Kathleen Kellett

storytelling and scholarship for young adults and children

TRANSCRIPT: Guillermo del Toro’s Monsters and Children under Fascism: “Pinocchio” and “Pan’s Labyrinth”

INTRODUCTION

            Hello, and welcome to The Monster & The Child, where childhood studies and monster studies collide! I am Dr. Kathleen Kellett, and before we even get into the video – did you see that amazing new intro image?? Illustrator and animator Kiernan Sjursen-Lien reached out with an offer to create artwork for the channel, which is just about the coolest thing that’s ever happened to me. So I’ve linked their info below in the description if you want to check out more of their work, which you absolutely should. And thank you so much again, Kiernan!

All right, so in this video, we are exploring the monster and the child under fascism in two works from Guillermo del Toro: Pinocchio and Pan’s Labyrinth. Del Toro, like myself, has made monsters pretty much his life’s work. Unsurprisingly, I have a great deal of fondness for him, even when I sometimes have mixed feelings about some of his projects. (A video where I discuss his interpretation of Frankenstein is in the queue.) When he nails it, though, he really nails it, and that’s why I’m particularly excited about the  Pan’s Labyrinth part of this video, because Pan’s Labyrinth is one of my favorite films. And, no matter the story, we can always trust del Toro to reveal the gaping inhumanity at the heart of fascism.

            Pan’s Labyrinth takes place in Francoist Spain, in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. Pinocchio, meanwhile, is based on source material that was written by Carlo Collodi in 1883, but del Toro’s film has moved its setting up to 20th century fascist Italy under Mussolini. Since we are dealing with these historical settings, it makes sense for us to ground ourselves in some historical facts first – though I will do so fairly briefly, since I’m for sure not an expert in either of these time periods. But starting with Spain, General Francisco Franco ruled as dictator from 1939 to his death in 1975. He led the Nationalist military forces in overthrowing the previous Spanish government, which was the Second Spanish Republic. During the Civil War in the 1930s, he had the support of other fascist leaders and their governments, including Hitler and Mussolini – not just, like, ideologically but also materially, with funds and equipment. Though Franco provided some small aid to Hitler in World War II, which started up right on the heels of the Spanish Civil War, he ultimately kept the country itself out of the war as a non-belligerent.

            Whether Franco’s government meets the whole political definition of “fascism” as a system of national governance, and whether it does so throughout the entirety of his rule, which obviously spanned decades, is a matter of debate, partially because there was an even more “classically fascist” party in Spain during the Civil War that Franco’s party had sort of merged with but also diverged from over the course of the war. Spain retained a monarchy alongside Franco’s government, and Franco was also very into restoring the power of the Catholic Church. His reverent attitudes towards traditional institutions of power can be seen as a distinction from the totalizing drive toward a fascist kind of futurism that can be seen in, for instance, Hitler’s government. But like I said, those particular political and historical distinctions are not my area, so for our purposes, honestly, I think fascism fits fine. Variations in functions of government aside, if we’re talking about the ways that far right-wing ideologies construct childhood – so what meanings they assign to young people, the roles they are expected to play in society, and the monstrous consequences for failing to do so – we’re going to find a lot more similarities than differences between Francoism and other forms of fascism … including many of the biggest political powers in the U.S. today.

            Meanwhile, Benito Mussolini is probably a bit more well-known to an Anglophone audience, because his country very much did not stay out of World War II, as Italy was one of the central Axis powers, alongside Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany. Mussolini ruled as the Italian dictator from 1922 to 1943, at which point Italy had lost the war and Mussolini was arrested by his own government. Nazi troops rescued him from prison (and then subsequently invaded Italy). And Mussolini was then captured by Italian partisans – so resistance fighters – in 1945 and summarily executed. Before that, though, he was arguably modern fascism’s most prominent pioneer. And both Mussolini and Franco, as part of their fascist agendas, did not neglect the power of youth.

            Now, obviously, there was another fascist dictator looming even larger over world history at the time, and it’s fairly well-known that Adolf Hitler knew the importance of utilizing young people, as evidenced by his creation of the Hitler Youth. For an interesting parodic film treatment of that subject, see Taika Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit. But since del Toro and his monsters have given us Pinocchio and Pan’s Labyrinth about Italy and Spain, respectively, those are sort of the specific contexts we’ll be focusing on here. However, I think you will see that, as much as nationalist ideologies like fascism insist upon the specific specialness of their respective nations, the playbook remains the same from country to country. If children are the future, then they must be both cherished and heavily controlled. And if a child fails to travel that straight line to the glorious future that the fascists intend? Then that’s not a kid; it’s a monster.

