Francisco J.

Sánchez

A Post-­National Spanish Imaginary

A Case-­Study: Pan’s Labyrinth



The acclaimed film Pan’s Labyrinth (El laberinto del fauno, 2006, directed by
Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro) portrays the repression of democratic
resistance (the maquis) during the years that followed Franco’s victory over the
Spanish Republic in 1939. The film focuses on a sadistic military officer and his de-
termination to kill and torture people, and on a child, his stepdaughter, who rebels
and escapes to a world of fantasy. In the following pages I argue that the narrative
of Pan’s Labyrinth presents a reconsideration of State-­sponsored Fascist repression
in terms of a male-­dominated order. I argue that this portrayal implies a displace-
ment of the political nature of totalitarian violence from questions regarding the
nation-­State to the sphere of a cultural region. I further argue, then, that Pan’s Laby-
rinth belongs to what Paul Julian Smith has called a “Trans-­Atlantic traffic.” Cross-­
national production companies, film-­makers and actors are creating a flux of films
that do not identify strictly as a national product, but rather a circuit of produc-
tion, exchange and distribution (Smith). The displacement from the nation permits
us to raise important considerations regarding the current status of the notion of
Spanish as a brand in the marketing of cultural issues.

On Fascist Violence. The Father, the Law of Death—

the Patriarchal Memory
The major conflict within the narrative of the film is not (or is not exclusively) be-
tween Franco’s repressive forces and the anti-­Fascist resistance, but above all be-
tween a Fascist officer, Captain Vidal, and his stepdaughter, Ofelia. The child’s father
died at the start of the war, and her mother has now married Vidal in order to have
a better living amid the miseries of scarcity and poverty in post-­war Spain. The
child shows no affection to her stepfather; on the contrary she rejects him from the
first moment. Her disposition to fantasy is further strengthened when she arrives
with her mother to the small town where Vidal is leading the hunting and killing
of resistance fighters. Indeed, it becomes a means of survival in the hostile home.
While her mother prepares herself in ill conditions to deliver Vidal’s baby, Ofelia

137
creates a fairy-­tale story in which she is the heroine of a struggle that obviously par-
allels the simultaneous story of the democratic fighters against Vidal and Franco’s
repression. Her fantasy world is intended to substitute and at the same time isolate
the atrocities of the evil and repression that she sees around her; her fairy-­tale be-
comes a symbolic transgression of a social order dominated by Fascism (Tsuei).
Fascism is certainly evoked in the film as a military power allied with an oli-
garchy with the goal of preserving their economic interests, which seem to be chal-
lenged by the popular classes. However, the narrative of the film emphasizes the
sadistic characterization of Vidal to such a degree that this “psychological” perspec-
tive overcomes the representation of Fascist violence. The officer is portrayed with
an essential disposition toward murder and the inflicting of pain. Indeed, Vidal
carries out the killing of civilians and the persecution of anti-­fascist fighters with
a sort of personal passion that is above and beyond what his subordinated officers
are willing to do.
At the same time, the film portrays this evil officer as struggling with himself
and with the memory of his own father. Vidal carries with him at all times his
father’s watch, as a permanent memory of the exact time of his death in battle.
His mystification of the love for his father in terms of an exaltation of death and
war certainly points to a characterization of Fascism as a culture of death and of a
masculine veneration of war. The emphasis, however, on depicting obsessive traits
rather than an ideological conviction for the establishment of a Fascist state, per-
mits us to see Vidal as a pathological individual and, then, to focus on the charac-
terization of political repression in terms of emotions and a dynamics of love and
hate within a familial space under a patriarchal power.
As the stepfather of Ofelia, Vidal is a tyrannical figure who has usurped a role
for which he has no other interest but his own self-­affirmation. His law is clearly a
law of the patriarch and of male domination by physical force. His appropriation of
the child and of the child’s mother by a forceful submission to his tyrannical law is
certainly equivalent to his persecution of democratic fighters because both actions
are, in turn, the result of his own submission to the memory of death. In other words,
he hunts democratic fighters because he is compelled to follow the law of his father.
The narrative of the film recognizes at some points the economic interests that
support the repression of democratic resistance. A clear and direct statement comes
in a sequence in which members of the oligarchy and the church enjoy a copious
meal right after the Army distributes some food to the village as a symbol of “la
España de Franco.” At this meal, however, Vidal is portrayed as having a personal
investment in the repression of the resistance, different from the greedy interests
of the rest. This moment reinforces the perception that Vidal has his own patho-
logical mission apart from the merely economic interests of the oligarchy, a mission
related to honoring the memory of his father. He even denies having his father’s

