On my way into Pan's Labyrinth opening weekend I overheard one of "Judy's friends" excitedly hiss this sacrilege into the ear of his movie date: "I heard it's better than The Wizard of Oz!"  I hoped it would be nothing like The Wizard of Oz, of course—and while I have to admit I would love to have seen a flying monkey and a musical number or two in Pan's Labyrinth—I am pleased to report that it is a singular masterpiece that bears absolutely no resemblance to that other singular masterpiece.  

Frankly I can't imagine how someone expecting something like The Wizard of Oz would react to Pan's Labyrinth, with its blood, brutality, and beautiful, unflinchingly tragic view of not just a world at war, but of life in general.  (I saw the aforementioned Judy Queen stumbling out of the cinema afterwards, though, a little wild-eyed and calling for a stiff drink—at least I think she said "drink.")

The movie starts out whimsically enough, I suppose, with a pregnant car-sick woman tossing her cookies while her kid chases a creepy mantis into the woods to find an ancient stone phallus.  Sadly, Bambi and Thumper missed their bus, and are nowhere to be found.  But insects can be cute, can't they?  I mean, mantises are sort of like crickets.  Remember Jiminy Cricket in Disney's Pinocchio?  Mantises can be sort of cute, maybe... somehow... in a certain light... at a certain distance... dead... behind glass. 

But any last, lingering hope that this would be a cutesy fairy tale in the Disney vain, or a jaunty yellow-brick-road-trip to a magical, musical realm, was pretty much dashed about fifteen minutes in when the Capitán smashes a peasant boy's face in with a bottle in front of the lad's father and then shoots his father in the head at point-blank range.  All in brilliant technicolor!  I'd hate to see what he'd have done to those obnoxious little Lollipop Guild reps.

The scene was so deliberate, brutal and graphic, I all but expected the blood to spurt right off the screen, and had visions of emerging from the theater, as if from a brutal version of Gallagher!--where instead of watermelons he smashed Spanish peasants—covered in gore.  I had to fight the urge to look away (an urge I very rarely have in my life and art, except when watching Judge Judy or middle-aged couples french-kissing in public), more than once.  And I had to ask myself later if the scenes of torture and sadism were gratuitous, or if there was something more to them that justified the gore.  

My take on it is that violence—particularly the extreme and graphic nature of the violence that is ubiquitous in our world (much of it courtesy the media) nowadays—is a central theme of this movie.  The question the film presents is not only to what extremes children go to deal with violence in the world around them (and it is not a sentimental escapism we're talking about here—children exposed to violence process violence with violence), but whether it is right to look for varieties of violence—if in facing down violence and meeting a violent end we can transform and transcend violence into something meaningful—into grace.

The theme of sacrifice and salvation through violence is as old as humanity, and I think this is at least in part what the movie explores.  Obviously that can't be done without depicting the violence itself. 

The first thing to understand about this tale is that it is a fairytale in the pre-modern, pre-Disney, Brothers Grimm, "Bettelheimian" mode, and to say that these tales were violent is not particularly controversial.  Life before indoor plumbing was no picnic, people.  There were plagues and poxes and epidemics of all shapes and sizes.  Most folks died at home. 

Nor was industrialism a boon to sanitation.  Think of the squalor of Dickensian London. Or the immigrants of Gotham in their dumbbell tenements in the nineteenth century. Old people, adults and children separated—and sometimes not so much—by nothing but a sheet hung from the ceiling. Everybody doing their business right there basically in front of everybody else. It must have looked to the children like some hideous shadow play. To an even more hideous soundtrack.

Even today, most children in the developing world do not enjoy the sanitary and sanitized version of childhood most American kids do.

Given the true history of childhood, I don't need to tell you that fairytales were not My Pretty Pony escapism so much as bloody cautionary narratives. The poster for Pan's Labyrinth fairly trumpets its allegiances with the ancient tradition of cautionary tales, rite-of-passage stories, and hero myths: I mean, the image of the girl passing through the slit of a tree shaped like a giant gnarled-up uterus is about as subtle as the violence in the movie.

The next thing to bear in mind going in is that this is not an Anglo film.  It's a Latin film.  And nowhere is the difference between these cultures more stark than in the sense of the tragic.  Latin cultures have retained a finely, beautifully uncorrupted and uncompromising sense of the tragic.  Unamuno, who so exquisitely elucidated it in his Tragic Sense of Life, called "the real discovery of death... the entrance into spiritual puberty." We non-Latin Americans, in our social and cultural lives, and increasingly in our innermost personal lives, resist leaving our spiritual childhood with all our might. The hubris of the age we live in extends to the certainty we can conquer death, and thus never have to grow up at all.  It's the Peter Pan Syndrome on a national scale.