            But monsters, as always, are in the eye of the beholder – or, perhaps more accurately, in the mouth of the storyteller. It is not a new observation that the people who seek to stamp out what they see as monstrosity often are the most monstrous in their anti-human actions, but just because it’s trite doesn’t mean it’s not true. Guillermo del Toro, as a storyteller, pretty much lives in this lane. Sometimes he can overplay his hand a little, like with William straight-up telling his brother Victor Frankenstein “you’re the monster” – like, I know I’m the “subtlety is for chumps” guy, but come on, man – but when del Toro focuses on how clashing definitions of monstrosity and power affect people on the margins, he can make magic. And those people on the margins in Pinocchio and Pan’s Labyrinth are children, imbued with symbolic power but denied systemic power. They are thus misused and misunderstood by adults. Pinocchio and Ofelia engage with their fascist environments at oblique angles. They refuse to come to the conclusions and take the actions that would secure the fascist future – even if that makes them monsters.

DISOBEDIENCE AS VIRTUE: THE MONSTER-CHILD IN PINOCCHIO

            Okay, before we get into the meat of the analysis, let’s get a few criticisms of del Toro’s Pinocchio out of the way. Namely: what is up with the songs? This movie is technically a musical, though it only has a smattering of musical numbers – but honestly, thank God, because the songs it does have are so weirdly terrible. Like, melodically, lyrically – the scansion is all off – I have no idea what happened here. I mean, this is a stop-motion animation film, so this is one of if not the most labor-intensive ways to make a movie. So much incredible care went into each character and set piece, and then the songs kick in, and woof. None of this has anything to do with monsters and childhood and fascism, but if anyone hadn’t seen the movie and then wanted to based on this video, I just felt like I had to kind of warn you. I do think it’s generally worth watching, and like I said, the songs are sparse, but the music here is really just a baffling artistic misstep.

            That aside, there is a lot of interesting stuff going on with this film. The screenplay was written by del Toro and Patrick McHale, the creator of Over the Garden Wall, which is one of my absolute favorite pieces of media. In my opinion, Pinocchio doesn’t rise to the heights of either of those writers’ respective masterpieces, but it does give the viewer plenty to wrestle with when it comes to the experience of childhood in a totalitarian state.

As I mentioned, this film mostly takes place under Mussolini’s rule, in between the two World Wars. In its prologue, however, the First World War is not yet over, and this is the context in which Geppetto the woodworker and his flesh-and-blood son Carlo live. Their home is in a remote village, and their lives at first don’t seem particularly touched by the war. Carlo is a sweet, obedient kid whom Geppetto loves to bring with him to work as he carves a new crucifix for the local church. But one night, a passing plane lets loose its bomb – not even aiming at the village, just lightening its load – and it hits the church, where Carlo had run back inside to retrieve a perfect pinecone that he had found. The child dies.

Geppetto plants the pinecone on Carlo’s grave, and as the years pass, a tree grows – but so does Geppetto’s despair. Soon the grieving father is nothing more than the town drunk. One particularly rough night, he chops down the tree, in which a talking cricket has taken residence. This cricket’s name is Sebastian and he is voiced by Ewan McGregor, which activated me like a sleeper agent because he was my most intense adolescent celebrity crush – so shout out to the childhood friend group and our years-long mania for Moulin Rouge. Unfortunately, the cricket is pretty annoying here – in ways that are thematically relevant, I think, but he did have my wife and me groaning more often than not. Anyway, Geppetto tries to remake Carlo out of wood, but he only gets halfway through his alcohol-fueled project before passing out. That’s when the blue fairy shows up.

Of course, this being a Guillermo del Toro vehicle, she’s less fairy – even though she’s referred to as the Wood Sprite – and more terrifying eldritch angel. Six wings, covered with eyes, the whole nine yards. We love to see it. Not only do I just personally enjoy this whole aesthetic, but her strangeness points to a deeper and more mysterious reality behind and beyond a culture that is rapidly calcifying under its fascist influence. Fascism tries to impose its own order, but this mysterious being clearly exists outside of all that. She takes pity on Geppetto and grants the puppet life so he can bring joy back to the old man. The cricket objects, since he was living there, and the sprite says that if the cricket acts as a moral guide to the boy, whom she christens Pinocchio, then she will grant the cricket a wish if he calls upon her later. Sebastian begrudgingly accepts – and then the chaos begins.

Immediately, Pinocchio is uncontrollable. Geppetto is deeply freaked out when he wakes up to find the puppet scuttling about his attic – and I do mean “scuttling.” He very much has a monstrous, uncanny appearance, with a body that moves in disjointed, unsettling ways, not like a child’s or even a person’s until after he has had some time to observe Geppetto. He sings a (terrible) song about how everything in the world is brand new and exciting to him. He’s essentially like if a newborn infant had both speech and mobility, and he kind of proves why it’s a good thing that they don’t. Pinocchio smashes through Geppetto’s stuff, enchanted – and distracted – by everything, with no concept of what it means to listen or obey.

