Smithology

What’s more important? Reality or how we make sense of it? That question seems to be at the heart of many films and the most recent I’ve seen of this meme is Pan’s Labyrinth. I heard a lot about this film when it was in the cinemas so I was keen to have a look at it when I wondered into the local DVD shop and saw it on the shelf.

Pan’s didn’t meet my expectations. I was told that it was deep and confronting and scary. I didn’t find it scary, I thought the ‘evilness’ of the characters was predictable and one dimensional. As I’ve already said, the idea of the imagination reinterpreting reality has been done before – even in big blockbusters: Don Juan? Never Ending Story?

However, there was something about this film different to what I was expecting. It was really mythical in an Iron John kind of way. The movie is based around fairy tails and I think this is what some people I’d heard raving about the film were trying to express. It seems to have all these deep symbols that tug at some part of you but you can’t resolve them into focus. It mixes up a whole bunch of symbols and creatures that seem to represent things: mystery, greed, sickness, lust, fear, hatred, power, sacrifice, innocence etc… And then there is a response to each of these things in the story from a number of characters.

Our protagonist is a pre-teenage girl obsessed with fairy tails, traveling with her pregnant and ill mother to meet her new step father who is a commander of an army. She has vivid experiences of a fantasy world and as she journeys her fairy tails come to life: she seems to be expressing her inner world and also “coming of age”. At the same time, events around her are escalating as her fascist step-father ups the ante in his ethnic cleansing.

I enjoyed the film in the end because I’m a real sucker for this kind of “re framing reality” thing. I suppose because it seems to be a helpful way of reconciling a spiritual framework in a rationalist world. Like Don Juan, we are left questioning whether it is better to “live in the real world” or to experience life through a lens that brings out a greater meaning to it.