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In an early scene in Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth, Carmen, the very pregnant mother of the protagonist, Ofelia, takes a book of fairy stories from Ofelia's hands and says, "I don't understand why you had to bring so many books, Ofelia. Fairy tales, you're a bit too old to be filling your head with such nonsense."1 As soon as the words pass her lips, Carmen feels a sudden need to vomit. And thus an important theme of the film is presented as a warning: rejecting fairy tales will make you barf.
While I raise this warning as a joke, the importance of story and storytelling to Pan's Labyrinth is no joking matter. Attention to story is paramount in this film, and not as a panacea for the hardships of "real" life; the relationship between characters and various types of narrative is key to survival, both of the stories themselves and of the characters who tell them. This paper asks how the narrative desires of the characters interact at the level of story ("what" is being told) and how the desires at work in the narrative itself play out at the level of discourse ("how" a story is told - in cinematic texts in terms of miseen-scène and editing). Key to my reading of Pan's Labyrinth is the notion of disobedience: the refusal of characters to submit to the narrative desires of others at their own expense as well as the disobethence of the film itself to satisfy audience desires and conventional generic expectations. In this reading the fairy tale is the vehicle through which the film not only problematizes and resists reductive and regulatory discourses of particular characters within the text but also challenges audiences and critics who may be tempted to produce reductive readings or employ totalizing textual theories.
Pan's Labyrinth is an original cinematic fairy tale that makes clear visual and verbal references to oral, literary, and cinematic fairy-tale traditions. In its intertextual references Pan's Labyrinth announces its fealty to the fairy tale in the alignment of its heroine with well-known fairy-tale heroines like Snow White, Lewis Carroll's Alice (Alice in Wonderland 1865), and Dorothy of MGM's The Wizard of Oz (1939). Ofelia's connections to these characters is particularly apparent in her...