Pan's Labyrinth

0:00:03.1 Natalie Dowzicky: Welcome to Pop & Locke. I’m Natalie Dowzicky.

0:00:05.3 Landry Ayres: And I’m Landry Ayres.

0:00:06.6 Natalie Dowzicky: Fairy tales come in all shapes and sizes. They’re not always about returning glass slippers, poison apples and flying carpets. Guillermo del Toro’s “Pan’s Labyrinth” is a brilliant mix of reality and fantasy. Today, to discuss the Academy Award-​winning 2006 film, is Libertarianism.org’s own intellectual history editor and host of the Portraits of Liberty podcast, Paul Meany.

0:00:29.3 Paul Meany: Hello.

0:00:30.3 Natalie Dowzicky: Philosophy MA student at Queen’s University, Akiva Malamet.

0:00:33.1 Akiva Malamet: Hey.

0:00:34.7 Natalie Dowzicky: And PhD candidate in the Department of Economics at George Mason University, Alex Craig.

0:00:39.5 Alexander Craig: Hi there.

0:00:41.5 Landry Ayres: Fairy tales, which are obviously a huge theme and crucial plot point in Pan’s Labyrinth are explicitly magical folk tales usually separated from our world or ones that take the character away from our world, think Alice in Wonderland or Wizard of Oz, but they still have inherent moral themes or pre-​scripts that apply to our world, generally. The Brothers Grimm, for instance, explicitly rejected stories that were not purely German in their oral history, giving rise to this sort of notion of romantic nationalism and the power of folklore in creating a nationalist identity, which is also a big part of this story. So what do you think del Toro was trying to say about nationalism and fascism and what the power of fairy tales are with Pan’s Labyrinth?

0:01:45.2 Paul Meany: Well, whenever I think of myths and folklore, I also think of Tolkien, and Lord of The Rings. And he talked about myths as if a way to get outside of circumstance and analyze things from a more universal point of view. I think Pan’s Labyrinth is one of those simple stories, complicated, because there’s two stories going on at once, but it’s about good versus evil quite simply, but it’s about how they’re portrayed. And fascism is quite often about aesthetics, the actual fantasy parts of the world are actually quite disgusting and gross, the Faun looks weird, the toad’s disgusting, and the Pale Man is really, really creepy. But then all of the fascist soldiers, say what you will about them, all the uniforms are looking crisp and clean, they’re always constantly cleaning themselves meticulously. The fairytale aspect and the real world aspect collide, and they’re actually both the same, they’re both quite cruel realities.

0:02:39.5 Landry Ayres: Yeah, I think about the sort of crispness of their uniforms, particularly in not just in the costume design of the captain and all of the soldiers and everything, but also in the sound design. Whenever the Captain is on screen for most of the film, especially at the beginning, he’s constantly fixing his gloves, and he’s got these big dark leather boots and these straps and sort of a belt, and all the sort of military trappings that go along with that uniform, and you hear this creaking and tightening leather sound even when he’s not directly on screen, but when he’s in the scene such that there is this tightening. It’s odd, but there is definitely a sort of bondage, domination, sound design aesthetic that is going on in that, and that also is evident in the way that there is definitely an erotic tinge to his domineering and the way that he talks to specifically Mercedes and when he is torturing people, there is a charge to those interactions that it seems that he is enjoying the violence that he is enacting on these people in a way, not that bondage in and of itself is the issue, it is the pure enjoyment of the displeasure of the people that he’s inflicting it on that makes it so sinister and eerie.

0:04:30.7 Landry Ayres: And it’s really… I did not catch it until this time, but just the creaking of his gloves whenever he’s on screen immediately gave me this sort of visceral reaction, and he doesn’t treat other people like that. Whenever he’s just going about business and he’s talking mostly to his wife and Ofelia, he’s very cold and kind of direct and almost flippant, or he doesn’t really pay them much attention. But when the cruelty is something that he enjoys and he knows he will get to indulge that violent side of him, he takes his time. It’s a little bit almost like a sort of a cat-​and-​mouse game to him when he goes to Mercedes and is describing how it’s funny, he says that everything else was busted, but that the key unlocked the lock, they didn’t blow it open, he could outright just go up to her and be like, “I know what you did.” But he doesn’t, he enjoys pressuring and putting that displeasure on her, and so you can see that in the reactions as well as the way that he is depicted physically and orally.

0:05:42.4 Akiva Malamet: So I wanted to pick up a little bit on what Paul was saying earlier about the cleanliness of the uniform and the methodical-​ness of the Captain compared with the sort of grossness of the fantasy world. And I think what’s interesting about this, to connect to your opening question about nationalism and fascism is that nationalism and fascism are always mythologies, they’re this kind of story about who we are, but it’s not really who we are in a kind of a real material sense. It’s our spiritual essence, our spiritual selves, and who we could be in a kind of way. It’s an aspirational ideology, but it concretizes it through stories and myths about some kind of primeval past about how… And our origin story and the purity of that and the need to return to that.