138 The Comparatist 36 : 2012

watch, making explicit for the audience his own repressed dependence on a mascu-
line exaltation of war and on a self-­censorship of emotions and empathy.
Vidal’s goal is to kill and repress as a means to actualize and commemorate the
death of his father. At the same time, Ofelia constructs a fairy tale in which, after
struggle and heroism, she finally reunites with her dead father in the form of the
king of the underworld. The father-­quest of both characters, Vidal and Ofelia, con-
figures in my view a narrative of its own within the film. This narrative articulates a
juxtaposition of Vidal’s memory of his father and Ofelia’s quest for her own father.
They stand to each other as a struggle of liberation realized through fantasy (Clark
and McDonald) which, it has been argued, may even project a mythical dimension
(Spector) and a reflection of the inner workings of fear (Hubner).
The dynamics of repression and the fantasy of liberation center on the story of
the absent (dead) father. This absence constitutes both, Vidal and Ofelia, as agents
of their own lives as they both live by and through the memory of a death, the
former as an impulse to hate and the latter as a wish for love. As an emotional con-
figuration of this familial space, the dynamics of hate and love serve the purposes
of a “psychological” twist that fuses the confrontation between the patriarch and
the child with each one’s own individual longing (perverse in one case and heroic
in the other) for subliminal fulfillment.
Thus, in spite of the seemingly obvious relation to Franco’s repression, the de-
piction of Vidal as a sadistic officer does not intend to provide a representation
of Fascism or, much less, of the workings of a Fascist State. Moreover, the implicit
references in Vidal to a Fascist ideology might distort the web of rational alliances
and political and ideological practices that identifies historical Fascism. While it
is true that Fascism resorts to violence and terror to accomplish its political goals,
such violence results from a systematic and calculated plan. This plan was the
outcome of a rationalization of the interests of the social classes and groups sup-
porting Fascism, and not merely the product of pathological individuals. In other
words, Fascist terror was a calculated practice to attain a political goal—the elimi-
nation of all opposition and, in particular, the opposition of popular classes. Cer-
tainly, pathological individuals may have supported and practiced Fascist violence,
but pathology alone did not motivate Fascism. Pathology cannot explain the State’s
systematic recourse to violence.
This issue becomes more relevant in considering the role of the Military in the
Spanish branch of Fascism. The Military and the oligarchy, together with some seg-
ments of the Catholic Church, were the groups that supported the repression and
persecution of democratic resistance in the aftermath of the war. The film’s scene
of the meal reflects this alliance perfectly well. However, it also reflects the personal
distance that Captain Vidal shows in relation to the other members of the oligarchy.
He is personally involved in the repression in order to satisfy the demands of the

A Post-National Spanish Imaginary 139

memory of his father. His violence serves for him as a means to reinforce the emo-
tional dimension of his quest. This is why Vidal’s violence is equivalent, in the film’s
narrative structure, to the violence of the monster that Ofelia encounters in the
underworld (the Pale Man). Their parallelism is embedded in a representation of
a violence that is essentially emotional and psychological: it is a senseless, evil vio-
lence aimed at killing innocent people irrationally.
Vidal’s own drive to inflict death and torture does not respond to a political plan.
In this sense, the participation of the Military in the construction of Spanish Fas-
cism is not the actual historical reference of the narrative. The repression of demo-
cratic resistance is portrayed primarily in terms of an abnormality repeated in the
obsessive compulsion of a man. The pathological characterization of the officer
signifies a displacement of the question of terror and repression, from the calcu-
lated political role it has in Fascism to the representation of a tormented individual
struggling with the imaginary demands of his dead father.
Vidal’s tormented inner struggle further consolidates his search for the dead
father with the antagonistic deeds of Ofelia’s own imagination. Vidal’s and Ofelia’s
story articulates a narrative space in which the memory of the father becomes inte-
grated in a common memory of death. This permits us to read the representation
of repression symbolically as a battle of essential or mythical forces that at the same
time, and paradoxically, brings forward an affective dimension:

