This article was downloaded by: [UNSW Library]

On: 16 July 2014, At: 03:47

Publisher: Routledge
Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954
Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH,
UK

Socialism and Democracy

Publication details, including instructions for authors
and subscription information:
http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/csad20

The Antifascist Aesthetics of

Pan's Labyrinth
Kam Hei Tsuei
Published online: 20 Sep 2010.

To cite this article: Kam Hei Tsuei (2008) The Antifascist Aesthetics of Pan's Labyrinth ,
Socialism and Democracy, 22:2, 225-244, DOI: 10.1080/08854300802083422
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08854300802083422

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the
information (the Content) contained in the publications on our platform.
However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no
representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or
suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed
in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the
views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should
not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources
of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions,
claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities
whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection
with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content.
This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes.
Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sublicensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly

Downloaded by [UNSW Library] at 03:47 16 July 2014

forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://
www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

The Antifascist Aesthetics of

Pans Labyrinth

Downloaded by [UNSW Library] at 03:47 16 July 2014

Kam Hei Tsuei

Were the first potential parents who can contain the ancestral house.
Wilson Harris, The Whole Armour

Hollywood projects itself as a liberal and tolerant social institution,

even as a liberatory agent in the fight against prejudice and bigotry, a
courageous proponent of humanitarianism. It is, of course, a ridiculous
conceit and a necessary illusion, one well nourished over the past 30
years by the Christian Right in its endless attacks on Hollywoods socalled atheistic secularism and anything-goes cultural relativism. In
this way the religious Right and liberal Hollywood form a closed
circle. Corollaries of each other, they are also like mirrors in a funhouse,
for any person who passes through the apparatus must forget that the
whole experience has been put together by those who own and control
it, in order for the mirrors to produce the desired illusory effects.
Occasionally a film is distributed by Hollywood that breaks free of
this closed circle, a film that in fact did not come from Hollywood at all,
that is neither a pretentious independent production nor the work of
a veteran auteur like Brian De Palma, Francis Ford Coppola, or Sidney
Lumet. A film with mass appeal in terms of its aesthetics, yet boldly
dissonant and disjunctive ideologically. This happened in 2006 when
Hollywood released Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toros
monster movie El laberinto del fauno, marketed to American moviegoers
as Pans Labyrinth.
While the films content, the establishment of fascist rule in
Francos Spain, helps to explain why Hollywood chose to distribute
and market the movie to American audiences that is, as a way of
both appealing to the strong anti-Bush sentiment in the country and
showing at the same time that fascism is something that happens somewhere else, that in the US such barbarism is unthinkable its mythical
dimension, which constitutes Pans Labyrinths total form, offers a new
popular cinema aesthetic. My suggestion is that del Toros aesthetic
Socialism and Democracy, Vol.22, No.2, July 2008, pp.225244
ISSN 0885-4300 print/ISSN 1745-2635 online
DOI: 10.1080/08854300802083422

# 2008 The Research Group on Socialism and Democracy

Downloaded by [UNSW Library] at 03:47 16 July 2014

226 Socialism and Democracy

brings to the surface a startling absence in Hollywood film: the lack of

movies that use ancient or pre-capitalist mythology to animate stories
about modern capitalist social relations. In general, the Hollywood aesthetic does the opposite: it superimposes present-day capitalist social
relations onto all history as if capitalism has no pre-history as if it
has always existed exactly the way it is today.
Freud argued that this kind of creative artistic activity, in which
ancient myths are called on to explain events in the present, belongs
to the realm of mass psychology, or the collective psyche as a
social space. The mass, according to Freud, wants to be dominated
and suppressed and to fear its master. The expression of mass psychology comes through the collective unconscious the unconscious
foundation that is the same for everyone.1 For Freud, the two great
social institutions through which mass psychology expresses itself
are the army and the church. Here the masses are inspired to extremes,
knowing neither doubt nor uncertainty. Here they are encouraged to
compensate themselves for being a helpless target for all the taxes,
epidemics, sicknesses, and evils of social institutions.2 Here is where
the poor, says Freud, act out their libidinal attachments, namely
self-love, parental and infant love, friendship, general love of humanity, and even dedication to concrete objects as well as to abstract
ideas.3 Since being loved is the goal, the army and the church spend
much of their resources trying to satisfy this desire and gear their
entire propaganda apparatus to it. Yet these revered institutions
almost always fail in making people feel loved. Consequently, the
army and the church become home to a universal compulsive neurosis, where people find ample opportunity to fashion their own
system of delusion.
Freud pointed out the obvious, that in the army and the church
people merely echo the real human experience of being loved and
thus in this distorted form every sort of perversion imaginable
(and unimaginable) can then be carried out. If a culture has not got
beyond the point where the satisfaction of some participants requires
the oppression of others, [who may constitute] the majority (and this
is the case with all contemporary cultures), he argued, then, understandably, the oppressed will develop a deep hostility towards
1. Sigmund Freud, Mass Psychology and Other Writings, trans. Jim Underwood (London:
Penguin Modern Classics, 2004), 22, 26.
2. The Letters of Sigmund Freud, selected and edited Ernst L. Freud (New York: Basic
Books, 1960), 46f.
3. Freud, Mass Psychology, 41.

Downloaded by [UNSW Library] at 03:47 16 July 2014

Kam Hei Tsuei 227

a culture that their labor makes possible but in whose commodities

they have too small a share.4 Freud never got to see firsthand the
total expression in Europe of the universal compulsive neurosis
he died in 1939. But he would very likely have agreed that the failure
to prevent fascist hegemony in Germany and elsewhere was a failure
to see in the commodity logic of capital the seed of authoritarian
social control.
With the decline in US society of the church and the army as the
two great social institutions (in the sense of mass appeal) and their
replacement by Hollywood, Freuds theory of mass psychology or
the collective unconscious is useful for a study of fascism and
Hollywood cinema. My aim in this essay is to center this type of analysis on what we might call del Toros outside aesthetics. His approach
to filmmaking comes not only from outside the Hollywood system of
cultural production, but also outside its closed ideologies, in particular
the ideology of US liberalism the notion that the mission of the US is
to fight fascism and make the world safe for democracy. As we will see,
del Toros fascist monsters are loaded with pre-capitalist mythical
content of a kind that enables a full objectification of historical
fascism, that makes the invisible reality or collective unconscious of
fascism present. And that this is precisely what the Hollywood
aesthetic always avoids.

