Why is it that we love monsters? Why do we willingly subject ourselves to visual arrays of horror, of brutality, of fear, and the feeling of someone – something - watching us? What is it that compels one to invest in the story, or even root for the monster itself? Scholarship on the “monster” in the arts indicates that the fascination with monstrous creatures is an attempt to make sense of the horrors of our world…. to make tangible our fears, while furthering our understanding of identity. The monster is an agent of meaning-making, and is a means of recognizing or commenting on the world as one sees it.

​

No one seems to understand the role of the monster better than Guillermo del Toro, the Mexican filmmaker, director, screenwriter, producer, storyteller and former special effects makeup artist. To him, “monsters are living, breathing, metaphors”[1]. Del Toro uses his monsters to make historical and socio-political commentaries on contemporary society. In Western culture, one is taught to understand the world in binaries - as good vs. evil. Western monsters often isolate and propagate conceptions of what is typically designated as ‘The Other’.

​

Del Toro’s monsters are complex in nature and are often reflections of the character’s psyche, or a culmination of their histories and social situation rather than easily defined as good or evil. They are warnings, as often as they are representations, of concentrated abomination or exiled and misunderstood outcasts. In the exhibition catalogue, Guillermo del Toro: At Home with Monsters: Inside His Films, Notebooks, and Collections, Keith McDonald and Roger Clark locate the filmmaker’s intense love for the monstrous figure, citing del Toro’s belief that the monster “represents an image of humanity itself, complete with all its imperfections”[2]. For del Toro, the monster’s struggle as an outcast is the “existential struggle of the human condition…they are a twisted reflection, like a funhouse mirror, and within that reflection, there are aspects of yourself you don’t normally see”[3]. His filmic works have been praised for his ability to represent fantastic worlds with elements of the Gothic[4] while his heightened understanding of the monster acts as a historical and contemporary narrative allegory for society. Del Toro is successful in his ability to combine different elements from the Gothic novel of the early Romantic period and to meld them with features of his own heritage. His monsters are shaped by various suggestions of cultures and traditions worldwide, lending them intertextual[5] significance[6]. His use of cultural lore when approaching the monster, forms a rich visual palette of transnational film authorship. Despite all the writing on del Toro’s critical and observational abilities as a ‘meaning-maker’, there has been no parallel examination of his style of story-telling to that of flânerie. Specifically, the analysis of his use of the monster device as a tool for his brand of flânerie, where the monster, embedded with social critiques and historical information, serve as symbolizers for del Toro’s perspectives on the modern condition. Like Charles Baudelaire’s flâneur who observes and seeks meaning in modernity[7], del Toro controls the meaning within his created worlds and has used his monster-devices as points of commentary. In this way, del Toro is a cultivator, creator, and curator of the worlds he constructs.

​

It is these worlds and of the mind of which created them, that his AGO exhibition - Guillermo del Toro: at Home with Monsters - communicated to its viewers by displaying his expansive private collection. Collections matter because they gather cultural signifiers; physically hosting cultural meaning. These meanings are interpreted and explained in the exhibition as they are extensively done in his films. Del Toro’s activities as a collector and his close advisory role in the AGO exhibition testify to his interest in storytelling and the authorship he takes up as a curator. This paper intends to make visible the link between del Toro’s representational abilities (his impressive storytelling and visual style) and his status as a post-modern flâneur, between borders and between a multitude of mediums (from the screen to the exhibition). Expanding on these concepts, it is pertinent to consider the role collections and curation play into the exhibition as the exhibition is the sum of del Toro’s possessions, films, and creative mindset. His films have consistently probed the intricate and altering relationship of humanity and monstrosity, of which are the focus of the exhibition. The exhibition was created with the intention to enable the viewer to see through his eyes and understand the man whose stories about monsters have become so impactful. It is essential to analyze the socio-political and cultural effects his films possess when examining how they relay and assert his status as flâneur. I intend to approach del Toro’s storytelling devices/monsters under the lenses of flânerie and affect, to examine how he creates his characters as representations of his experiences and understandings of the world as transposed on to and from film, further into the gallery space. More specifically, I argue that the exhibition acts as a vehicle through which flânerie is activated as a curatorial methodology that compliments his filmmaking and storytelling practice. To advance this argument, I will focus on select filmic case studies from his oeuvre such as Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), Cronos (1993), The Devil’s Backbone (2001), and HellBoy (2004) as well as themes present in the curation of his exhibitions that mirror his representational value of the monster through his unique storytelling ability. Why del Toro scholarship has exploded over the past few years will be explored by examining academic literature on the auteur-director himself.

