A World All Your Own
Fantasy Escapes in Cinema
A World All Your Own
Fantasy Escapes in Cinema
Portraits of escapism on film are automatically interesting in their construction. Using an escapist medium to explore the concept of escaping reality allows the filmmakers to layer their works with subtext and metatextual elements. Not only do the films explore their individual allegories, but they touch on the broader reasoning as to why film and filmmaking has become such a popular artistic medium. Additionally, when the metaphors and fantasy constructs within the films do eventually fall, the films can question the audiences relations with the on screen myths we’ve used as escapism, and as to whether the relationship is healthy or whether there is a hidden darkness found in our trips to the other side of the screen.
There is an old saying, “never let the truth get in the way of a good story.” With these films we can see that often the lies we tell to each other and ourselves are not meant to hide anything, and if anything amplify the emotional truth. While some lies are made to better oneself or save face, the lies told within the fantasies of these films are often to ward off darkness, or to place the audiences into the world that the storyteller felt to be true. Fear can elongate shadows, desperation can drag out a minute to eternity, boredom can send the mind swimming for more. So while these are by all measures “lies”, they are used to expose the truth.
Even calling the fabrications of our characters lies may be too harsh. They believe these worlds they create completely, much like how an audience believes the world of a film. The verisimilitude on screen is projected onto the stories within the stories, and it’s only when questioning the veracity of what’s being told that one is dissatisfied. Whether it’s the son Will Bloom (Billy Crudup) in Big Fish or the Writer (Rafe Spall) in Life of Pi, they’re dissatisfaction only comes when they question the stories they’ve been told. This is similar to how anyone could be dissatisfied with the art of cinema if they actively chose to question every decision and every frame. The truth and lessons we learn from the screen require us to detach from reality, to live in the realm between the truth and the story, and it’s when we devote ourselves entirely to one side of that that we can lose the joy we’re meant to have.
Will Bloom in Big Fish is an exemplar example of this. Having lived his life hearing his father’s tall tales and resenting him for embellishing his life, it’s only upon Edward Bloom’s (played by both Ewan McGregor and Albert Finney) deathbed that Will is able to come to terms with not just the man his father actually is, but the man he claimed to be. In Edward’s final moments Will is able to understand that both the reality and the fantasy are true, and that a man is only the stories he tells. As Edward slips away from this life, his son is able to tell him how he goes, in the lake that his famous big fish lived, surrounded by everyone he’s ever loved or touched, to live forever as a legend unto himself. We cut from this to the hospital room that Edward Bloom dies in, knowing that both the story his son just told and the room his son currently stood in are equally true.
This is reiterated at the funeral of Edward Bloom, when the cast of characters from the fantasy life he’d led gather in mourning. While we can see the embellishments of his stories in the crowd that gathers, whether it’s that the giant he had befriended was simply a very tall man, or that the conjoined twins were only identical, we can also see why these embellishments were made. Edward Bloom was a man who lived a fantastic life, with a loving wife and an exciting, adventurous youth, and he had wished to bequeath his son with this wonder he’d been blessed with. A man is a series of stories told on his decades long death bed, and Edward Bloom wanted nothing more than to distract from that inevitability. His gift to his son was being able to see death is yet another journey.
While Edward Bloom was an example of a quiet life amplified by the grandiose stories he told, we see in Life of Pi that even amazing stories may need to be hidden behind a veneer of falsehood. We see an adult Pi Patel (Irrfan Kahn as an adult, Suraj Sharma as a youth) tell his tale of survival at sea to a unnamed Writer. In the story first told, Pi regales the Writer with the story of a young man, an adult Bengal Tiger, a carnivorous island, and 227 days on a lifeboat. The story he tells is full of adventure, victory, tragedy, and power, a story so bold that he tells the Writer it will make him “believe in God.”
After hearing the entire tale, the Writer attempts to discern the “truth” behind the story. He tries to piece together elements of the story with what the Writer deems more believable, only to land on a story even more tragic than the one he had just heard. Pi then puts a simple question to him: which one is the better story? Both start with tragedy, both are remarkable, both end with Pi having survived the unsurvivable. If the destination is the same, can we not embellish the journey? Pi knows his truth, knows which story he has chosen to believe in, and he leaves it for the Writer to decide which story he will tell. We the audience see both stories played out, and are left with the same decision. Our interpretation is what gives the story it’s power.
It’s important that Pi’s story did not begin with the tragedy of the death of his family, and that it didn’t end when he reached the shoreline. We are more than the most important events of our lives. While these events can often define us in great ways, the day after our greatest day still exists. If you accomplished your lifelong goal today, you would still wake up tomorrow. Pi is an amalgamation of all the days before his ship sank and all the days after he was saved, and these elements of his story and all stories are important to note. Decisions he made as a castaway were informed by the boy he was before that.
If we believe the “realistic” version of the story, that Pi Patel and the Bengal tiger Richard Parker were one and the same, we then ask why this separation must have occurred. Outside of the concept of the “better” story that the Writer is confronted with, we see that Pi needed Richard Parker to push himself to survive. Whether he was a real Bengal tiger or a construct of psyche, Richard Parker was a fierce and foreboding figure, a towering obstacle that forced Pi to confront his mortality head-on and decide whether he was to live or die. If Richard Parker was the tiger, he made Pi learn confrontation, confidence, and self-reliance. If he was the dark side of Pi, it gave him a brutality and savagery that was needed to survive those days at sea. In either way, the antagonism of Richard Parker sculpted Pi into a man of survival.
