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The Fable: A Case Study of Darkness: The Wizard of Oz and Pan’s Labyrinth
The Wizard of Oz
Rare is the film where the children’s world is the center and where children are more complex beings. The MGM film version of the Frank Baum classic The Wizard of Oz is such a film.
The Wizard of Oz is about a real world, Kansas, and an imagined world, Oz. Part musical and part fable, it audaciously pictorializes its main character, Dorothy’s world. Structurally fables have an overabundance of plot relative to other genres, variable tone, and are unified by the moral of the story (see Chapter 13). It doesn’t shirk from anxiety, and it relies on imaginatively doubling the characters in Dorothy’s Kansas life with characters represented in her imagined life.
In the 1960s since The Wizard of Oz was created, it has taken on legendary stature.
Point of View
Childhood is a product of the past 200 years (see Edward Shorter’s The Making of the Modern Family, 1977, on childhood). Before that there was birth, work, reproduction, and death. That period from birth to 12 years has developed in these 200 years as an incubation period where the child prepares for adult life. It’s a protected period, a period of considerable practical and moral learning taking place. It is also a time of fear and anxiety as the ways of the world become increasingly clear. Whether this engenders security or insecurity in the child, is also a part of childhood.
The greatness of The Wizard of Oz lies in good part in its willingness to sidestep Hollywood stereotypes about children (as smaller adults) and vest itself in Dorothy’s world, the child’s world. This world is viewed as a bifurcated world—a world of good and bad, a world of protectors and of predators, a world where adults are mysterious and in terms of trustworthiness they are unpredictable, whereas animals are always predictable. As Dorothy is the only child in this world we cannot see a split between children and adults in terms of doing good and evil things. Bad behavior in her world seems to reside squarely in the adult world.
In terms of a more detailed presentation of the child’s world, the film’s narrative features flesh out that world. The first phase of the film takes place in Kansas. It’s a dark brooding place with changes of weather threatening. Dorothy and her dog Toto live with her elderly aunt Emily and uncle Henry. Their threadbare farm has three workers, Hunk, Zeke, and Hickory.
This part of the story focuses on the local entrepreneur Miss Gulch’s interdiction to have Dorothy’s dog, Toto, destroyed. Dorothy’s aunt and uncle comply and hand over the dog that promptly runs away from Miss Gulch back to Dorothy. Dorothy then runs away in order to save her dog. She visits Professor Marvel, a benevolent itinerant fortune-teller. He convinces her to return home. Upon her return, a tornado is blowing, and she imagines the entire farm and its surround are sucked up into the eye of the tornado, including Miss Gulch. She is then transported to the imagined world of Oz.
In this first sequence, Dorothy expresses anger at the injustice of the adult world. Miss Gulch has the power to punish, and no one stands against her. Dorothy is powerless, and she’s anxious not only about Toto but also about the impotence of her aunt and uncle to protect her and Toto. Dorothy is also willful. She is willing to run away to save Toto. She’s also young and impressionable. Professor Marvel easily convinces her to return home.
In this sequence, Dorothy is powerless but willful, angry but anxious; in short, she’s a vulnerable child looking to protect what means most to her but fearful that the adult world will unjustly punish her. There is an underlying sense of disappointment here about adults in general.
In the next longer sequence of the film, the visit to Oz, Dorothy is on a journey of discovery. Oz the world divides more simply into a world of good and evil. There is a good witch, and there are two bad witches. The good witch is helpful to Dorothy as a benevolent “parent” would be, and the surviving Wicked Witch of the West, looking remarkably like Miss Gulch, is all about punishment and harming. And the world of Oz is presented in glorious Technicolor.
In order to find her way back to her world, Dorothy is advised to travel to the Emerald City to see the Wizard of Oz and seek his advice. To get to Emerald City, she must follow the yellow brick road. Along that road she meets three accomplices who like herself find themselves lacking. The Scarecrow (Ray Bolger) feels he has no brain. Perhaps the Wizard of Oz will tell him where he can find a brain. The Tin Man (Jack Haley) feels he has no heart. He will ask the wizard where he can find a heart. And the lion is a Cowardly Lion. He would like to know where he can find courage. Each is seeking an answer, as is Dorothy. The four travel to Emerald City, and after a confrontation with the Wicked Witch of the West, they find what they are seeking. The wizard tells them it’s all inside themselves rather than out there in the world.
