The Devil's Backbone
“The Devil’s Backbone is my favorite movie, the one closest to my heart—because it is my first movie,” proclaims del Toro in an interview on Trilogía‘s second disc. If Cronos is a warm-up, del Toro’s exercise in entering the headspace necessary for moviemakers to materialize their stylistic signature, The Devil’s Backbone is the moment at which newfound aesthetic identity meets and embraces formal discipline and forges a relationship with historical reality.
A gothic interpretation of 1939 Spain during the final year of the Spanish Civil War, The Devil’s Backbone centers on orphanage owners/operators Cesares (Luppi) and Carmen (Marisa Paredes), groundskeeper Jacinto (Eduardo Noriega), teacher Conchita (Irene Visedo) and young, just-orphaned Carlos (Fernando Tielve), who is taken in by the orphanage’s makeshift family after his Republican loyalist father dies at the hands of Franco-fascist troops.
The film opens, as does Cronos, with voice-over narration, but here del Toro assigns it the purpose not of filling in audiences on loaded backstory, but rather of announcing the film’s thematic complexity:
“What is a ghost? A tragedy doomed to repeat itself time and time again? An instant of pain, perhaps. Something dead which still seems to be alive. An emotion, suspended in time. Like a blurred photograph. Like an insect trapped in amber.”
The specter of Santi (Junio Valverde) haunts an orphanage in Civil War-torn Spain. Courtesy of the Criterion Collection
A useful exercise for moviemakers with theme on the brain might be to identify all of the subtextual threads that stitch together both Cronos and The Devil’s Backbone.
In its poetic opening monologue, the latter film instantly recalls the insect imagery of the former. In its grounding in the minutia of everyday life among boys in the orphanage, The Devil’s Backbone also lends a degree of maturation to del Toro’s characterization of youth, which he first tested in Cronos with the character of Jesús’ granddaughter, Aurora (Tamara Shanath). The ominous forewarning issued in del Toro and co-writer Antonio Trashorras’ screenplay about the past’s doomed fate to repeat itself, too, riffs on allusions to an ancient past made in the opening moments of Cronos, while ascribing an historical representativeness to The Devil’s Backbone‘s gothic horror ghost archetype. Further, The Devil‘s Backbone‘s ghost itself, which manifests in the physical form of the dead spirit of Santi (Junio Valverde)—a boy who lived at the orphanage before disappearing mysteriously—bears cracks upon his sickly, pale face, signifying the cracks in Spain’s national body through which its increasingly ravaged citizens fall during wartime, and by which even its families break apart.
Observing, in The Devil’s Backbone, del Toro’s expansion of the tropes of childhood innocence and the deterioration of the family unit that Cronos first introduced to his filmography, writer-directors can develop a method of revisiting previously explored cinematic territory as their perspective increases in worldliness. Whether you’re crafting your next feature against a regional or international backdrop, latch on to ideas, theories and frameworks that have never ceased compel you, and cast aside any fear that doing so will result in derivative work.
Pan's Labyrinth
Until this year, Pan’s Labyrinth was the only film included in the Trilogía package that Criterion had not yet released under their label. The timing may or may not be incidental: It seems likely that del Toro’s “At Home With Monsters” exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art provided a neat event with which both the single-disc release of Pan’s Labyrinth and the three-film box set could coincide.
Whether or not this was Criterion and del Toro’s intent, the public’s increased fascination with the master’s creations and eccentricities in 2016 (his house has even become a conversation piece of late-night TV) sets the stage to revisit the most resonant theme of del Toro’s crowning achievement, and perhaps his entire body of work: the innate beauty of things shunned by society as “horrific.”
Of all of del Toro’s acquired insights during the making of The Devil’s Backbone, this assertion distills how that film informs the modus operandi of Pan’s Labyrinth: “Pathos needs to be in a children’s story in order for it to work,” he says in “Spanish Gothic,” a featurette on Trilogía‘s second disc that explores the dark fantastical elements of his Spanish-language productions. “When people imitate Disney and only imitate the saccharine side, only try to make it nice, joyful and rosy, the movies are horrible to watch. [Walt] Disney felt the same way: The better the villain, the better the film.”
A companion piece to The Devil’s Backbone steeped in what del Toro describes in “Spanish Gothic” as “the complete triumph of fascism, the suffocation of individuality,” Pan’s Labyrinth portrays life after the war that the preceding film chronicles. Juxtaposing beauty and brutality as perceived through the eyes of one young, imaginative girl, Ofelia (Ivana Baquero), Pan’s Labyrinth finds ambiguity in the distinction between the otherworldly creatures she encounters and the real-life villains—among them, her sadistic stepfather, the Falangist Captain Vidal (Sergi López)—who perpetrate a reign violence over post-Civil War Spain.
The Faun (Doug Jones) beckons Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) to fulfill her destiny as Moanna, Princess of the underworld. Courtesy of the Criterion Collection
“Eye candy is when something looks good but is not supporting the text or subtext of the movie. Eye protein is designing the movie and knowing all the colors, textures, shapes and telling a story,” del Toro astutely states in his interview on Trilogía‘s Cronos disc. “Eye protein” abounds in Pan’s Labyrinth: the latex foam make-up effects for the film’s uncanny Faun and Pale Man creatures by DDT Efectos Especiales’ Xavi Bastida, David Marti and Montse Ribe; the bewitching, contorted performances as both characters by frequent del Toro collaborator Doug Jones; and the fairy tale schema of the film’s production design all function in service of del Toro’s quest to champion the beauty of what is traditionally considered ugly, or even profane.
Creating cognitive dissonance between what is gorgeous and grotesque has been a genre moviemaking mission carried out since time immemorial, from F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu to Tod Browning’s Freaks to Universal’s Golden Age of monster films and beyond. Del Toro’s tension between epic narrative and FX spectacle—specifically, his decision to craft Ofelia’s journey as a discovery of men’s monstrosity and monsters’ humanity—is his preferred means of fulfilling such a mission.
For those who seek to accomplish that mission in their own work, Pan’s Labyrinth is an endlessly scrutable case study of the allegorical and visceral power of dark fiction motifs. An ideal finale to Criterion’s curated triple-feature, the film brings del Toro’s ever-evolving themes full circle, challenging moviemakers to establish pathos through themes of their own to forge rewarding relationships with their films’ audiences.
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