0:06:36.3 Akiva Malamet: And it’s constantly trying to return to that by making life more than real life, by making it the kind of grand dramatic thing, and so it lends itself really easily to just the general idea of fantasy, and also it gets this interesting question about what fantasy is and what reality is… Because if you think about for the soldiers and for the captain, what’s really real is this war that they’re fighting and this cruelty that they’re enacting in order to achieve this more pure… This pure state and this utopia, and the kind of softness of women and of Ofelia’s fantasies or whatever is what’s supposed to be not really real. And what’s really real is this kind of violent aesthetic and this attempt to achieve this sort of pure state. And so it gets into this interesting question about what is really real or what’s really important or what’s really valuable in life in these sort of contrasting things between the supposed reality of fascism versus the fantasy that Ofelia lives in or that the non-​fascist live in.

0:07:54.4 Natalie Dowzicky: Yeah, and kind of bouncing off of that, it’s the way the film, there’s this fluidity between the reality and the fantasy world in a way that it comes through the protagonist, which is a child, and I think I had written down the importance of the protagonist being a child in this sense, mind you, ’cause she does go into the fantasy world and is very Alice in Wonderland-​like, in the sense that she gets immersed and then comes back into reality, but I think it’s also the fluidity is not… It is slightly… There are holes, I wouldn’t say it’s perfect, but the way that she experiences the fantasy and then we get put back into reality and we can see the parallels between the two is like, first of all, what the movie is super famous for, also that it does it in a way that’s almost teaching her, the young protagonist, how to cope with the way reality is, and kind of making… The parallels are helping her to understand ’cause it’s clear that she doesn’t understand necessarily what’s going on in the context of the Spanish Civil War here, but it’s very interesting how the fantasy aspect is almost used to enlighten her on reality, and the fluidity between the two is really excellent.

0:09:28.3 Alexander Craig: I think the really pivotal scene for that sort of fluidity and the parallels that help Ofelia navigate her world is the banquet scene with the fascist Captain Vidal, where he is seated at the front of the table and he has all his guests and his wife is more or less there as a prop for him, this priest is right at his side and saying, the people don’t need to worry about their bodies, even though the fascists are saying that they’re going to take care of their bodies, the priest just says, God has already saved their souls, so they just need to be more careful about their bodies and not worry so much. And while all of that’s happening and Vidal is actually explicit in that scene and says, “I want to be here at the birth of a new clean, fascist Spain,” Ofelia’s out getting dirty, crawling around in the mud in the middle of this bombed out or lightning struck or something, tree, feeding a giant frog, that then disgorges its entire contents.

0:10:43.1 Alexander Craig: Her escape is into the dirt and the mud, but then also paralleling that scene or perhaps the frog quest is sort of contrasting with the scene, but parallel with the scene is her quest with the Pale Man, who’s also sitting at the front of this banquet and wants to sort of consume everyone and has a kind of gross and flabby body, but everything around him is actually very orderly. The banquet in front of him is actually very cleanly arranged so that all of the food is still sitting on the table, nothing’s spilling off, all that kind of thing, and as she takes some of that, she’s punished for it, for participating, for trying to have access to this bounty. And so I think those parallelisms are really apparent in those three parts of the movie.

0:11:35.4 Paul Meany: And the whole feast scene, there’s the toad that eats all the bugs, but then there’s also Vidal and his co-​conspirators, I guess, and fascism and how they can have massive banquets while everyone else is being rationed to. Then there’s also the Pale Man, but all of them are consuming something. It reminds me of… ‘Cause Guillermo del Toro is always constantly referencing tons of different fairy tales all at once. And so it could be referencing Cronus, who was the Greek Titan, he used to eat his own children, but he also represented the ravages of time, and that gets even more credence when you start thinking about the Vidal and his clock that he keeps on him at all times, and how he wants his son to know the time he dies at the end of the film. And then the worst… That he has the worst fate possible of his name not being remembered and fascism is all about this kind of long-​standing tradition as Akiva already talk about.

0:12:23.7 Landry Ayres: One of the other things in the other myths that I think comes up a lot and is sort of about the parallels between is the Faun, who is obviously a figure in myth and folklore, and the identity of the Faun and its intentions is also really, really important to the story as well, because it sort of vacillates between two extremes and like a lot of depictions of sort of a fae-​like creatures in fairytales, they are guided by intense emotions and are not all explicitly untrustworthy, but…

0:13:05.5 Landry Ayres: Are tricksters in a certain sense, and are also guided by strong emotions. So the Faun is pledging fealty to Ofelia at the very beginning, and is so excited to finally meet her, and then when she breaks the rules and eats the grapes in the Pale Man’s banquet hall, he flies into a fit of rage. And then at the end, when he’s asking for the brother’s blood, he is being like, “You have to do this,” only to, we find out at the end, by not spilling the blood of the innocent, he plays a trick on her and she actually passes the test and goes on to the underground kingdom where her father is, and lives on with him there. So there is this unease about what the Faun’s intentions are, and what… Who he is. And you get that also because he is played by the same actor that plays the Pale Man, Doug Jones, who is a really famous and a really phenomenal creature actor that you’ve probably seen so many different times and don’t even realize it, The Shape of Water, Hellboy. He obviously gets along with Guillermo del Toro very well.