The monster mash

It would be a cliche to say that, because I am a Mexican, I see death in a certain
way. But I have seen more than my share of corpses, certainly more than the
average First World guy. I worked for months next to a morgue that I had to
go through to get to work. Ive seen people being shot, Ive had guns put to
my head, Ive seen people burnt alive, stabbed, decapitated . . . because
Mexico is still a very violent place. So I do think that some of that element in
my films comes from a Mexican sensibility.
Guillermo del Toro

To judge by the most commercially successful Hollywood films,

the desire for apocalypse is the American masses deepest wish fulfillment in response to the horrors of life under capitalism, that their
abiding wish is to see capitalism destroyed utterly.5 What might
4. Freud, Mass Psychology, 11, 117.
5. Of the 50 top-grossing movies of all time in the United States, only one isnt about
either the supernatural/paranormal or an apocalyptic event the 2002 film My Big
Fat Greek Wedding. This low-budget movie about normal everyday people embroiled
in the chaotic, frustrating, and often joyous details of normal everyday American life

Downloaded by [UNSW Library] at 03:47 16 July 2014

228 Socialism and Democracy

replace capitalism is as alien to Hollywood cinema as the movie aliens

are to their audiences, yet that is not the point in Freuds terms. The
point is that capitalist culture has produced social alienation on a
scale so vast and extreme that vastly extreme responses to it are the
only appealing ones. Everything in between, such as political reform
or realistic hope for making a better world, is rejected as pure fantasy.
In this aspect, my analysis of Hollywood cinema is not new or
original. The treatment of ideology as a camera obscura or set of
optical illusions, of an upside-down world in which historical reality
is inverted into fantasy and fantasy into historical reality, goes
back to the Romantic era (Left and Right alike), and before the
Romantics to Vico. Frederic Jameson has referred to this procedure
as thinking about culture in terms of a dawning historicity in the
realm of taste. Jameson, accordingly, uses the term ideograms to
describe the artifacts of capitalist mass culture. Such thinking about
culture, he writes, is marked by the will to link together in a single
figure two incommensurable realities, two independent codes or
systems of signs, two heterogeneous and asymmetrical terms: spirit
and matter, the data of individual experience and the vaster forms of
institutional society, the language of existence and that of history.6
As a result, one sees a clash not merely between illusion and reality
(between what really happened and how we imagine it happened),
but between the language of particular illusions and that languages
constantly shifting terms and vocabulary in relation to epochal historical change. In the case of film language, and in the monster movie genre
specifically, the clash of asymmetrical terms, between ideology and
history, is of course expressed visually and thus involves a set of
analytic procedures different than those used in literature or music
criticism. Nevertheless, as a system of signs film invites the same
kind of the interpretive analysis as other artistic fields, so long as the

rests at number 50. Next to the other 49, My Big Fat Greek Wedding is like an evolutionary biologist forced to sit through a Billy Graham sermon at a sold out football
stadium: in front of it is a spectacular religious monolith. Most of these films
feature swashbuckling humans with superpowers fighting back rampaging forces
of catastrophic evil (Spider-Man, Batman, Men in Black, The Incredibles, Transformers,
Star Wars, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, The Matrix), while the rest are about rampaging catastrophic evil getting the better of the humans (Jaws, Titanic, Jurassic Park,
Independence Day, Twister), or animals who have replaced humans in this eternal
battle between good and evil and turn out to be more successful at it (Shrek,
Finding Nemo, The Lion King, Toy Story 2, Monsters, Inc.).
6. Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 6f.

Downloaded by [UNSW Library] at 03:47 16 July 2014

Kam Hei Tsuei 229

two conflicting heterogeneous and asymmetrical terms are treated as

the creative force of all artistic activity.
It might come as a surprise that the monster movie is by far
the most popular genre of Hollywood cinema. It is not at any rate the
romantic comedy, the gangster flick, the musical, the western,
the detective movie, the psychological thriller, or the road movie. All
the piles of awards heaped on to such genre films notwithstanding,
American moviegoers much prefer monster movies and reward the
film studios handsomely for producing an enormous excess of them.
Yet these monster movies are not monolithic. There are a great
variety of monsters in fact, compared to the romantic comedy for
example, the monster movie genre is astonishingly eclectic and
totally unpredictable.
Doubtless this is part of the monster movies mass appeal. Whereas
the romantic comedy is essentially a date movie (strictly a means to an
end), the monster movie is pure cinema, pure in the sense of offering to
moviegoers a fully conceived alternate universe, a social space mathematically constructed in images through which peoples everyday
fears and hopes are transfigured into a special visual language impossible to translate or transfer outside those two thrilling hours in a
darkened theater. That said, the monster movie is certainly a
formula-type genre film. Here it should be stressed that I am thinking
of the monster movie in broader terms than is customary in film studies
and in Hollywood marketing and advertising, where horror movies,
fantasy films, disaster movies, alien movies, and sci-fi flicks are
usually divided into discrete categories. I find this kind of categorization of little use, since moviegoers themselves appear to draw no distinctions between them. If the film has a sufficiently kick-ass monster in
it, whether he, she or it is an alien, a phantom or ghost, a terrifying
supercomputer, a malignant wizard, a vicious dinosaur, a great
storm, a freak of nature, a stuffed demonic animal or toy or Satan
himself, the masses will pay to see it. Therefore, when I say monster
movie I mean any movie featuring a massively destructive force committed single-mindedly to annihilating the human race. From this
open-ended beginning, things fall into a fairly straightforward order.
There are fascist monsters and monsters of the apocalypse. Movies
with fascist monsters tend to be films of the apocalypse (or the end
of the capitalist world), and movies with monsters of the apocalypse
work according to a fascist logic, in terms of their dominant ideograms.
In general, the Hollywood aesthetic prefers the latter.
The Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro made El laberinto del
fauno (2006), which has been translated for American moviegoers as

Downloaded by [UNSW Library] at 03:47 16 July 2014

230 Socialism and Democracy

Pans Labyrinth, although there is no such Pan character in the film.

