Self-Reliance is the Death of Conformity | Pan's Labyrinth

A tale of self-reliance in the face of institutional evil, *Pan's Labyrinth* is a disobedient masterpiece. It feels authentic because it draws from writer-director Guillermo del Toro's identity as a lonely, misfit child. "I was like this rail-thin—can you imagine that? Rail-thin, pale, quiet kid who buttoned all his buttons in his shirt. I never spoke, just looked around, really spooked."

His friends were monsters, and his haven was cinema. He didn't understand why the world around him wanted him to be something he wasn't. It stuck in my throat that I didn't like the idea of changing to become a good boy. I was already getting that from the church, the Sunday service, my grandma, and everyone else who was pressuring me to conform. Being different as a kid takes courage, and the overwhelming majority of children would rather be liked than be original.

I say that as one of those former children. Conformity is drilled into us from the get-go, and in my eyes, it can only be a learned behavior. I think about my childhood and how I slowly warped my personality to fit in with what others expected. To be different is to challenge the status quo, the existing personality, and power structures.

So we are told, but Ophelia, like little Guillermo, is different. Even when pushed to the brink of hopelessness, she refuses to obey just for obedience's sake. She relies on herself, her morality, and in so doing, she achieves immortality. Ophelia and Guillermo didn't need education to show them that imitation is suicide. They stood firm as their own weird, unique, beautiful humans.

I admire that confidence because I was very much not that way. Pan's Labyrinth is a fairy tale that is realer than the world it critiques. It's realer than the made-up geographical, political, and religious boundaries we've invented to separate us. It's realer than the walls of Western storytelling conventions, which it demolishes. It's realer than the vapidity of fascism and the banality of obedience.

And its realness is made clear with its monsters. What's up, everybody? Welcome back to the Stories We Tell. My name is Ryan. I do video essays on books and films with a sort of philosophical slash personal lens.

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I have a lot of ideas for the future of this channel. You'll see some stylistic experimentation later on in this video. A free way to support the channel is by commenting, sharing, and liking. Those things help a lot. I hope you enjoy this video.

Peace and love. Guillermo del Toro's obsession with monsters began with "Frankenstein," the story of a scientist driven mad by a pursuit of glory, who, in his blindness, brings a creature to life—stitched together from the appendages of corpses collected from a graveyard. Guillermo identified with the creature, who craved connection but received only fear. There was a moment that was very religious for me when Boris Karloff, as the creature, comes to the threshold in "Frankenstein." I was moved to tears.

I was like, I saw the Messiah. I was St. Paul on the road to Damascus. I saw a Christ-like figure, full of suffering and beatitude. You know, his eyes were up, sort of like a saint.

Monsters, for Guillermo, are not objects of terror but of beauty. Ironically, in Mary Shelley's novel, it is Dr. Frankenstein who is the true monster, while the creature is deeply human. The creature reflects our deepest desires, our darkest fears, and our most vile impulses. He's a mirror for the human condition. And little Guillermo found solace in not just him, but in all monsters.

There is that instant pardon of your deficiencies with monsters, whereas the intolerance of people who believe there is only one way of behaving, one skin color, one single credo—people who are absolutely certain—scares me the most. Del Toro has gone on to bring to the screen some of the most iconic monsters in film history, from the amphibious man in "The Shape of Water," to Hellboy, to Pinocchio, to the ghost in "The Devil's Backbone" and the vampire from "Kronos." As with Frankenstein's creation, there is something undeniably human about Guillermo's monsters. Whether they are sympathetic or brutal parasites, they reflect the depths of our humanity. The Pale Man is no exception.

To me, it represented the type of power that devours innocence. I said it shouldn't have a face; it shouldn't be a specific person. The Pale Man is a mirror of Captain Vidal, the central villain of Pan's Labyrinth. The visual similarities between the characters make Del Toro's point clear.

The pale man represents fascism. More than that, the pale man and his bloodlust embody all institutional evil, as well as all those who conform to it. For instance, Del Toro notes that these banquet meals also serve as a criticism of the Catholic Church, and I quote, "the absolutely horrifying, not only complicity, but participation of the Church in the entire fascist movement in Spain." The fascists gorge on this feast while discussing the lowering of rations for their citizens, who Vidal worries might illegally supply the revolutionaries with food.

