Toro’s 2006 film Pan’s Labyrinth. Ferreiro has just decided to euthanize a resistance fighter after he’s been captured and brutally tortured to reveal where his comrades are hiding. After realizing what the doctor has done, fascist captain Vidal asks why he disobeyed him. The doctor utters this legendary response, leaves, and is promptly shot in the back by Vidal.

It’s a heart-wrenching scene in a movie full of them, and one that nicely encapsulates the crushing power of this masterpiece of a movie. Guillermo Del Toro’s take down of fascism hits just as hard as Verhoeven’s, however he uses a more intricate, fantastical route to approach the subject matter from the other side. While Starship Troopers uses satire and sci-fi to explore what it takes to obey a fascist regime, Pan’s Labryinth uses fairy tales and fantasy to explore what it takes to resist one.

After a “once upon a time” set up for the ages, we meet bookish young Ofelia heading into the Sierra De Guadarrama mountains outside of Madrid with her mother, Carmen in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. Ofelia’s dad has died during the war and Carmen is now pregnant with the child of her new husband, the fascist Captain Vidal. He believes in the values of dictator Francisco Franco unquestioningly and has been sent to the mountains to help put down the last of the resistance waging a guerilla war against Franco’s regime. With this bleak backdrop, and surrounded by adults who display little interest in her, Ofelia begins wandering off into the woods where she encounters magical creatures who give her a series of quests to complete. The film cuts back and forth between the real world struggle of fascists against rebels and the fantasy world struggle of Ofelia completing her quest until the two bleed into each other in grim and terrifying ways. While the plot is as gripping as the performances (watching Vidal is a terrifying highlight for me), this film’s triumph comes from its artful selection of images and concepts and how it layers them into a hauntingly beautiful tapestry.

It’s telling that in Del Toro’s bifurcated story, bridging both a fantastical world of fauns and fairies and our world of army captains and rebel guerillas, the darker scenes tend to happen in the real world. Nothing Ofelia’s imagination can conjure is quite as bleak, horrific, and violent as captain Vidal, his absolutist ideology, and his gruesome tactics. As one commenter on IMDB astutely noted, the violence depicted in this film is so visceral that you can taste the copper in the blood on screen.

Moreover, Ofelia’s quests are clearly influenced by the horrors happening around her. The creatures she encounters there mirror the characters and conflicts that make up the epilogue to the Spanish Civil War, not in the tidy fashion of allegory but through chilling and sublime refractions and references. Through this surreal kaleidescope, Del Toro invites us to ponder how, given all of the worlds we could possibly imagine, we willingly create such dark ones. If we know monsters to be evil as children, why do they so often end up in power as adults?

This film also wields ambiguity like a samurai sword. Del Toro wants to make you unsettled and he succeeds at every turn. In addition to some truly horrific scenes starring captain Vidal, and an unforgettably harrowing encounter with a pale man, the magical realism aspects make deciphering what was real versus imagined tricky. Were Ofelia’s dark visions just internalized trauma that a child’s mind would create to explain away or dissociate from the horrors of fascism? Or were they real events that helped inform and impact the narrative happening outside of her quest? The film gives us ample evidence to the plausibility of both interpretations but, Del Toro always avoids the easy conclusion.

We are left to wonder how much Ofelia’s three defining attributes: hope, imagination, and disobedience in the face of such unfeeling hatred represent dangerous, childish naïveté or an essential survival strategy. More troubling still is this question: facing a world as dark as Ofelia’s, would we be willing to pay the true price for disobedience or would we fall in line to escape it?

The ambiguity extends to the powerful ending, where the various victories and defeats are all intertwined and interconnected, leaving you profoundly unsure how to feel or what to think. It’s set in 1944, but the looming allied victory at D-Day can’t help the doomed rebels survive any more than Ofelia’s fairy friends can help her fight off captain Vidal. Like Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke, this movie defies easy categorization and leaves you deftly disoriented. This is the movie that convinced me that unsettling movies like this are necessary.

Just as Brad Bird has shown us that animation is not a genre but rather a medium through which to deliver a variety of different stories, in Pan’s Labryinth, Del Toro shows us that fairy tales can be subverted to tell darker, more complex, and profoundly modern stories. In his excellent video essay on this film, titled “Disobedient Fairy Tale” Nerdwriter points how the film’s ending forces us to unpack the true meaning of obedience and even narrative itself:

“Del Toro’s genius is to use perhaps this most formulaic genre of all and disobey our expectations of how it should unfold and how it should end. The rebels capture and kill Vidal but Spain will continue under authoritarian dictatorship for 30 years. Ofelia is murdered but completes her quest and returns to the underground realm. You can read that as a poetic ending to a sad story, a happy ending to a fairy tale, or Ofelia’s final choice of the story she wants to tell for and about herself. Of course, she doesn’t have to choose at all. No single story could contain her.”

Pan’s Labryinth is a captivating meditation on morality and free will. It’s an unflinching examination of ideology as the ultimate fairy tale that grants great power at a terrible cost. Its genius is how its duality defies our expectations and in so doing multiplies its impact— how a film that’s so clearly, explicitly fantastical manages to cover deadly serious subject matter in such an honest and heartbreaking way.

Yes, of course fascist regimes are reprehensible. However, as important as the despicable nature of what they do once they’re in power is the question of how they attain and hold onto power. Films like Starship Troopers and Pan’s Labryinth are worth watching because they show us how, long before fascists impose their will on people through violence, they must first impose it through storytelling, marketing, and propaganda. In a very existential sense, the war over the truth is the first war they must win. In doing so, they will at every turn try to convince you that there is only one group to blame, one cause of adversity, one interpretation of events, and one way you ought to feel about them. This is fiction, an appealing one, but a fiction nonetheless. The reality, Del Toro shows us, is always more complicated, more beautiful, more nuanced, and more horrific. Fascists want to paint in bold, primary colors, but the world we live in can’t and shouldn’t be limited to a few pre-determined shades. Sometimes it takes a clever fiction to refract the truth so that we can see this vast color palette for ourselves. What you decide to paint with all these messy colors is only for you to decide. The act of interpretation is always your right and responsibility. In Pan’s Labryinth, Del Toro confronts us with the truth that assigning meaning to words and images is never a purely academic or artistic exercise. Ofelia’s fantastical quest is given the same weight as the fascist nightmare occurring around her for a good reason. Deciding what stories are true and which ones are just fantasies is a powerful and ultimately political act.

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