In the final sequence, it’s the Good Witch of the North who tells Dorothy how to return to Kansas. All she has to do is repeat the phrase “there’s no place like home.” She does, and she’s back home again with aunt Emily and uncle Henry, and their three workers. She repeats the phrase “there’s no place like home,” and the film ends.
In this part of the film, the life lesson of personal action enters Dorothy’s repertoire. She learns that personal empowerment leads to a goal fulfilled. She also learns to appreciate home despite its shortcomings; it’s still home. Acceptance of a life of limits is implicit in the conclusion.
What is notable about The Wizard of Oz is its focus on the anxious child and the role of anxiety in general in life. Let’s turn to this central issue of the film.
Anxiety
If we were to ask the question whether Dorothy reflects a sense of belonging or mastery in her world, I would have to say she does not. In its stead, she seems to be anxious about her position in her world. The anxiety generates from different features of Dorothy’s life and her behavior.
Above all, Dorothy is presented as a child without parents. Her aunt Emily and uncle Henry are custodians, but where are the parents? Both aunt and uncle seem older, another factor in the gap between Dorothy and her custodians.
A second feature of Dorothy’s world is that there are no peers. No brothers or sisters, no school friends, no neighbors of a similar age. Dorothy is very much alone. Her best friend seems to be her dog, Toto. The prevalence of adults relative to children emphasizes Dorothy’s aloneness.
A third feature of Dorothy’s anxiety is the attitude of the adult world. The privileged Miss Gulch sees it as her desire to strip Dorothy of her only friend, Toto. Dorothy’s custodians are powerless to intervene on her behalf.
Finally, the environment seems malevolent. Rather than being supportive or growth-oriented, in Dorothy’s world, nature turns as violent as Miss Gulch, and uproots homes, and people. She cannot find respite from her anxiety anywhere.
In the second part of the film, in Oz the three friends, the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion become the repository of much of Dorothy’s anxiety. Their anxieties are more focused, but nevertheless they are continually undone by that anxiety. They require reassurance particularly from Dorothy in order to cope with their anxiety.
Dorothy’s own anxiety is focused on one goal, getting home. Here she has help from a parental figure, the Good Witch of the North who gives her special red shoes for protection. The negative forces whether they be human or natural are deposited in the Wicked Witch of the West. At least in this world, Dorothy has help to cope with the Wicked Witch. Dorothy also has a peer group, the Munchkins, the little people, that is, the children of Oz. They provide peers or allies for Dorothy in this imagined world.
Finally the whole of Oz, the imagined world, is a strategy for Dorothy to cope with her real world anxiety. The creation of Oz itself implies how very much anxiety inhabits Dorothy’s world.
Two Worlds
A real world and an imagined world, this is the strategy created to help Dorothy contain her anxiety. In a sense, the analogy is to the toy animal the child uses as the positive polarity as she/he learns about the real world. The more vigorous that the attachment is to the toy animal; the greater the fear factor about the world at large. The toy animal pictorializes a defense against the fear. So, too, Dorothy’s Oz.
Dorothy is not 2 years old. She’s 12, on the cusp of entering the adult world. Whatever her age she is clearly a child using the imagined world to fill up the enormous void left by the features of her real world.
Her real world is a black and white (at best sepia) world. As such it’s imagined as a world with a big storm brewing. The sky is not bright but rather ominous, threatening. A tornado in the making swirls in the deep background. This portrayal of powerful nature is the context. Her aunt and uncle’s farm is Dorothy’s corner of Kansas. Although there is an animal, there are also three workmen. Is this a make work project? The farm certainly does not look to be a prosperous working farm. The workers seem to be edgy, tense rather than benevolent. Bickering characterizes the employer–employee relationship. Are the aunt and uncle making ends meet? Because it’s the Midwest, and it’s the depression, the viability of the farm is dubious. And why do aunt Emily and uncle Henry look so grandparent-like in their appearance? Are they old before their time?
One can imagine aunt Emily and uncle Henry being worried about the viability of their farm. How else is one to understand their appearance, the bickering with the workers, their ready submission to the will of Miss Gulch, owner of so much of the town? Does Miss Gulch also hold the mortgage to their farm?
This is Dorothy’s real world—a storm is brewing; her home, the farm, is vulnerable to economic storms; and her aunt, her de facto mother, feels and acts powerless. For Dorothy, the real world is a frightening place. And her future is as subject to whim as is the fate of her dog. Each can be taken away in an instant. The real world then is a very dark place.
