Nebula Awards Showcase 2009 (34 page)

BOOK: Nebula Awards Showcase 2009
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One could, with painstaking difficulty, write dozens of pages in praise of the film’s visual ingenuity, its sensitive performances, or its amazing talismanic monsters (the Pale Man particularly vaults immediately into the pantheon of horror greats). However, for me, the ultimate key to the film’s importance is the success with which del Toro couches his fantasy in a parallel historic reality; it is what makes the film Spanish and what also makes the film universal, which suggests to me that
Pan’s Labyrinth
is that rare work of art invested with the totemic power to bring people and nations together.
On first viewing, the film’s fantastic segments are consistently surprising, but subsequent viewings emphasize the myriad ways in which the fantastic episodes mirror what is simultaneously happening within the film’s turbulent reality. Capitán Vidal has set up his headquarters in this precise spot because the surrounding woods are full of rebels. Therefore, the rebels are the liberal and liberating force living outside common detection in the woods, like the fairies inhabiting Ofelia’s universe. Before she has her first fantastic experience in the woods, Ofelia witnesses the servant Mercedes accepting ampoules of antibiotics to consign to the rebels, which may plant in her subconscious (or conscious) the suggestion of unseen life thriving in the woods. Carmen’s precarious pregnancy mirrors the instability of Spain, and Ofelia’s beseeching of her unborn brother not to hurt their mother when he is born gives voice to her fear that Vidal will have no further use for her once she gives him a son. Ofelia’s burgeoning transformation into Princess Moanna, and its linkage to the cycles of the moon, relate to her pubertal age and the coming of her menstrual cycle. The tree in the woods, from whence the fantasy originates, is unambiguously designed to resemble a diagram of the female reproductive organs, and these dimensions recur on a blank spread of
The Book of Crossroads
in a menstrual-like flow of blood that presages her mother’s near-miscarriage. When Capitán Vidal attempts to tease the rebels out of the woods by filling a storehouse with everything they require, from food and medicine to “real” tobacco, Ofelia’s fantasies send her into the realm of the Pale Man—she is given an hourglass to time a visit she must not overstay, mirroring Vidal’s death-obsessed preoccupation with time, and the Faun cautions her that she must take nothing from the Pale Man’s opulent banquet table or face terrible consequences. Ofelia cannot resist plucking two plump grapes (testes? ovaries?) from the impressive table spread and eating them, which prompts the Faun to close her out of her fantasy world temporarily, but, when the rebels manage to turn the tide against Vidal, the Faun reappears to offer Ofelia one last chance. The Faun’s denial of Ofelia also coincides with Vidal’s murder of Dr. Ferrerio (Álex Angulo), the man whom he entrusted with the responsibility of delivering his child, his own stake in the future.
Del Toro’s scripts have always been remarkable for their rich imagination—we seem to feel Capitán Vidal stitching his slashed cheek back together—and literary qualities, but the density and completeness of
Pan’s Labyrinth
is new in his work, and at least uncommon in the filmography of any other currently active director.
It is also the most ravishing fantasy film to come along in many years, visually comparable to Bernardo Bertolucci’s best work with Vittorio Storaro, its beauty bolstered by Bernat Vilaplana’s patient and nondisruptive cutting.
Del Toro is also one of the finest audio commentators around, and his commentary track for New Line Cinema’s “Platinum Series” two-disc set of
Pan’s Labyrinth
is as personable, charming, intelligent, and instructive as one could hope. It is rare for any artist, least of all a film director, to speak with such forthright critical awareness about his work and its underlying meanings, design, influences, and antecedents, yet del Toro manages this without projecting any sense of egocentricity, pretension, or neurosis. Like a true craftsman, he never puts himself before the expression of his art, and his talk unfolds in the manner of a loving autopsy of a fully conscious and smiling entity. He dissects his and director of photography Guillermo Navarro’s use of horizontal and vertical wipes for scene transitions (“not eye candy but eye protein”), the film’s use of warm uterine reds and golds and rounded lines for its fantasy sequences and cold blues and greens and straight lines for its reality scenes, the necessity of adding CGI light bursts and sound effects to gunfire scenes filmed without discharging any weapons, and discusses how all of the film’s characters are at figurative crossroads in their lives. Regardless of how many of the film’s architectural secrets he lays bare, these revelations only enhance the pleasures of watching it again and again.