There is a faun (a goat-god or horned beast), but in del Toros construction of the mythological figure the Greek Pan archetype is fused with
Roman as well as other ancient religious concepts of the great goatgod to produce a new antifascist archetype. It seems likely, however,
that the English translations choice of Pan, instead of faun, was
based not on American moviegoers general knowledge of ancient
Greek mythology, which is very doubtful, but rather on Disneys
version of the archetype, Peter Pan.7
Del Toro was born and raised in Guadalajara, Jalisco state. While
his films for Hollywood are remarkably fresh and elegantly singular
in visual style, he is nevertheless better known in the US media
for his close friendship with two other Mexican filmmakers, Alfonso
Cuaron Orozco (Great Expectations, Y tu mama tambien, Harry
Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, and Children of Men) and Alejandro
Gonzalez Inarritu (Amores perros, 21 Grams, and Babel). The Mexican
triumvirate has indeed taken not only Hollywood but the entire
cinema world by storm, collecting dozens of nominations and several
prizes, from Cannes and Venice to the Golden Globe and Academy
Awards. In addition to his intimate association and working relationship with Cuaron Orozco and Gonzalez Inarritu, del Toro is famous
in world cinema for having rejected a hugely lucrative deal with
Warner Brothers to make the third Harry Potter movie in favor of
work on his lifelong obsession: turning the Hellboy comic, a Dark
Horse Comics character created by Mike Mignola in 1993, into a
major motion picture, which he achieved in 2004. Hellboy is already
considered a cult classic, and del Toros sequel to it, to be released in
July 2008, has become one of the most anxiously anticipated films in
recent screen history.
El laberinto del fauno is explicitly about fascism, but is of interest not
simply because of its subject matter but above all because of del Toros
iconoclastic approach to the rendering of fascism on screen. In obvious
7. In Greek mythology Pan is a goat-god and an important nature spirit. His name
means herdsman, and Pan plays a central part in many ancient Greek legends,
such as the battle with the Titans and in the myth of Echo. In both tales Pan
becomes closely associated with his famous flute. The Roman version of Pan is
Faunus, from which the Indo-European name faun derives. Many ancient religions
have a Pan-like god or horned beast, and in most cases he is an archetype of virility.
Of course many Americans associate Pan with Walt Disneys version of the archetype,
Peter Pan, a boy who refuses to grow up. Del Toros version of Pan is a hybridic recreation of the ancient concept of the goat-god, and thus the term faun is much
closer than Pan to what del Toro intends.

Downloaded by [UNSW Library] at 03:47 16 July 2014

Kam Hei Tsuei 231

ways, the film came through Hollywood by way of a distinctively

non-US sensibility, a Mexican sensibility in which the question of
fascist dictatorship is perceived by the filmmaker both personally
and historically. In del Toros case, following his fathers kidnapping
in 1998 he was forced into exile, a condition in which he remains
today. But what makes del Toros artistic approach to fascism so different from that of the run-of-the-mill Hollywood production, such as
Steven Spielbergs Schindlers List, is his construction of a transcendent
fascist-monster archetype. Schindlers List, in contrast, offers fascist
social types that cannot exist anywhere but in Nazi Germany.
Moreover, unlike Schindlers List, where there are antifascist German
capitalists and fascist German capitalists (a clever ideological invention
on Spielbergs part, since in reality there were no German capitalists
who opposed fascism), in El laberinto del fauno, all the capitalists are
behind fascism, which is shown, as we shall see, in one of the films
most compelling scenes.8 First, however, it is necessary to describe
del Toros visual style and how he constructs his distinctive fascistmonster archetype.
From El laberinto del faunos opening scene, we understand ourselves to be entering a magical place that is nevertheless coldly historical. We are in Francos Spain, but we are also deep in the verdant
woods, where shards of brilliant light are knifing through thick and
damp foliage above. We are traveling with a fascist cavalcade, but
we are not with them: we are neither prisoners of fascism nor its unwitting accomplices. We occupy, in terms of our gaze, a strategic location
sharply dissonant and ideologically disjunctive in relation to
Hollywoods representation of the fascist experience. In del Toros imaginary, fascism is directly in front of us to see and fear, but its power is
thrown into direct relief against forces much larger than itself. Importantly, fascism in del Toros vision is not an unhistorical, faceless,
and invincible evil monolith extending its reach everywhere, nor is it,
in the manner of Spielberg, hypostatized into period piece ethnodrama (German Nazis and Jewish victims). Rather than Satanic or
ethnic, it is thoroughly human, made by particular human beings for
8. Henry Ashby Turner sets out in his history of the German capitalist class and Hitlerism, German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler (New York: Oxford, 1985) to disprove
the myth that German financiers were responsible for significantly funding the
Nazi Party. He shows that the bourgeois parties the DVP (Deutsche Volkspartei),
the DDP (Deutsche Demokratische Partei), and the DNVP (Deutsche Nationale
Volkspartei) were in fact badly disorganized and as a result had no coherent
policy in favor of Nazism. But he provides no evidence that even a single German
capitalist offered any organized resistance to fascism.

