Viewing in the Virtual Cloister: "Pan's Labyrinth"
I just rented and watched the stupendous “Pan’s Labyrinth,” story, screenplay, and direction by Guillermo del Toro. The story is set in post-civil war Spain, during the domination by the fascist Franco government. The theme of opposing fascism in both the world of action and through understanding and opposing its supporting mythologies is important to me.
Also, my cathedral, Grace, is the home of the labyrinth spiritual movement, which is a genuine movement, international in scope. I look out the windows of my office onto the outdoor labyrinth on the Grace Cathedral plaza, patterned after the one in the floor pavement of Chartres Cathedral.
Years before I was elected Bishop of the Diocese of California, I was given a pendant of the Chartres labyrinth, bought in the Grace Cathedral gift shop. The pendant was given to me in the deepest pastoral moment, of pain, death, loss, and hope in Christ for new life. I wear it all the time. One feature of the Chartres labyrinth that makes it more meaningful to me is that the sinuous path is, in total, cruciform.
Before looking specifically at the film, it is important to say that the labyrinth spiritual movement has a shadowy, terrifying history/pre-history, not well known by most of us walking the labyrinths that have sprung up everywhere.
Long before the Chartres labyrinth was shaped around the cross of Christ, the labyrinth was a place of ritual sacrifice. Innocent blood, representational life, was taken in the labyrinth, in rituals of renewal for cultures and the land.
These sacrifices, based on the observable patterns of death and rebirth in the vegetative realm, had a cyclic quality, a prison of introverting time and space: the sacrifice must be repeated regularly to return the aging, dying world to its freshness.
It is Christ, and before him, the Prophets, who begin the process of unchaining humanity from this imprisoning mythological system that had life-and-death consequences. By rejecting the scapegoating mechanism in his own execution, Jesus begins the liberation of us all from that mechanism.
As a result, objects of terror, like the labyrinth, can be redeemed and redeployed in positive ways, as at Grace and now so many places in the world.
The film, “Pan’s Labyrinth,” presents two manifestations of the same mythology of perpetuated violence, dominance, and power: fascism in the adult realm, and the labyrinth in the fantasy world of a child.
Two characters, Ofelia, a child who is caught in a web of domination and power, and Mercedes, a servant in the same frightening household and compound, who says to the fascist leader, Vidal, “What someone like me thinks doesn’t matter,” are the people who confront these systems.
Mercedes, face to face with Vidal, just before his execution by the revolutionaries, tells him that not only will his infant son not be told stories of his father’s strength and heroism, stories that would perpetuate the mythology of violence propping up fascism, “He will not even know your name.” It is an incomplete victory, from a Christian point of view, as stopping the mythology of violence seems to be causally connected with the execution of Vidal, as if this were necessary.
More complete is the spiritual work of Ofelia. She is tempted by a faun to sacrifice her infant brother, Vidal’s and her mother’s son, “innocent blood,” in the center of an ancient stone labyrinth on the property where they are living. She rejects the faun’s threats and blandishments, and pays for her loving courage with her own life at the hands of Vidal. She is, for me, a figure of Christ in this film, the most completely realized one in the story.
This is a complex film, with layers of thought which I’ve only begun to outline. It is itself a profound meditation on power, violence, and domination as supported by mythologies. The film invites you into this meditation. In our world, where our country proclaims freedom and democracy and justifies government-sponsored torture on the other, this invitation to think deeply on these themes is one which should be accepted.
Let me caution you, the film portrays torture and violence graphically. While young people should know its themes and thoughts, I would not show them this film myself., without viewing it first.