According to del Toro, he ensured the track’s listenability and fluidity by recording it twice, in two takes each, with the end result assembled from the best scene-specific material. “I prepare these commentaries from the notes I keep in my notebooks,” he told me. “I really try and grind my initial thoughts, through my notebooks and work papers, until the initial instinct is ‘codified’ like a painting (composition, camera movement, height of the camera, etc.). Actually, I could do
three
commentaries per disc—one thematic, one technical, and one visual—and still have notes and thoughts to spare.”
In a business where it has become the accepted rule to let one’s audience interpret their work however it will, Guillermo del Toro is at once our most important living practitioner of fantasy cinema and his own most perceptive interpreter. As we watch his films and listen to his revelations of all that underlies his dense and inexhaustible imagery, we are reminded of the Socratic wisdom that an unexamined life is not worth living. Or, as del Toro might rephrase that wisdom, “Would there have been a story if Alice had fallen down the rabbit-hole with her eyes closed?”
Note: This is an adaptation of a critical piece by Lucas in
Video Watchdog
135, December 2007.
NEBULA AWARD NOMINEE
,
NOVELETTE
THE EVOLUTION OF TRICKSTER STORIES AMONG THE DOGS OF NORTH PARK AFTER THE CHANGE
KIJ JOHNSON
K
ij Johnson is a previous winner of the IAFA’s William L. Crawford Award and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award and has been a finalist for the World Fantasy Award. She is associate director for the Center for the Study of Science Fiction (CSSF) at the University of Kansas and aboutSF. com, an online science fiction resource center. Each summer she teaches an intensive novel-writing workshop for CSSF.
She lives in Seattle; she has a day job in tech and spends the rest of her time climbing crags, boulders, and walls.
N
orth Park is a backwater tucked into a loop of the Kaw River: pale dirt and baked grass, aging playground equipment, silver-leafed cottonwoods, underbrush—mosquitoes and gnats blackening the air at dusk. To the south is a busy street. Engine noise and the hissing of tires on pavement mean it’s no retreat. By late afternoon the air smells of hot tar and summertime river-bottoms. There are two entrances to North Park: the formal one, of silvered railroad ties framing an arch of sorts; and an accidental little gap in the fence, back where Second Street dead-ends into the park’s west side, just by the river.
A few stray dogs have always lived here, too clever or shy or easily hidden to be caught and taken to the shelter. On nice days (and this is a nice day, a smell like boiling sweet corn easing in on the south wind to blunt the sharper scents), Linna sits at one of the faded picnic tables with a reading assignment from her summer class and a paper bag full of fast food, the remains of her lunch. She waits to see who visits her.
The squirrels come first, and she ignores them. At last she sees the little dust-colored dog, the one she calls Gold.
“What’d you bring?” he says. His voice, like all dogs’ voices, is hoarse and rasping. He has trouble making certain sounds. Linna understands him the way one understands a bad lisp or someone speaking with a harelip.
(It’s a universal fantasy, isn’t it?—that the animals learn to speak, and at last we learn what they’re thinking, our cats and dogs and horses: a new era in cross-species understanding. But nothing ever works out quite as we imagine. When the Change happened, it affected all the mammals we have shaped to meet our own needs. They all could talk a little, and they all could frame their thoughts well enough to talk. Cattle, horses, goats, llamas; rats, too. Pigs. Minks. And dogs and cats. And we found that, really, we prefer our slaves mute.