​

The Transnational Auteurship of del Toro

​

Akin to the Baudelairean flâneur, del Toro is the “maker of the order of things” as evidenced with his auteurism. According to long-established tradition in film studies, the term auteur designates a conception of the director as the creator and shaper of the total cinematic work. The director’s artistic control dominates the entirety of the film in the same way as the writer’s work would shape the totality of a novel.

​

Despite the fact that del Toro does not explicitly address the issue of the flâneur himself, his preoccupation with collecting and meaning-making aligns him implicitly with the Baudelairean stance. In this way he becomes a reimagining flâneur of the twenty-first century. Del Toro makes his home among many locations whether fictive or not, and he develops his plots in keeping with current events even when he positions his stories in the past[8]. To focus on del Toro’s exhibition and cultivation of meaning-making through various devices is important to the study of contemporary flânerie because its scope is not only tied to his methods as a film director, but how his film authorship translates into the affective presence in the museum space. This transposition between mediums (from film to exhibit) highlights the enduring and fluid nature of the flâneur as an active methodology (versus passive experience). Del Toro’s monsters host a great diversity of cultural and social issue references from literature (fairy tales) to films, lending to their intertextual nature, making them rich treats for his audience to devour. Monsters have long been the subject of conversations reflecting on the complex relationship between humanity and monstrosity, grounded in society’s sentiments on the modern and current socio-cultural conditions and questions of identity.

​

In recent years, scholarship on del Toro has increased substantially. While del Toro has been prolifically directing films since 1993 and most articles and reviews on his work focus on his Spanish-language films: Cronos, El espinazo del diablo/The Devil’s Backbone, and El laberinto del fauno/Pan’s Labyrinth[9]. Critics often focus on the intertextual nature of Pan’s Labyrinth: specifically, on the director’s consciousness and use of historical events embedded in his world of fantasy. Sean Volk’s investigation of the del Toro phenomenon has recognized in his article Transnational Monsters, three primary texts have been published on del Toro and his films. The Three Amigos: The Transnational Filmmaking of Guillermo del Toro, Alejandro Gonzá lez Iñá rritu, and Alfonso Cuaró n (Shaw 2013), Guillermo Del Toro: Film as Alchemic Art (McDonald and Clark 2014), and The Transnational Fantasies of Guillermo del Toro (Davies, Shaw and Tierney 2014). These studies examine del Toro’s films under transnational and intertextual lenses. Where Volk’s concern is with del Toro’s intertextuality and the monster as a lynchpin of his parables on the socio-economic implications of nations and borders, McDonald and Clark assert that del Toro’s use of these elements is a distinguishing characteristic in his style as a director. Del Toro’s films defy familiar binaries that often typifies Latin American films as exploring cultural ‘cross-fertilization’. Davies, Shaw and Tierney approach his films as ‘transnational fantasy’. While Stephanie Dennison asserts that del Toro’s traits as a director, alongside his dual national standing[10], results in his use of cinematic devices that make his films accessible for mixed audiences. Shaw’s book Contemporary Hispanic Cinema, argues that del Toro’s films cause viewers to question traditional ideas about the auteur as the representative of a national identity. This intention applies del Toro’s own movements across geographical borders, in addition to those of his monsters[11]. Volk explains that referencing diverse texts and mediums enables directors to create connections to cultural and historical contexts that encompass the original work[12]. The process of linking film to literature realizes a connection between new projects and the cultural lineage of earlier works in blockbuster Hollywood cinema. This is the precise sense in which Volk deploys the concept of intertextuality[13].

