A Post-National Spanish Imaginary. A Case-Study: Pan's Labyrinth

Abstract

The acclaimed film Pan's Labyrinth (El laberinto del fauno, 2006, directed by Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro) portrays the repression of democratic resistance (the maquis) during the years that followed Franco's victory over the Spanish Republic in 1939. The film focuses on a sadistic military officer and his determination to kill and torture people, and on a child, his stepdaughter, who rebels and escapes to a world of fantasy. In the following pages I argue that the narrative of Pan's Labyrinth presents a reconsideration of State-sponsored Fascist repression in terms of a male-dominated order. I argue that this portrayal implies a displacement of the political nature of totalitarian violence from questions regarding the nation-State to the sphere of a cultural region. I further argue, then, that Pan's Labyrinth belongs to what Paul Julian Smith has called a Trans-Atlantic traffic. Cross-national production companies, film-makers and actors are creating a flux of films that do not identify strictly as a national product, but rather a circuit of production, exchange and distribution (Smith). The displacement from the nation permits us to raise important considerations regarding the current status of the notion of Spanish as a brand in the marketing of cultural issues. ON FASCIST VIOLENCE. THE FATHER, THE LAW OF DEATH--THE PATRIARCHAL MEMORY The major conflict within the narrative of the film is not (or is not exclusively) between Franco's repressive forces and the anti-Fascist resistance, but above all between a Fascist officer, Captain Vidal, and his stepdaughter, Ofelia. The child's father died at the start of the war, and her mother has now married Vidal in order to have a better living amid the miseries of scarcity and poverty in post-war Spain. The child shows no affection to her stepfather; on the contrary she rejects him from the first moment. Her disposition to fantasy is further strengthened when she arrives with her mother to the small town where Vidal is leading the hunting and killing of resistance fighters. Indeed, it becomes a means of survival in the hostile home. While her mother prepares herself in ill conditions to deliver Vidal's baby, Ofelia creates a fairy-tale story in which she is the heroine of a struggle that obviously parallels the simultaneous story of the democratic fighters against Vidal and Franco's repression. Her fantasy world is intended to substitute and at the same time isolate the atrocities of the evil and repression that she sees around her; her fairy-tale becomes a symbolic transgression of a social order dominated by Fascism (Tsuei). Fascism is certainly evoked in the film as a military power allied with an oligarchy with the goal of preserving their economic interests, which seem to be challenged by the popular classes. However, the narrative of the film emphasizes the sadistic characterization of Vidal to such a degree that this psychological perspective overcomes the representation of Fascist violence. The officer is portrayed with an essential disposition toward murder and the inflicting of pain. Indeed, Vidal carries out the killing of civilians and the persecution of anti-fascist fighters with a sort of personal passion that is above and beyond what his subordinated officers are willing to do. At the same time, the film portrays this evil officer as struggling with himself and with the memory of his own father. Vidal carries with him at all times his father's watch, as a permanent memory of the exact time of his death in battle. His mystification of the love for his father in terms of an exaltation of death and war certainly points to a characterization of Fascism as a culture of death and of a masculine veneration of war. The emphasis, however, on depicting obsessive traits rather than an ideological conviction for the establishment of a Fascist state, permits us to see Vidal as a pathological individual and, then, to focus on the characterization of political repression in terms of emotions and a dynamics of love and hate within a familial space under a patriarchal power. …