Downloaded by [UNSW Library] at 03:47 16 July 2014

232 Socialism and Democracy

specific political ends. Fascism for del Toro is much more than an
individual lust for totalitarian social control this has been the selfserving bourgeois interpretation. Rather, it is a systematic attack on
nature, in particular on the relationship between mother and child.
As del Toros camera begins following a young girl through the
woods (the fascist cavalcade has stopped so that the girls pregnant
mother can vomit by the side of the road), the fascists are left behind
to guard their vehicles. From this point forward the fascists scurry
around like rats on the margins of del Toros narrative he never
allows them any centrality. So we realize right away that this will not
be a movie about the fascist mentality or how everyday people
become fascists. This liberatory feeling dawns on us the deeper the
young girl, Ofelia, moves into the forest. For there she meets a fairy,
who will soon take her to the fauns labyrinth which is in a different
place in the woods. Like all of del Toros mythical figures in the film,
the fairy is strikingly concrete. Always gender-free, his fairies avoid
the typical sort of crude Hollywood anthropomorphism whereby
immortal mythical characters are loaded with mortal human attributes,
a tactic aimed apparently to make them less alien, but which usually
has the opposite effect: it closes off the imagination to everything
which is not immediately recognizable or that lacks instant human
potentiality. Del Toros fairy in this opening scene is tiny, and is seen
fluttering around like a butterfly, incapable of human speech but
gifted at physical gesturing. His fairies will play a central part in the
tale he tells.
Before we meet the faun, we meet the fascist. He is Captain Vidal,
dispatched to the mountain village of Navarra by Franco to exterminate
the antifascist resistance there. He is Ofelias stepfather, and Ofelias
mother Carmen implores her young daughter, who has yet to meet
the man (the cavalcades purpose is to deliver the pregnant Carmen
to Captain Vidal so he might personally secure his heir, for he has convinced himself that Carmens unborn child is a boy), always to address
him as father. Ofelia flatly refuses, and for the rest of the movie we
witness the consequences of her lucid intuition, that Captain Vidal is
nobody any decent human being would ever call father. That her
mother has fallen in love with such a monster does not, however,
concern Ofelia. Her mind is always in another place.
This utopian place in Ofelias mind is constructed by del Toro in
two ways: through a lugubrious lullaby that begins and ends the
film, and by overlaying the films main story of historical fascism in
Spain with an ancient resurrection myth. In del Toros use of the
myth, based on the Mother Goddess archetype, a young princess

Downloaded by [UNSW Library] at 03:47 16 July 2014

Kam Hei Tsuei 233

wanders away from her kingdom of eternal happiness in search of

what lies beyond, only to find herself desperately lost in the world of
the mortals. In response her parents, the king and queen, order that
all the portals to the human world be opened in the hope their lost
daughter will one day stumble onto one of them and be returned to
her place at the throne. After all but one of the portals have been unsuccessfully used up and long since withered away, those in the kingdom
of eternal happiness come to fear the very worst, that their princess has
been disappeared by the mortals and will never return until a fateful
day in the mountains of Navarra, when Ofelia meets a fairy who takes
her to the faun.
Karen Armstrong has identified the Mother Goddess myth as
the most popular myth of the Neolithic period (8000 4000 BCE ). A
meeting with the mother goddess, she says, represents the ultimate
adventure of the hero, the supreme illumination.9 At first indefinable,
since Del Toro renders him with the same dangerously potent ambiguity found in the ancient Greek and Roman myths of the goat-god, the
fauns true identity becomes clear soon enough. He belongs to the
kingdom of eternal feminine happiness, sent by the king and queen
to guard the last remaining portal to the human world, which the
faun has embedded inside a labyrinth deep in the woods. The faun
explains to Ofelia her true identity as well as her destiny: a return to
the throne where she will rejoin her mother the queen and her father
the king. First though, she must complete three tasks before the
moon is full. And at the same Ofelia is carrying out the three tasks,
Captain Vidal is carrying out his own, a massacre of the antifascist
guerrilla movement. Not only is there a doubling of characters
(mortal Ofelia and Princess Ofelia; mortal Carmen and Queen
Carmen); there is also a doubling of narratives. This mythical doubling
technique is not the only thing that distinguishes del Toros movie
about fascism from those of mainstream Hollywood, yet it is
the most crucial and enlivening. A slight digression here is therefore
required.
Doubling is an ancient aesthetic practice; it can be found in the
bronzes of Benin in Africa and in the sacred Ugaritic texts of ancient
Mesopotamia (for example, in the epic of Gilgamesh) down to the elaborate cosmology of the Mayan Indians, articulated systematically in the
Popul Vuh, the great Mayan Quiche book of life. In ancient Greek
theater doubling is also fundamental, seen in Oedipus the King for
instance, where Oedipuss blind misrecognition of the doubling
9. Karen Armstrong, A Short History of Myth (New York: Canongate, 2005), 54.

Downloaded by [UNSW Library] at 03:47 16 July 2014

234 Socialism and Democracy

principle is the source of his tragic fate. It is all through Homers

Odyssey as well.10 Psychoanalytic theory tells us that psychic
doubling is the beginning of all human subjectivity: the moment in
which the infant child realizes, in sheer terror, that mommy is not
simply an extension of herself but a real person, with needs and interests of her own. In defense against this frightening reality, the child
creates her own double, to serve as a reliable mommy substitute but
also to anchor the fragile self in what has become a fallen and
hostile world of other people and their own demanding subjectivities.
This double will become in Freudian theory the ego, which undergoes
in his revision of his initial theory its own process of doubling. In fact,
due to the power of narcissism and what Freud referred to as the
dynamic capacity of the unconscious to absorb and then reconstitute blocked narcissistic desires, the doubling process never finally
ends.11
Tellingly, Freud in his final years went back to the ancient roots of
doubling, in his then extremely controversial work, Moses and Monotheism (1938). Here he argued that all along there were two men called
Moses, the ancient Egyptian Moses and the Midianite or Hebrew
Moses: the former a prince, priest, or high official belonging to the
ancient monotheistic cult of Aton (1358 BCE ), and the latter a son of
the Midianite priest Jethro, who belonged to the cult of the volcanic
god Yahweh (around 1000 BCE ). Freud was very reluctant to publish
the text, and consequently only its first two parts appeared during
his lifetime.12 It is, as Edward Said pointed out in his 2003 study
Freud and the Non-European, a truly revolutionary work, carefully
opening out Jewish identity toward its non-Jewish background.13
Freuds underlying thesis, as he stated it in the foreword to the last
essay of Moses, is that progress has forged an alliance with barbarism.
Because, he wrote tersely, The corruption of a text is not unlike a
murder. The problem lies not in doing the deed but in removing the
10. See Armstrongs Short History of Myth for a concise and eloquent explanation of
ancient doubling, in particular her chapters The Early Civilizations and The
Axial Age.
11. Freud writes in The Ego and the Id (New York: Norton, 1989) that When the ego
assumes the features of the object, it is forcing itself, so to speak, upon the id as a
love-object and is trying to make good the ids loss by saying: Look, you can love
me too I am so like the object (24). This antithesis between the coherent ego
and the repressed which is split off from it, Freud argued, is the beginning of psychoanalytic practice (9).
12. Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism, trans. Katherine Jones (New York: Random
House, 1939).
13. Edward Said, Freud and the Non-European (London and New York: Verso, 2003).

