Two narrative spaces stand side by side here, one is the space of reality, that is, a space that continues in the dictatorship, and the other is the space of fairy tales, or the space of a little girl's fantasy. In the labyrinth, a chase-and-flight space is created, with the girl running wild with her brother in her arms, while the weak officer drinking the potion pursues her between the walls and the loops of the wall. This image is taking on a function of separation, which separates the two narrative spaces. Outside the labyrinth is the real cruelty, and inside the labyrinth is the psychedelic fantasy of fairy tales. The fairy tale itself is as mysterious as the atmosphere created by the labyrinth. Gloomy, and as elusive as its indefinable nature (true? false?). Inside the labyrinth, Pan, a god who acts as a mentor for the little girl's adventure, leads her through layers of adventure to the kingdom of fairy tales. At the same time, the audience is just like a little girl passing through the mazes and through the three missions through the twisting tunnel of the story, reaching the end of a film, which is equally real and fantasy. As a result, the image of the four-layer labyrinth is established at the structural level: the real labyrinth in the film, the fairy tale world floating in the fantasy, the complexity of Pan's image, and the difficulty of meaning interpretation.
1. Pan God
In the Western world, the image of the god Pan is difficult to define. As a combination of man and goat, there is a wonderful tension between Pan's ugly appearance and demagogic magic: he is the god of fauns, the god of forests, the god of music, the embodiment of nature and inspiration; at the same time, he is the Nightmares and porn, representing infinite panic. Therefore, Pan's duality in the symbolic system first creates a sense of good and evil for the god Pan in the film. At the same time, at some moments, his eyes often show a black and white feature due to the side lighting. In the image, Pan Shen's complexity and contradictions have been presented metaphorically. He is often a mixture of two elements: man and sheep, black and white, good and evil.
On the good side, Pan is considered to be the god who helps the lonely voyager to dispel his fears, which also supports his role as a guide in the film. In reality, the little girl who was under the control of the dictatorial officer's stepfather opened up a world of fantasy and fairy tales under the guidance of Pan. Although this world is not as fresh and lovely as fairy tales in the traditional sense, it is full of almost curious horror elements. Pan God is not only a helper for the little girl to dispel the fear of reality, but also a mentor to overcome the fear of fairy tales. The blank book that leads the way, as the incarnation of Pan, accompanies the girl in his absence. Through brutal and thrilling challenges, through the double maze of reality and fairy tales, the little adventurer finally got the perfect ending and became the princess of his own kingdom. And all of this was accomplished under the guidance of Pan Shen.
He is a positive image who leads the brave to complete the challenge, but he is also a bearer of fear. It can be said that the ultimate tragedy of the little girl in the real world, that is, the tragedy of death, was realized under the instigation of Pan Shen. A disgusting, gloomy, and frightening fairy tale world can hardly be regarded as a manifestation of the goodwill of the gods. At the same time, the negative factors of Pan Shen are difficult to shake off: his erotic and almost provocative stroking of the little girl's cheek, the request for the girl to sacrifice with her brother's blood, and sometimes the cold order to surpass the status of "official" ... All of them are putting a magical veil on Pan Shen, and we can only speculate on the real face behind the veil, but not clear.
Pan's identity as "the god of the forest" links plants and animals together, that is, the two share a natural image. Pan is not a single god, but a comprehensive, multi-functional and multi-meaning god. The film endows the body of Pan with an element not found in previous myths, that is, the element of the tree, which was not physical but only symbolic, and now directly embodies-he is like a newly revived ancient Stepping out of silence like a tree god, he appeared in front of the girl, wrapped in vines and branches. Pan's tree element provides an entry point for the challenge's first layer of imagery, the tree. In ancient legends all over the world, big trees, especially ancient trees, exist as an image of an old god. It is the embodiment of nature, the land that gives us all things. After defeating the evil toad entrenched at the root of the tree, the tree regained its vitality. What was restored here was not only the vitality of the tree, but also the vitality of people, that is, hope. The successful completion of the first mission has injected a glimmer of hope into the little girl's homecoming (the land of fairy tales) and the bleak life in the real world.
2. Time
Time is more functional in the film, and it marks the urgency of the fairy tale world in the first place. There is a limited time to complete the task, otherwise, the protagonist faces the risk of failure, which also implies death. The girl must complete all tasks before the night of the full moon, when the entrance to the kingdom will open, and if you miss it, you will lose the only chance to return to her own country. In the second mission, the end result of ignoring time is to never find an exit, forever falling into the secondary narrative space constructed by chalk. In it, time is embodied, its passage is replaced by a small hourglass, and the intangible is placed at the front of the stage, which creates a tense psychological presupposition due to its observable and unmanageable nature.