Despite the Wood Sprite’s intentions, Geppetto is not thrilled with this turn of events, and he repeatedly protests that he is not Pinocchio’s papa, despite the fact that Pinocchio immediately identifies him as such. Pinocchio also frightens the other villagers in church, and they blame Geppetto for the creation of a demonic puppet when he never even finished the crucifix. The priest and the leading local fascist official, Podesta, later pay Geppetto and Pinocchio a visit. Podesta, who brings along his own son Candlewick, is concerned about the bad influence Pinocchio could exert over the town. He says that if Pinocchio is going to remain in the village, he will need to be educated so that he can become a model fascist youth like Candlewick, who he claims is “Virile, like his father!” Always a bad sign when a dad says something like that. Candlewick, for his part, acts out this purported virility as cruelty, and he urges Pinocchio to bring his feet closer to the fire, which predictably ignites them. Yet Podesta is even more excited when he realizes that Pinocchio can’t feel pain. Wouldn’t that be remarkable in a soldier? All they need to do is make sure Pinocchio is trained up like a proper fascist child, and then he can be everything the fatherland needs him to be. So it’s time for Pinocchio to go to school.

Pinocchio’s education goes immediately awry when he is intercepted by Count Volpe, a sketchy traveling circus ringmaster who sees big money in a living puppet. It’s not necessary to go into a blow-by-blow of this plotline, but it is important to point out that the adults around Pinocchio repeatedly view him only through the lens of what he can do for them. To Podesta, he’s a potential national military asset. To Count Volpe, he’s a money-making machine. Even to the Wood Sprite, he’s a means of making Geppetto, another adult, happy. Pinocchio has entered into his childhood with a purpose; the adults just disagree on what that purpose is.

Count Volpe’s shrewdness is demonstrated not just by his seizing the opportunity of a living puppet, but also by his willingness to tailor his entertainment material to the fascist powers that be. He has Pinocchio perform a song about serving the fatherland and Il Duce and being eager to fight, like any good fascist child. This act catches the ear of Mussolini himself, who wants to patronize Count Volpe’s circus, much to the grifter’s delight. (Grifters and fascists have always gone hand in hand.)

Mussolini’s interest in this type of display of childhood is pretty historically accurate. In Mussolini’s Children: Race and Elementary Education in Fascist Italy, Eden K. McLean writes, “Youth, both the notion and the demographic, was a central theme of Fascism. Its associations with beginnings, strength, energy, virility, and optimism were fundamentally useful to a movement and regime founded in the aftermath of World War I that pledged to fight against anything ‘weakening’ the Italian nation-state or race” (23). Similarly, in Shaping the New Man: Youth Training Regimes in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, Alessio Ponzio writes, “Fascism was a forward-looking regime, and the Fascists knew that only the new generations, with time, could attain the all-desired national greatness that Italy had lost over the centuries and that Mussolini craved to recover” (35). A nice big spectacle of patriotic youth was therefore right up Mussolini’s alley. A show like Count Volpe’s supported the thesis that children wanted to carry out these patriotic duties that fascist ideologies and policies assigned to them, and that they would do so cheerfully and obediently, marching proudly into the future.

Unfortunately for fascists and for Count Volpe, obedience is not actually an essential trait of childhood, despite so many societies constructing it as such. With the help of Count Volpe’s put-upon monkey, Spazzatura, Pinocchio realizes that Count Volpe has not been keeping his promises to send the money that Pinocchio earns back to Geppetto. Pinocchio and Spazzatura therefore conspire to sabotage Count Volpe’s big show for the dictator. Mussolini himself is depicted as a ridiculous figure in this film: tiny, beady-eyed, not very bright. He settles in for a fun circus show and instead gets Pinocchio singing about the great leader pooping and farting. This song is somehow the most successful in the film because it’s at least supposed to be bad. It is a pointedly childish way of fighting back – using humor associated with immaturity to completely cut down the self-seriousness of the great fascist vision.

This sequence also points to the values embedded in this iteration of Pinocchio – and the specificity of using Pinocchio himself as a figure to deliver this message. Pinocchio as a character is associated with learning correct moral behavior and facing consequences when he does not, with the most iconic example being his nose growing when he lies. In the various iterations of this story, from the original to the Disney film and beyond, when Pinocchio disobeys Geppetto or other benevolent authority figures, generally bad things happen to him. But this film wants to use this character and all his associated themes of morality to make the argument that sometimes disobedience is virtuous. Pinocchio’s little poop song is a refusal to embody the kind of childhood that extractive adults like Count Volpe and Mussolini prize. It’s a celebration of chaotic decision-making and childhood agency.

But it also has consequences. Mussolini may be ridiculous, but that doesn’t mean he’s not dangerous. He orders his soldiers to shoot Pinocchio – the disobedient child has no place in the fascist future. Pinocchio dies for the first time.

