Pan’s Labyrinth on the Art of Torture

February 12th, 2007 Posted in Essays, Torture

In Bomber Harris’ description of the effect of aerial power on Kurds, and Barry Lando’s comparison to Guernica, I am reminded of the recent film by Guillermo Del Toro which has its setting in Franco’s Spain.

Pan’s Labyrinth is about torture, broadly conceived: there is the literal torture of a rebel by a sadistic Captain in Franco’s army. But torture is also a legitimate part of a child’s fairy-tale imagination in its connection to the natural world: mythological creatures are like hybrids of what is human and what is alien to humanity: a praying mantas becomes a faerie, a goat a faun. These creatures are what nature looks like when it is appropriated as a possible key to ourselves.

As Hume points out, these sort of metamorphoses are just what the imagination is about:

The mind has the command over all its ideas, and can separate, unite, mix, and vary them, as it pleases

And here we see hints of the sinister possibilities for the imagination: unlike the senses, it is not resisted (or rebelled against) by the world; it has absolute power to cut apart and reassemble its subjects. In Pan’s Labyrinth Captain Vidal punches in the face of one victim with a wine bottle; and severely deforms the face of a captured rebel, whose hand he also lacerates until it looks more like a tree than a hand. The Captain has command over all the body parts of his victims, and can vary them as he pleases.

And in fact, there is a certain resemblance between the rebel torture victim and the Faun that gives the film its name. This grizzled creature looks to be an ent-like cross between a Faun and a tree; his body is gnarled, tortured in that way that trees become. And here we have crossed from the imagination back to the unwieldy-ness of vegetative form: there is not necessarily a symmetry to trees, whose shapes nature bends and varies as it pleases.

The point is that in nature, and in the creatures of imagination that connect us intimately to nature, the distorted forms of the victims of war and torture and other human maladies are evoked more or less vividly. These evocations are important to telling the story of our place in nature, and inevitable return to it; but also imporant is the palpable unnaturalness (and “evil”) that ensues when human minds are put to deforming human bodies (as opposed to elements of the imagination or objects of art).

Hence the Grimm-ness of fairy tales and the aptness of Picasso’s surrealism to the portrayal of the war in Guernica. He separates, unites, mixes, and varies his shapes as he pleases.