I Laughed at the Great God Pan

'The settings of Andersen, the Brothers Grimm and Oscar Wilde were incredibly brutal: Hansel and Gretel were two children abandoned in the woods in the middle of a famine to die of hunger and cold. But you need to know the brutality for the reality of the magic to happen.'

Something quite odd happened in the cinema where I was watching Guillermo Del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth. In a scene where a singularly ferocious Fascist officer does a bit of painful DIY facial surgery (I shan't spoil by saying why) there was a distinct chuckle from several people in the audience. That people should laugh at extreme physical pain, irrespective of it happening to an incredibly unpleasant character, seemed distinctly strange. Perhaps down to some acclimatising to torture in the post-9/11 and post-Geneva convention geopolitic, or a side-effect of Del Toro's mingling of fairytale and bleak history. In that both are taken utterly seriously, and both are utterly horrible might be scrambling people's usual reactions. Yet both have hints of hope within them, whether the Communist fighters hiding out in the hills or the promise of a fairytale kingdom. While the usual ideological move is to have an idyllic fairytale world that contrasts with a grim reality, here both are refractions of each other, each unrelenting in their brutality and fear.



Mark Kermode's S&S piece cites Angela Carter and Bruno Bettelheim as theoretical precursors of what Del Toro does with the fairytale, and Carter's Bloody Chamber does seem an appropriate referent, in the reclaiming of the fairytale from Victorian sanitisation into its true goriness and overt sexuality. It's worth noting how Ofelia, Del Toro's heroine, is on the cusp of puberty, with adulthood and all it entails explicitly tied to the terrifying Fascist father and a bloody future of childbirth and subjugation, as experienced by her mother. However I kept thinking of Ernst Bloch's writings on the fairytale (in The Utopian Function of Art & Literature), on its radically ambiguous quality. Bloch and Adorno's position on the fairytale emphasises both its legitimating, ideological quality and its transformative, metamorphical promise. Crucial in this is how the fairytale must never patronise its child protagonist, must take the fantasy completely seriously.



Hence, a serious political fairytale wouldn't use the fantasy as myth, but would be totally faithful to the child's eye. This is part of what makes Pan's Labyrinth so intensely powerful, that there's never a moment where the fantasy is debunked. The fascist 'father' pulls the root-baby that is brought by Ofelia from the labyrinth out from under her mother's bed- both are as real or unreal as each other. Del Toro has apparently been trying for some time to get the rights for an adaptation of Katsuhiro Otomo's Domu. This is an early 80s manga set in a Japanese Modernist social housing project (my South London mans would notice strong visual similarities between Otomo's drawings and the Heygate and Aylesbury Estates: which, according to Jonathan Glancey, have a need for angels in trees). Like the later and more famous Akira, Otomo's geometric urban anomie has as its protagonists children with so active a mental life that they become telekinetic. In Domu only children are able to discern the true psychic strangeness of their environment, and hence to change it.



To patronise this is to immediately drag them back into an acceptance of the world as it is. Del Toro or Otomo share a similar aesthetic as that of what I was pleasantly surprised to find voted Pitchfork's album of 2006, The Knife's Silent Shout (perfectly summed up by Philip Sherburne). This is a decidedly Scandinavian metamorphosis of techno into a nightmarish fairytale landscape, like an Aalto housing project with a teeming forest in its hinterland. Silent Shout has an indistinct political undertow, even as it sounds like the product of strange creatures from Andersen as much as creations depersonalised and technoid, as on the wonderful, yearning 'Forest Families': an eldritch woodland community illustrated via the most unashamedly, icily emotive europop.