[chuckle]

0:14:22.0 Landry Ayres: But he’s just really phenomenal and does amazing creature acting and things like that. So you’ve got… There’s some interpretations that perhaps the Pale Man is a manifestation of, or another form, a visage of the Faun, and that he is playing these games with these tasks for Ofelia, but there’s also the confusion about who the Faun itself is. So the English title that we know it by is Pan’s Labyrinth, but the original title in Spanish is The Labyrinth of the Faun. And Guillermo del Toro has specifically said the Faun itself is not actually Pan, the god. And the difference between the Roman Faun and the Greek Satyr is I think an interesting tension, because in the old myths Satyrs themselves, which are what people generally think of when they think of fauns, actually, the sort of half-​goat men are very lecherous and party-​boy goats.

[chuckle]

0:15:29.7 Landry Ayres: They’re not the polite Mr. Tumnus, who’s gonna invite you into his like snowy cabin and give you tea.

[chuckle]

0:15:36.2 Landry Ayres: They want a rage.

0:15:38.9 Natalie Dowzicky: Right.

0:15:42.0 Landry Ayres: And then the Roman faun was dumbed down a little bit. They still share a lot, and the Romans obviously subsumed a lot of the symbols into their mythology, like they did with a lot of gods, but there is a tension between what is the Faun, and what does he do that Ofelia has to combat? And I think by calling it Pan’s Labyrinth, but it not being Pan explicitly, there is that unease in the audience that makes you think like, well, is he this god? Is he this weird creepy guy that’s gonna misuse me for mischievous ends? And at first, I was annoyed. I was like, “Well, it’s not Pan. Why do they call it Pan’s Labyrinth?” But now I think I see a bit of a point, even if it was unintentional.

[music]

0:16:38.1 Akiva Malamet: Another potential parallel that immediately comes to mind is the parallel between the Faun and Vidal, right? So these are both characters that want people to obey them, right? Or Ofelia to obey them. So Vidal obviously wants everyone to obey him because he has this domineering fascist personality, and Ofelia is part of his larger plan, and she doesn’t understand what’s going on, and then in the Faun’s case, it’s a bit less like she’s doing it for the sake of some cause that she’s an importance to, and more because she wants to be liberated and rejoin her family, or myth family that she’s got.

0:17:14.4 Akiva Malamet: But there’s an interesting subversion in the Faun case, where in the case of Captain Vidal, all that’s interesting… Ofelia is like an unimportant secondary figure, and that’s not just true for her, but it’s true for women, and for anyone fascism sees as weak. Whereas, the obedience in the case of the Faun is actually because Ofelia is supposed to be very important, and her actions make a difference. And so there’s a interesting question about when obedience makes sense, and whether the kind of obedience that’s being asked for… What kind of deal you’re being offered, basically? Are you obeying this because your will is less important, or your interests are less important than… For some larger collective goal, which is obviously the goal of fascism, compared with the deal that the Faun offers her, which is that she’ll end up in this great situation, and whether in fact she will or not. And so there’s an interesting contrast there about what kinds of fealties are being demanded, and what sort of place individual people, or people who are considered lesser have in different realms.

0:18:33.0 Alexander Craig: And I think related to that, the Faun plays this bridging role in several different respects. The Faun is half human, half animal, the Faun is Ofelia’s means of access to her life as Princess Moanna, the Faun is both someone to be obeyed, but also by his own explicit admission in the final quest, someone to be disobeyed. And so this bridging role between the characters that represent obedience, like Captain Vidal, and the characters that represent disobedience, like Ofelia, or Mercedes is really interesting. And maybe that bridge also then between the Roman conception of Pan and the Greek conception of the Satyrs is an element in that.

0:19:31.5 Akiva Malamet: I think it’s interesting, to pick up on that also in terms of not just the Satyr-​Faun comparison, but just the general idea of fauns and other kinds of mythical creatures as the means of access to a reality that we can’t quite get to in these transitional spaces. So if we think about the book that he gives her, which gives her instructions for her quest and advice and so on, it’s called “The Book of the Crossroads.” And in mythology, crossroads are sort of this famous device for places of transition, ways that places that people transfer between worlds, sometimes they’re entrances to the underworld. I think in Greek mythology, they’re places where criminals are buried in medieval England. So they represent these kind of magical in-​between, transitional space, and the Faun is a creature of the crossroads or a creature of this transitional space, represents this kind of duality of… Or dialectic that I think Alex is highlighting.

0:20:37.7 Natalie Dowzicky: And it’s interesting, Akiva, you bring up this idea about choice and obedience, because that’s really… When you boil down the rest of the film, it’s really about this idea of holding your moral ground versus what choices do you make and what do you pay for them, because throughout the film, she’s obviously making all these choices on her quest, and she is, at the end, trying to decide, do I sacrifice my brother in a sense, or how do I become princess again? And there’s all of that, that happens in the fantasy world, but then there’s also a lot of choice and obedience that happens with Mercedes in reality, again back to the parallels that happen. It makes a little bit more sense to me why it could be boiled down, especially for a child protagonist, for it to be about choice and disobedience, trusting authority, let’s say that. But at the same time, the Faun never really gained authority over her. It was never clear why that was, but you can see the same parallels with Mercedes and Captain Vidal, is that Mercedes is going through the same thought process, the same decision-​making process, in reality, about whether or not to stay obedient or… And having like perceiving to have these choices when it comes to her family, her son, her daughter. And I just think that, again, that parallel is super interesting that it comes up… Choice comes up in fantasy world and then in reality.