In many fairy tales, time functions as such a condition. Because we who live in a symbolic order act according to time, the value of getting something is giving some time. At the same time, it marks a kind of prohibition that if something is not done before time runs out, we lose something. The shared concept of time allows us to have not just individual time, but collective time, time shared with others. In the Cinderella story, she has to leave the ball before twelve o'clock, because magic works with time. In the world of twelve dancing princesses, they must return to the kingdom before dawn or the secrets will be revealed. In Cupid's story, he must leave the girl during the day or she will see his face. Time divides the world and makes people act according to its laws.
Likewise, time has a certain metaphor. The girl's stepfather, the father of fascist officer Vader, had broken his pocket watch on the battlefield to stop the hands and let his children know when his father died. He didn't really want him to remember this moment, but to remember his death. Through this ritualistic move, death is condensed on the clock and in this moment, which is a metaphor for the death of the father. At the same time, after Vader shot the little girl, he walked out of the labyrinth with his son, the girl's younger brother in his arms, saw the guerrilla soldiers and realized his death, he also unconsciously held the pocket watch in his hand, I want to stop the rotation of the pointer again as a metaphor for my own death. But the cycle of history was cut short at this moment, and the woman refused her request, saying that the child would never know his father. Through the cessation of this metaphor, the cycle of brutality is stopped, the death of war is stopped.
The end of a period of time is also a necessary prerequisite for the beginning of time at the other end. The cessation of earthly time allows the little girl to return to her realm. At the end of time, that is, after death, another form of time unfolds. The time after this is the time of religion, for the little girl, it is the time of fantasy, and for the narrative of the film, it is the time of hope.
3. Life
In the story, there is a pregnant woman who is the girl's mother. Pregnancy imagery is almost pivotal in this story, and therefore necessary. Because of the pregnancy, the girl's mother had to marry a fascist officer. At the same time, because of the difficult pregnancy, the mother's life was in danger at any time. So, the story revolves around the life in the womb, who is the prince of the kingdom of fantasy and its sacrifice.
To a certain extent, the mandrake soaked in milk under the bed assumes the role of a god. It is not only the incarnation of the god of life, but also the incarnation of Pan, and a symbol of life in the womb. By giving it milk and blood, the gods got their own offering, thus protecting the child and the mother, and after it was thrown into the fire, this blasphemous sin cost the mother her own life. The mandrake grows under the gallows with a nature that absorbs the souls of the dead, and appears as a twisted baby, but exists as the protector of the girl's younger brother. Here, life and death are unified.
Similarly, the night of the full moon also shows that this is a story that is closely related to life, or reproduction. The fullness of the moon is a metaphor for the fullness of life, as well as the round belly of the girl's mother and the child in her belly. The moon is often regarded as feminine, and is always in the cycle of yin and yang, as if the ebb and flow of life, while the "round" heralds the great perfection of life, where life and death converge on a single point. At the end of the labyrinth, Pan asked the little girl to kill her younger brother, complete the ritual with the blood of the newborn, and open the door to the land of fairy tales. At this time, Pan held a primitive dagger in his hand, and he stood on the ancient side and took blood with the knife according to the ancient ritual.
However, the girl rejected him. The night of the full moon was about to pass, and it seemed that she would never be able to return to her kingdom, and Pan disappeared into the world. And at this moment, reality broke into the fantasy world, Vader appeared, and grabbed his son, shot the girl in the heart, and she fell down, blood flowing out of her body. After Vader left and there were no outsiders, the sacrificial ritual began to work. Bullets instead of daggers became the tools of sacrificial rituals, and the blood of the princess, the goddess herself, became a sacrifice, flowing into the door to another world, an image almost similar to Prometheus who stole fire.
4. Eyeballs
What started the little girl on this journey was an act of putting her eyes back on. Before she came to Vader's camp with her mother, she found a stone with painted eyes in the forest that belonged to a god. By putting the eye stone back into the statue, an insect appeared. Since it climbed out of the stone statue, the little girl saw it as an incarnation of the god, and later on as a genie (as depicted in her storybook), who guided it with Pan in its quests .