It’s a pungent trope: from a child’s subjective perspective, a bloody civil conflict
appears as it is in its essence, a heavens-­fall contest between family victims and
neighborhood monsters, in which the children underfoot bear the greatest cost
(suggesting the Nigerian proverb that when elephants fight, it is the grass that
suffers). (Atkinson 52)

Paul J. Smith has argued that an “emotional imperative” operates in the narrative
structure of some films that intend to highlight a private sphere to which feel-
ings and emotions are relegated. He sees this emotional dimension as “an invita-
tion to make national narratives in collaboration with it” (Smith 48). Analyzing
other Spanish filmic and television works, Smith posits that the representation of a
domestic space of inner emotions within the family may serve as an ethical back-
ground against which one may come to terms with broader social and political
issues that have become too painful to be analyzed solely at intellectual and ideo-
logical levels, particularly the traumatic events of the Spain’s Civil War and Franco’s
regime of four decades. Given the trans-­Atlantic context of its production and dis-
tribution, we can see also in Pan’s Labyrinth a major tendency in contemporary
visual production to represent political and social issues through the lens of fa-
milial spaces.
Certainly, the metaphor of the familial space helps to demonstrate how a sym-

140 The Comparatist 36 : 2012

bolic displacement from the historical context of Fascist repression to an indi-
vidualized story of the struggle between a tyrannical patriarch and a rebellious
child takes place. A stepfather (a “political” father) who is determined to impose
his repressive law must confront face-­to-­face an innocent but valorous child who
is equally determined to reject his law and his name. This is a rejection that implies
the overall confrontation with Vidal’s own memory of Death.
In my view, the theme of the absent (dead) father is the ideological connection
between, on the one hand, the realm of emotions within a familial space, and on
the other hand, the “historical” context of the Military’s hunting of the Republic’s
resistance. In other words, the narrative evolves through a series of confrontations
both at the “national” level and the “familial” level, ending in the final showdown
between the illegitimate father and the rebellious child. Vidal’s death at the hands of
the maquis, right after he himself kills Ofelia, finally superimposes the implicit ref-
erence to a potential end of repression upon a reconstruction of the family’s future.
This reconstruction is inscribed in a twofold way: by the imaginary recovering
of Ofelia’s father in the underground in the form of the fairy king, and by Vidal’s
realization that his new-­born child will never know his name. In other words, while
eventually the future would erase the memory of death and the name of the op-
pressor, the memory of Ofelia’s father is transformed into the benevolent king of a
fairy world.
The transcendence of the child’s death and the erasing of Vidal’s memory seem
to correspond to a transition to post-­Franco Spain and the recovery of parliamen-
tary democracy:

Se puede suponer que en sí misma, celebra la sabiduría del rey actual dadas las
circunstancias históricas que sucedieron después de la transición de poder y el
papel conciliatorio, pacificador y unificador que ejerció Juan Carlos. (Deaver 164)

Though I am not fond of easy parallelisms or of representational homologies, there

are obvious subliminal connotations in this after-­death fairy and benevolent king.
Indeed, the recovery of a democratic system after Franco’s death in 1975 was insti-
tutionalized through the re-­instatement of the monarchy, a political move steered
by the political establishment with the acceptance of groups and parties that had
traditionally opposed the monarchy during Franco’s dictatorship. The acceptance
of a monarchical regime was considered to be a way to avoid a rupture or a break
in Spanish society that would potentially ignite a violent reaction by the Military.
The monarchy was then presented as the sine qua non of a post-­Franco Spain, as
effectively being the condition for erasing the memory of many years of death and
repression. Moreover, the media and mainstream political discourses explicitly in-
tended to disengage historical resistance and opposition to Fascism and to Franco’s
regime from the cause of the Republic.

A Post-National Spanish Imaginary 141

 The fairy king in the narrative of the film has clear political and ideological im-
plications. It is, above all, the king-­father that protects and loves Ofelia in contrast
to a stepfather who hates and represses her. The king is also her final rest and tran-
scendence. As a child-­princess, Ofelia transcends her own death in an imaginary
that appeals to a continuity of space and time directly to the present of the audi-
ence.