0:22:19.9 Paul Meany: Yeah, and the idea of choice comes up with the Doctor Ferreiro when he euthanizes one of the characters who was being tortured, and he has the quote where he says, “To obey just like that for obedience sake without questioning. That’s only something people like you do.” He’s saying it to Vidal. And Vidal at one point says like, “Why don’t you obey me, there is no one above me.” Oh, no, it’s when he’s torturing the poor guy with a stutter. He says, “You can leave if you count to three.” And he says, “No one’s gonna contradict me, there’s no one above me.” And you can start to see the way he thinks about fascism is that it’s basically, everyone automatically does exactly what you say, while everyone else in the movie starts… I think the movie is separating the characters in two sections, the ones who obey and then the ones who disobey. And so Ofelia’s mother has to obey, she doesn’t really have much of a choice in the matter. And even Mercedes, to an extent, has to obey in a day-​to-​day basis, but she has her small rebellion in the corner, away from everyone’s sight. She’s not one of the explicit people going out fighting, which she’s kind of civil disobedience almost.

0:23:18.3 Natalie Dowzicky: And it’s also, it’s the disobedience she can do in the context of her environment. So we’ve kind of hinted at that women in this film are treated pretty poorly, which is obviously a tenet of fascism to begin with. But, you can see kind of how Vidal treats his pregnant wife, and also how he talks about the baby. Because there’s this whole part when the doctor comes and Vidal is convinced that the baby is a boy, and the doctor is like, “Well, how would you know that?” And he just talks about how it has to be a boy, and this whole idea of continuing on his father’s legacy, all that kind of stuff. And then there was also a part in the very beginning when they’re getting out of the carriage and she meets Captain Vidal for the first time, the mother is telling her to call her “father”, which is weird because first of all, it’s her stepfather and second of all, they’ve never met. It’s like this weird encounter, and he’s super stand-​off-​ish to the young girl, and I think that kind of just led up to more and more disrespect Captain Vidal in particular had for women, especially a woman carrying his child. I could only imagine if the child was a girl, how the woman would have been treated, and literally, her only value is that she had his son. And that’s why she… And it was very clear, obviously at the end that he didn’t care if the mom lived, just as long as the boy survives the tumultuous pregnancy.

0:25:01.5 Alexander Craig: And in that introductory scene where Ofelia and Vidal are meeting, he actually says to his wife, Carmen, “I want you to use this wheelchair.” She says, “I don’t want to use it.” He whispers in her ear, “Do it for me.” And that’s a phrase that’s sometimes used to say, “Alright, I think this is what’s best for you, so even if you don’t think it’s what’s best for you, hey, please do it for me.” But since he’s already drug her out to this sort of middle of nowhere outpost on the front lines of the remaining fight against the Rebels, it doesn’t seem to actually be about, “Hey, I think this is what’s best, the doctor thinks it’s what’s best. Please do it.” It seems to just be, “Submit to my will in front of all the other soldiers. Show them that you are just my wife, you are obedient, you are less than me, you are literally sitting down even as we’re walking into our home, you are below me.” It’s not about taking care of her, or else he wouldn’t have drug her out there against the doctor’s wishes in the first place.

[music]

0:26:12.8 Natalie Dowzicky: I know a few people have brought up this idea of the watch. So the watch, I believe it was like… Was it his father or him that wanted to break the watch so they would know… His son would know the exact time that he died?

0:26:28.8 Landry Ayres: It was his father. That’s the story that he hears at the dinner, where the priest says all that stuff about, “Don’t worry about your bodies.” One of the guys says, “Did I ever tell you I met your father?” And proceeds to tell this story about how he broke his watch ’cause he wanted his family to know the moment he died. But then, interestingly enough, the captain then says, “It’s a lie, that he never carried a watch.” And sort of contradicts that, but then we explicitly see that he does it, and it’s definitely supposed to be his father’s watch. So I was kind of curious about that, especially because I had read something somewhere where they described how his room, where he was shaving and where he walks around, the set design, is made to kind of resemble the inside of the watch.

0:27:23.5 Alexander Craig: Oh I think his quarters or his meeting room are the inside of the mill, like the actual mechanical inner workings of the windmill that is grinding the flower, presumably there, which no one lives in those. That’s not normal, that’s a very strange place to live. So it really reinforces this image of him as obedient, in charge of this un-​thinking machine, this mechanistic world view of him on top of everyone else.

0:27:57.8 Akiva Malamet: I think it also, just to pick up on that, it highlighted this interesting thing in the way that he operates, and I guess fascism more generally, which is like perfect control and then unbelievable violence and cruelty, and it’s in this very kind of precise manner. So when he tortures people, he plays with them like he’s hunting them or they’re food or whatever, and he tries to really be cruel to them. And he does it in this very precise way, right? So when he kills that innocent farmer with a bottle, he smashes his face in this very precise, exact way. And obviously, he’s always checking the watch, as Alex said, he lives in this industrial place that no one really lives in. But all of that is a container for something that’s very wild and sort of primitive, which is just this outpouring of violence and control.