Pinocchio is met in a halfway-to-the-afterlife space by the sister of the Wood Sprite – equally strange and not quite as charmed by Pinocchio. She explains the rules: since he is not a real boy, he cannot truly die. He has to wait a little longer in this liminal space with her each successive time he gets killed, after which she will send him back to his wooden body. Seems like a good deal to Pinocchio, and before he knows it, he wakes up to the astonishment of those around him. Podesta in particular is thrilled. This is even better than Pinocchio not feeling pain. Though existing outside of life and death usually is the mark of a monster, Podesta believes that a child who can’t die will be the ultimate gift to the fatherland. Ponzio writes, “Like the prewar Nationalists and Futurists, Fascists thought that young people possessed special regenerative qualities” (27). Obviously, in this film that is made more literal than it would have played out in real life, but it’s a great metaphor for how the fascists imbued childhood with the power to essentially raise the nation from the dead. But in order for that to happen, every moment of their education had to be tightly controlled.

Mussolini himself worked for a brief stint as an elementary school teacher, before going the dictator route instead. His mother was also a teacher, and McLean details how Mussolini made this legacy part of his sort of personal mythology. In Pinocchio, Podesta is the mouthpiece of Mussolini’s drive for fascist education, and he proclaims, “As with all great empires, the strength of Italy will be forged in its youth.” Mussolini established an increasingly all-encompassing and mandatory system of youth training programs to ensure this forging. Educators needed to be carefully chosen, as now, according to Ponzio, “The family and the schools were not suitable for carrying out the Fascist educational process,” since those parents and teachers probably still held the values of “liberal Italy” in which they were raised (34). Therefore, they needed additional programs, staffed with loyal party members. McLean chronicles how “Education was to take place at all times, with excursions, competitions, lessons, and other collective activities that would encourage children to work harder and become stronger individuals so that they could better serve the nation” (15). Both McLean and Ponzio emphasize how important physical education was within this educational regime, and that’s what the film shows us, as well, with Pinocchio, Candlewick, and many other young boys being whisked away to play war games.

At first, this is kind of fun, since they get to play paintball capture-the-flag. This sequence is, I believe, intended to mirror the Toy Island section of the original story, wherein childhood delights lead to upsetting ends. Pinocchio and Candlewick, as captains of their respective teams, win simultaneously, which they find delightful. Candlewick has shed his initial animosity towards Pinocchio, and now he is happy to have him as a friend. But this is not what Podesta wants. Their willingness to tie speaks to an unwillingness to be ruthless – and that won’t do for a fascist youth. He orders Candlewick to shoot Pinocchio with a real gun. An air raid starts up as Candlewick balks, demonstrating the extremely real stakes of the situation. The other boys are sent out with guns and gas masks. But Candlewick will not carry out his father’s order. He tells him, “I’m not afraid to say no. Are you?” He punctuates this rebuke from the realm of childhood with a paintball shot, and it is echoed by the adult world of war moments later: Podesta is killed by a bomb from above.

Pinocchio’s story is not over, and more things happen that aren’t as directly related to the portrayal of fascism, but the theme of defying untrustworthy adults continues. Also significantly, Pinocchio uses his growing nose to help Geppetto and Sebastian escape the belly of the giant dogfish, as he extends it to form a bridge to the blowhole. Once again, the implication is that those hard-and-fast rules of morality that adults hand down to children do, in fact, have exceptions.

In this version of the story, Pinocchio does not actually become a flesh-and-blood boy at the end. Instead, when the fish escape goes wrong – the danger was compounded by floating mines – he gets stuck in his in-between space with the Wood Sprite’s sister. Having died several times at this point, he has to wait quite a while to go back, but he knows that the longer he remains, the more likely it is that Geppetto will die, too, without his son there to save him. So he deliberately breaks the rules of his immortality, becoming a real – that is, mortal – boy. He doesn’t change his composition, but when the wooden child succeeds in saving Geppetto, it’s at the cost of his own life. Sebastian, however, calls in his favor and brings Pinocchio back one last time. This time, the life sticks, except of course it doesn’t for everyone else. One by one, Geppetto, Spazzatura the monkey, and even Sebastian all die. Pinocchio remains, made of wood. Sebastian, from the afterlife, assures us that Pinocchio is real, though. There’s a lot going on here about the nature of love and mortality, and I’m not sure if I feel like the film really sticks the landing on all of it, but one thing that is significant to my analysis is that it is not obedience or discipline that make Pinocchio real. It’s love – and also sacrifice, which is one of those “virtues” that can get really dicey depending on who’s defining it. Fascists love telling other people to make sacrifices for the greater good. But in Pinocchio’s case, it is the sort of selfless sacrifice that comes from genuine caring. It doesn’t matter that he’s impulsive or immature or chaotic; those were never really faults that he needed to overcome in the first place. His inability to model the “correct behavior” of fascism is what keeps him real, instead of the puppet that the ideal fascist child ultimately is meant to be.

