Lutecium Blog

Pan’s Labyrinth

Posted in Uncategorized by benjamin on the November 14th, 2007

Thank you, Rebecca and Kristopher, for organizing an amazing and intense three days. Jacques Siboni was, as always, brilliant, and I found Eric Essman’s comments on the film Pan’s Labyrinth were insightful, witty, and surprising.

The film was a great way to begin the immersion. Pan’s Labyrinth became a convenient reference point during some at times abstract and highly theoretical discussion. I find myself returning to the film in order to integrate the theoretical and clinical portions of the immersion. I hope that some of the remarks below can become points of entry into a continuing discussion of the film and the ideas.

Eric pointed out that the protagonist of the film, Ofelia, has three fathers: The Tailor, which Ophelia and her mother named as Ophelia’s birth father, Captain Vidal, the adopted father, and the King of the Underworld, who accepts her after she is shot by Vidal.

Within this triangle is the figure of the Faun. Critically, the Faun is referred to as “Pan” (after the Greek God) only in the English version of the film. He is not given a proper name in the Spanish original. “The Faun” is a title, rather than a name. The Faun resists naming, and says that he has names only “the wind and trees can pronounce.” Captain Vidal is never assigned a given name in the film. This is one of a variety of interesting ways the two resemble each other. The possibility that the Faun is a fourth incarnation of the Father is suggested by the fact that Ofelia’s birth father does not have a name in the film either. He is referred to only by his vocation, a tailor.

Captain Vidal is a “Falangista,” a member of the “Falange,” a political party controlled by Franco. There is something of a homophony between “Fauna” and “Falange” that seems suggestive, especially in light of the other parallels between the Captain and the Faun as they deal with objects: the Captain gives a key to Mercedes, the Faun asks Ofelia to retrieve a “golden key,” the Captain demands unquestioning obedience of the Doctor, the Faun demands the same after Ofelia fails a task, the Captain’s pocket watch parallels the Faun’s hourglass, and so on. The bulk of the film seems to trace Ofelia’s oscillation between the Faun and the Captain.

Vidal carries a weight, a psychic valence, that he is compelled to discharge. This weight is embodied in a particular object, his father’s pocket watch. Witness the dinner scene where an Army officer asks Vidal about his father’s watch. Vidal responds with a lie: “That’s nonsense. My father never owned a watch.” Vidal cannot speak of his father breaking his wristwatch so that “his son would know what time he died”, he is forced to live with this unbearable weight until he can dispose of it properly, through a son. Vidal does not only live with this weight, but cares for it. In one scene he maintains his timepiece with an expression of meticulous and almost tender attention. The labyrinth of the film is the curse of the father; the only way out is to make someone else enter it.

Ofelia’s relationship with Captain Vidal seems classically Oedipal to me. Ofelia asks her mother why she had to marry the Captain, and her mother responds, “Because I have been alone too long. When you are older, you will understand”. Ofelia protests “But you aren’t alone! You have me!” In other words, let me be your object, we can live in this closed universe where the outside world will not intervene, and your desire will belong to me alone.

Immediately after this refusal to accommodate the demand of Ofelia, in Ofelia’s “book of the crossroads”, given to her by the Faun, what Eric Essman called a “prophetic Rorschach” occurs. As blood begins to spread outward in what is- to me- an obvious reference to menstruation (the three tasks must be completed by the time the “moon is full”, as the Faun tells her). Ofelia shuts the book in disgust, then opens the door to the bathroom, where her mother is clutching her abdomen, blood flowing down her legs and soaking her nightgown.

The story is complicated by the difficulty in separating the fantasy world from the diegetic reality of the narrative. In other words, when does Ofelia’s hallucination begin? Against this frustration of her Oedipal desire, Ofelia retreats into this fantasy world where the Faun, her “fourth Father,” gives Ofelia a mandrake root to heal her mother’s (not quite coincidental) sudden illness, so that she can continue her quest. Ofelia follows the Faun’s instructions, and, placing the mandrake root in milk with two drops of her blood, effects the dramatic recovery of the mother. I read this formula as symbols of sexual maturation, pregnancy, lactation, etc.