​

Del Toro’s transnational success is in part due to his combination of mythic scenery and themes, rendered with narratives about political strife “and an honesty in the representation of the brutal violence so much a part of both worlds”[14]. The tension in del Toro’s work stems from his oeuvre as the epitome of postmodern reproduction and simulacra. His films restructure existing narratives that are immersed in codes and conventions of well-known popular genres. Throughout his career, del Toro has shifted between Spanish-language horror-fantasy films and mainstream American science-fiction/horror. His unique situation between cultures, and ability to take characteristics from ethnic history and lore constitutes his skillful border crossing and contemporary storytelling[15]. Del Toro is a liminal auteur who moves between many things: media, borders and genres. His use of intercultural language in film has the power to break down barriers and forge new cultural in parallel with multilingual films making their ideas accessible to more than one demographic of language-speaking viewers. These alliances, often taking place on borders, involve a symbiosis either symbolically or literally as transnational exchanges, making his content accessible and their stories affective in nature to a large audience.

​

Working in both America and his native Mexico, this distinguishing characteristic suggests that a multiplicity of del Toro’s films exemplify his transnational nature, from Pan’s Labyrinth, HellBoy and even Cronos – a film that gives weight to the connection of diverse geographies while not so subtly hinting at American-Mexican relations[16]. The Cronos story follows a ‘Mexican baroque cyborg’ whose character has narratives of colonization and is argued to embody the transgression of boundaries between technology and nature. This was a film that was created for a globalized audience as recognized in its dual language of Spanish and English as well as retaining a culturally mixed cast. This story as well is an emblem of the “vampiresque operations of multinational capitalism,” of which Claire Taylor and Thea Pitman recognize threatens “the loss of temporal depth and cultural memory”[17]. In their book Latin American Cyberculture and Cyberliterature, the cyborg in Latin American culture holds on to specified anxieties regarding the dissolution of collective memory and identity. Anxieties that are historically connected to the experience of colonization as well as the erasure of the nation[18]. The vampire on the other hand, is also well known in American literature as the polluter of life. The vampire transforms others through the parasitic infection of blood, “the one who is undead, unnatural, and perversely incorruptible”[19]. These creatures are the organisms of transformation; a monster that signals the racialized historical and national unconscious.

​

            The film, Cronos, went into production in 1992, during the time of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) debate[20]. The representation of borders in Cronos offers a contextual framework that explores the vampire monster in its cross-cultural creation. The film, by engaging with monster characterizations, analyzes the cultural/geo-political perspectives of the filmmaker. Borders are central to the construction of the monster in horror. The entity that crosses or threatens to cross the border is considered wretched and dangerous. The border, once crossed, destroys the separation of human and inhuman, supernatural/natural, giving rise to anxieties and the destruction of subjugating binaries. In Cronos a multitude of borders are threatened or crossed. Sarah Watson and Emily Adler’s book Gothic Science Fiction 1980-2010 make note that the prologue in Cronos is set partly in 1537 and 1937, while the rest of the film takes place during the last two days of 1996 unto the beginning of 1997[21]. Del Toro’s choice of setting for the film projects an unhappy future rife with urban putrefaction, hinting towards feelings of unease around the era of NAFTA. The film’s acknowledgement of ruins suggests conditions of living in the age of ‘throwaways’, “implying that ruins carry the greater cultural charge”[22]. These ruins allude to a literary Gothic[23] sensibility – a known factor and influence in many of del Toro’s stories. He cultivates a tension between cultural decline and persistence of his characters often in the landscape that envelops them[24]. These characters, largely monsters, serve to highlight the destruction through their presence as either antagonists or protagonists, forcing viewers to reflect on the cultural mirror of their modernity and identity within it.