(The cats mostly leave, even ones who love their owners. Their pragmatic sociopathy makes us uncomfortable, and we bore them; and they leave. They slip out between our legs and lope into summer dusks. We hear them at night, fighting as they sort out ranges, mates, boundaries. The savage sounds frighten us, a fear that does not ease when our cat Klio returns home for a single night, asking to be fed and to sleep on the bed. A lot of cats die in fights or under car wheels, but they seem to prefer that to living under our roofs; and as I said, we fear them.
(Some dogs run away. Others are thrown out by the owners who loved them. Some were always free.)
“Chicken and French fries,” Linna tells the dog, Gold. Linna has a summer cold that ruins her appetite, and in any case it’s too hot to eat. She brought her lunch leftovers, hours-old but still lukewarm: half of a Chik-fil-A and some French fries. He never takes anything from her hand, so she tosses the food onto the ground just beyond kicking range. Gold likes French fries, so he eats them first.
Linna tips her head toward the two dogs she sees peeking from the bushes. (She knows better than to lift her hand suddenly, even to point or wave.) “Who are these two?”
“Hope and Maggie.”
“Hi, Hope,” Linna says. “Hi, Maggie.” The dogs dip their heads nervously as if bowing. They don’t meet her eyes. She recognizes their expressions, the hurt wariness: she’s seen it a few times, on the recent strays of North Park, the ones whose owners threw them out after the Change. There are five North Park dogs she’s seen so far: these two are new.
“Story,” says the collie, Hope.
2. ONE DOG LOSES HER COLLAR.
This is the same dog. She lives in a little room with her master. She has a collar that itches, so she claws at it. When her master comes home, he ties a rope to the collar and takes her outside to the sidewalk. There’s a busy street outside. The dog wants to play on the street with the cars, which smell strong and move very fast. When her master tries to take her back inside, she sits down and won’t move. He pulls on the rope and her collar slips over her ears and falls to the ground. When she sees this, she runs into the street. She gets hit by a car and dies.
 
This is not the first story Linna has heard the dogs tell. The first one was about a dog who’s been inside all day and rushes outside with his master to urinate against a tree. When he’s done, his master hits him, because his master was standing too close and his shoe is covered with urine.
One Dog Pisses on a Person
. The dog in the story has no name, but the dogs all call him (or her: she changes sex with each telling) One Dog. Each story starts: “This is the same dog.”
The little dust-colored dog, Gold, is the storyteller. As the sky dims and the mosquitoes swarm, the strays of North Park ease from the underbrush and sit or lie belly-down in the dirt to listen to Gold. Linna listens, as well.
(Perhaps the dogs always told these stories and we could not understand them. Now they tell their stories here in North Park, as does the pack in Cruz Park a little to the south, and so across the world. The tales are not all the same, though there are similarities. There is no possibility of gathering them all. The dogs do not welcome eager anthropologists with their tape recorders and their agendas.
(The cats after the Change tell stories as well, but no one will ever know what they are.)
When the story is done, and the last of the French fries eaten, Linna asks Hope, “Why are you here?” The collie turns her face away, and it is Maggie, the little Jack Russell, who answers: “Our mother made us leave. She has a baby.” Maggie’s tone is matter-of-fact: it is Hope who mourns for the woman and child she loved, who compulsively licks her paw as if she were dirty and cannot be cleaned.
Linna knows this story. She’s heard it from the other new strays of North Park: all but Gold, who has been feral all his life.
(Sometimes we think we want to know what our dogs think. We don’t, not really. Someone who watches us with unclouded eyes and sees who we really are is more frightening than a man with a gun. We can fight or flee or avoid the man, but the truth sticks like pine sap. After the Change, some dog owners feel a cold place in the pit of their stomachs when they meet their pets’ eyes. Sooner or later, they ask their dogs to find new homes, or they forget to latch the gate, or they force the dogs out with curses and the ends of brooms. Or the dogs leave, unable to bear the look in their masters’ eyes.
BOOK: Nebula Awards Showcase 2009
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