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The Fantastic and Labyrinth Motif in Pan’s Labyrinth
Journal of Popular Narrative
2019, 25(4),
pp.135-158
DOI :10.18856/jpn.2019.25.4.005
Publisher : The Association of Popular Narrative
Research Area : Interdisciplinary Research
DOI :10.18856/jpn.2019.25.4.005
Publisher : The Association of Popular Narrative
Research Area : Interdisciplinary Research
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The purpose of this paper is to elucidate the characteristics that make Guillermo del Toro’s film Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) a fantasy film, and the meaning and function of the labyrinth motifs closely related to it. Tzvetan Todorov defined the ‘fantastic’ as the hesitation between natural and supernatural interpretations in the face of supernatural events that invade reality. In Pan’s Labyrinth, the fantastic continues to be seen, because the film does not allow the hesitation to disappear; thus, the fantastic does not enter the ‘uncanny’ genre or ‘marvelous’ genre, and because it keeps its fantastic state. In this case, the labyrinth symbolizes art as a passage into the fantastic world and a space that represents it. Rosemary Jackson saw the fantasy as a “literature of desire to compensate for a lack resulting from cultural constraints” and thus repeatedly dealing with unconscious materials. Del Toro’s film shows the character of the fantastic as an expression of desire by allowing ‘family romance’ to take place in the fantastic world. In this case, the labyrinth symbolizes the mind as a place of desire. Kathryn Hume defined fantasy as a reaction to reality, like mimesis, and ‘departure from consensus reality.’ The film, operating in a ‘vision’ genre, satisfies its definition by allowing the fantastic world to illuminate the reality world through ‘contrastive’ technique, and brings out the fantastic it has. In this case, the labyrinth symbolizes the world as a mirror of the world of reality. Thus, Pan’s Labyrinth is representative of fantastic film in that the fantastic functions very effectively, and the labyrinth appearing in this film can be evaluated as a motif that is full of meaning by symbolizing all three elements of art, world and mind. The significance of this paper is to shed light on how a motif works in a particular genre through the above considerations.
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