​

Cronos is rife with encounters between language, cultural specificity, geo-politics, economics and all that infer an instability within these categories[25]. The ‘vampiric’ relationship between North America and Mexico in a post-NAFTA’ world is a subtextual influence evocative in the character’s relations[26]. Where, through the vampiric relationship between the nephew and uncle, del Toro reflects the exchanges between North America and Mexico; “The uncle’s determination to stay alive at all costs, and his confidence in the power of medical technology, suggest that del Toro’s critique of nortenos is cultural as well as economic”[27]. The visualization of vampirism is most evident as a metaphor for economic exploitation, seen in del Toro’s character dependencies; Dieter De La Guardia is the family boss and riddled with cancer. As a cyborg composite, he is entirely dependent on biomedical technology to stay alive, “and as such he is the post-modern double of the insect cocooned inside the pre-modern Chronos device”[28].  The cyborg as a monster has origins in narratives of colonization, symbolizing the breaching of boundaries between nature and technology as a mix of cultural fusions and transfusions of the ‘megalopolis’. The vampiresque affairs of capitalism are what threaten the loss of cultural identity[29]. Moreover, the cyborg is one which disturbs boundaries between cultures and that of the organic and artificial as well as appearing to have the ability to collapse temporal and spatial distinctions. The postmodern figure of the cyborg is comprised of multiple interfaces interconnected between machine and organism networks. The entangled networks in del Toro’s oeuvre are regarded symbolically as dramatic tellings of technological production and the conflict of global power systems.

​

The Cronos narrative from del Toro’s early career established the interstitial quality of his work as director and storyteller, and is only one of many examples of his cross-pollination of cultural beliefs and representation. Although his work was an uneasy fit in the 1990s with the seemingly inflexible art-cinema demands of his own ‘state-supported national cinema’ and of the genre expectations of a Hollywood independent, del Toro made waves because of his storytelling and a large part of it was his transnationalism[30]. His positioning of the monster in the social context of familiar, rather than the other, magnifies his values on representation and the coherence of humanity and its fears. In each of his films, the style of their storytelling addresses extensive ideological and cultural anxieties; given that these monsters are often a reaction to human action, it is understandable to conceive that del Toro’s films use monstrosity to confront and establish a connection between the personal life of the individual and the political/cultural contexts of the narrative[31].

​

In many of his films, past events are addressed in the present narrative, and pre-existing literature are drawn from different cultures for the film’s story. Through these textual references, del Toro’s transnational perspective is evident in his use of the monster and the pointed narrative. He tells his stories with creatures that are disguised as allusions to social or historical issues, making apparent his conceptions on modern conditions. The resounding popularity that came from del Toro’s works is due to, as Deborah Shaw proposes, strong films that did well in the box office, winning international recognition in film festivals. This success came from the language hybridity making the stories accessible to more than one language. Where the blending of cultural lore and transnational mixing of cast, cultivated an intertextuality that is easy to consume. Her book, Contemporary Cinema of Latin America, highlights that auteurs like del Toro among others such as Alfonso Cuaron and Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, gained the interest of global distributors and producers who found that investing in Latin American cinema can produce large financial reward. As a result of this new source of funding, a recent trend developed in Latin American films, one deriving from an increased reliance on public finance for distribution and production[32]. A number of Latin directors no longer needed state-sponsored film institutes and Latin American, European, and North American production companies turned filmmaking into a commercial enterprise. Meaning that cinema production was no longer closely tied to state policy – and their means of censorship. This change enabled filmmakers to go on to creating films that would otherwise be censored and lose their cultural or social affect, while taking away from auteurist intentions such as those of del Toro. Where films that host personal perspectives such as Pan’s Labyrinth embodies harsh critical perspectives on Francoism and the effect of historical memory and trauma as a result of the Spanish Civil War would have otherwise been censored.

​

This concept of transnationalism, although inclusive, is also in need of defining. The problem of definition is approached where ‘transnational’ replaces ‘national’ as a new framework in which to examine film cultures[33]. In this essay, the transnational is a means of describing cultural and economic arrangements that are not always contained by national boundaries[34]. The category of the transnational stems from the content of films and their cinematic storytelling devices (such as monsters and landscapes) used that make them accessible to audiences all over the world. Cinematic transnationalism should resist globalization as cultural homogenization. Del Toro’s methods of filmmaking are guided by the ideologies encapsulated with cinematic transnationalism in that the economic realities associated with filmmaking do not shadow the inquiry of aesthetic, social, or political values[35]. Del Toro’s conjunction of auteurism and transnationalism connects his flânerie to his liminality as seen in the case studies of his monsters.

