Pan's Labyrinth: time travel through myth

I resisted Pan's Labyrinth for a long time because of the violence. I had never had so many people come from the movie and tell me that children should be kept away from it. What could be in that movie, I thought, that so spooked its viewers?

Photo: Celtic spirals.

So, yes, now that I have seen it, I know what spooked them. But I don't know that it is something that should be kept from all children. I think it should be kept from children who have been raised on American myth.

I am reading a book called Dirt: the erosion of civilizations, which is about how civilizations rise and fall based on the fertility (and exhaustion) of their soil. Early on, the author, David Montgomery, takes us through a whirlwind tour of early human existence, leading up to the dawn of agriculture.

His account deeply re-impressed on me the reality that human beings have lived for many, many more thousands of years without complex urban and technological social systems than they have with them. Montgomery writes of a thousand-year period in Syria, at the end of the last Ice Age, when the climate was less harsh than it is today, and the land above the headwaters of the Euphrates River was blanketed in oak trees.

Here, Montgomery goes on to say, settlements of hundreds and then a few thousand people lived for centuries. We know little about them, except that they began experimenting with domestication of animals and cultivation, in contrast to their ancestors, who followed herds of beasts and lived off of them, as a way of coping with the cold millennia of the Ice Age.

What did these people believe, under the eaves of all these spreading oaks? What realities did they face, under what burdens of their past did they labor, what hopes and aspirations did they harbor for their children?

Moomin Light has recently done a brace of memes, and one of the questions in one of them was "What superpower would you have, if you could choose?" She chose time travel. So would I.

Pan's Labyrinth is the first movie I've seen in a long time-- maybe ever-- that gives the feel of ancient, traditional belief. Maybe it's only because I'm thinking about the subject, but the sets and the creatures and the stories told flew me back, thousands of years before Christianity, even before Greek mythology.

The myth and religion of civilization is based on the ancient, one might say genetic, memory of humanity. Not Jung's Collective Unconscious (I have strong feelings both for and against Jung in general), but something more common sense. When people are driven to make the hard, fundamental, and recurring choices of life-- to kill, to spare, to love, to leave behind-- they may not remember that thousands of generations of their ancestors had to make the same choices. But by some instinct something quickens in us when a choice is required.

Pan's Labyrinth takes us to a time when people in a modern technological society had to make fundamental choices. The film strips away the veneer of ease and comfort which makes such a society believe the choices don't exist.

The plot unfolds in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, when the supporters of democracy, the Republicans, have been reduced to hiding in the mountains, and the Fascists are attempting to root them out.

Choices here become very stark, very elementary. Slavery versus freedom. Betrayal versus self-sacrifice. Food versus starvation.

Life, death, the whole ball of wax.

So into this stark world comes a young girl, Ofelia, who creates, or discovers, or is already a part of (the film encourages this ambiguity), another world beneath the surface of the world, which is conventionally called an Underworld, but which recalls the distant past, when the same choices were made but with a different spiritual and imaginative vocabulary.

It is to the credit of director Guillermo Del Toro that in bringing these two worlds together, he makes the mythical past substantial and believable, while rendering the present day mythical-- that is to say, a place where choices matter.

Why is the violence of this movie so affecting, when in so many other movies (say, 300, for example) it has no effect on us at all?

The audience feels every gunshot, every hammer blow, and every slash of a knife. All of it matters.

Not to put it too dramatically, but our present world will finally be destroyed when enough of us believe that the only reality that matters is our own personal comfort. Because then, the psychopaths that rise up and peddle that kind of comfort will have free rein to do their destructive work, and we'll be gone in a puff of smoke before we realize that they've done it. The trains will run on time until there are no more trains.

American myth with its ethos of easy grace and easy resurrection does lull us into the mistaken belief that all will be well because it just has to be.

This story's ethos of resurrection is much more complex and un-keyed to the conventional misuse of Christian themes. It makes me think back to a time in human existence when no one would have dreamed of sugarcoating-- Disney-fying-- a traditional story, because the story was vital in its original form in order to cope with the realities of that time.

So also, Pan's Labyrinth is one of our age's essential stories, a document that should help us face life with more honesty, integrity, and compassion. Or at least an enhanced sense of what we're up against.

Comments

[Steve]

I noticed a powerful parallel in your post - one you don't draw out, but I can't resist. You mention "a book called Dirt: the erosion of civilizations, which is about how civilizations rise and fall based on the fertility (and exhaustion) of their soil." It hit me hard, during the rest of your post, that it might also be said that civilizations rise and fall based on the fertility of their mythology. Candy mythology leads to obesity and death - there are too many calories and there isn't enough nourishment. Not enough fertility. Where are we headed? You have posted often about that last question.

[DF]

Steve, I wondered why I was so drawn to this book, and I think that is part of it. I'm very interested in what builds and keeps society going. Scholars are always speculating about what makes a civilization rise and fall; I'm not sure that many would agree with the "fertility of mythology" argument, but I can see the logic.

Greek mythology as a valid spiritual system is popularly considered to have begun its decline around the time of Socrates and Plato, which also coincides with the fall of Athens to Sparta and the deaths of the greatest Athenian playwrights, Sophocles and Euripides.

Within a few decades we have the rise of Macedonia and Alexander the Great and the permanent fall of classical Greece (Athens, Sparta, Thebes, etc.) as political powers in the Mediterranean. With Alexander came the importation of much religious innovation from the East, as well as new philosophical systems such as Stoicism and Epicureanism. Greek mythology lost out in this big shuffle.

Does the evidence I present here indicate classical Greece could have gone on ruling if only they'd produced a few more magisterial playwrights, or another Homer? Well, no. Even I haven't convinced myself. But the fall of a spiritual system is certainly a symptom of a larger problem in a society.

As to the USA, I do see in our dominant mythology a looming problem. But hey-- with this democratic, global Internet of ours, with its ability to produce content independent of some disastrous trend, maybe we are being pulled back from the brink. I do think that Pan's Labyrinth is a positive sign. I hope it isn't just the last surge before the creativity machine poops out.

[Lee]

I finally got round to watching this. A beautiful balance of myth and history.