0:28:49.2 Akiva Malamet: So there’s this interesting kind of… You need to be like… Well, what I’m really interested in, is this… Is ultimately a very uncontrolled, untamed sort of primitive feeling of needing to dominate, needing to be violent. But within this kind of cage of, well, it’s sort of acceptable because my uniform is clean and because I have this time-​keeping obsession and everything is just so, and I live in this kind of machine world. So it’s this sort of veneer or cage that maintains this, what is ultimately a very kind of chaotic and violent approach to the world and to dealing with people. And I think that just represents sort of an interesting study in contrast, and in a way is emblematic of fascism.

0:29:46.0 Akiva Malamet: So there’s a scholar of fascism called Jeffrey Herf, who wrote this book called, “Reactionary Modernism.” And it’s all about how the weird thing about fascism and nationalism is that it’s a very backward-​looking ideology, in the sense that it has this romantic vision of this pure ethnic group, and it wants to restore it and all that stuff, and it plays on the mythology of the society that was and fairytales and so on. But it uses technology a lot in order to achieve that, and in order to maintain control. And so it’s this interesting duality between modernism and technology, and preciseness, and it’s much more kind of ancient primal urges.

0:30:22.2 Landry Ayres: I just was reminded… It’s funny ’cause you talk about the sort covering up of this wild thing that’s inside him. And you could also make the same distinction between the fact that he takes care of the watch so much, but it’s ironic because the watch, itself, is just a symbol. It does not function at all, it is broken on the inside, but if it is polished up enough and kept taken care of, that it will still serve as a reminder and have this sort of totemic power similar to the captain.

0:30:52.5 Natalie Dowzicky: Well, I’m also wondering too now, if he denies that story of his father because it almost gives him emotional attachment to the watch. It’s like a very emotional thing rather than him being perceived as calculated and meticulous. So it’s like this… Almost like an emotional tethering that could make him seem weak…

0:31:17.4 Landry Ayres: Sure.

0:31:17.8 Natalie Dowzicky: In a way.

0:31:18.8 Landry Ayres: And it also is a sort of reminder of mortality, there’s… Maybe it’s just ’cause I’ve been playing a lot of Assassin’s Creed lately.

[chuckle]

0:31:27.1 Landry Ayres: But there is a sort of… There’s that glory of dying in battle. He doesn’t think he’s going to Valhalla, as a place, but that sort of idea about the glory of dying in battle is like the best thing, and that you will live on.

0:31:43.8 Paul Meany: So he shouts at one of his comrades during the battle, he says, “This is the only decent way to die”. And there was also a famous quote from Horace, “Dulce et decorum est,” it’s honorable and pleasurable to die for one’s country. And there was a poem around the same time, movie set, about how that was all a lie, basically.

0:32:01.6 Landry Ayres: It’s like a reminder of his mortality as well, and there is this sort of… Another theme of religion, obviously, that he sort of wants to live on and views himself as… With almost like god-​like power. And that in this world, at least, he is the one that is in control. You shouldn’t have to worry about your bodies because God has already saved your souls, but while you’re on this plane of existence, we will control what happens to your body. And obviously, the sort of co-​opting of the priest and using the sort of Roman Catholic status to legitimize your authority and the co-​opting of religion is extremely common in fascist ideology. And you see a lot of that symbolism in the scenes with the Pale Man as well, which I believe del Toro specifically said is a sort of symbol of the way that the church itself can…

0:33:09.3 Landry Ayres: It has this full plate before them, but decides to devour the children and eat them up and consume them, going back to that consuming theme that we talked about before, and that he himself didn’t even write it to make that point about the Catholic Church, but that he… I believe he’s a lapsed Catholic, has just said like, once a Catholic, always a Catholic, and you can’t get away from those themes, they’re are so embedded into society.

0:33:41.4 Alexander Craig: And thinking about Vidal and his association of this life and death thing, his version of continuing on and eternal life, since fascism is usually sort of ambivalent in its relationship with religion, on the one hand, it wants to use it to legitimize itself, but on the other hand, it’s another loyalty that it doesn’t necessarily want its victims and subjects to have, away from the nation, away from the state. Vidal’s means of continuing his life forever is through his son, and so his son become sort of everything to him, all of his decisions are oriented towards, “My son will know the hour of my death and the means of my death,” and the ultimate cut-​off for him from his continuing life is that his son will not know his name, will not know anything about him, and even Vidal’s name, Vidal comes from the Latin word for life. So just everything about this character is about this odd obsession with eternal life and his own continuance, despite his sort of supposed commitment to Franco-​Spain.

0:34:55.9 Paul Meany: The faun says something similar when he’s giving out to Ofelia at the end of the film, when he’s saying you disobeyed me. He’s saying “You’re going to die like a human, you’re gonna age like one, and eventually you’ll be out of everyone’s memory,” like there’s something similar for both Vidal and the Faun, two people demanding obedience [0:35:09.2] ____.