A priest in attendance nonchalantly says, "These words are taken verbatim from a priest's speech repeatedly given to Republican prisoners in a fascist concentration camp." Indeed, Vidal's entire speech about choice is meant to highlight the fascist choice to conform, to fall in line, to think only of themselves yet not for themselves. In Paulo Freire's "Pedagogy of the Oppressed," he describes how the education model much of the world follows is one of monologue rather than dialogue. It involves a teacher disseminating information from a certain curriculum, usually determined by the government, and making students memorize facts that they are then tested on. The Tariff Act, which was raised or lowered, raised tariffs in an effort to collect more revenue for the federal government.

The U.S. is certainly like this, and as a new teacher in Hong Kong, they are just as, if not more, focused on standardized education. Freire says that this method of education is great at producing citizens who conform to the existing power structures without asking too many questions. However, where it fails is in producing what he calls critical consciousness, a state of existence in which one is aware of and questioning the various aspects of one's identity and how they intersect with the social, political, and cultural reality that we live in. In this oppressive system of education, we are doing a disservice not only to the oppressed but indeed to the oppressors as well.

No one can be authentically human while he prevents others from being so. Was Guillermo del Toro's intention with the Pale Man to criticize this system of education? Probably not. But with all the things that he said the Pale Man symbolizes, who knows? My point is, if the Pale Man represents blind obedience and faceless power, he can be applied to all systems in which conformity is bred to keep those in power in power.

Music is bred to keep those in power, in power. Ophelia's introduction is a microcosm for how the world treats that which it does not understand, with scorn. Ophelia brushes aside her mother's comment because she is used to the world not understanding her, a reflection of how Guillermo felt as a boy. And I felt like that as a kid. I felt like the truths and lies that the adults were praying I understood were all really hollow.

And life was telling me a bunch of things that were different. Ophelia's mother and new stepfather want her to accept their fascist ideology. However, Ophelia's determination to act and think on her own accord only grows stronger as the film progresses. Ideas can change the world if you have the courage to embrace them. While ideology crumbles under the weight of scrutiny, ideas, like grass, grow better for being stepped on.

The difference between an ideology and an idea is that an ideology is inherited from someone else, and you don't really know how it works; you just accept that it is. It's an article of faith. An idea is born out of instinct and experience, and you then construct your own vocabulary to articulate the world. Ophelia's storyline follows her completion of three tasks that the fawn devises in order to test her mortality and whether she has the right to claim her throne as Moana, a princess of the underworld.

But whether she completes these tasks is not really important. The important thing is how she goes about those tests—how brave she is, how self-reliant she is, and how her spirit remains intact. When Ophelia fails the Pale Man test, everything begins to go wrong. Her kingdom is taken away.

And her mother throws the mandrake root that was keeping her healthy into the fire, which causes her to die while giving birth to Ophelia's brother. Then, in an attempt to escape, Ophelia and Mercedes are captured. Ophelia is confined to her room while Mercedes is imprisoned, presumably to be tortured. Everything of substance in Ophelia's life has crumbled, and she's trapped under the command of a murderous fascist.

This is the moment of desperation in which the fawn reappears, telling her she has one last chance. Ophelia is clearly hesitant but agrees. After all, what choice does she have? However, as we'll see, this thinking is a fallacy. There's always another option to say no.

Ophelia's final task is revealed when the fawn tells her that they require the blood of an innocent—her brother—to open the portal to the underworld. This is where the true nature of Ophelia's heart is tested. Will she do something she knows is wrong and, in doing so, achieve immortality? Or will she follow her moral compass and return to a life of imprisonment, grief, and uncertainty? Ophelia refuses, and although she dies after spilling the blood of an innocent herself, she is reborn in the underworld, closing the circular narrative that began the film.

And the moment I saw the image of the blood going back to her, I've tried to identify why this story has moved me so profoundly this most recent time, and I think it's this: I finally feel like I am embodying Ophelia, like I am speaking my truth and not the lies I think others want to hear, as I did in my early 20s when I was desperate for community. At that time in my life, I didn't know who I was or why I was. And when the inevitable existential dread hit, I had no foundation of self-trust to fall back on. It took years of pain, self-pity, therapy, and growth before I could look back on that time—and really all my life until now—with gratitude.

And while I can't help but admire people like Guillermo for their steadfast confidence in who they were and what they wanted from a young age, I want to encourage anybody watching to reject the limiting belief that it's too late for them to embrace themselves. You think now in hard words, and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradicts everything you said today. Ah, so you shall be misunderstood. Is it so bad then to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh.

To be great is to be misunderstood. Action will explain itself and will clarify your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing. This is my favorite passage in all of "Self-Reliance." I admit it's an insecurity I have with this channel.

