Dude. You could have sold tickets to that.

I like that idea quite a lot. However, it's purely your eisegesis of the film, as there is almost nothing in the film to indicate this and interpreting things this way doesn't mend the central problem that the film is two hours long and tells two unrelated stories with nothing worthwhile to say.

Had your reading of the film actually been the film, I think it could have been fucking awesome. A fascist monster coming out to the countryside and running afoul of actual monsters in league with his abused stepdaughter? Well, I just gave myself chills.

But alas.

I think Dorkman just did that.

Hey guys. The other movie you were trying to remember is "The Devil's Backbone."

I think GTD has kind of the same problem in PL that the Coens sometimes have, particularly in Barton Fink. They have said (specifically in regard to BF) that they don't plan symbolism. They just do what feels right. For me, Barton Fink works on a visceral level (whereas PL didn't), but I still found myself frustrated intellectually because the pieces of the storyline do not add up to a single coherent story.

People who love PL must buy GDT's premise that the film is a parable, meaning that this specific story is really applicable generally for everyone and has a moral, which in this case must necessarily be something like "Achieve fulfillment by asserting your independence, but be prepared for the consequences." (He probably also called it a fairy tale; certainly every reviewer did.)

But in PL, we have two worlds: a mundane world at war and a fantastic world missing a princess. Ofelia's primary reality must be the fantastic world. If it weren't, then the story would merely be Ofelia's tragic delusion, which is certainly not GDT's aim. However, the parallels between the events in the two worlds (so well described by Squiggly_P), therefore, are a distraction. The only purpose for narrative parallels is to equate the two things that are acting in parallel, and we have established that the fantastic world is necessarily independent of and equal to the mundane world.

I would really like to find a justification for GDT to create those parallels between the two worlds. Perhaps he merely wants to reinforce the idea that the moral about asserting yourself is applicable in the mundane world. But the problem of the unnecessary parallels are compounded by the strangeness of the application of the moral to the events in the story. Michael is right when he wrote that the tests don't really reinforce the theme of asserting yourself against authority... unless—and I think maybe I can give the film this—these aren't so much tests as lessons; and lessons governed by fantastical logic.

The lesson of the toad is that you can get what you want if you assert yourself and apply the tools you have (that is: you may be small but you are not powerless).

The lesson of the Pale Man is that you are taking a risk if you do not follow the rules of authority (however unreasonable they may be) and you must be prepared for the consequences.

These lessons prepare her for the final confrontation, which really is a test of her princess-hood. She asserts herself against unreasonable authority (which, knee-jerk or not, is sadly more than most adults did when confronted with fascists) and knowingly suffers the consequences. That is an A in the movie's fantastical logic, and she gets to return to the fairy world as a princess.

I'll have to re-watch the film (it's been a couple of years) to see if that analysis holds up, but thinking of it this way may soften my gut-level negative reaction.

Last edited by Zarban (2010-06-10 20:00:55)

This movie is basically a demo reel for the production designer, a series of images not required to abide by consistent logic. For many people, that seems to be fine, but being the kind of writer I am, I can't not think critically about the situation.

If you're making a fantasy world, even to the degree we're signing up for with every movie, the rules of the world should be clear, or at least internally consistent. There's a tradition in myth and in fairy tales, when you meet a guide and they tell you the rules, they're right. In other movies, it's just called exposition. It's generally the only information we have about the situation, so we have to take it as fact.

Am I giving the movie too much credit if the point was an unreliable guide to the fantasy world? They seemed to imply the faun was lying all along for some reason, which would have been interesting if it had built up to that twist by stages of her figuring that out before making an informed decision at the end.

Just the number of times in the commentary you guys say "they did that so the next thing in the movie could happen" convinces me that nope, this movie was just making up the rules as it went along. In Jan Svankmajer's Alice, that's cool, but PL tried to eat its gritty realism cake at the same time.

"Fantasy" doesn't mean you have total freedom to change the rules as you go along. That's the whole point of magic beans.

I think the problem with Pan's Labyrinth is that it probably has a moral (and I shall explain it) but it doesn't hang a lantern on it so anyone who doesn't watch the movie and look deep (really deep) into the character's motives won't even scratch the surface of it.

Stay with me, here.

After much thought and a second listening to the commentary (I have a lot of time to listen to stuff at work) I think the moral of Pan's Labyrinth is: Make your own decisions and live (or die, as it were) with the consequences.