​

The Del Torian Gothic

​

A potent theme in del Toro’s works focuses on relations and choices. Often these choices are borne out of political strife or displacement. Pan’s Labyrinth and The Devil’s Backbone are notable examples of the use of themes regarding kinship and political strife. A part of del Toro’s transnationalist endeavors not only span across borders geographically in terms of shooting location or cast choices, but in his references to cultural literature and beliefs. Gothic literature (as opposed to the Gothic style of the late Middle Ages or the Gothic Revival style of the nineteenth century), originates in the eighteenth century within the early Romantic movement. In this sense, it plays an important role in del Toro’s work as both a reflection and symptom of specific cultural issues. The Gothic ghost of the eighteenth century signifies a transgression of limits – “a crossing of borders in order to engage in the ongoing dialectic between seemingly opposed cultural forces”[36]. The Del Torian Gothic ‘disentangles’ social conventions that prompt exploration of the ir/rational and super/natural borders. The contemporary Gothic functions as a response to social and national traumas that have affected individuals with the inability to tell any complete story about them. The Gothic narrative renders these stories in pieces, littered with ghostly appearances that attempt to reveal traumatic contradictions of a collective past that is unspoken. The Devil’s Backbone exemplifies Gothic tendencies that are rife with imagery evoking a physical and mental landscape of trauma, deriving from repressed memories of the Spanish Civil War. McDonald and Clark expand on del Toro’s appropriation of Gothic conventions in the historical and political context, linking recent readings of modern Spanish culture that treat the Gothic as a ghost story. The ghost is the image of subjugated history, a reminder of historical trauma erased from conscious memory only to make its presence known through ghostly traces. The ghost child Santi from Devil’s Backbone is a ghost-device that embodies not only his own murder in the narrative but that of the thousands who have perished during the war under Franco’s dictatorship. Santi’s status as a ghost recognizes him as a monster/monster-device. His role in the film as a political and historical subtext is to fill the historical gap in Spain’s memory, voicing the silent horrors inflicted by the Spanish Civil War[37].

​

Del Toro’s use of the monster as a historical device allows for the shifting of these early Romantic texts out of their original cultural and historical space. This transposition enables the recontextualization of their traits in a late twenty and twenty-first century cinematic framework. In this way, del Toro recycles established tropes from earlier literature and within new transnational and transcultural contexts. The monster in del Toro’s works is tied to the use of intertextuality as well as a transnationalism that has been widely recognized within film studies. Ann Davies and other authors consider del Toro’s negotiation between his own transnationalised national culture and the globalizing Hollywood to be successful. Questioning what it is to be interstitial, the authors suggest that the filmmaker is an auteur who “creates his own individual vision somewhere in between geographical spaces, genres, and production models”[38]. Ann Davies and Deborah Shaw’s essay The Transnational Fantasies of Guillermo del Toro acknowledge and explore the filmmaker’s mixing of nationality, intersitiality and transnational nature. Film is the visual element that enables the replication of ideologies of a nation as well as perpetuating the discourses of countries and communities[39]. The influence of Gothic writing from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries provided del Toro with an ‘encyclopedia of the uncanny’. Allowing him to re-interpret and re-create recognized tropes and stories; the customary horrific settings, spectral entities and monsters of the Gothic story re-emerge in abandoned subway systems, empty factories or even lonely orphanages[40].   

