Pan's Labyrinth

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“Fantasy and Myth in Pan’s Labyrinth: Analysis of Guillermo del Toro´s Symbolic Imagery.” The ancient myth of Cronus (or “Saturn” for the Romans). is at the center of Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth (2006). Del Toro revealed that a major inspiration for the creation of the supernatural creatures in the film was painter Francisco de Goya. In fact the scene were the Pale Man bites the fairies in half and gobbles them up is a direct reference to one of Goya’s most famous Black Paintings: “Saturn devouring his son,” Goya in turn, as Valerian von Loga has pointed out, was likely influenced by the 1636 “Saturn,” a painting by Peter Paul Rubens which describes the same mythological image. However, unlike Rubens’s, whose focus is on the infant’s
In a 1984 clinical psychology article, John W. Crandall describes the “Cronus Complex,” not as a murderous tendency per se, since Cronus did not just got rid of his offspring, but as a “destructive ingestive process which hinders the [child’s] capacity to exist separately and autonomously” from the parent (110). In consuming his child, Cronus does not only aim to annihilate him but does so by making him part of himself. Bolen argues that since ancient times, the “Cronus complex” is a tendency through which male oriented cultures have maintained power. This is historically evident in systems such as Fascism, one of the most radical mutations of patriarchy. The action in Pan’s Labyrinth takes place in just such context, 1944 Spain. The Spanish civil war ended in 1939 with the defeat of the second democratic republic and Francisco Franco taking power as dictator. The postwar period was marked by escalating violence and repression from the Francoist regime, as well as by resistance from antifascist guerrillas who hid in the mountains and were aided by village sympathizers. Fascism is represented in the film by Vidal, Ofelia´s stepfather, a vicious captain in Franco’s Civil Guard based at a rural military post. He is in charge of eliminating the guerrillas resisting in the mountains. Ofelia, the child-heroine, is an orphan whose father died in obscure circumstances during the Spanish Civil War. Carmen, her mother, remarried Vidal who controls her and limits her to a wheelchair. She is constantly sedated and confined to her bedroom during the last weeks of her pregnancy with Vidal’s child. From the beginning of the story, it is clear that Ofelia does not want to establish a daughterfather relationship with Vidal. Moreover, it is soon very obvious that Vidal is incapable of noble feelings, and completely uninterested in any type of filial relationship with Ofelia. To Vidal, his wife is just a sort of human incubator carrying what he