Latin films delve a little deeper.  They're lustier on the whole, not least because love and death are so inextricably linked, but they're usually not as bloody as American movies tend to be.  Pan's Labyrinth is a notable exception.  But, again, it's not gore we've got here, exactly.  The blood here shimmers, shines, slithers and plumes.  It is a living substance, a presence here, always significant, always symbolic.  This is blood as life-force, sometimes as rorschach (I thought I saw fallopian tubes in that one, Doctor!), but never just as wall-paper.  

One of the most memorable scenes in The Depahted—and if you haven't seen it yet you might want to avert your eyes here—is when our young protagonist, played with real intensity by Leonardo DiCaprio, is very unsentimentally and unceremoniously dispatched.  There is nothing sensuous, sinuous, or sexual about the blood in that scene.  It is a shock of red against a drab backdrop, and the scene is over in about a second and a half.  And that was perfect for the world Scorsese was showing us.  It's not a tragic world, it's an indifferent one.  A violently indifferent one, to be sure, but ultimately indifferent.

In Pan's Labyrinth whenever we see blood we see suffering.  And much of it is inflicted by the Capitán.  Which is another thing.  I've noticed many more much more graphic depictions of torture since the revelations of Abu Ghraib.  It could be that I'm imagining a connection here that does not exist, but it seems some in the press have taken notice, too. Back in February Greg Braxton of the Los Angeles Times pointed out what he called "the torture-for-entertainment wave":

In the last several months, numerous torture scenes have been set pieces on TV dramas, not only in thrill-ride dramas, such as ''24" and ABC's ''Alias," but also in melodramatic or escapist fare such as Fox's ''Prison Break." One key character on ABC's ''Lost" is an Iraqi military officer who tortures a fellow castaway. ''Alias" had an unnamed recurring villain who quietly tortured key characters. FX's ''Nip/Tuck," a hit drama about the psychic turmoil of people who seek and perform cosmetic surgery, recently spotlighted physical turmoil with two simultaneous torture scenes, each set to a tango....

It has crept into ''unscripted" series such as NBC's ''Fear Factor," where willing contestants are trapped or doused with insects, and Fox Reality's upcoming ''Solitary," in which isolated contestants are pushed to the physical and psychological brink.

Torture scenes are featured in mainstream movies such as ''Syriana" and ''Kiss Kiss Bang Bang" and play a starring role in recent horror films, as campy boogeymen including hockey-masked Jason Voorhees and knife-fingered Freddy Krueger are replaced with the gnarly madmen of the recently released ''Hostel" and the ''Saw" franchise, who savage their victims so horribly that death might come as a welcome relief.

The question I left Pan's Labyrinth asking myself was, was it necessary for me to see that?  Are scenes depicting sadism and suffering essential in some contexts and gratuitous in others?  Are there directors who are demanding that we acknowledge what is happening in the world by forcing images of graphic violence on us?  Is it a moral call to witness or just a case of pushing the envelope in an increasingly desensitized world?  By placing extreme violence in a meaningful context are we glorifying it?  Do we glorify it by acknowledging its transformative power—a truth about violence that is also at the heart of religion? Is it wrongheaded to deny the role of pain and loss in spiritual transcendence?

There are earthier questions that violence honestly depicted prompts, too, about the inescapable relationship between our physical and spiritual selves, which we feel most keenly in love and violence.  Pan's Labyrinth touches on these of necessity.  The implications of age and gender—how we are made vulnerable by these things, particularly in violent times, is another theme the film explores in some depth. 

Some reviewers have gotten hung up on the ending, and the question of whether Ofelia's vision was "real" or not.  This seems an important distinction for many moviegoers.  Bruno Bettelheim's idea was that fairy tales, far from being airy escapism, teach us "that a struggle against severe difficulties in life is unavoidable, is an intrinsic part of human existence - but that if one does not shy away, but steadfastly meets unexpected and often unjust hardships, one masters all obstacles and at the end emerges victorious." 

And by Bettelheim's definition, Pan's Labyrinth is a pretty much by-the-book, good old-fashioned fairy tale.  In the end Ofelia masters the obstacles and claims her kingdom.  There is no ambiguity about this, and to debate, as some reviewers (I'm thinking of Dave Wildman's ham-handed review in The Dig here) have, whether "it’s either the triumph of the soul or a terrible human tragedy," is to miss the boat entirely. 

It is both.  It is emphatically both.