Kam Hei Tsuei 235

Downloaded by [UNSW Library] at 03:47 16 July 2014

traces.14 Removing the traces of the non-European (Egyptian) roots of

Judaism and Christianity has been done in the name of progress, but it
is in fact an act of extreme violence, a mass extermination at the level of
popular memory, which itself carries recognition of an original murder,
that of the first Moses, who according to Freud was killed by the Midianites in response to the severity of his law. The second Moses then,
the Hebrew Moses, is an ancient masquerade: a collective attempt
among the Jews to remember their crime of murdering the first Egyptian Moses, their real father, and to atone for it. Freud explains:
Putting our conclusion in the shortest possible form of words, to the familiar
dualisms of that history (two peoples coming together to form the nation, two
kingdoms into which that nation divides, two names for god in the source writings of the Bible) we add two new ones: two religious inaugurations, the first
forced out by the second but later emerging behind it and coming victoriously
to the fore, two religious inaugurators, both of whom went by the same name
Moses.15

Yet in the end it is the baffling staying power of monotheistic belief

that provokes Freuds controversial query, the task of finding out, he
says, how those who have faith in a Divine Being could have acquired
it, and whence this belief derives the enormous power that enables it to
overwhelm Reason and Science.16 Here the connection between
Freuds theory of the double Moses and mass psychology and del
Toros narrative of fascism in El laberinto del fauno lies in what Freud
called the ancient ambivalence of the father-son relationship. Originally a father religion, says Freud, Christianity became a Son religion. The fate of having to displace the Father it could not escape.17
Thus, to unravel the masquerade of appearances, as the
Caribbean novelist Wilson Harris has nicely put it, is the true task of
the artist, who needs to assume the role of the lost child in order to
recall what has been erased from the oppressed communitys
memory to deepen its insights into the soil of place in which
ancient masquerades exist to validate the risks a community may
take if it is to come abreast of its hidden potential.18 Ofelia is a lost
child in precisely this sense, and through her del Toro tells his story
of fascism. But before turning back to his movie, it is important to
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.

Freud, Mass Psychology, 202.

Freud, Mass Psychology, 210.
Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 157.
Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 175.
Wilson Harris, A Note on the Genesis of The Guyana Quartet, The Guyana Quartet
(Boston and London: Faber & Faber, 1985), 13f.

Downloaded by [UNSW Library] at 03:47 16 July 2014

236 Socialism and Democracy

note another compelling connection to Freuds theory of mass psychology: that it took a non-European to recall for the masses of Spain its
traumatic past. To judge by the lack of any mainstream Spanish films
on the subject, the Spanish peoples failure to murder Franco the fake
father (whose brutal fascist regime was allowed to persist until 1975)
is a deeply disturbing memory that they are still unwilling to bring
into the light. This helps explain del Toros double narrative and the
character-doubling which drives his plot. Since Francos fascism has
been given in Spain a kind of unchallenged hegemony at the level of
official national memory, in which both the historical crimes of his
regime and the heroic antifascist resistance to them are kept in
psychic limbo, the only way to unravel this masquerade of appearances is through recourse to ancient myth, in this case the resurrection
myth. It is a simple idea but a rare one in Hollywood cinema.
For now it is enough to register two basic principles of artistic creation in relation to mass psychology. First, that to recall a deeply
repressed traumatic past can certainly be done by the artist without
recourse to ancient myth or aesthetic doubling, but that a rational
and scientific approach to the past will have little if any impact on a
political unconscious completely invested in unrequited love and in a
corresponding singular desire to see the real world in which we
live where the satisfaction of some participants requires the oppression of others totally abolished so that eternal happiness can spring
to life. It goes without saying that making this argument through
rational and scientific critique for example, by proving that the inherently destructive and radically alienating nature of capitalism more
often than not produces fascism has consistently failed to move the
masses of humanity. Whenever the working classes and the poor
have taken up arms against capital, it has been to avoid mass starvation
or another catastrophic war. And second, in the absence of such imminent real apocalypse that is, the visible presence of fascism the
masses of people are not thinking of proletarian socialist revolution
but instead are consumed with endless daydreaming and fantasy
about a totally different world, which under a capitalist-controlled
media usually takes the form of monotheistic religious belief, that Big
Daddy Capital will save us all hopefully in the form of an apocalypse.
Del Toros narrative of fascism is a rejection of the monotheistic
religious turn. His concept of religion comes not from Catholicism
but from Mexican spiritualism or the Obra Espiritual, as it is popularly
known. The Mexican novelist and anthropologist Elena Poniatowska
has written authoritatively of spiritualisms mass appeal to the
Mexican poor. Their cultural roots have been disturbed by television

