All thumbs 2--or--blah blah blah blah blah
I've been trying to rethink Pan's Labyrinth in terms of magic realism (as a genre) because, well, theorizing is (stupidly) safe. And when you're feeling non-theoretically vulnerable, a little bit of heady BS makes for a nice palliative.
While Pan's Labyrinth is not clearcut magic realism, it does exhibit one of the most consistent attributes found in magic realist texts: real and magic components collapse into each other to deconstruct and then obliterate meaning. Despite Ofelia's attempts to find solace from loss (of nation, father, mother) in Pan's magical world, that world of fantasy suffers from the same problems and is similarly traumatizing for her. In weaving these two worlds together (with Ofelia as the desperate thread), the film leaves us not with meaning, or redemption, or hope ... but simply painful experience. Most magic realist texts have loving and happy experience side by side with the painful--but, yeah, NOTHING in this one. (In that way, it resonates with that one chapter in Isabel Allende's House of the Spirits, in which Clara is being tortured.) There is no light at the end of the tunnel ... and Ofelia's (or, really, it would the audience's at this point) ability to imagine that end place in which she can rest in peace (king, queen, and princess reunited) is understood as a ridiculously desperate gesture. And, in some ways, it is. But it is what it is. Loss is loss. And you don't handle it so much as cling to it because ... what else are you going to do when something can NEVER be again?
The problem here is that we usually associate that "clinging" with hope--in the movies we see, that is. We've grown accustomed, I think, to films with ambiguous endings; would I be going too far to say that perhaps ambivalent conclusions are the new Hollywood kiss? Ambivalent endings once meant that the film was challenging the status quo--challenging our expectations. But perhaps, now, ambiguity is itself status quo. We live our lives so quickly and haphazardly that we expect ambiguity in all its shades of grey. So much so that we've grown (or I've grown ...) suspicious of a film that ends with the Hollywood kiss--unsatisfied, unbelieving. Instead, it's the ambiguous ending that seems weirdly comfortable and hopeful--the ending in which we can imagine the possibility of future happiness without having to commit to it. These wishy-washy films--they're losing something for me. Perhaps I'm starting to question why I always cling to the hopeful side of things, despite the simultaneous promise of calamity. Or perhaps I've grown tired of being lazy--that I'd like a clear decision rather than to have several options open to me. But now I'm just rambling.
You could argue that there is ambiguity in Pan's Labyrinth, but I would probably disagree with you. If anything, the film is painfully and horribly in your face and unabashed about being so. And I think I've decided that I don't think that's a good or bad thing. It is what it is (though I would say something about why the female suffers and the male heir gets to survive--but that's all social commentary). Pan's Labyrinth leaves us clinging only to loss, loss, and more loss. Of course I'm not suggesting that all film should now follow suit and be as horribly brutal as Pan, but hey, maybe postmodernism's heyday is finally over. And that would be good.
In conclusion, thank god that I'll always have Mirrormask for when the Pan's Labyrinths get to be too much. Hooray for Mirrormask. You know what you get when you joggle the BA-NA-NAS?!!!
Oh and also--blah blah blah blah blah.