Both in the fantastic and the historical, the boundaries of the narrative are
broken by stories that tend to extend through time before and after the events
covered by the film. This occurs both through suggested but not elaborated per-
sonal and social histories and through the continuing of the story to the audi-
ence’s past and present in the appeal of the child as protagonist and in the as-
sumption of contextualizing history. (Hanley 44)

The fairy-­king in Ofelia’s imaginary replaces the evil stepfather; the figure of a
father of love replaces the hate of the dead father. Since the maquis in the film are
supposed to be fighting for the Republic in 1940s, this monarchical transcendence
of the fairy tale is quite paradoxical. In fact, the film never mentions the Republic
as the democratic system suppressed by the military uprising. Thus, Ofelia’s fairy
tale of liberation actually confirms the silencing of the Republic, a crucial national
reference that is absent from the narrative of the film. The transcendence of this
absence is, nevertheless, much broader. It is a symptom of the displacement of po-
litical structures in the cultural commodities of a cross-­national Spanish region.

The Absence of the Nation-­S tate

and a Spanish Region
Pan’s Labyrinth participates in the marketing of current political and cultural de-
bates in Spain regarding the memory of totalitarian repression. By silencing the
Republic, the film displaces the political context of the nation of Spain into a trans-­
Atlantic Spanish region in which Spanish functions as a brand of cultural goods.
At this point, I think that A. Monegal is on the right path when he points out
that “categories such as ‘Spanish,’ ‘Hispanic,’ ‘Iberian,’ and ‘Latin America,’ do not
distinguish cultural singularities but a complex network of relations” (Monegal
232). Assessing the transformations we witness in the academic field of Hispanic
Studies, Monegal argues that we need

models that are no longer based on the nation, but on the more complex con-
cept of culture. Such a model is not determined by national boundaries and
does not draw a map that separates the domestic from the alien, the inside from

142 The Comparatist 36 : 2012

 the outside, but acknowledges the fluctuation of such positions, their character
as cultural constructs, simultaneously inside and outside. (Monegal 246)

Pan’s Labyrinth must be seen within this complex network of relations, in which
the identity of a work is the product of the values of a now de-­territorialized cul-
ture. We should see this network as forming something close to what Appadurai
called imagined worlds in distinction to the imagined communities anchored in the
nation. These worlds are detached from politically defined territories and are re-
produced by and through the formation of cultural networks that receive the input
of a variety of local and regional imprints as they are actualized in concrete works
(Appadurai). The local or national dimensions of these works are, however, stylized
to meet the demands of a de-­territorialized audience.
In this case, Pan’s Labyrinth re-­articulates the national issue of the memory of
the Spanish civil war in an emotional and psychological dimension that actually
disconnects the film from a memory anchored in a historically-­determined po-
litical question: that is, the role of violence in the formation of the Spanish Fascist
State and the destruction of the Spanish Republic. Although the film offers some
national references, they are substantially transformed by the omission of major
political references such as the Republic. The portrait of Vidal’s violence func-
tions, then, as a synecdoche by which the narrative of the film stylizes politically-­
organized repression during Fascism. The public dimension of violence, that is, the
use of terror as a political tool in the construction of the State, is displaced in the
narrative of the film by a focalization on an individual officer who seems to repre-
sent the workings of power as a whole. Thus, Vidal functions as a male tyrant, con-
flating in his person a male domination and the leader of the execution of violence.
In other words, he is both the individual patriarch and the chief of repression.
The film may appeal, then, to a wider audience that does not necessarily know
anything about the Spanish civil war, the persecution of democratic resistance by
Franco’s government or the current local (national) debates on the recuperation of
the memory of Fascist repression. Certainly the film portrays some of the issues of
the establishment of Fascism in Spain, and certainly it participates in the current
demand in Spain for inscribing the memory of death in public discourse. Never-
theless, as I argued above, Vidal’s mission is subordinated to the memory of his
father. There is no political connection between his personal orchestration of vio-
lence and the benefits the oligarchy receive. On the contrary, the connection be-
tween the oligarchy (portrayed in the scene of the meal) and his violence seems to
arise from different realms of motivations: greedy economic interests, on the one
hand, and the distancing personal investment in a memory of a death, on the other
hand.