In opposition to this is the carnivorous island Pi encounters. A pyrrhic paradise, this island provides him with a near endless source of food and comfort, but at night the island would slowly eat away at his body until eventually he would die. This island is the comforting embrace of death that dangled dangerously close to Pi throughout his days as a castaway. He could have stayed on this island, lived in relative luxury for a limited amount of time, and simply disappeared from this world with no possible trace. He could choose death, and how easy a choice that would have been. But Richard Parker warns him against this choice, and whether the animal or the construct, Pi knows that life is to precious to give up on.
Setting aside Richard Parker’s as a barbarity that keeps Pi alive throughout his travels, the beginning of his life as a castaway still explains his possible retreat into the fantasy of Richard Parker. If the more “true” story is to be believed, Pi would have seen the French cook kill his shipmate and eat his flesh, followed by the Frenchman killing Pi’s mother. These traumas alone would explain his possible retreat into fantasy and into the mind of a Bengal tiger. This exemplifies the type of escapism that audience members are more familiar with, the escapism we partake in often when losing ourselves in a film. This is the easy reading, the simple way to discern the “truth”, but again it does not make for the better story.
This more conventional idea of escaping from trauma is explored in Guillermo del Toro’s 2006 fantasy masterpiece Pan’s Labyrinth. Taking place in 1944 Spain after the fascist dictatorship has taken control of the control following the civil war, our young protagonist Ofelia travels with her heavily pregnant mother to the remote Spanish countryside. Ofelia’s stepfather, the brutal and unforgiving Falangist captain, has set up a base in this country house in hopes to hunt down and slaughter the remaining rebels that live in the forests. Ofelia’s life is considered inconsequential to Captain Vidal, and her mother is in no condition to take care of her, so in this foreign and dangerous new place Ofelia retreats into the fantasy world of a fairy tale.
The fairy tale that intertwines the harsh reality of the war is the tale of the princess of the underworld who’s spirit has been lost on the mortal realm for centuries. Her father, the king of the underworld, builds portals in the forms of labyrinths in the hopes her soul will eventually find it’s way home. Ofelia, upon searching the labyrinth near the fascists’ compound, discovers a faun who claims that Ofelia must be the princess returned. The faun gives Ofelia a book and tells her that there will be three quests she must complete in order to prove she is the princess.
The blending of fantasy and reality is much more vigorous in this film, with many elements of the narrative being unexplainable if not for the magic being true. At the same time, the adults of the world are never able to see what Ofelia does, and these magical elements only happen to and for Ofelia. She places the mandrake under her mother, seemingly healing her, only for Vidal to discover a rooting root instead of the screaming creature. Ofelia creates a door using chalk and escapes her room, but the adults only find the chalk drawing without it being open, Ofelia’s escape remaining a mystery to them. The whimsy of fantasy is bled away from us with age, and as a child we are able to affect this world as well as the other. Pan’s Labyrinth not only blends fantasy and reality in the narrative but also shows us how this blending occurs in the lives of the characters.
This is by far the most violent of the three films discussed today, and it’s this heightened reality that allows the fantasy to so easily blend together. The fantasy world here is dark and gruesome, portraying evil creatures such as the Pale Man and the gargantuan frog. These dark phantasms are contrasted to the darkness that resides within the fascists, and especially Captain Vidal. We see him ruthlessly kill innocent farmers and shoot his doctor in the back, all but dooming his wife to death. By showing these dark creatures beside the real evil of man, it highlights that even in imagination it’s hard to by crueler than reality.
Ofelia’s retreat into the fantasy world eventually costs her her life, as she takes her baby brother into the labyrinth and is shot by Captain Vidal while conversing with the faun. But we are shown that death is not the end for her, and instead her blood was needed for her to reclaim her throne in the underworld. Simultaneously we see Vidal shot dead by the rebel forces who have lead a successful attack against the compound. While in the end both the innocence of Ofelia and the evil of Vidal are killed, it’s only Ofelia’s future which is beaming. Her spirit has returned to a place of glory, and even if these are just the imaginations of a dying child, they are wonderful ideas to die to. Vidal, on the other hand, dies knowing that his son will not even know his name, and that everything he is done has been for nothing. It’s a quiet victory for innocence and for things that are right.
Much of film and being a film fan is about these quiet victories that are shown throughout these films. All of these films leave us feeling bittersweet, and that is the ultimate goal of loving and studying film should lead to. We’re not changing the world when we sit down to watch a film, we’re not making an active betterment of the horrors of our every day. But escaping into the fantasy of the screen can teach of things, about the world, our friends, our families, ourselves, and these lessons are what we need to go out and make change. We fantasize about the world we live in, and strive to make it a reality. Maybe one day we will no longer have to separate the two.
Nice thematic review of these three. The stories/fantasy make more sense to me in Life of Pi and Big Fish than Pan's Labyrinth. The horror style creepiness of the fantasy in Pan's Labyrinth doesn't make sense as a refuge. Maybe it has to be seen as the true story. Would love for you to add in Terry Gilliam's Tideland. The fantastic elements in that story were devastatingly necessary.