0:35:10.7 Akiva Malamet: Yeah, and they both seem to suggest that what’s really important is not the life that you live but the life that other people perceive you with having lived, and the sort of mythology of life, right? Because to reference what Alex has said, I think other people have already said, the big glory for fascism is to die a good death, it’s not to live your life. It’s to sacrifice yourself for this state or for some kind of racial thing, some kind of larger collective mythology and then to be perceived as having been glorious in doing so. And so the big question there is whether the remembrance that the Faun is talking about is the same kind of remembrance or lack thereof, or the importance of being remembered is the same kind of importance as the one that Vidal attaches. And I’m not sure. I kinda have this, as I said earlier, vague notion that it’s somehow subverting the kind of stories that Vidal is telling about obedience and being remembered and whatever, because it’s focused on Ophelia and her specific life, as opposed to for some larger collective goal, but they left a bit ambiguous and perhaps that’s deliberate.

0:36:24.9 Paul Meany: I think the entire film is kind of ambiguous. There’s always a lot of problematizing. You can think these two worlds exist at the same time, but then the captain at the end of the film, he looks and he sees Ofelia on her own, not talking to the Faun, but also at the same time, he’s quite drugged up, so he could be hallucinating. There’s always kind of like a double thing. You don’t exactly know what is supposed to be real and isn’t, like some of the items Ofelia takes, they have a presence in the physical world. The mandrake root is real, seemingly, but then it’s thrown to the fire, you don’t know if the sounds are real as only Ofelia hears them. And that could have… When her mother keels over, that could have been labor induced by stress or by fear, that could just be a coincidence, so you never really know. It’s always so hard to tell. I think that’s kind of part of the whole thing that Guillermo del Toro… There’s no one authoritative, narrative review, there’s just a multiplicity of things happening, and there’s people like Vidal trying to force the world into one nice clean narrative, while it just won’t conform to that at all.

0:37:25.0 Akiva Malamet: Yeah, and there’s a suggestion that all of these are… That the only real [0:37:28.7] ____ are the people who try to force him into one thing, but otherwise, many realities can exist at once. This world that Ofelia experiences, which as you say, we don’t really know whether it’s real or not, the world that her… I guess the world of adults that… To contrast it with, that also exists at the same time and it’s ambiguous, like with the mandrake root or the way that the fairies turn from whatever the… Stick insects or something into fairies and back again and this kind of ambiguous quasi-​postmodern fluidity between worlds and the metacommentary of that is just not trying to force perceptions of the world or what is into a box.

0:38:18.5 Paul Meany: Yeah, and the fairies originally start off as stick insects, then Ofelia shows them a picture of a fairy and they change to suit her preferences.

0:38:27.7 Akiva Malamet: Yeah, she shows the fairy the book and then the fairy changes. Or the stick insect changes and that it’s all very perception-​driven, rather than based on anything that we can concretely nail down, which obviously has a lot of tie-​in with the general traditions of magical realism, which is like a whole genre that comes with a lot of famous stuff from Salman Rushdie and various… It’s a very Latin American kind of a genre, magical realism, with people like Borges and Marquez. And I imagine that somehow made its way into del Toro’s way of thinking about fairytales in general, as this kind of thing that’s not not untrue or true but a kind of way of seeing the world, and importantly is this kind of psychological thing about how we relate to the experiences that we’ve got. To what extent are the things that Ofelia… Is this whole Faun world her way of interpreting or experiencing what’s going on around her, to what extent is it mirroring what’s going on around her and has its own reality and is just a reflection of what’s actually happening in this fascist place that she’s in, and it’s all a bit messy.

0:39:43.0 Landry Ayres: Borges wrote a book, a collection of stories called Labyrinths, which is obviously a big influence on Pan’s Labyrinth. So you’ve got stories like, the Garden of Forking Paths, and the Library of Babel, and things like that that are literally all about the power of a labyrinth, and what it means to sort of delve into something like that, and get lost and have to choose between multiple different paths. Which leads to the notion of choice that you raised earlier, Natalie.

0:40:10.2 Alexander Craig: Well, earlier Akiva explicitly raised the issue of sort of being at a crossroads in the way that Ofelia has to navigate all this world and the sort of liminal space she’s constantly in. And a labyrinth is sort of a series of crossroads just arranged in a maximally confusing way.

0:40:26.0 Natalie Dowzicky: Yeah.

0:40:28.1 Landry Ayres: Yeah, the Faun gives her the book of the crossroads so…

0:40:31.2 Akiva Malamet: And also the whole device of her drawing these doors with chalk, and so there’s entrances into other places and breaks with what is supposed to be like a continuous… What’s supposed to be a contained space at any given point, so she can always enter this room or leave another where you wouldn’t think she would be able to, but she can because of the whole chalk device. And you get this kind of ambiguity about whether she has in fact left or entered a room. When she comes back from the Pale Man chamber and she slams the trapdoor down and then there’s this sound, this sort of thudding sound and you’re not sure whether it’s the Pale Man trying to get through the door that she’s just closed or it’s just sounds from outside. And it kind of retains this kind of transitional confusing quality.