​

Latin-American Cinema, the Monster and Fairy Tales; Monsters and What They Signify

​

As widely acknowledged within scholarly literature, the early Romantic Gothic monster is redeployed by Del Torian storytelling to address ideological and cultural concerns. This approach, in turn, sheds light on his status as a cinematic auteur, while his transnationalism emphasizes his ability to suture narrative material across cultures to create specific stories about his perceptions of contemporary human predicaments.  Pan’s Labyrinth is highly illuminating in the context of addressing the monster-device as a vehicle for del Toro’s flânerie. While the film is set just after the Spanish Civil War, del Toro considers the film an indirect reflection upon the historical period that was shaped by the terrorist attacks on September 11th, 2001. The passage of time between Pan’s Labyrinth and The Devil’s Backbone – approximately five years regarding production and the setting of the story for each film – was meant to reflect the changing cultural and political contexts that succeeded 9/11. Del Toro recognized that America’s response to the tragic event was similar to that of Spain’s following the Spanish Civil War (insofar as both periods displayed an extensive sense of national fear and obedience to national authority). I intend to use what Sean Volk conceptualized of these sentiments to engage further his analysis of the monster as an agent of del Toro’s flânerie. Del Toro’s ability to combine the realities of war and monsters in storytelling reflects his critique of history and modern social issues. Within these transpositions, the fairy tale produces a reflection of modernity as struggle, identity, destitution, enlightenment, trauma and memory. It is often that the fairy tale traces the experience of a child protagonist undergoing trials in order to change their situation. Their journey is usually within an imagined environment, populated by strange creatures who both help and threaten them[41].

​

The other-worldly creatures, in Pan’s Labyrinth experienced by the protagonist Ophelia, are not the only monsters. Ophelia is faced with the horrifying realities of history. Her childhood fantasies fade and she is left with a real-world monster, Captain Vidal, the cruel captain in the Francoist army. The juxtaposition of the recognizable monster and the human monster is a common theme for del Toro who enjoys playing with concepts of humanity. In many of his films, del Toro will have a leading attractive male character as the true monster who hides his monstrosity behind his appearance. While, the recognizable creature is evidently in possession of more humanity than the human character themselves. In Vidal, del Toro cultivates a connection between fairy tale monsters and the human monster where he is able to step into Ophelia’s fantasies, occupying the same space as the fairy tale monsters. Even though he is human, his ability to occupy the same space as Ophelia’s imagined monsters, visually situate him as a monster. This is especially prominent given that the spaces of the fairy tale and reality are kept separate. Vidal is associated with the faun or the Pale Man where, in sharing the same space, it is revealed that monsters exist just as much in reality as they do in fantasy. The function of the two figures is intended as a reflection on the nature of storytelling; where worlds of history and fairy tale collide in confrontation[42]. Del Toro’s monsters exist in both fantasy and history which allows the creatures to work liminally in the film’s historical contexts. This mode of border crossing enables the communication of contemporary concerns through fairy tale models. The Pale Man, for example, is a character that references not only loss from the Spanish Civil War, but events outside of it. The monster’s compilation of children’s shoes is connected to another historical context, linking the monster to the Holocaust as well. In this manner, the monster functions beyond time and history. The shoes draw on the historical realism of the Holocaust, and it is this imagery that correlates with the popularizing use of the term when accounting for the deaths of the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath[43]. Del Toro’s Pale Man engages cultural and historical contexts, utilizing the fairy tale to confront history where the monster is able to reference and even comment on historical events, in effect acting as a liminal advocate of symbolic/representative meaning.

​

Pan’s Labyrinth engages motifs from a multiplicity of sources into a ‘hypertextual metafiction’ that profits from both ‘older print textuality’ and ‘newer hypertextuality’. In her essay Approximating the Hypertextual, Replicating the Metafictional, Kristine Kotecki considers Pan’s Labyrinth in possession of the authority of ‘ancient origin’[44]. The double action of replication and likeness contributes to the sociopolitical angle of Pan’s Labyrinth – permitting the film to interrogate concepts of authority and the history of the fairy tale “with a seriousness that avoids discounting the historical and potential power of fairy tale texts […] and that claims this power for its filmic fairy tale through pointed sociopolitical critique”[45]. Kotecki’s focus on del Toro’s film regards the intertextual nature of the piece and its designation as ‘hypertextual’ to connote the material relations that inform adaptations across media. The definition Kotecki uses for hypertextuality refers to a system that utilizes “one-to-many linking, which permits readers to obtain different information for the same textual site [and] multiplies the reader’s choices”[46]. This model encompasses the multiple directions and layers for citability that allow a referent to be recontextualized. Film as a medium, where audio and visual avenues converge, engage a multitrack and multiformat structure that allows for layered messages to be presented simultaneously as hypertext. The filmmaker as the hyperlinker does not replicate print tropes but rather links, repurposes and creates stories and allusions. As a hyperlinker, the filmmaker has greater flexibility for criticism available than the individual who faithfully adapts a source. Pan’s Labyrinth utilizes themes of fascism and resistance, incorporating Gothic influences and fairy tale motifs. The film stages the struggle between Franco Nationalists and the Republican army. The authoritarianism of the Franco regime is exposed in Captain Vidal. The Fascist political context that Vidal imposes mirrors Ofelia’s experience in an oppressive familial context. These experiences also parallel her magical engagements which reveal the potential for fairy tales as a political and social critique. The juxtaposition of the fairy tale with horrible wartime experiences works because the fairy tale film engages a ‘corrective’ and ‘realistic’ version of the world in contrast to the nearsighted outlook individuals have on reality. Ofelia’s experiences in the magical world are shaping and shaped by the political conditions that encompass them.