This recovery lasts until the mother, through Captain Vidal, discovers the concoction beneath her bed. The mother says to Ofelia “life is not like one of your fairy tales!” and throws the moving, grotesque, root-becoming-infant into the fire, where it dies screaming and writhing in pain. Ofelia screams, the mother goes into labor, then ultimately dies.

Ofelia murdered her mother because of her mother’s insistence on the reality principle, and castration, against Ofelia’s fantasy. Ofelia sentenced her mother to death because her mother killed Ofelia’s (imaginary) child, given to her by her (imaginary) Father, the Faun. Ofelia forces her mother into labor, producing Vidal’s son, which she then steals and takes for her own to deliver to the Faun.

The final scene is the one that was the most discussed, perhaps because it is the most transparently Lacanian, dealing as it does with the “Name of the Father.” Captain Vidal chases Ofelia into the labyrinth, where she confronts the Faun, who demands the blood of the “innocent” boy. When Ofelia refuses, she is confronted by the Faun’s alter-ego, Captain Vidal. Vidal takes the baby then casually shoots Ofelia. Ofelia’s blood drains into the labyrinth, and she is swallowed by her fantasy world entirely in a sort of psychotic immersion.

Upon walking out of the labyrinth, Vidal finds himself facing Mercedes and the band of rebels who destroyed his encampment. Vidal knows he is going to die. He faces his death with courage because he knows that finally he will be free of the terrible weight of his father’s watch. He prepares to break the terrible weight, break the watch in anticipation of his death, saying “Tell my son what time I died. Tell him I…” Mercedes interrupts him by saying, “your son will never know your name.” Mercedes then shoots Captain Vidal in his face. The demolition of his face is ontological as well as physical. He has to carry this psychic valence, embodied by his father’s watch, to his grave, and will not be able to transmit it to his son. As Vidal’s life has been determined by the structure which the watch represents, the frustration of this transmission equals his ontological dissolution.
The only way out of a labyrinth is to make someone else enter it. In my reading, Captain Vidal and Mercedes, while opposed on the level of ideology, nonetheless collaborated on an unconscious level to ensure the transmission of a particular unconscious structure and its concomitant valence to their infant.

Vidal was correct in assuming that the name of the father was more important than the presence or absence of the empirical father, but was incorrect in his assumption that the “name of the father”, (in this case the surname “Vidal”) and the symbolic function of the “Name of the Father” were identical. Mercedes’ assassination enforced and underlined a distinction between these two concepts.

Through this assassination of the actual father, Captain Vidal was shifted from the imaginary, perceived father to a symbolic function, a name. When Mercedes denies Vidal his symbolic function (”He won’t even know your name!”), Vidal is shifted again, this time into the Real. His expression was horrified because he did not realize at the moment that he would more effectively determine the psychic structure of his son through his incarnation in the Real than in the Symbolic.

Jacques Siboni distinguished the Symbolic from the Real by way of a comparison with a library: a book which you are certain you own but can not locate, a book not in its proper place, is in the Real. The book is missing, but not absent, it compels your search. Once the book is located, it can be returned to the Symbolic (alphabetic) order.

The boy’s new parents, presumably Mercedes and her lover, will find their speech orbiting the black hole of the foreclosed, repressed, or repudiated name of Vidal, the “Name of the Father.” The lies, half-truths, lapses, slips, fears, anxieties, perceptions of the parents will serve to transmit the father, the weight of the father, and the psychic valence that he carried more effectively than the actual molding of the boy by Vidal, or the transmission of the watch. Mercedes lives up to her name, “merciful”, in that she accedes to the desire of Vidal and attempts to transmit his psychic structure through his son.

In that sense, the entire movie could be seen as a dream or a “primal scene” of the son, who would be re-creating what “must have happened” in order to make him the man he is as an adult, with his deep love of authority, punctuality, attraction to the military, and so on.

This is a great film, and one that admits a wide variety of readings and interpretations. Lutecium has been a great experience, and I am very much looking forward to engaging with you all further!

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Pan’s Labyrinth