Oz as a world is created as an antidote to the real world. The imagined world is a world in color, vivid, brilliant color. Roads are yellow, and cities are emerald green. And there are principally benevolent adult figures—the Witch of the North and the Wizard. The punitive figure of the Wicked Witch of the West at the very least has adult offset figures. As for the balance of the adult figures—the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion—each are incomplete, in sense adults in deficit figures. By allowing them to join her in her journey to the Emerald City to pose serious and personal questions to the Wizard, Dorothy has allies in her quest. She is also sharing anxiety with these adult figures. Her own anxiety by doing so is diminished compared to her presentation in the real world sequence. In a sense, her imagined world is occupied by bad, good, and anxious adults, again an improvement on her real world.
A bit of gender probing in these two worlds suggests gender differences in power. In Dorothy’s real world, uncle Henry is ineffectual, whereas her aunt Emily seems to be the critical “parent.” Another woman, Miss Gulch, is the repository of power in the community. The male workers seem as ineffectual as uncle Henry. Only Professor Marvel as a male holds out any possibility of power. Because he examines her handbag for information about Dorothy and then presents that information as “sighted” information or revealed through magic powers information, Professor Marvel is a male under suspicion. In this sense, he has no real power. All the males have no power, and hence, the only hope in Dorothy’s real world lies with the females.
In the imagined world, it’s the same. The men are anxious as her three co-travelers and the wizard like Professor Marvel (same actor) admits he’s a benevolent fraud. He can’t even take Dorothy home. He flies off before she’s ready, which leaves the women, and here the women replicate the real world. The Good Witch is an empowered aunt Emily and the Wicked Witch of the West is Miss Gulch revisited (same actress).
In terms of gender, the women have it in them to be powerful in The Wizard of Oz. And the men need the women to empower them. For Dorothy, a female, empowerment is the answer. And that’s just what happens in The Wizard of Oz.
The two worlds are used creatively. The imagined world helps the child contain her anxiety and provides her sufficient empowerment to accept her real world (and move on).
The Fable
The fable is not realistic. All that occurs in it from a story point of view serves the moral of the story. In It’s a Wonderful Life, an angel comes down from heaven to talk a man out of committing suicide. Forrest Gump is all about a limited character whose mother treated him as special. Consequently, he influences all the “normal” people in his life over a 60-year period. The moral of the story is that special is special regardless of physical or emotional deficits. Life is Beautiful is all about how you bring up your children. The right attitude will get you through all life’s hardships; in this film, even a concentration camp.
Fables are all about the power of a single idea about meeting life. It can be physical, emotional, and spiritual. Whatever the moral is, it’s the key to the fable. In The Wizard of Oz, the moral of the story is that the solution to life’s problems is within us, not out there somewhere in the ether. It is inside. And this moral is what Dorothy will learn in the course of The Wizard of Oz.
The fable can have a dark tone such as Schlondorff’s The Tin Drum or it can be light as is Benigni’s Life is Beautiful. Generally the tone can also shift as it does in The Wizard of Oz from the characters of Dorothy’s real world to the lightness of the imagined world of Oz.
Fables also tend to have a journey quality. The journey represents the metamorphosis of the main character from idealist to realist in Boorman’s Excalibur, from innocent to political activist in Schlondorff’s The Lost Honor of Katerina Blum. For Dorothy, the journey is from being paralyzed by anxiety to a stage where she can move on in life.
Fables also tend to have elaborate and complex plots and here too the bifurcated world and the journey to Oz is an intense elaborate trip for Dorothy.
What is critical to the fable is that all actions and characters serve the moral of the story. All the characters and events in Dorothy’s imagined world are present to articulate and apply a strategy to overcome the problem posed in her real world. Fables have a constructed feel to them because we see the character constructing a coping strategy. “I will not grow” is Oscar’s strategy in The Tin Drum. “Life is a game” is Guido’s strategy in Life is Beautiful. The imagined world of Oz with its wisdom and good fairy help Dorothy realize that the answer lies within, not outside as she previously thought.
There is also a ritualistic quality to the fable, a constructed pathway to the moral of the story. The yellow brick road is one pathway just as the Emerald City is a destination. The disposition of the qualities needed to meet life, head, heart, and courage, each in three different characters, is an example of how the ritualization is constructed. The shaman role of Professor Marvel and the Wizard of Oz is also constructed. The division of good and evil in the witches, who occupy different geographical zones, is also a construction.