My views are undeniably going to change, and the videos I make now may not reflect how I feel in five years. But should I let that stop me? Absolutely not. Sharing is part of growth, and the most senseless thing any of us can do is not share our views for fear of being judged or criticized.

If you think about modern times, we are in a paradox where we have super sophisticated social language that makes it almost impossible to be imperfect, because then you are pilloried publicly. At the same time, we are living in an environment where, socially, we see things that we thought were past—sexual hang-ups, racism, classism, and brutal divisions fueled by fear and hatred—that we believed were dormant or gone for 50 years are now coming back. So there's a paradox at play. The only place where I think I can find refuge, solace, and forgiveness is in monsters. In 1785, Jeremy Bentham developed a conceptual model of a prison that he called the Panopticon.

His idea was, rather than using the inefficient and inhumane methods of prisoner control utilized at the time, what if we redesigned the prison building itself? Bentham's model was a circular building in which a guard in the central tower, through various shades and lighting tricks, could see into each prison, but the prisoners would have no way of knowing if they were being watched. In the Panopticon, prisoners would essentially have to police themselves, acting at all times as if they were being watched. Michel Foucault described the Panopticon as "a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form." It serves as a metaphor for the disciplinary society in which we live.

But there's a big difference between 1975, when Foucault made this critique of panoptic power, and today, where it's simply accepted that we are being spied on. Byung-Chul Han says that in our modern digital panopticon, inhabitants actively collaborate with their captors, engage in lively communication, and bear themselves of their own free will. Think about it for a second. Think about our rapidly disappearing privacy. Think about the massive tech companies eager to sell your data to the highest bidder.

Think about machine learning and AI-powered data processing that grows more sophisticated by the hour in predicting your behavior based on your online actions. Even if you wanted to protect your privacy and delete social media, that wouldn't stop companies from tracking you. Almost every app on your phone is collecting several location points every minute. Advertisers and social media companies have proven to be the most willing to exploit this data for profit. However, that's likely because they're the only ones with the resources to analyze the vast amounts of data that exist about us.

When data processing becomes less cost-prohibitive, I'm not inclined to believe that any company will limit its invasions of our privacy out of the goodness of their heart. Capitalism's core tenet is competition, and if companies aren't keeping up with surveillance and hyper-personalized marketing trends, they're going to be left behind. This should outrage and sicken us. Yet, we put up with these blatant invasions of privacy because we've been tricked into content addiction. Byung-Chul Han says this is evidence that we've moved beyond Foucault's disciplinary society to what he calls the transparency society.

"Quote: Not lonesomeness through isolation, but hypercommunication guarantees transparency. While Bentham at least created his machine of oppression through some misguided notion for the betterment of humanity, no such moral imperative exists in the digital panopticon. It is economic through and through. Whatever its motives, the underlying power of the panopticon, digital or analog, is the pressure to conform. And under this subtle but repressive power, where will be the space for critical thought?"

Where can we embrace dissonant ideas without fear of being listened to? What will happen to our absolute, inalienable right to be flawed, to be imperfect, which I defend? I believe that imperfection is one of the most beautiful things. Fallibility and imperfection. The panopticon reminds me of the book of crossroads.

This is the book of the crossroads. In that, both represent a divergent path. We can accept our panoptic duty to self-police, or we can resist it. We can roll over to the violence of panoptic power, or we can disobey. We can do nothing while critical thought is suppressed in our minds, or we can find beauty in imagination.

We can be enslaved by algorithms and corporations, or we can rely not on them, but on ourselves, and in so doing, discover our creativity. This is the crossroads we find ourselves at, and I'll be the first to admit, it's scary as hell. But if you ask Guillermo del Toro, there's only one thing we can do. So, I have constructed my own sort of personal religion, you know, which doesn't depend on a guy in the sky that I pray to, but that does depend on trying to be as good a person as I can be. And I'm not a good person all the time, but I allow myself to understand that too.

You know, the Greeks used to say, "We don't need good government; we need good citizens." In the same way, religion and spirituality don't require a great church; you don't need to belong to a grand institution; you just need to try to be a good person. In my last video, I talked about the toxic attitude we have toward achievement and ambition, and how it leads to a commodified experience of the world, where content floods your consciousness at every waking moment. I received several replies to the video along the lines of this comment, which highlights the commenter’s need to seek validation from, in her words, "literally everything outside of me." I immediately identified with this comment.

Back in my Letterboxd era, I'm embarrassed to admit that I would actually change my rating of a film that I didn't like if it was heralded as a classic, or vice versa if I loved a film that was reviewed poorly. I would think, "Oh well, there must be something I was missing." And don't get me wrong, sometimes you really are missing something, or you're not in the right frame of mind to appreciate a movie or a book. But honestly, who gives a fuck?

