Ashley

I also found the Tokyo club shot particularly compelling.  The flashing strobe light, the pounding music, and chaotic shots of frantic clubbers spliced with scenes of Chieko’s face (as she looks upon the scene with awe and finally devastation) devoid of sound.  Her emotional desolation is compounded by her auditory isolation and we are invited to experience both as she does in this sensory and emotionally intense scene.  I found myself comparing this segment with one of the concluding segments of 21 grams, where Naomi Watts is cradling Sean Penn’s bloodied body in the hotel bathroom and the sound cuts before building to an exploding static cacophony.  The disruption and manipulation of sound in both scenes signals their importance to the audience while adding to their emotional resonance.

Apparently the Tokyo story in Babel was a point of contention for the class.  While I do find it strikingly different from the other two storylines in some ways, I have a hard time feeling it is disastrously “out of time” (forgive the phrase) with the rest of the film.  In fact I found it just as emotionally compelling as Brad Pitts desperate efforts to save his wounded wife in Morocco or their children’s plight in the Mexican desert.  And while is a portrait of heightened teen angst, I find Denby’s cursory and condensed synopsis, he refers to Chieko  as “a girl grieving over her mother’s suicide, and longing for some sort of sexual contact—exposes herself to boys and men,” particularly repugnant.  I agree with comments others have made concerning Chieko as an emblem of isolation and the barriers to communication even within one’s own home environment.  In this respect I feel that she does connect quite well to the other two plots.

Like many others have noted, I think the Pale Man is one of the most striking images of Pan’s Labyrinth.  He’s disturbing on a number of levels. He a highly distorted humanoid creature, without eyes he places in is palms.  Moreover, he only “awakens” when Ofelia eats from his table.  The feast set out before her is clearly a temptation, contrasted against the wartime deprivations suffered in the real world.  It also highlights the fact that the Pale Man does not eat traditional food but rather has an inhuman craving for flesh (he also has a keen sense of smell which he uses to track his prey).  His grotesque physical form (skeletal frame, excess flesh drooping from his arms and jowls, blackened fingertips) is equally unsettling and is perhaps a visual manifestation of his deviant and distorted appetite.  As terrifying as the Pale Man is, I’ve always thought of him as slightly cumbersome, he’s big and gangly and somewhat slow moving, impaired by his lack of eye sockets.  And while this may be necessary to facilitate Ofelia’s escape, it almost adds to his overall creepiness.

I’m interested in Guillermo del Toro’s statements about collaboration in Pan’s Labyrinth?  While in Ofelia’s fantasy world it is often unclear whom to trust, in Ofelia’s reality, good and evil are more clearly delineated.  The resistance fighters and Mercedes are images of courage, righteousness, humanity, and self sacrifice just as the Captain and his henchmen are unspeakably cruel, immoral, and self-obsessed (at their best bumbling and ineffective).  The Captain is an especially iconic (even heavy-handed) image of evil.  I think the one place where shades of grey are most evident is within the character of Ofelia’s mother.   She is a woman of dire circumstances who makes a morally questionable decision as a result.   While to a certain extent I think that this absolves her, we are constantly reminded that she has placed Ofelia in frightening proximity to evil, and that her family and subsequently herself (she dies following the Captain’s orders to save his unborn child over his new wife) are in increasing danger. Ofelia’s exploits in Pan’s labyrinth may be a delusion, but ultimately it’s her mother that’s truly delusional.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the two worlds of Pan’s Labyrinth.  I was always struck by the way Ofelia’s fantasy world often mirrored the terror and grotesqueness of her reality.  I had never really considered the fact that other cultures have construction of fantasy that incorporate darkness in ways contemporary “Disney” fairytales do not.   This seems to be a pretty good explanation for Ofelia’s harrowing experiences within the fantastical underworld.  Fantasy offers an escape, be it into a world of impossible beauty and magic (which enables us to envision our deepest, most unattainable longings) or into a world of impossible cruelty (which allows us to explore our deepest fears within a safe, imaginary setting).  In light of this, I wonder about the grim meaning of fantasy as escape into a world that’s no darker, and at times, no less real, than reality.  Is it purely and adult fairy tale with adult themes?

Del Toro’s Hell Boy is an interesting filmic adaptation which lingers as much on explosive special effects and physical bravado as humor, heart, and empathy, especially in regards to its main character.  The end result is a film that even someone outside of the traditional comic book demographic can find relatable.  Hell Boy’s cartoonishly intimidating exterior, underworld origins, and near lust for violent exchange are all mediated by Del Toro’s expert efforts at “humanizing the demon.” From the very outset, Hell Boy is pointedly distanced from the very evil he is supposedly an embodiment of.  Baby Hell Boy is co-opted by allied forces when he is offered a Baby Ruth candy bar, revealing a quirky sweet-tooth which he carries into adulthood. There are other elements: Hell Boy’s love of cats, his pained desire for Liz, incredible appetite, plentiful verbal quips, and his all too human longing to fit in (Hell Boy routinely files his demonic horns).  These details help strip away the prosthetic barriers between Hell Boy’s character and his audience, both within the film itself and within the theater.