INNOCENT BLOOD? MONSTROUS GIRLHOOD IN PAN’S LABYRINTH

            You may have noticed that literally all the children we talked about with Pinocchio were boys. You may have also noticed, due to the general state of the world right now, that gender roles matter a lot in fascist ideologies. This was certainly no exception in Francoist Spain. In The Seduction of Modern Spain: The Female Body and the Francoist Body Politic, Aurora G. Morcillo explains how Franco’s regime revived centuries-old Catholic gendered virtues for their new twentieth-century nationalism. Spain itself was imagined as a female body, both nurturing and vulnerable. This feminine country would give life, but it also needed to be protected and defended by strong men and boys. As for the girls and women within the country, they were expected to live up to the example of this personified, almost deified nation. Morcillo writes, “Young women must prepare themselves to become angels of the home, winning the respect of humankind by preserving their physical and spiritual virginity” (15-16).

            It is in this starkly gender-divided setting that we meet Ofelia, the protagonist of Pan’s Labyrinth. She is the newly-minted stepdaughter of Captain Vidal, a prominent Francoist military leader. The film takes place after the end of the Spanish Civil War, so at this point, Franco has won, but there are still pockets of armed resistance in the countryside, and part of Vidal’s role is to root them out. Vidal has married Ofelia’s previously widowed mother Carmen, who is now heavily pregnant with Vidal’s child. To Vidal, that unborn child, whom he is positive will be a son, is all that matters. Ofelia is, at best, just kind of there.

            But the opening narration of the film defies this position of lesser importance for Ofelia. We are told that in the mystical Underground Realm, a place of fairies and monsters, a princess was long ago lost. The denizens of this realm live in hope that the princess may one day return and save them. Since this information is given to the viewer by way of introduction to Ofelia, it is clear that she is the one who holds this great destiny. We already know that she is meant to be more than just the domestic nurturer that her new national government would require her to be.

            Near the sprawling forest estate is a labyrinth with an ancient well at its center. It is here that Ofelia meets the Faun, who informs her of her destiny. To test her worthiness, she must complete three tasks before the next full moon. Ofelia’s first task is to retrieve a key from a gluttonous toad, who has been squatting in the roots of an ancient fig tree, slowly killing it. When Ofelia sets off on this task, she is dressed in finery that her mother has provided for an important dinner that Vidal is holding that evening. The tree is all muddy, with the soil itself suffering due to the toad’s presence. Ofelia takes care to remove her fine dress and hang it up on a branch before crawling into the roots – but the wind takes it off and casts it into the mud. Not that it would really matter anyway, because Ofelia’s shoes, hair, face, etc., all get completely muddied in her confrontation with the toad, during which she reprimands the monster for his selfish destruction.

Meanwhile, Vidal is hosting his opulent banquet for the elites of the fascist regime. The ties between the grotesque beasts of the fairy realm and Captain Vidal are not subtle, but they are searing. We know that the people in the hills surrounding the estate have been starving; like the toad, Vidal hoards his resources and destroys everything around him. But this is not the scandal upon Ofelia’s return: her dirtiness is. Angel of the home, she certainly is not. Pointedly, Vidal tells his guests that he wants his son born in a “new, clean Spain.” Ofelia’s inability to model that cleanliness makes her monstrous in her stepfather’s ideology: tainted, contaminating, a scourge to Spain itself. Morcillo writes that “Men’s and women’s bodies became indispensable members (‘limbs’) of the Francoist mystic body politic; men were to be soldiers and producers, and women political and biological reproductive mothers” (19). By not progressing through her girlhood in a “clean” straight line towards domesticity, Ofelia demonstrates how the promise of childhood, so emphasized in fascist ideologies, can easily turn into a dire threat.

One of the most important things to realize about fascism or fascist-adjacent ideologies is that they are not just harmful but they are also foolish and factually incorrect. The efficiency and might and unstoppable nature of the fascist machine is just propaganda, and it always has been. Like, yes, obviously, fascism has done immense historical damage and continues to do so, and it has ruined and ended untold lives, but this is not because fascists are uniquely powerful or good at what they do. Fascism is held together through violence because it can’t hold itself together any other way. It’s a dumb and bad system of governance led by willfully ignorant people. To wit: Vidal is obsessed with his clean perfect family in his clean perfect Spain, but his wife’s pregnancy is not going well. The reproductive role that she is forced to inhabit is killing her, and the only one doing anything about it is Ofelia. Following the Faun’s advice, she puts a mandrake – a living root baby – in fresh milk beneath her mother’s bed, which does seem to alleviate Carmen’s symptoms. Vidal, meanwhile, is over here telling the doctor, “If you have to choose, save the baby.” This makes sense based on the immense fascist futurity bestowed upon male children, but also it makes an obvious lie out of this complementarian view of men and women as limbs of the thriving body politic of Spain. Another thing to remember about fascists: they don’t actually believe in all the lofty ideals that they say they do. Having failed to cultivate the perfect family unit that technically is his job to do, Vidal is more than willing to just amputate the feminine limb of that body.