The eye occupies an extremely important position in the human body, that is, it allows us to see the world intuitively. Through the eyes, the world is observed, and it is through their own eyes that people can change their behavior according to others. The eyes represent a kind of knowing. It implies correct judgment and knowledge at the same time. When we accuse a person of not distinguishing right from wrong, we will say that he is blind, that he cannot see black and white. Discrimination of facts often operates in a metaphorical way, even the word "discrimination". Eyes give us a sense of security, but they also deceive us. Our eyes are hiding from us, preventing us from telling the truth of the story, and the little girl's eyes are hiding from her, putting a veil on her world.
In the second mission, the pale faceless man sitting at the end of the long table, after fitting his eyeballs, was able to see where the little girl was, and thus went on his own hunt. For an interesting consideration, his eye sockets are in the palm of his hand, and this setting gives the little girl the possibility of escaping. The prototype of the pale faceless man is likely to come from Lamia in Greek mythology, a goddess who was cursed by Hera to eat her own children, and she eventually turned into a monster that lived in a secret room and hunted children. And in her there is a detour given by Zeus out of kindness. Lamia is free to take off her eyeballs. When she takes off her eyeballs, she no longer hunts children. When she puts on her eyeballs, she becomes a monster again. . The faceless man in the mission of the little girl represents a kind of fear that is unique to children. It has a characteristic horror because it hunts children, and it cannot be guessed because it has no expression, suggesting mystery and unknown. With the eyeballs off, it's safe and nonjudgmental, a beastly disgust; with the eyeballs on, it's a moving nightmare.
5. Forbidden fruit
In the Garden of Eden, Eve and Adam were expelled from the Garden of Eden for eating an apple from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. And here, the forbidden fruit became the grape. Prohibitions like "you can't touch anything or you'll stay" or "you can't eat anything or you can't leave" are common in various works. In "Spirited Away", Chihiro's parents ate food from another world and turned into pigs. Eating is far more serious than "touching" because it also implies "assimilation". Eating something from another world means that the other world has partially existed within yourself. From another perspective, you have partially become another world. Thus, you are partially assimilated, and this assimilation prohibits your leaving, you "become a part of here."
At the same time, if a prohibition exists and is not broken, there is no need for it to be narrated, just as God told Lot's family not to look back, and his wife turned into a pillar of salt when she looked back at Gomorrah, so did the little girl Ignoring Pan's warning and the elf's dissuasion, he ate the grapes in the secondary space one by one. This was a switch that awakened the sleeping faceless monster. And the deeper meaning behind this awakening is: you eat what is here, you become a part of it, and therefore you cannot leave. And the faceless monster is the messenger who executes this "no leave" order.
As an ambiguous and ambiguous film, Pan's Labyrinth has great room for interpretation. What the film refers to is obviously far more than the world of fairy tales and symbols, but more of a negotiation with reality. Although it does not show a more intimate intertextuality in the two worlds of reality and fantasy, it shows an ambiguous and dual tension in the fantasy part, so it is difficult to be ruled by judgment. There is no definite answer as to whether the blood of the little girl opens up the paradise faced by a little girl who sells matches, or the real and beautiful kingdom to be ruled by her.
At the same time, as a film in the shell of a fairy tale, it seems almost incompatible with the fairy tale itself. Through fairy tales, it tells a political story, or a religious story, or a mixture of the two, so it is extremely symbolic and metaphorical. That's why the film is full of violence, horror, and strange-looking imagery. But it does use many elements of fairy tales, and adopts many patterns of folk fairy tales, such as rewards for completing tasks, reaching goals in a tight time, and punishment for breaking bans...
It also rejects self-consistent logic, a consistent explanation. If the story were summed up as a fantasy game of a poor girl in a tragic reality, we couldn't tell how she got into a locked room, how the walls of the labyrinth opened and closed, how her mother got better and better because of mandrakes Turn evil; if it is summed up as a real alien world breaking into the story, it is difficult for us to be completely persuaded, because no one except the little girl can see those fantastic things, the reality is too tragic, and the final return home ending is very real Unreal: The little girl's real mother is wearing the face of her dead mother. This is too complete, too beautiful, and too inconsistent with the gloomy fears shown before, and they are difficult to blend.
Here, then, is a maze facing the audience: a maze that does not give an exit. All clear and accurate explanations are impossible here, we can only spin in the polysemy of the film, in the symbols and symbols, in the puzzles of opposites and contradictions, and there is no entrance to another world that is the exit of the labyrinth. waiting for us. And Pan Shen, because of his elusiveness, has never been able to gain our complete trust.
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