Thoughts of Interference

I saw Pan's Labyrinth yesterday and liked it a lot. I agree with Jim Emerson, who wrote in a review in the Chicago Sun Times that the movie is, "...a fairy tale of such potency and awesome beauty that it reconnects the adult imagination to the primal thrill and horror of the stories that held us spellbound as children." It really does bring back that anomalous space in childhood, where we exist on the fringes of reality and fantasy, a world full of magic, beauty and potent horror and taboo.

The film's grounding in postwar repression of Franco's Spain in the 1940's reminded me again how we make sense of life and death and all that happens in between, through myth, fairy tales, the entering of that space that has no basis in "reality". We long for life to have meaning.

When I was very young I had a recurring dream where I entered a maze. (I didn't know then that there was such a thing as a labyrinth, or that a maze and a labyrinth are very different.) The dream took place in the woods off a dirt road near our family cabin in the north country, where I was presented a skeleton key by a sly fox. The fox would allow me to attempt to escape from the maze, which was full of locked doors, and perhaps find my way home again, but with the knowledge that I would be relentlessly hunted during this trial by the fox himself. I felt panic, excitement, and the realization that I may "lose," but enchantment invaded the dream to such a degree that I was taken.

As a girl I also believed in fairies, and spent hours rowing the reedy banks of the northern lake observing their mysterious nest-like hiding places. The black and white of life, even in childhood, sometimes demands extreme imagination.

And now, as adults, by what myths do we live? How do we keep the mundane at bay? Do we pursue a soldier's death followed by a hero's ascent to heaven? How do we process a president who tells us to go out shopping and spend money when we face crisis and long for meaning? How can we react authentically when we live in a real maze of illusions, with manufactured wars, the vision of utopia, the juxtaposition of a childlike patriotism and belief in democracy with nightmare visions of Abu Graib?

Can we be redeemed through death? Will we sit at the right hand of our "father" at the end of our story? Will we be rewarded for all of our purchases? Is Paris Hilton the most googled celebrity? Can we muddy our new patent leather shoes while chasing meaning for a bleak existence? Shall we interfere with violence?