The next monster that we encounter is the iconic Pale Man. Ofelia is sent on her second quest to retrieve a dagger from his lair, and she is given the standard fairy realm rule that she cannot eat any of the food from his table. The Pale Man is another hoarding monster, but the beautiful banquet laid out before his immobile form is not what actually sustains him. Ofelia sees a pile of children’s shoes that stand as monument to his past victims. Del Toro packs a lot of references and inspirations into this scene. The Pale Man’s design is inspired by a Japanese yokai, the Tenome. That’s where we get the blind face and the eyes in the palms of the hands. Del Toro is nothing if not a connoisseur of the world’s monsters. But the pile of shoes brings to mind another historical reference: the stolen and discarded shoes of victims of the Holocaust. Though Spain remained a noncombatant in World War II, the imagery here ties the violence of the fascist ideologies of the 1940s together – especially their violence against children.

In an interview, del Toro further explained that the Pale Man specifically represents the involvement – as he says, “not just complicity, but participation” – of the Catholic Church in Franco’s regime. He said that the Pale Man “represents fascism and the Church eating the children when they have a perversely abundant banquet in front of them. There is almost a hunger to eat innocence. A hunger to eat purity.” Now, obviously, as the childhood studies scholar that I am, that rhetoric about innocence and purity pushes my buttons a bit. It is always important to recognize that the social construction of childhood innocence is shared across the political spectrum. Adults disagree on what that innocence really means, but in general, the notion of an inherent innocence attached to childhood – a moral superiority over adulthood, a pristine, almost spiritual goodness – is immensely common. And as a critical scholar of this stuff, I think we all need to be interrogating it, because it does have a lot of unintended negative consequences for actual kids. But, I mean, del Toro’s point stands. The Catholic Church was a major supporter of Franco’s regime, as they enjoyed a mutual relationship of hierarchical power within his system of governance. And we all know the many ways in which the Church has betrayed and harmed countless children in its care all over the world.

Ofelia fails to refrain from eating a single perfect grape in the Pale Man’s hall. (Why should she have to? Why should she have to be sent to bed without dinner when she returned home muddy? Why is withholding food an acceptable punishment for children – or for anyone?) She manages to escape with her life, but the Faun tells her that she has failed her quest. She will not take her place as princess, and the fairy realm will die. Meanwhile, Vidal finds the mandrake root under his wife’s bed and furiously throws it into the fire. Only Ofelia can hear its infant screaming. Carmen tells her daughter, “You’re getting older. Soon you’ll see that life isn’t like fairytales.” It is time for Ofelia to learn, she says, that “magic does not exist.” It doesn’t, at least, for Carmen, because Vidal has destroyed it. She goes into early labor and hemorrhages. The baby boy is saved. Carmen is not.

Ofelia would be alone now if not for Mercedes, who works in Vidal’s kitchen and, unbeknownst to Vidal, also for the rebel partisans. Ofelia knows and keeps Mercedes’s secret, and Mercedes cares for Ofelia. As an adult, Mercedes has learned how to keep her unruly womanhood hidden in a way that Ofelia has not yet managed to hide her unruly girlhood. The assumption of enclosed domesticity is what allows Mercedes to conceal her revolutionary actions. But it is Mercedes’s love for the out-of-place girl child that gets her caught, as she is intercepted trying to smuggle Ofelia away from her dangerous home. Mercedes wounds Vidal by slicing open his cheek, finally literally destroying the clean façade that he keeps up. In a film full of grotesqueries, the most unsettling image to me is when Vidal, after sewing up his own face, takes a drink of liquor to fortify himself and presumably clean the wound. The way the blood seeps through the bandage as the alcohol hits it makes me wince every time.

As Vidal outwardly begins to embody his violence, the Faun returns to Ofelia. He is willing to give her one last chance, as long as she takes the Pale Man’s dagger and her infant brother to the well. To steal her brother away and try to ensure her own – and the partisans’ – safety from Vidal, Ofelia enters his study with magic chalk and poisons his drink. So a note here about the magic chalk of it all: throughout the movie, Ofelia is the only one to interact directly with the magical realm. Many people have interpreted the fairytale elements of this film as figments of her imagination. When I taught this film in my classes last year, nearly all of my students had the same interpretation. I, however, do not, and the seeming reality of the magical chalk is only part of the reasoning. Like Pinnochio, Pan’s Labyrinth uses del Toro’s baroque grotesque aesthetic sensibilities to point at a deeper reality beyond the rigid rules of authoritarianism. So I don’t view Ofelia’s ability to see the strange, rich, messy fairy realm as just her childish imagination running away with her. I think the fact that the adults don’t see it is their imaginations failing them. Fascism is inherently unimaginative. It does not want its subjects to imagine. I therefore think that interpreting the fairy realm as real is more in line with the film’s themes than interpreting it as just Ofelia’s method of coping.

