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Guillermo Del Toro: Busting the myth of fairy tales

Written by Nigel Booth
Thursday, 06 November 2008 00:00

Myths and fairy tales are misunderstood creatures. They’ve been around for millennia; the oldest and most sophisticated of ancient civilizations built a huge proportion of their culture around them, yet contemporary culture seems content to leave this gift in the past. In the collective cultural consciousness of the West, myth only really survives to this day in the form of fairy tales and, lamentably, even they have been cruelly twisted over the course of time away from their origins into pleasant bedtime stories for young children. But Guillermo del Toro remains as at least one artist who shows a subtle appreciation of myth. In his hands, the fairy tale has been returned to its roots, as an eternally relevant and entertaining mode of storytelling with enough lightness to thrill children but sufficient darkness to remind us why we once feared the dark.

This wide appeal has been reflected in del Toro’s success with his modern fairy tales. He has managed to achieve the seemingly impossible combination of art-house acclaim with commercial success; this is tough (just ask Cuba Gooding Jr.).

It is, however, somewhat unusual that a writer of fairy tales should be so popular. Indeed, the Iberian Midas’ most famous work is also his most extravagantly mythical: Pan’s Labyrinth. That a foreign-language film should achieve such widespread recognition is atypical; that it should feature fairies, fauns and fascism, but be outside of the epics of Middle-earth and Narnia, should again point towards failure. But del Toro succeeds, both financially and critically. The Hellboy series has reinvigorated a stagnating pool of Hollywood cartoon-based films and his earlier projects such as Cronos and The Devil’s Backbone continue to have a considerable cult following.

Yet these films are incredibly disparate entities in budget, setting, and theme; del Toro’s treatment of myth is the only unifying centre. It is this sensitive treatment that sets him apart from so many other writers and directors that take on similar themes.

Plausibility is the single greatest problem facing fairy tales in the modern age. Consider a perfectly realistic but fictional character; for example Mr Darcy: he was never actually a rich man who owned most of Derbyshire, but he could so easily have existed that the audience has no issue in accepting his actions as possible. When the protagonist becomes Hellboy (the red-skinned progeny of Satan who has decided to help mankind fight an array of supernatural monsters), the modern mind distances itself from the story.

It’s a catch-22 situation, but one which del Toro seems to have solved; in order for fairy tales to be affective they have to be believed, and they will only be believed if they are realistic enough. The fantastical must paradoxically be rendered realistic. This has little to do with physical appearance and everything to do with characterisation. If the audience is given sufficient reason to look past the physical appearance of mythology and begin to establish an empathetic relationship with its protagonists, then the false veil under which fairy tales have languished for so long can fall away and all their inherent complexities and joys become free for all to see.

For all the apparent difficulties involved in creating Hellboy, del Toro does so magnificently; he has relationship issues with his girlfriend, likes to drink and is clumsy – an average guy. Essentially, there is nothing abnormal about him apart from his physical appearance, and because del Toro doesn’t try to hide this or pretend it is normal the audience genuinely glosses over it. At one point, Hellboy drunkenly confesses to Abe: “Look at her, Abe. She's my... she’s my whole, wide w... I would... I would give my life for her. But she also expects me to do the dishes!”

This trend towards naturalising or humanising monsters also allows del Toro to create more light-hearted scenes, such as that in which Hellboy and Abe (a fishman) are both pining after love, get drunk and sing along to Barry Manilow. Confronted by what is nothing more than bad karaoke, how can the audience not completely forget that these two guys are actually monsters? Their actions are sympathetic and realistic though enacted by the most unrealistic of characters.

The same can be said of the opening sequence of the film. The scene is reminiscent of the explanatory preamble to The Fellowship of the Ring, but rather than investing in computer-generated images (CGI), del Toro uses armies of sinister marionettes. This is a perfect surrogate for straight representation as it befits the context in which the story is being told to Hellboy himself as a bedtime fairy tale. Here, just as in the film at large, the mundane fairy tale is rendered sinister because, in not even attempting to make it look realistic, it strangely becomes more so. This is the sort of anti-rational thinking that accents del Toro’s work. In 2000, he said: “Science always sounds fake if you don't make it a mythology. If you make science a mythology, it's attractive to the audience, but if you try to use science as a tool of truth, it's horrible.”