Downloaded by [UNSW Library] at 03:47 16 July 2014

Kam Hei Tsuei 237

and radio, she says, and for them, spiritualism is more satisfying
than Catholicism: the emotions are stronger, and they are treated like
people. Spiritualism makes men and women feel as if they were
chosen by God from among all the whirling souls on Earth. She
argues that in the Obra Espiritual, Men and women of all ages recognize the catharsis that occurs when they are spiritually possessed by
their protectors.19 This is clearly evident in El laberinto del fauno,
where the lost child Ofelia is spiritually possessed by her double the
Princess Ofelia, who with the help of the faun and his fairies protects
her from fascism. The fascists, in contrast, who carry out their massacres of the poor on behalf of monotheism and the Fatherland, are
left unprotected. Not only have they cut themselves off from the
ancient past, from spiritualism in the popular sense, as the religion of
the poor, but they have also committed themselves to eradicating all
memory traces of it from the land they are militarily occupying. And
this seems to be the underlying motive for Captain Vidals extermination campaign in the mountains of Navarra: to make sure the ancient
resurrection myth of the Mother Goddess never happens again.
Here the tragedy of El laberinto del fauno emerges in full view, the
tragedy of Ofelias mother Carmen, who has forbidden her daughter
to walk through the woods and who constantly admonishes Ofelia
for reading fairytales. And yet Carmens heart is not in it, thus Ofelia
is able to pursue the faun and the mission he has laid out for her
without constraint. Meanwhile Captain Vidal, being a misogynist, is
blind to the subversive activities of Ofelia and even more so to those
of Mercedes, a local villager whom he has hired to manage his household. Above all he is indifferent to the fate of Carmen, her sole purpose
on earth being to bear him a son. Mercedes is the real hero of the story
and a different side of the Mother Goddess archetype. Sister to the antifascist undergrounds commander, she also leads a double life, playing
the part of a docile peasant woman in the face of Captain Vidal, while
stealing from him medicines and supplies and delivering messages for
the resistance. All this doubling will come to a head when Captain
Vidal discovers, much too late for him as it happens, Mercedes antifascist activities and Ofelias support of them. The resistance prevails, but
it is not a happy ending, not by Hollywood standards: Carmen dies a
19. See Elena Poniatowskas masterpiece, Heres to You, Jesusa! (New York: Farrar, Straus
& Giroux, 2001), for a full description of the Obra espiritual, in particular her elegant
Introduction to the text, which is a memoir as told to Poniatowska by Josefina
Borquez, a working-class Mexican woman born and raised in Oaxaca, who spent
most of her life in the barrios of Mexico City.

238 Socialism and Democracy

Downloaded by [UNSW Library] at 03:47 16 July 2014

horrible death in childbirth and Ofelia is murdered by Captain Vidal.

As the films beautiful and haunting lullaby returns once again, the
blood of Ofelia, who has been shot in the back by Captain Vidal
before she can enter the portal, drips into the portal, triggering her resurrection. As the lullaby continues we see Ofelia enter the kingdom of
eternal feminine happiness, where she is welcomed by her father and
her mother Carmen, rendered by del Toro in magnificent splendor, in
dazzling rich red and gold hues. A huge chorus then rises to its feet in
thunderous applause, to thank Ofelia for never once compromising
with fascism.

A myth happens all the time

A myth is an event that happened once, but which also happens all the time. An
occurrence needs to be liberated from the confines of a specific period and
brought into the lives of contemporary worshippers, or it will remain a
unique, unrepeatable incident, or even a historical freak that cannot really
touch the lives of others.
Karen Armstrong
Utopia wants speech against power and against the reality principle which is
only the phantasm of the system and its indefinite reproduction. It wants
only the spoken word; and it wants to lose itself in it.
Jean Baudrillard

As earlier alluded to, the general approach in Hollywood to historical fascism is non-mythical, even anti-mythical. Rather than liberating
fascism from the confines of a specific period, it does the opposite it
de-universalizes and then sublimates the bourgeois roots of fascism by
either making true stories about it (Sophies Choice, Marathon Man,
Schindlers List, The Pianist) or concocting freakish, thinly-veiled allegorical monster tales about invading foreign terrorists hell-bent on imposing fascism on democracy-loving Americans and destroying their way
of life (True Lies, Independence Day, 300).
Armstrong shows that in the ancient world, a symbol became
inseparable from its unseen referent. Because likeness constitutes
some kind of identity, it makes the invisible reality present.20 In El
laberinto del fauno, the underlying invisible reality is a Mother
Goddess Utopia, where the mother child bond or the Eternal Feminine
is the foundation of all human happiness. Del Toro, who was raised by
a female community headed by his grandmother, is explicit about this
in the film: what enables the visible antifascist resistance to succeed are
20. Armstrong, A Short History of Myth, 69.

Downloaded by [UNSW Library] at 03:47 16 July 2014

Kam Hei Tsuei 239

its invisible women organizers, invisible in the sense of using

cunning dual identities to trick the fascists. For example, when a
male medical doctor tries to use a double identity to fool Captain
Vidal, in order to give the resistance medical supplies, he is caught
and murdered, but Mercedes always eludes the captain, even in the
midst of being tortured by him. Again, this has to do with the captains
misogyny: he cannot conceive of a woman with guts enough to challenge his fascist authority. His misogyny is the antifascist movements
security. In this climactic scene, Mercedes secret role in the resistance
has just been discovered by Captain Vidal, who excitedly takes her over
to his torture chamber. While preparing his sharp and heavy metal
instruments of torture, with his back turned to Mercedes who is tied
to a chair, she cuts through the rope with a paring knife and then
uses the knife on the captains face. Rather than killing him, she
slices a deep gash from the corner of his mouth all the way up his
cheekbone, symbolically turning him into the deformed monster he
has in reality always been. Symbolically marked as he now is, even if
the resistance loses the battle for Navarra the fascist Vidal will never
be able to disguise his true identity.
Captain Vidal has his mythical double also. He is the Pale Man,
whom Ofelia must overcome in order to achieve the second of the
tasks the faun has set for her. He is a seducer of children, who by
way of a long table of luscious foods is able to lure them into his
grasp and then eat them alive. For his malignant perversity, he has
been banished by the gods to a cavern where he is forced to sit in a
state of paralysis at his table of delicious sweets, fruits, and roast
meats, his eyes gouged out and resting on a plate in front of him.
Inside the Pale Mans cavern, where dusty piles of childrens shoes
and clothes can be seen, is the key that will open a door inside which
is a dagger, a ceremonial weapon Ofelia needs to complete the third
and final task. Needless to say, the faun has warned Ofelia not to
partake of any of the foods on the table, not even a single grape. Yet
Captain Vidal has just punished Ofelia for being late to a dinner
party by depriving her of her supper, thus she is very hungry as she
enters the Pale Mans cavern. After locating the key, unlocking the
box containing the dagger, and securing it, she cannot resist the food
and eats a grape, bringing the Pale Man back to life. The Pale Man
devours two of the fairies that have gone with Ofelia to the cavern
and begins chasing her down. She narrowly escapes, and is later
harshly chastised by the faun for failing to resist her appetite.
What makes the Pale Man Captain Vidals double is twofold: his
hatred of children and the way he uses food to achieve his fascist