In “Narrative Desire and Disobedience in Pan’s Labyrinth,” Jennifer Orme analyzes this messy “reality” of the film as a central facet of its valorization of, again, disobedience, just as we saw in Pinocchio. Orme argues that “Pan’s Labyrinth actively pits the monologic monovocality of Captain Vidal and fascism against the dialogic multivocality of Ofelia, Mercedes, and the fairy tale” (223). In other words, Vidal, like all fascists, lives in a world that only allows for “the paternal story cycle,” a master narrative of patriarchal power and control (231). Orme argues, and I agree, that the film resists this fascist version of events by refusing to uphold Vidal’s world as more real than Ofelia’s. Orme writes, “this juxtaposition of congruent realities produces critiques of monologic totalitarian discourses and endorses stories of magical transformation as forms of resistance and vehicles of hope” (223).

But resistance and hope are never easy under fascism. Ofelia, closely pursued by her drugged stepfather, runs through the labyrinth to complete her final task. But when she arrives at the well, the Faun demands that she hand her brother over as a sacrifice. He needs to spill “the blood of an innocent” to reopen the way to the Underground Realm. He says he only needs a drop, but Ofelia doesn’t believe him, which: good for her. The Faun is just another adult man trying to use children for his own ends, and Ofelia refuses to fall for it. The Faun asks if she’s really willing to sacrifice her throne for this baby who took everything from her: her mother and her safety. But Ofelia knows that’s not her brother’s fault. That’s just the meaning that everyone else has placed on him, just like Vidal has placed upon Ofelia the meaning of a filthy, unwanted creature, a failure of femininity. She declares: “I will sacrifice.”

And, indeed, she will. Vidal makes it to the heart of the labyrinth, where he shoots Ofelia and takes the baby. But he is not triumphant. As he emerges from the labyrinth, he is met by the escaped Mercedes and the resistance fighters. Vidal stops his precious patriarchal pocket watch, a relic of his own dead father, and tells Mercedes to tell his son when he died. He begins another order: “Tell him –” But Mercedes cuts him off with “No.” She informs the fascist, “He won’t even know your name.” With that, the resistance kills him. Fascist fathers don’t tend to make it out of del Toro films alive.

As for Ofelia? Mercedes finds her bleeding out in the center of the labyrinth, and she hums her a wordless lullaby as she slips away. But where does she slip away to? We watch her blood stream into the well, and then we are transported to the Underground Realm, where Ofelia arrives in splendor. A wise old man sits on a towering throne, as does the queen – her mother, Carmen. They welcome her in and say that she passed the final test by refusing to sacrifice her brother. Now, do I buy that? I’m not sure. I remain wary of the Faun and his intentions; I think Ofelia may have changed the story on him in ways that he did not expect. Still, the king congratulates Ofelia: “It was your blood and not that of an innocent that made you worthy of the throne.”

That is really interesting wording to me! Of course, I am relying on the English translation, here so if I’m missing anything in Spanish, let me know. But the film could have easily led us to believe that it was Ofelia’s blood that was actually the “blood of an innocent” that completed the final task, if not for this deliberate statement to the contrary. Ofelia isn’t innocent – not in the way that any adult would define that term. She ate from the Pale Man’s table. She arrived at her stepfather’s hall covered in mud. She disobeyed at every turn. Ofelia’s innocence – that most sacred construct of childhood, especially for the angels-in-training that girls in Franco’s Spain are supposed to be – is simply not important here. Innocence is not a virtue in a guilty world.

CONCLUSION: FASCISM IS ANTI-CHILD

            Under Franco, thousands upon thousands of children were kidnapped. Peter Anderson, in his article “Spain’s Lost Children,” explains that Franco stole these children “from political opponents, placed them in care homes and brought them up to hold their parents and their values in contempt.” It didn’t just stop with the children of dissidents, either; children were also taken from non-political prisoners, from families attempting to leave Spain, and from just the poor. Many of these children were sent out in forced adoptions to Franco’s loyalists. This is not a tactic that is relegated only to the past, unfortunately. Russia has been carrying out similar culturally genocidal operations by stealing Ukrainian children and systematically breaking down their Ukrainian identities, to be replaced with Russian propaganda. And again, I’m not here to split hairs of fascism versus authoritarianism versus totalitarianism – those distinctions do matter in terms of the practicalities of governance, but ideologically, we’re dealing with a lot of the same, then and now.