Ritual is critical in the fable, because it moves meaning away from realism. The fable is all about using metaphor to say something about life.
The Musical
The musical is a genre of wish fulfillment. It is about being a success in a relationship and in work. Generally, a performance on stage ( The Bandwagon ) or in a film ( Singing in the Rain ) is the enabling action to move from aspirant to actualized. The musical focuses on a performance skill—singing, dancing as the vehicle for success. The tone of the Musical is light and enabling. The music is often part of the performance focus of the film.
The Wizard of Oz is a different kind of musical. It is about a non-performing character. In this sense, it is more similar to Oklahoma and Brigadoon than it is to Swing Time or Cabaret. It is also much darker in terms of the material than the musical tends to be. There have been darker musicals— Damn Yankees (the Devil) and Cabaret (the Nazis), but they are in the minority.
It’s best to look at the musical dimension of The Wizard of Oz as a promise that all will be well in the end. The tone of the musical, enabling, fulfilling the wish of the main character, is sustained in The Wizard of Oz. But the use of the music is interesting. “Over the Rainbow,” for example, is a lament about the impossibility of things getting better in Dorothy’s current life. A better life is always beyond reach, somewhere, over the rainbow.
Only when Dorothy reaches her imagined world Oz, does optimism enter. The song “Follow the Yellow Brick Road” brims with the optimism so lacking in the earlier song.
It is best to think of The Wizard of Oz as a musical about an internal issue rather than an external event. I’ll explain. Generally the musical is about the external event of putting on a show in order to be an entertainment success in the world and to secure a love relationship, also out there in the world.
In The Wizard of Oz, the focus is on an interior journey rather than an external event. It is about Dorothy’s state of mind rather about success or failure. This characteristic establishes The Wizard of Oz as a different kind of musical.
Another dimension to this difference is that most musicals use a play, a nightclub act, a cabaret act, or a movie as integral to their stature. Each of these forms have their own style of performance, the silent movie exaggerated acting style in Singing in the Rain, for example.
The Wizard of Oz is linked not to the theater as its performance base but rather to the circus. This may have to do with the fact that children don’t go to a lot of plays or cabaret acts in their formative years. But they do go to the circus. To set a performance base in the circus for a children’s sensibility in The Wizard of Oz, seems perfectly attuned. Chaplin in The Circus and Fellini in La Strada use the circus as their framework for character and behavior, but their work emanated from an adult sensibility for, in the most part, an adult audience. Mervyn LeRoy as the producer working with the writers, Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson, and Edgar Alan Woolf, was looking to capitalize on the Baum books and their pictorialization of the circus in the child’s life.
Consequently, the basis for the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion becomes the clown. Each performs in a pantomime style of acting. Movements are exaggerated and physical. Expression and verbalization are equally exaggerated.
The Good Witch is the ringmaster. The Wicked Witch of the West is the exaggerated expression of evil, in her way, a different kind of clown.
If we consider the imagined world of Oz with all its color, exaggeration, and clowns as the population, we can see Oz—the circus—as the equivalent of the play in The Bandwagon. In The Wizard of Oz, the circus is the forum for Dorothy’s internal life pageant. In The Bandwagon, the play is the vehicle for Tony’s (Fred Astaire) life pageant.
The Musical Fable
The Wizard of Oz is a musical that is also a fable. Producers and writers mix story forms because of the ambition they have for their story. Among the most famous mixed genre films are Blade Runner (film noir and science fiction), Crimes and Misdemeanors (melodrama and situation comedy), and Basic Instinct (police story and film noir). The Wizard of Oz, as a Musical, uses the circus as the performance metaphor for Dorothy’s journey. That journey is internal rather than external, understandable and meaningful from the fact that the main character, Dorothy, is a child. Oz is enabling for Dorothy, and its presentation is tonally in keeping with the musical; it’s light, lively, and enabling.
But LeRoy and company are interested in more than an entertainment in The Wizard of Oz. The fable is all about the moral of the story. In The Wizard of Oz, we have a main character who is beset by anxiety. The moral of the story has as its goal to contain her anxiety. You cannot run away from your problems. You have to face them. And the best place to do so is at home. It does not say it in so many words, but if you do stay at home, you can begin to deal with those problems. The moral of the story is you can deal with the difficulties; the answers are all inside.
Pan’s Labyrinth
As in the case of The Wizard of Oz, there are two worlds depicted in Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth (2006). Seen through the eyes of Ofelia, an 11-year-old girl, one is real, and the other imagined.