Downloaded by [UNSW Library] at 03:47 16 July 2014

240 Socialism and Democracy

objectives. We see this early in the narrative when the captain seizes
from two local farmers, a father and son, a bag of wild rabbits they
have hunted and killed, after which he brutally murders them, and
later when he imposes on the villagers a strict food rationing
program. If the villagers do not collaborate with the fascists, they will
be starved to death. Prior to the Pale Man scene, we switch between
double actions: Ofelia carrying out her first task, which is to overthrow
a giant, grotesque and stupid toad that has occupied an ancient and
beautiful tree in the forest and, through its insatiable greed for the
trees nutrients, is causing it to die, and the dinner party, at which
are gathered all the members of Navarras ruling class, the priest, the
village magistrate, the local sheriff, the big landowners and their
wives, and the county governor. Without exception, each strongly supports Captain Vidals campaign to exterminate the resistance. While
Ofelia is slaying the mythical fascist toad, the real fascists are plotting
their repression of the villagers.
This narrative doubling technique structures every scene in the
movie, where the figures of historical fascism such as Captain Vidal
and the ruling-class members of Navarra are made inseparable from
their unseen referents, that is, the mythical symbols of fascism
such as the giant toad and the Pale Man. To put it another way, still following Armstrongs insight, the likeness drawn between the identity of
the grotesque and idiotic toad, as well as the deathly child-eating Pale
Man, and the historical fascist Captain Vidal makes the invisible
reality of fascism present. This invisible reality is the political unconscious or mass psychology: the way fascism uses our basic libidinal
attachments (self-love, parental and infant love, friendship, general
love of humanity, and even dedication to concrete objects as well as
to abstract ideas, in Freuds words) on behalf of concentrating economic power and putting down laboring-class resistance to bourgeois
oppression. In so doing, it also seeks to eradicate from popular
memory any and all myths that tell the story of an original crime: the
murder of ancient communalism by an emergent capitalist class.
In El laberinto del fauno, this idea is subtle and complex. For
example, not until the final scene does it become clear that Captain
Vidal murdered Ofelias father in order to replace him as Carmens
husband and steal from them the rights to their unborn son, by claiming the child as his own. For it turns out that the fauns final task for
Ofelia is to use the ceremonial dagger on her newborn brother. The
spilling of his blood, the faun tells her, will open the portal whereupon
she will be returned to the kingdom of eternal happiness. It is a clever
stratagem, of course: the final test is not the sacrifice of her brother but

Downloaded by [UNSW Library] at 03:47 16 July 2014

Kam Hei Tsuei 241

proof of Ofelias purity of heart. She passes the test, choosing her own
mortality over taking the life of her brother to gain immortality. And so
there mortal Ofelia perishes, at the mouth of the portal, shot in the back
by Vidal in pursuit of Ofelias brother, whom she has taken to the
fauns labyrinth to hide him from the captain. He kills Ofelia, after
grabbing the child from her. But as mortal Ofelia dies, immortal
Ofelia is resurrected to her rightful place at the throne, next to her
mother the queen. Meanwhile, with the child clenched in his arms,
Captain Vidal emerges from the labyrinth, thinking he has prevailed.
Yet at its entrance he is greeted by the leaders of the antifascist resistance. Tell my son . . . Tell him what time his father died. Tell him
that I . . . he orders the resistance leaders, after Mercedes has taken
the child from him and begins preparing his execution. No, she
says plainly. He wont even know your name.
Perhaps the most striking example of cosmic doubling in del Toros
narrative is that between Ofelias unborn brother and a mandrake root.
Given to Ofelia by the faun, to aid Ofelia in the care of her deathly ill
mother Carmen, the mandrake root, through Ofelias nurturing,
comes alive: she feeds and protects the root as if it were her own
infant child. Kept in hiding under her mothers sick bed, the mandrake
root begins to flourish, and its growth and happiness cures Carmen of
her illness, baffling both her physician and Captain Vidal. The captain
is of course very pleased to see this development, for it convinces him
fate is working in his favor, that his heir will soon be born and in good
health. In a scene that leads to the films conclusion the resurrection
of Ofelia to the throne and the execution of Captain Vidal the captain
discovers the mandrake root and brutally murders it, provoking the
unborn childs premature birth and with it massive hemorrhaging in
the body of Carmen. Like every scene in the movie of violent death
caused by Captain Vidal and his fascist henchmen, Carmens death is
accompanied by the birth of new life, the birth of Ofelias brother.
Importantly, the mandrake root has cosmological significance in
many ancient religions, from the lands of China to Palestine. Its
magical, heavenly properties, given that the plant is both poisonous
and has a human semblance, tend to be alchemical in nature. In
ancient mythology the idea is that, if not treated delicately and with
special knowledge of its dynamic life-giving potential, the mandrake
root can take the form of a dangerous weapon, since it is believed
that if dug up without forethought and care the mandrake will
become murderously violent. In the Book of Genesis, the mandrake is
referred to as a love plant, and this view of the mandrake can be
found in other ancient religions as well that it stimulates conception.