            The rationale for such actions under Franco was that “political beliefs promoted in centre and left-wing families could ‘intoxicate’ children and ‘damage the mental health of future generations.’” Sound familiar? In 2023, Eden McLean – the author of Mussolini’s Children whom I was quoting earlier – published an op-ed with Scientific American titled “Fascism’s History Offers Lessons about Today’s Attacks on Education.” She was responding in particular to the crackdowns on school libraries and curricula in Florida under Governor Ron DeSantis, who very much was reproducing the rhetoric of expunging materials that would “intoxicate” and “damage” children’s minds. She wrote that, historically, “At the heart of fascist political strategy was the expansion of state control over public and private life under the facades of popular support and common good.”

            Now, is the “Don’t Say Gay” bill the same as kidnapping children or forcing them into nationalist youth programs? No. But they are branches that grow from the same ideological roots. Besides, in 2026, the United States is kidnapping children – immigrant children, or the children of immigrants, or just kids who look like they might not be white. Because fascists can harp on the preciousness of childhood all they want, but we all know they don’t mean all childhood. That’s what happens when you have an ideology that reduces people to symbols. In-group men are the heroes, in-group women are the angelic broodmares, and in-group children are the glorious future. Everyone else – regardless of age – are inhuman enemies. Monsters. They are to be reeducated if possible, or expelled – at best. It’s no accident that both Pinocchio and Ofelia die in their stories. They experience resurrections because of their greater narrative significance about the power of disobedience, of unruliness, of larger, stranger truths that can triumph over fascism – and I believe in those things, immensely, wholeheartedly. But they only actually bring people back to life in fantasy.

            Fascism and fascism-adjacent systems are always anti-child. At best, you have the hermeneutical injustice of withholding “subject-appropriate, expert-developed materials” from kids, which, as McLean points out, “limits their ability to assess sources for reliability and accuracy.” This makes children more vulnerable to manipulation and abuse and things like being exploited for war as soon as they’re legally old enough – or, in plenty of historical examples, before that. And that’s the in-group ones! The disobedient ones – whether it’s their actions that are disobedient or simply their gendered and/or racialized bodies – are subjected to so much worse. And all the while, the public messaging is that all of this is necessary to protect children. To “secure their future,” as the famous white supremacist phrase goes.

            This first month of 2026 has been bad in my country. Fascist violence abounds, and kids are among its many victims. At least I’m still able to talk about this on the internet, which is something, I guess, but man, I feel helpless over here. All I can really offer is that we have to stay disobedient, especially for those whose “disobedience” is not their own choice, like those Othered kids. I’ve provided a list of resources in the description, mostly focused on opposing ICE and CBP, which are about as anti-child and anti-human as national organizations can get.

            Ofelia is told that she is too old for fairytales. But del Toro’s films demonstrate that it is not fairytales that are simplistic, immature, incomplete narratives. That distinction belongs to fascism. The fairy princess and the wooden boy are too real to be contained with such rigid, artificial boundaries. All children are. A child is not a symbol, despite the ways they are used in fascist propaganda. A child is not an unfinished project, an investment waiting to pay off. Children are complete human beings, with all of the messiness and complexity that that entails. We need to tell the stories that acknowledge this basic truth, and we need to let these stories fuel us as we fight for a world that does not either squash children down or throw them away.

            This was a heavy one to come back on for the video essays, but I hope that you found it thought-provoking. I’m glad to be back in the analysis saddle. New video essays will come out every two weeks, and on the off-weeks, I will be releasing chapters from my YA manuscript, Our Sharp Forsaken Teeth. I am also gearing up to start launching my book club and mentorship programs – and fundraising will be coming soon, and don’t worry, there will be plenty of perks that I hope will pique your interest. Any support you give this channel also is going straight into that programming, which will provide teenagers with spaces to connect with peers, share their thoughts and ideas on literature and politics, and spearhead their own projects on the topics that matter most to them. Outside of protesting and supporting anti-fascist organizations like the ones I’ve linked below, this is the kind of stuff that I am best suited to do to hopefully create a little pro-youth light in all of this darkness. So thank you so much for any support you give me on here, on Patreon, and in the weeks to come. I will see you again soon for more monstrous food for thought.

Resources to resist American fascism:

Most of the groups I’ve been paying attention to are local to where I live, and I encourage you to investigate your local organizing scene, as well! If you happen to be around Philly, the New Sanctuary Movement (https://www.sanctuaryphiladelphia.org/) is a great place to start.

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/TheMonsterAndTheChild

Kiernan Sjursen-Lien’s art: https://www.kiernansjursenlien.com/

Media discussed:

  • Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, dir. Guillermo del Toro & Mark Gustafson (2022)
  • Pan’s Labyrinth, dir. Guillermo del Toro (2006)

References:

kathleenmkellett

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