[music]

0:41:30.8 Alexander Craig: So I was curious if any of you had any thoughts on the issues surrounding Ofelia’s father, her biological father. Because she says to Carmen at the beginning… Not Carmen, to Mercedes at the beginning of the movie that he died in the war, but Carmen at the sort of big dinner party banquet scene says he made uniforms and then just died. And the two women at the banquet sort of imply that it’s suspicious, almost, that she and Vidal met after her husband died, almost implying that maybe there’s some sort of David and Bathsheba thing going on or maybe Vidal had some hand in her first husband’s death or something like that. But I wasn’t totally sure whether that was what was going on or just them sort of I don’t know, needling him for the sake of it, what do you think?

0:42:25.4 Landry Ayres: I hadn’t thought about it until you raised it because I was just like, “Oh, yeah he died in the war.” People die in wars all the time even if they’re not the ones fighting. But I think specifically the fact that he made uniforms and now that we’ve dissected his respect for the uniform, that you could certainly see that if someone treated it the wrong way or didn’t do it precisely how he liked, how he would simply just either in an indulgent way or just telling someone else to be like, “Okay. We’re going to get rid of this guy, and I… To the victor, goes the spoils. I get his wife,” because he views her as an object in that way.

0:43:02.8 Natalie Dowzicky: Yeah. I do agree in that scene, it was very sketchy and then he was also… The Captain Vidal was… After she was telling the story of how they met, it was like he didn’t want to talk about it again ’cause it made him seem human, ’cause she was saying how like, “Oh, we met and then we met back up a year later.” And then he was like, “Oh she doesn’t know how to act in company so please disregard what she’s saying.” It was all very… It was very strange. So I could see how you like… I can see where there’s like, “This seems a bit sus.”

[laughter]

0:43:43.1 Akiva Malamet: I thought the acting company thing was another of the kind of everything… These raw emotions need to be contained, kind of mode, right?

0:43:51.0 Natalie Dowzicky: Yeah.

0:43:51.8 Akiva Malamet: So it’s the same as having a crisp uniform but being very violent underneath, and it’s just kind of like, “We can’t let it out, let people see.” Basically we can’t let people see our human vulnerability, whether that’s for dark urges like violence or love. And he needs to be like this controlled machine all the time in order to function. And we all, in polite company, know that that we can’t let out our vulnerabilities, because that would be like a betrayal of how things are supposed to be.

0:44:26.3 Paul Meany: But fascism is also all about aesthetics, and so it’s all about kind of a stylishness of violence and making it romanticized and glorious and have a big narrative to it that might not really be there but they say it anyway. And so when I first saw the part where he said his dad didn’t have a watch. One of my thoughts was maybe he’s just… It’s a little lie to him, it’s a myth he makes up for himself to give his life more meaning. It seems like that’s a large part of fascism because, as a philosophy, it kind of really rejected the enlightenment vision of reason and rationality, and it’s is much more of the will and the passions and kind of a primordial self that relies on pure instinct and violence.

0:45:06.9 Paul Meany: Like Vidal, he’s not a very scholarly type guy but he’s intellectual, nonetheless, because he can read people and he can go off of instinct and he can go through human nature. So I think… One thing I think Guillermo del Toro actually talked about himself was that fascism is very appealing to a lot of people because of the way it portrays itself, and it’s scary how many people are actually complicit in it. There’s a certain degree that some of the characters in the film on the Franco’s… The Franco’s side of the war, they turn their eyes away from all the things happening in front of them. They see the cruelty, and they kind of just accept it. Some of the fellow soldiers, they’re obviously not the same level of evil as Vidal but they still kill people who are trying to surrender. They still kill the wounded, but they just look away while they do it. There’s a certain level of like Hannah Arendt’s idea of the Banality of Evil, that a lot of them just don’t make choices anymore, but that’s part of fascism. It’s about subsuming yourself to the will of another person.

[music]

0:46:06.5 Landry Ayres: And now for the time in the show where we get to share all of the other things that we’ve been enjoying with our time at home. This is Locked In. So Akiva, Paul, Alex, what else have you been enjoying with your time at home?

0:46:21.0 Alexander Craig: So sort of on the same collection of things of just children and anxiety and obedience, disobedience, horror, the movie We Need To Talk About Kevin, I think, was excellent. And it’s about two hours of the most anxiety-​inducing thing I have ever consumed, but it stars John C. Riley and Tilda Swinton, they’re both incredible. And I really enjoyed it. Even though it is a little bit of an ordeal to get through, I think it’s a superb movie.

0:46:54.3 Paul Meany: I remember reading the book for that, and it was genuinely terrifying and extremely creepy and unsettling. And the book was quite long. So it was like the movie is two hours, but the book was like 10. I’ve been on a weird apocalypse binge, so I’ve been watching Sunshine and 12 Monkeys. Sunshine’s about the sun is dying, and there’s a mission to try and restart it basically with a nuclear bomb, and 12 Monkeys is about time travel to stop a new bubonic plague, very grim altogether.