Why do I think that? I guess that goes back to the reason that the girl, though she dies, still "passes" the tests and goes on to HappyFantasyLand. To pass the frog test, she had to ruin her dress and get punished. For the pale man test, she doesn't pick the door that the faeries say is the right one. She "passes" the test, but  makes the stupid move of eating the grapes and almost pays with her life for it. To pass the final test, she has to choose whether to kill her brother or not, but (obviously) has to live with the fact that she stole him from SuperFascist. Blam, she's dead, but "ascends" to HappyFantasyLand because in the end she "passed" all the tests.

The same could be said for SuperFascist. He throws the mandrake root in the fire and almost loses the baby he wants so desperately. He shoots the little girl in the end and the rebels kill him for it (and all the other oppressive decisions he's made).

While it's not harped on and we don't get flashbacks of "Ah-ha! She made the right decisions and that's why she gets to go to HappyFantasyLand!" that's the throughline that I see through the film.

That's my rationalization and I'm sticking to it. *nod*

*smiles, gazes into monitor for days, eventually dies of dehydration*

Just finished watching the movie for the first time and my initial reaction is that I kind of love this film, and now I just started the commentary and you guys hate it? Hmm.

I see the Captain's motivation as he's a narcissist/psychopath, and that's all I needed to really "know" (although that's how I read his character; it's not mentioned), but people with consciouses don't do what he did, and he mentioned pride as a weakness.

And I didn't really care that it didn't follow the rules of a fairy tale, is it wrong to break the rules sometimes?

Edit: Because kids never disobey what they're told to do

Goddammit, you guys were condescending assholes in this one.

Last edited by Mr. Pointy (2011-08-05 05:38:34)

We probably were, this was a year ago and we're pretty much only just coming out of that phase in our negative commentaries. (Or I am, anyway; I might have lagged behind everyone else.)

Here's the less assholish (I hope, anyway) way to put it. As we most recently articulated in the LOST WORLD commentary (which if you weren't in the chat for the recording session you won't have heard yet), one of if not the primary thing that distinguishes a well-told story from a poor one is that, at the end, you can say, "Okay, I see why you told me that." The filmmakers had some idea they wanted to express, some perspective on the human experience they wanted to lay out there and say "here's how I see it," and they succeeded in doing so. You may or may not agree with what the filmmakers have to say, but at least you get it.

I don't understand what GDT was trying to say here, and the most popular answer I get when I say that -- something about imagination being an escape from harsh reality -- isn't supported by what I would consider an honest reading of the film. It's okay to break the rules but it should be for a reason, and I can't discern what that reason is. It's all style and no substance -- and the style, admittedly, is striking. If I watched this film without subtitles I'd probably be mesmerized. But with them on, knowing what's being said, it rings vapid and hollow to me.

So when people praised it to the rafters for being deeply philosophical and a modern fairy tale, I got shitty about it, because I don't think it is and to say so is, in my view, an insult to the transformative and instructive power of true fairy tales.

It's like if wizards were real, you've gone on adventures with them, and then many years later, after they've all gone, you hear a new one has come to town and everyone's saying the age of wizards has returned. So you go to see him... and he's an illusionist, not a wizard, performing tricks and sleights and not an ounce of true magic. And he's good, he's really good at doing what he's doing, but he's no wizard. After all the praise and buildup -- and hope, frankly, because you would LOVE to see a second age of wizards begin -- you just want to yell "Are you fucking kidding me? We've rolled with Merlin! Doesn't anyone remember what that was like?" And then you despair, because it starts to seem like no one does.

Had this not been presented -- by its filmmakers and admirers alike -- as a "fairy tale," but just a weird quirky fantasy movie, I probably still wouldn't have much cared for it since I still don't think it tells a proper story, but I probably wouldn't have had the emotional response I did.

I had one more thing to add to this thread a while back and didn't want to dredge up the topic just for this:

The only thing in the movie that had perplexed me was the story Ofelia tells to her unborn brother about the rose that could give eternal life. I couldn't figure out why it was in there, and then it dawned on me. The baby is the rose. I suppose you could look at the rose story as some kind of metaphor for life in general as well. People sought the rose because it gave eternal life, but the thorns gave instant death. But the two are inseparable. You can't have life without death, yeah? So maybe it's like a story about how dumb it is to want eternal life. Like, this Captain guy just wanted his name and memory to go on, yeah? So that's why he wanted the kid, but he obviously got stuck by a thorn instead.

I still don't know what all that crap ends up meaning, but there you go. I wonder if the face-smashing scene was a metaphor for alcoholism or something...