​

Within Pan’s Labyrinth, there are layers of other fairy tale references; Ofelia’s mother Carmen, loves the Alice in Wonderland-esque dress that she gave to Ofelia. Ofelia ends up dirtying the dress and wears another in the final scene of her coronation, accompanied by red shoes that Kotecki suggests, are from MGM’s The Wizard of Oz (1939). Del Toro’s use of the red shoes alludes to their symbolism as a device in the literary tale –presented as the authentic or “age-old” fairy tale genre. Kotecki’s analysis of the shoe connects their relevance in the film with specific events in history. The pile of shoes in the Pale Man’s layer function as substitutions for the Holocaust and of fascism itself in hypertext; “it alludes to the various Holocaust depictions of piles of victim’s clothing […]. The hypertextual linking here disseminates source authority, thus emphasizing the filmmaker’s creative engagement with multiple cultural references”[47]. Kotecki’s analysis affirms that the film’s engagement with hypertext and filmic replication of literature emphasizes ‘constructedness’ – where the book’s literary tropes are replicated to emphasize the ‘constructed contextualization’ of the hyperlinks and the viewer’s ability to discern their effects.

​

Marc Cotta Vaz and Nick Nunziata’s book Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth dutifully provides a historical backdrop for the juxtaposition of the Spanish Civil War and del Toro’s fairy tale film. This analysis offers a potent argument for the affective use of historical trauma and the monster as a method of criticism and awareness. The Spanish Civil War has been referred to as the ‘opening battle of World War II’; beginning soon after the Republican government gained power in February 1936, Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy supported the Franco’s side. A rebellion against the left-wing government ignited in Morocco and spread to mainland Spain where General Francisco Franco was the leader of the Rebel Nationalists. When Franco’s forces emerged victorious, approximately 600,000 people had died fighting[48]. The Franco government invested in terror, with all of Spain held by Franco, the war against the Republic continued not through battle but in military courts, prisons and concentration camps – as well as the pursuit of exiles[49]. Many Republicans escaped to Mexico and many of the Mexican production agents who worked on Pan’s Labyrinth grew up under their influence; much of the history regarding the Spanish Civil War was silenced under Franco. The historical context produced in Pan’s Labyrinth held a personal and collective discovery of history and politics that engaged with elements of monstrosity and fairy tales. The monster has a duality to it, as a metaphor for what human beings attempt to address in their own lives – whether past or present. But, while the monster is characterized as one that enjoys chaos and symbolizes destructive behaviours that threaten society, the monster also makes this destruction possible. The creature in this way, as Michelle Kay Hansen believes in her essay Monsters in Our Midst, are resources for identification and awe as well as of horror; [50]. While the Pale Man is a recognizable monster, Vidal is soon revealed to be a monster himself. He is the destructive, war-indulging monster of the Spanish Civil War. Del Toro uses the human monster as a vehicle to address human-inflected traumas, paralleling his presence with recognizable monsters only to provoke self-reflection.