Ofelia’s real world is 1944 Spain. And it is populated by her pregnant mother, her new stepfather, Captain Vidal, and the captain’s housekeeper, Mercedes. Its rural setting is not unlike Kansas in The Wizard of Oz. It’s an unsettled frontier where the captain rules with an iron fist and where the population is compliant or in revolt against him.
The captain is cruel, controlling, and violent with no interest in Ofelia. His only interest in her mother is the son she will bear him. Ofelia’s mother is beautiful and weak. Life has all but crushed her. Mercedes is strong and supportive of Ofelia’s individuality. Ofelia is a rebellious dreamer. In her world, fairies and princesses make the world a better place.
In this real world, Ofelia experiences only loss. She tries to save her mother but cannot. And she tries to save her baby brother. That effort will cost her her life.
Although the guerilla war is ongoing, it is part of Mercedes’ life rather than Ofelia’s. Although the captain has become an important part of her mother’s life, Ofelia never joins this reconstituted family. She is only interested in her mother and the baby. Ofelia’s noncompliance with the new family order is her “guerilla attack.”
In Ofelia’s imagined world, she is a princess, mistakenly sent to live among humans. In the captain’s rural setting, a fairy leads her into a labyrinth, where a faun challenges her to three difficult tasks before the next full moon. If she is successful, it will prove her essence is intact, she has not become mortal.
Unlike Dorothy’s imagined world in The Wizard of Oz, Ofelia’s imagined world is not beautiful, and there is no good witch. Her world is ugly and violent, and the faun seems every bit as menacing as the captain. This may be the immortal world, but for Ofelia, the journey is as dangerous as life is in her real world. In this sense, Ofelia’s alternative world is a less optimistic alternative. The consequence is to force Ofelia to be more active in both worlds. The result is that more is at stake for Ofelia. In comparison, Dorothy’s world seems more gentle and more child-like.
Dread vs. Anxiety
Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz uses her imagined world to help her manage the anxiety promoted in her real world where her family cannot act on her behalf. In her real world, she will be victimized by a powerful adult who will take her dog, the greatest comfort she has in her life.
Ofelia faces a very different real world prepared to deny her mother and her brother, all that is important to her. Nor can Mercedes protect her from the captain, a merciless destroyer of the beauty and the fantasy life Ofelia needs to sustain herself. Ofelia faces a dire and dangerous world. She knows bad things will happen. The only thing to be determined is when. In this sense, hers is a world filled with dread. Consequently, she throws herself into her imagined world to desperately escape. But unlike Dorothy’s imagined world, Ofelia faces an unreliable dangerous imagined world. Dread has crept into this world as well.
The consequence is Ofelia’s rebellious behavior in her imagined world. During her second task, although warned not to eat any of the food on display, she eats two grapes, making her environment even more threatening. Although she escapes, she is not chastened. During the third task, the faun asks her to turn over to him her baby brother. The faun, knife in hand, tells her no harm will come to the baby. He needs only a few drops of blood from an innocent. Ofelia refuses distrusting and disobeying the faun. She runs off to save the brother. At that point, the captain finds her and shoots her reclaiming her brother, his son.
If death is the ultimate outcome of dread, this is the moment when the two worlds, real and imagined, merge and when what is most feared occurs, the collapse of Ofelia’s world.
The film’s codicil, which by shedding her own innocent blood, Ofelia has qualified to reclaim her rightful place as a princess in a place where her mother is the queen, is open to interpretation. Is the reclaimed status the final imagined thought of the dying Ofelia? Is this moment her justification for her ultimate sacrifice made to save the life of her baby brother? Perhaps! Whichever interpretation the moment confirms how very dark is Ofelia’s world, a world in which dread is partnered with hope, the more natural state of childhood.
Sexuality
Although Ofelia is prepubescent, sexuality is an important part of her life. This is not the case in Dorothy’s world in The Wizard of Oz. Indeed sexuality is notably absent from Dorothy’s world.
In Ofelia’s real world, it’s her mother who is the center of sexuality. Beyond how Ofelia sees her mother, as a beauty, her mother’s pregnancy is the focal point of her sexuality. Del Toro pictorializes the state of her pregnancy, as well as the methods used to sustain the pregnancy, in sexual terms. Beyond the mother’s weakened, vulnerable state, del Toro presents the pregnancy in terms of ingesting and expelling, a reenactment of the act that led to the pregnancy. Ofelia’s mother bleeds, and in order not to expel the fetus prematurely, Ofelia uses the faun’s recommendation to place a bowl of milk, herbs, and a replicate of the fetus (it moves as a real fetus might and is blood covered) under her mother’s bed. This act of superstition (as opposed to science) helps the mother recover and sustain the pregnancy. The visualization of this act of saving is as sexual as del Toro dares to suggest.