Del Toro thus makes the fantastical cut-it in a contemporary situation by refusing to acknowledge anything particularly monstrous in his monsters, instead accepting them with what the short-sighted experience of adulthood would term childlike naivety. Indeed, he claims to have made a pact with the monsters of the night during his childhood, having told them: “If you let me go pee every night, I will be your friend forever.” He looks on his monsters as Ophelia does the supernatural happenings in Pan’s Labyrinth - he just takes them as a given.

This allows him to paint such beautiful images as the dying plant in Hellboy II. This plant is effectively Prince Nuada’s crony; we should not, traditionally speaking, feel any sympathy towards it. Yet we are told that it is the last of its kind and so its destruction will bring about the end of its species, and it is clearly only fighting because it is under Nuada’s control. Even when it does die, it does so in the most breathtaking manner, covering the downtown scene with the goop seeping from its death wound. It is in these darker moments that del Toro showcases his cinematographic flair; the way the elves turn to stone as they die, the lumbering gait of Mr Wink the hired goon with a chain hand, even the portent of the angel of death. The liquid that spews from the dying plant, far from covering the street with the morbid stench of life-blood, breaks out in a host of flowers. New life is born, but as Nuada himself says, if the monsters die: “...the world will be poorer for it.”

But all this is actually rather ordinary; that is, it is how it should be. Myths, legends and fairy tales concern the warriors, monsters and gods of the deep past by necessity more than design; the past was simply when they were written. In fact, from the perspective of a contemporary audience back then, the events contained within myth would have seemed relatively recent, featuring familiar names and places. As such, it is not some rule of myth as a genre, but rather a quirk of modern attempts at mythic creation that they tend to base themselves in the past (think Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia).

Del Toro puts fairy tales back to their rightful purpose; he makes them bite with modernity, but he does so without sacrificing their unique timeless quality. Hellboy II may be set in the modern United States, but it harks back to an eternal golden army that can be summoned by the king of the elves. Pan’s Labyrinth is set in Franco’s Spain, but it is connected to the eternal underworld of Princess Ophelia and her royal dynasty. This perpetuity of the mythical realms throughout all time gives their stories a primordial essence, so that when they re-immerge in a modern context they maintain a sense of eternal authority merely for having existed for so long. This is the fable-like feature of myths and fairy tales that render them eternally applicable.

Unlike Aesop’s animalistic fables, fairy tales are brutal. The sheen of the title blinds an audience to what is really happening. If parents took the time to digest what the Grimm Brothers actually wrote in their fairy tales, it is questionable whether they would so readily read them to their children just before bed. In this way, del Toro reinstates the fairy tale to its traditional position; as a tale of the fantastical, but a sinister one in which the fairies are not all nice little Tinkabells. In Hellboy II, tooth-fairies eat an entire room of people and elves try to destroy all of mankind. In Pan’s Labyrinth, Ophelia has to brave the hall of a creature that eats children, and feed a mandrill her blood every day to keep her unborn brother alive, all this at the behest of a huge and genuinely scary faun.

Whether or not the inhabitants of the ancient world ever truly believed any of the myths, legends and tales that exist to this day is unknown, but as far as del Toro is concerned, this is a moot point. His monsters are real, and as such, they don’t require human belief to exist. It is in this willingness to allow fairy tales to return to their origins of realistic fantasy, then, that del Toro is truly unique. He allows his fairy tales to live; their protagonists might be fantastical but this has no relevance beyond physical appearance as the audience is asked to accept the realism of the unrealistic on faith. Once this is done, the story is liberated from the constraints of a modern conception of plausibility and the creativity of someone like del Toro is free to express itself with blazing and brutal brilliance.