A Post-National Spanish Imaginary 143

 The blurring of the political connection allows the film to reach a global audi-
ence that still can identify a Spanish dimension in the film. This Spanish identifica-
tion is not the nation of Spain or Mexico, but rather the Spanish of a region of cul-
tural production, the trans-­Atlantic “traffic” Smith has pointed to in his analysis of
the logistics of some such films. It is also a Spanish whose meaning and boundaries
need re-­definition. Works such as Pan’s Labyrinth exemplify what Santana sees as
the questioning of the “directa y singular correlación entre nación, lengua, territorio
y cultura que constituye el fundamento del nacionalismo romántico” (Santana 35).
This questioning of 19th-­century assumptions about the construction of the
nation also implies the fading of clear political structures in the representation
of power. The displacements and disjuncture of the traditional identification be-
tween territory, nation, culture and language are not just the result of theoretical
speculations or flimsy wishes of scholars who struggle to think and work in the
interdisciplinary realm of Hispanic Studies. These displacements are rather the ex-
pression of what David Harvey has described as the construction of a relative and
relational space in the material process of capital accumulation, which transgresses
the political territories formed during classical capitalism. Harvey sees regionality
as a fluid space in constant change, its limits and definitions being produced and
reorganized in the process of capital accumulation:

Regionality is always “under production” as well as “in the course of modifica-

tion” through capital accumulation. Further capital accumulation always has to
negotiate, confront and if necessary revolutionize the regional structures it had
earlier produced. (Harvey 104)

Contrary to the fixed borders of the nation-­State, the flexible limits of the region
are the consequence of its constant re-­articulation within new spaces of produc-
tion and circulation of capital. A region of cultural commodities correlates with the
growing expansion of imagined worlds, superseding the traditional correlation be-
tween the State and a national territory.
In this light, a Spanish region competes globally by means of a circulation of
cultural works that are not defined by the political territory of the nation. The ab-
sence of a national identity in the stylized narrative of Pan’s Labyrinth is equivalent
to the absence of a political structure in the region, a symptomatic phenomenon of
all global processes in which competition and accelerated accumulation of capital
are carried out outside of established, nationally-­anchored political identities.
(Callinicos; Harvey)
I believe that it is in this context that Eagleton sees how abstract and transcen-
dent notions of culture and spiritual legacies give way to the process of produc-
tion of exchange values and to the complex and contradictory interactions between
commodified value and identity:

144 The Comparatist 36 : 2012

 In a three-­way interaction, culture as spirituality is eroded by culture as com-
modity, to give birth to culture as identity. On a global scale, the relevant con-
flict here is between culture as commodity and culture as identity. (Eagleton 72)

Pan’s Labyrinth exemplifies, moreover, the transformations that take place within
Spanish as a brand of cultural works that are identified above all by their language.
The film contributes to constructing a Spanish imaginary that displaces or dis-
solves the political structures that configure the conflictive ideological relation-
ships between language and the nation-­State. Furthermore, the trans-­Atlantic di-
mension through which the film is produced and circulates globally points to a
re-­consideration of the status of the Spanish language within the traditionally de-
nominated Hispanic world.
The marketing of Spanish as a cultural identity and as a commodity indicates a
repositioning of the linguistic ideologies that have been associated with the nation-­
State and, in particular, with the political role of the language within conservative
and imperialistic (both old and new) conceptions of Spain (Resina; del Valle). The
representation of a male order and of the demands of the memory of death within
this order, generates a narrative that is not intended to be seen as belonging to
Spain or to Mexico, but rather that is conceived and marketed within a Spanish re-
gion. This Spanish is the language of a region of cultural production, something
that transcends the political relations of nations with each other or, even more, the
notion of a cultural hierarchy between these nations. This trans-­Atlantic traffic and
region of cultural production is a horizontal segment whose articulation within
global markets is contingent to its articulation with broader and larger regions of
cultural and film production.
In this sense, Pan’s Labyrinth is a post-­national Spanish work, a product of an
imaginary that is not centered on the political nation. This is not to say, of course,
that the nation-­State has disappeared from the scenario of the region, either this
Spanish region or any other region of cultural commodities. It is to say that the
nation-­State has been displaced from the imaginary representations of political
issues in some cultural commodities. The status of this displacement and its conse-
quences are another very complex issue that takes center stage in recent analyses of
the relations between the State, as a political form of liberal capitalism, and cultural
and economic global processes currently underway (Albrow; Robinson).

u University of South Carolina

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