0:47:28.0 Akiva Malamet: Mine is a little… I guess it somewhat keeps with the existential/​… The existential themes or the sort of quasi-​annihilist themes because I’ve been re-​watching… I re-​watched the past seasons of Rick and Morty and then watch the most recent season. I just did a massive Rick and Morty binge, which obviously has a lot of stuff about whether the realities that you’re inside of means anything compared to all the other realities that exist and what’s important and all that stuff. And then in addition to that, with totally… I guess in a different vein, although maybe they’re… Those are connected. [chuckle] I’ve been listening to… There’s a comedian that I like a lot named James Acaster, who has a very surrealistic, awkward style, but I guess it has implicit existentialism to it. I know he has a book called James Acaster’s Classic Scrapes, and it’s basically a bunch of stories about how he got into a ridiculous jam, because he made some really dumb decisions that are very funny, and have… Some of them are less horrible and tragic, and some of them are quite cringy and awkward or sad, and it’s a kind of interesting, very funny tales just about someone getting themselves into all kinds of uncomfortable situations because they were awkward or because they made some silly choice or whatever.

0:48:58.1 Natalie Dowzicky: For me, I just watched that, I think it… Was it The Tomorrow War? It’s that new movie that’s on Amazon Prime. It was fine to watch. It’s not a very good movie.

0:49:11.0 Landry Ayres: It was fine to watch.

[chuckle]

0:49:12.5 Natalie Dowzicky: I mean it was one of those…

0:49:13.6 Landry Ayres: One of those movies that you wouldn’t need sound, and you’d be like, “Yeah, whatever.”

0:49:18.9 Natalie Dowzicky: Well, no, you would definitely need sound, but it was one of those where the… There was some action. And then it also had Chris Pratt in it, so that helps. But it wasn’t actually a good movie, so I don’t really know if I recommend that or not, but it’s free.

0:49:42.0 Landry Ayres: But I did watch it.

0:49:44.0 Natalie Dowzicky: Yeah, I watched it, I did finish it. So I watched that and then I also, I’m reading The Nightingale right now, which is another… I’m back in my World War II historical fiction books.

0:49:55.5 Landry Ayres: World War II fiction, gotta get that historical fiction in there.

0:49:58.5 Natalie Dowzicky: We’re back, back to it. But this one is about a girl that is helping airmen from the British who crashed down in Spain or… Not in Spain, in France, and then she’s helping them cross the mountains in Spain in order to get them to the British Consulate, so away from the Germans. It’s good so far, and I don’t know what’s next on my list. I do really wanna watch The Expanse, because at least five people have recommended it to me now, so I think that might be my next long watch, just because it’s my sweet spot for TV shows. That kind of genre is very, very entertaining to me, so we’ll see if I get that started before our next recording. [chuckle]

0:50:52.9 Landry Ayres: Well, I have really been going into a deep existential dark watch as well, I’ve been watching… Or I’m just wanting to start Ted Lasso, obviously a very dark brooding, brooding show.

0:51:09.1 Natalie Dowzicky: I’ve heard good things.

0:51:11.4 Landry Ayres: I’ve heard really great things. And I remember when they came out with the promos for the Premier League on NBC, and they did just a little commercial with Jason Sudeikis as Ted Lasso, and I thought that was hilarious, so I’m kind of excited for the show, and now that I got on somebody’s Apple TV, I am happy to watch that. I also have really been enjoying the podcast Dead Eyes. It’s hosted by this guy named Connor Ratliff, who… You probably don’t recognize him if you saw him. He’s had bit parts and a lot of things here and there, but he was a writer on the Chris Gethard show, sort of very funny, alt comic. And it’s a series that he hosts and writes about how 20 years ago, he got cast in the HBO mini-​series Band of Brothers, and he was a bit part, and then right before he was supposed to film, Tom Hanks, who was directing the episode he was in, basically got him fired. And they said that… The story is, he was about to go and then they said “Tom Hanks saw your audition, he’s having second thoughts. He says you have dead eyes.” And that has haunt… And it has haunted him for 20 years.

0:52:38.6 Landry Ayres: And so this podcast is him being, talking to other funny, sometimes famous people, lots of comedians, you’ll recognize and being like, “Did you have an audition or a job that you had that you almost got and that got taken away from you, or when you were really disappointed, how did you deal with that?” And also, there’s the subtle thing of “Maybe if I can audition for Tom Hanks one more time, I don’t even have to get cast in anything, I just wanna know why he said I had dead eyes.” And it’s oddly touching and really heart-​warming and about persevering and dealing with businesses and then success and what it means to sort of be fulfilled, but it’s also just so funny and ridiculous because he just has this sort of… He gets cast in roles with things like pathetic man, that’s the kind of character actor that he is. So he kind of leans into what it means to be someone who gets cast in roles with names like that. So I really think people would enjoy Dead Eyes.

0:53:49.6 Landry Ayres: Thanks for listening. As always, the best way to get more Pop & Locke content is to follow us on Twitter. You can find us at the handle @popnlockepod. That’s pop the letter N Locke with an E, like the philosopher, pod. Make sure to follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen as well. We look forward to unraveling your favorite show or movie. Next time. Pop & Locke is produced by me, Landry Ayres and is co-​hosted by Natalie Dowzicky. We are a project of Lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org. To learn more, visit us on the web at www​.lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org.