Downloaded by [UNSW Library] at 03:47 16 July 2014

242 Socialism and Democracy

The mandrake is therefore a symbol of the life force, but it is also an

actual medicinal plant, thus it is itself the ultimate double, and as
such possesses the most force among del Toros many monster archetypes. To put it another way, when put in the context of modern
fascism the ancient myth of the mandrake root becomes, like del
Toros other mythical archetypes, loaded with political signifying
power. Contempt for the life force, the life force here being represented
by the mandrake, is the hallmark of fascism, and it is exactly the
fascists hatred for everything alive which brings about his own
violent death.
Now we can return to Freuds theory of mass psychology with a
better understanding of the relations between the political unconscious
and the creative artist. Without recourse to pre-capitalist mythology,
imaginative narratives of historical movements such as modern
fascism run the risk of confining themselves to specific places
and times, as if the true history of fascism is begun the moment the
narrative departs and ends as the narrative reaches its denouement.
While this is a straightforward problem the attempt to create a
whole world entirely sealed off from the dialectic of history, by removing all traces of it from the work of art the deeper, much less resolvable one has to do with the definition of a common humanity. Del Toros
solution is to use ancient cosmologies that are extremely multi-voiced
but that at the same time always return to the same common lullaby,
a primal scene in which our development as a species begins with
faith in the movement of history itself, that historys forward march
is unstoppable because of the life force in us all. It takes concrete
shape with proper respect paid to the Mother Goddess archetype in
everyday life, through careful cultivation of the mother child bond.
When this type of secular worship is disrespected and repressed
fascism takes control, and when it is enabled to flourish our hidden
potential comes to life. The political unconscious then is the place
where our hidden potential resides, and it is always being added
onto, from ancient times down to the present.
Most liberating about del Toros story of fascism in this respect is
that the ancient archetypes he chooses to draw on, those he perceives
as most deeply embedded in humanitys collective unconscious, are
all about the self-emancipation of women, which in his view is inseparable from a militant confrontation with patriarchal repression. To
confront patriarchal repression embodied in del Toros vision
by Francos Spain without recourse to the Mother Goddess archetype
is to squander a ripe opportunity, he suggests: the opportunity to create
through the political unconscious, or rather in direct relation to it, a

Downloaded by [UNSW Library] at 03:47 16 July 2014

Kam Hei Tsuei 243

new concept of emancipation, a concept that has deep roots in our

common ancestral past. That is, del Toros aesthetics belong to the revolutionary antifascist tradition not simply because his mythical heroes
and heroines risk their lives fighting the fascist movement, but rather
because of the way their heroic actions are brought into the lives of
contemporary worshippers, to borrow Armstrongs insightful
phrase in the way del Toro deliberately undermines the deceptive
and self-serving bourgeois common sense perception of fascism as
a unique, unrepeatable incident, or even a historical freak.21 Del
Toro wants us to see that the blundering endurance of male supremacy
is also the staying power of fascism as ideology, that antifeminism is
the invisible reality of fascism, for without it fascist movements
lose their connection to mass psychology.
Pans Labyrinth arrives at this enlightened understanding of fascism
through del Toros double narrative technique, yet the double narrative
is itself never schematic or formulaic, it is always dialectical. Rejecting
confinement to a specific period, even though the film has an explicit
historical setting, del Toros achievement is the linking together in
the single figure of fascism two incommensurable realities, the
individual experience under fascist oppression and, to continue with
Jamesons terminology, the vaster forms of institutional society. In
del Toros conception, these forms of institutional society transcend
individual fascists such as Franco, Mussolini, and Hitler. In fact,
what makes del Toros fascist monsters so alien to Hollywoods
favored method of rendering fascism on screen, a method by which
we remain in the world of common reality and are spared all
trace of the uncanny, as Freud put it in his analysis of the uncanny
in fairytales and literature, is precisely their uncanny dual identities.
Freuds theory of the uncanny is instructive here. It is a feeling, he
says, which cannot arise unless there is a conflict of judgment whether
things which have been surmounted and are regarded as incredible
are not, after all possible.22 The problem in literary tales of the
uncanny, Freud argued from Homer and Dante to Shakespeare
and Oscar Wilde is that they bring about events which never or
very rarely in fact happen. While in the fairytale this problem is
excluded from the beginning by the setting of the story, in literature
the storytellers less imaginary setting still maintains a sharp distinction from the real world, by admitting spiritual entities such as
21. Armstrong, A Short History of Myth, 70.
22. Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, in On Creativity and the Unconscious, ed. Benjamin
Nelson (New York: Harper & Row, 1958), 158.

Downloaded by [UNSW Library] at 03:47 16 July 2014

244 Socialism and Democracy

daemonic influences or departed spirits. And as a consequence of

remaining within their setting of poetic reality, he concludes, their
usual attribute of uncanniness fails to attach to such beings.23
As we have seen, del Toros monster movie of fascism begins not in
fairytale land but in historical reality Francos Spain in 1944 and his
mythical entities are actually doubles of real historical fascists.
Crucially, they do not pretend to live in common reality. Instead,
their uncanniness lies in their deeper ancestral identity: they are transcending figures inhabiting the collective unconscious and as such can
be brought into common reality at any moment. They are always historically possible. Thus the incredibly possible in del Toros aesthetics
is not what fascism once did to humanity but that it is always ready
to do it again. Accordingly, a vital part of the struggle against
fascism is at the level of myth. To prevent fascists from returning to
power, the constant production of counter-myths is necessary, new
myths of antifascist resistance derived from the collective unconscious
in which the abiding wish among the masses of humanity is to be
forever free of such monsters. The breakthrough del Toro makes is to
animate this ancient human desire without losing any of its uncanniness without acting as if we have already surmounted it. This he
achieves by showing the centrality of male supremacy in fascist
ideology. For del Toro, the opposite is true: we have not finished
with antifascist resistance, we are really just beginning.

23. Freud, The Uncanny, 158f.