In class, it was proposed that Valeria and Daniel (or Daniel y Valeria, as it’s rendered in the film) offer the closest thing to actual love, a concept central to the title of Amores Perros.   Not only do I find both characters immensely redeemable in and of themselves (despite their potential as characters of derision and class contempt), I also believe that their relationship is far from being a “lousy love.”  Although Valeria is forced to concoct a false relationship for publicity purposes and Daniel is himself living a married life of duplicity, the pair appear genuinely invested in their new life together, embodied by their new apartment.  Valeria’s accident presents the couple with dramatic changes.  Not only must Valeria come to terms with bodily disfigurement, immobility and dependence, the death of her career, and the collapse of her own self image, but Daniel too exhibits a particular attachment  to his lover’s public beauty (photos of Valeria plaster their apartment which looks out onto her enchant billboard).  I have been struggling with Ritchie’s purpose in the film but I feel that one possible reading is that he mediates the conflicts between the couple. Antagonism between Daniel and Valeria erupts because of Ritchie’s predicament, masking deeper tensions.  His eventual rescue by Daniel seems to offer a beacon of hope to their troubled relationship and reveals the core of love and emotion which remains.

I think it’s clear that El Chivo’s story is one of redemption, the return to society and familial love and responsibility of a man who discards both in his embrace of terror, violence, and revolutionary dreams. This transition is visualized in two very interesting ways: 1) by El Chivo’s glasses, and 2) by changes in El Chivo’s appearance.  Early in the film El Chivo comments that he does not wear glasses because “god intended him to see blurry.”  Towards the end of the film he puts them on, almost experimentally, and gazes around the room, his eyes finally coming to rest upon the photo of his daughter as a little girl which hangs above his bed.  It is at this point in the film when we begin to see the stirrings of real remorse and conscience within El Chivo.  The glasses draw upon metaphors of enlightenment and understanding.  El Chivo is a man who had chosen to be blind and now chooses to see; to see that social revolution has failed to happen in
Mexico, that the violence of terrorism therefore cannot be justified, that he has lost in the process his family and his dignity.  His bathing, change of dress, shaving, and fingernail clipping are further practical and symbolic markers of his deliverance from a life of crime, alienation, and asceticism.  From El Chivo’s portrait of grime and frightening dishevelment emerges a new man.  Although El Chivo appears both newly clean and kept, it is a shoddy, imperfect conversion (his suit is stolen and doesn’t match, his shoes are dusty, he’s balding).  He is now suddenly and old man, fragile and surprisingly vulnerable.  This revelation marks the true cost of his choices in life as well as the enormity of his future quest for forgiveness and reformation. 

Unlike the first time I watched the film, I now find El Chivo’s character to be, perhaps, the most compelling of Amores Perros.   He, like the dog Cofi whom he eventually rescues and befriends, is a trained killer.  While Cofi’s actions are forgivable for a number of reasons (because he is given no choice in the matter, because he is an otherwise docile dog, because his aggression can be attributed to instinct and self-defense) El Chivo is an active and complicit perpetrator of his crimes.  Yet he remains an empathetic figure, I would argue, first in his obsessive longings to reconnect with his abandoned daughter and eventually in his failure to unquestioningly perform his duties as a hit man.  His redemption begins as much with his decision to abandon his profession and re-establish a relationship with his daughter as his behavior in regards to Cofi.  It is interesting to compare El Chivo to the films other characters.  Octavio, for example, is unable to accept Susana’s rejection and ultimately to peruse his dreams of leaving Mexico City.  His “redemption”, perhaps represented by his commitment to Susana and her children and their escape from poverty, crime, and familial dependence, is never realized.

I find the use of water imagery in Y Tu Mama to be particularly compelling.  There are multiple shots of Tenoch and Julio racing in the pool, the ocean is a huge presence in the back half of the film, and Luisa’s final pearl of wisdom to the boys is something to the effect of “life is like the surf so give yourself away like the ocean.”  I think the significance of water to the film could have a lot to do with its importance to a desert culture, a romanticisation of nature and the supposed pastoral bliss of village life, the links between water and metaphors of rebirth (which I would argue Luisa experiences as she comes to terms with her own death), and maybe even the playful innocence of Julio and Tenoch.