In Ofelia’s imagined world, ingesting and expelling are also the avenues del Toro uses to sexualize Ofelia’s actions. The first task is to visit an obese frog that has a key that Ofelia will need. Her first contact with the frog is his tongue. He lashes out and touches Ofelia, leaving a sticky residue on her arm. She then finds him three stones that look like bugs, his food of choice. Upon ingesting the rocks, the frog all but explodes; expelling his innards on top of which Ofelia finds the key she needs. In effect, the key is birthed following the ingesting of rocks offered by Ofelia. The exchange even in logical terms is a visualization of the sexual act. This exchange between a male frog and an 11-year-old girl is every bit as grotesque as sexual union between the cruel captain and Ofelia’s sensitive, feeling mother. Neither represents love; both, however, have biological beginnings and consequences, birth.
The center of violence in Ofelia’s real world is her stepfather, Captain Vidal. The center of violence in Ofelia’s imagined world is the faun. Both have an aggressively masculine physicality.
When we first see Ofelia with her stepfather, she offers her left hand to greet him. He grabs her right hand tightly conveying punishment for her lack of respect toward him. Hostility will be the basis of exchange between them throughout the story.
To establish the captain’s true character, a violent character, del Toro uses the first scene where he interacts with two villagers, father and son. The father has been caught with a shotgun, recently fired in the woods. He is suspected of being a guerilla fighter. The son protests, claiming his father to be a poor farmer, who has only been hunting rabbits for food. Outraged the captain beats the son to death and then shoots the father. Searching his pouch, he does find two recently killed rabbits.
The captain’s penchant for violence includes shooting the local doctor and later Ofelia. In an earlier scene, when accusing Mercedes of being a guerilla sympathizer, she stabs the captain. He stitches one of the wounds, a slice from his mouth to his cheek. Doing violence to others and repairing the damage of violence toward him highlight the centrality of violence in Ofelia’s real world.
In Ofelia’s imagined world, the appearance and behavior of the faun portend violence toward her and hers. Beyond his menacing appearance, the faun wields a knife toward Ofelia’s infant brother. He doesn’t carry through the threat, but his intentions clearly feel destructive toward Ofelia.
Tone and the Fable
As we state in an earlier chapter, the fable is positive about the impact of its character on others ( Forrest Gump ) or about the character’s assessment of their life ( It’s a Wonderful Life ). Tone that accumulation of narrative detail and events makes that interpretation of characters and their lives credible.
The moral of the story in The Wizard of Oz is about self-reliance, even in children. Self-reliance in a dark time or place will save you. When we turn to Pan’s Labyrinth, the moral of the story is less clear.
A powerful antagonist, a weak mother, and a disloyal housekeeper make up the adult population. The negative power structure bodes poorly for Ofelia our main character-child. In fact, she is killed by the antagonist.
Nor is the imagined world an antidote for Ofelia’s dire situation. The imagined world brims with violence, monstrous creatures, and an unreliable menacing guide, the faun.
What can be said about Ofelia in both her real world and her imagined world is that she is not a naïf. Yes, she does love books and the world of fairies and fauns and princesses. But this is presented as a way to see an alternative to a real world beset with darkness and disappointment. Her mother, who has given up hope, preaches a similar attitude for Ofelia, but Ofelia doesn’t buy it. She actively rejects the captain and his values. She resists in the face of the poor condition of her mother, and allies herself with nonscientific remedies to help her mother. And she acts to protect her infant brother from the captain and from the faun.
Ofelia is in active resistance to the values she rejects in the real world. The captain is a product of the Falange victory in the Spanish Civil War. His militarism, his chauvinism, and his cruelty are all resisted and rejected by Ofelia. The moral of Pan’s Labyrinth is to act as Ofelia does, to resist, embracing alternate virtuous values, even if it costs you your life. And use that better world, the world where you are, what you dream of (a princess) to cope with the hardships of the real world. Only by doing so will you be able to endure the pain, the losses, and the disappointments of the real world. This is the moral of del Toro’s dark fable.