If you're wrong, be wrong. It's better to be wrong today so you can learn tomorrow than to imitate today so you can be a postmodern cliché tomorrow. In the words of Emerson, "Insist on yourself; never imitate." Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation, but of the adopted talent of another, you have only an extemporaneous half-possession. Okay, so you might be saying this self-reliance stuff is all well and good, but boy, it sure is a nebulous concept.

How do I actually rely on myself when I've been conditioned to rely on ideology? Guillermo del Toro might say that it begins with creativity. Now, as a former postmodern cliché myself, creativity was always a scary concept for me. I played terrible music, drew awful drawings, painted poor paintings, and overall felt like creativity just wasn't for me. I don't think it was until I started writing for fun, not for school, that I realized my creative potential.

And even then, I think it took another ten years or so until I realized I was actually good at it. Still, I have only recently started consciously relying on myself and my writing. It's not really possible to create something wholly original these days; it's pretty much all been done before at this point. But you shouldn't let that stop you.

What I'm trying to say is just create. If you feel self-conscious, then don't show it to anyone. Create for yourself and not for the feed. I truly believe that my writing, in addition to therapy, is what healed me from my trauma. Now, a life without this creative expression would feel hollow.

Second, staying on top of therapy is what healed me from my trauma. Now, a life without this creative expression would feel hollow. Friends of the channel might know where this is going: embrace mindfulness and critical thought. I have a more detailed video on this coming soon, so I won't get too into it, but if you want to be your own person, you need to actually spend meaningful time with yourself. Since I started prioritizing my time for mindful thinking, I’ve noticed that the ideas literally do not stop flowing.

"Quote, by contrast, leads to the reproduction of the same and to conformism. Learn all you can, but don't carry the notion that you need to know everything in order to have a valuable opinion. Trust thyself. Finally, you know what else goes hand in hand with true creative expression? One of the essential elements of art is disobedience."

And to say, "Forget it, do everything that is materially an obstacle," and to say, "I can do art with my blood and a canvas." That's right, it all comes full circle. I watched several Guillermo del Toro films and spent countless hours on interviews while researching this video. Disobedience, along with imperfection and fallibility, are the central themes in his work. A mute janitor falls in love with a fish man. A puppet comes to life but is rejected by the world.

A baby demon created by Nazis decides to serve the forces of good rather than the evil he was designed for. Man, Del Toro plots sure are weird, huh? Del Toro protagonists don't fit neatly into the ideological boxes that the world invents for them. Through them, Guillermo encourages his audience not to accept their predetermined roles in society. He tells us that disobedience is the beginning of thought, that ideas are the end of ideology, and that self-reliance is the death of conformity.

Thank you, everybody, again for watching. Did you see how I closed the loop there with the circular structure, the last line being the title? Yeah, people did seem to enjoy the mindful pause in that last video, so we're going to do that again. If you didn't see that video, the idea is to take a moment to pause instead of clicking on to the next video immediately. Reflect on it or on the movie if you’ve seen it—just take some time to be mindful. You don't have to meditate, although I would argue that any moment of mindfulness is a form of meditation. After that, you can hear me sing some of "Stick to the Status Quo" that I performed while I was testing the mic. Okay, let’s pause on three. One, two, three. With all my ideas, I don't have very many financial means to pursue them, such as investing in an actual camera.

That's not my phone. So, if you have the financial means or some spare change, I'm going to leave a tip jar down below. No pressure at all, of course. Check out my Substack; I've been populating it a little bit.

I'll be doing some end-of-the-year wrap-ups about what I've been reading and watching. In my next video, I have a new idea that I want to share with you. Hopefully, people will be interested. While watching all the interview clips for these videos, I found that there are often many insightful comments on creativity that don't really make sense in the context of the video. I want to create another video where I can discuss some of those insights, so I'm going to call it "Lessons in Creativity." The first one will focus on Guillermo Del Toro. I might also revisit Kendrick and Terry Gilliam, who is the director of the film I'm reviewing next. Let me know if that's something that interests you!

Oh, also, I forgot to mention, follow me on Twitter, on Instagram, and follow my Substack. Okay, bye. Oh, wait! I didn't say, and also, peace and love. I'll see you next time. I got a haircut the other day; doesn't it look good? No, no, no! Stick to the stuff you know. It's better to focus on the things that you understand. Don't mess with the flow. No, no!