​

Not only are monsters metaphors for one’s own inner expression of emotion, but Hansen makes clear that studies on monstrosity – whether human or inhuman – all define the monster as a symbol for uncertainty or discomfort. Del Toro’s Hellboy defies many binary definitions of good and evil and becomes assiduously ambiguous as the humanity in which Hellboy desires to be a part of, is the source of most destruction[51]. These anxieties are connected to perpetually changing social, political and economic conditions[52]. Largely, monsters serve as warnings. They challenge and redefine boundaries that are worn and make visible cultural or geo-political issues that we have forgotten or become numbed to. In this way, the monster is an outlaw, living ‘outside of the rules’ of society, making this, one of many attractive elements of monstrosity as they possess the freedom we seem to ‘lack’[53]. Horror is cultivated in the sense of the unknown, and the lack of definition promotes tension and fear. In Gothic horror fiction and film, ‘deterritorialization’ is an uncontrolled thing, blurring lines of fantasy and reality, the natural and unnatural. Del Toro’s storytelling hinges on the ability to manipulate, blur, and cross lines, as seen in his characters who transgress or blur lines of humanism and culture/identity politics as well as historical memory. One may only look to his use of film as a potent force for his ability to concoct such stories: the earliest forms of storytelling have come from fairy tale narratives, of which impress themselves upon science fiction, fantasy and horror.

​

Flânerie and del Toro

​

The horror film prefers to disrupt cause and effect patterns seen in classic devices such as “shot/counter-shot” or continuity and reverse-field editing in favour for cultivating a sense of mystery[54]. Andrea Sabbadini concedes that the artistic medium of film is considerably effective in del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth. In Moving Images: Psychoanalytic Reflections on Film, Sabbadini believes that the medium does well to represent different layers of reality within the work, having the ability to transport viewers in and out of realms of reality and fiction. Cinema in this way may be likened to a bridge through which one is invited to move across different planes of reality; “On the surface, documentaries seem to provide an objective representation of the external world, while fictional features create a completely imaginary one. These extremes however, are only caricatures of the truth, for in fact both kinds of film share in a complex, though often barely definable, admixture of both worlds”[55]. How does del Toro’s use of the cinematic medium make him a flâneur? Since Baudelaire established the flâneur in the nineteenth century, the figure has been subject to rigorous analysis. Baudelaire’s poems record the ambulatory gaze of the figure in Paris – one who ‘who goes botanizing on the asphalt,’ chalking the character up to a quintessential paradigm of the subject of modernity[56]. Baudelaire’s ‘perfect spectator’, as referred to in The Painter of Modern Life, was upper-class and staunchly male, a prince of observation who was gifted with the ability to be at home away from home[57]. His mobility through the urban space allowed him access to the streets and domesticity of the home, recording his observations[58]. He held a fluid social position, his pleasures were not, as Baudelaire insists, available to any man – only to those who possess an investigative eye and ability to render what they perceive; “the capacity of seeing [where] there are fewer still who possess the power of expression”[59]. Baudelaire recognized that flânerie allowed the individual to act as a detective. In the flâneur, there is a watchfulness, enabling the detective to develop reactions that are in keeping with the tempo of his time.

​

Baudelaire’s Monsieur G is the man of the crowd, he is not the man in the crowd. He is the center of an ordering of things from his own making, even if he appears to be a part of the metropolitan stream. It is his being of, as opposed to his being in that makes him different from others in the crowd[60]. He appears to be like everyone else, yet his anonymity is a ruse[61]; he is a liminal figure, able to transgress boundaries at will. Given that the flâneur is in control of a world of his own definition, he defines the order of things rather than allowing appearances to define themselves. Del Toro’s world is one of fiction blended with his geo-political critiques on modernity. He blends cultural and historical realities into the fabric of his fictions to entice voyeurs to decode their relational meanings. As a hyperlinker, he plants his monsters within his narratives to present his observations, criticisms and representations of the world. The flâneur’s approach to life is his curiosity which sparks new modes of sight, one that engages child-like curiosity that allows him to see everything in the light of ‘newness’[62]. He wills the faces and things he observes into meanings he attributes to them, marking him as the sovereign of the order of things. He reimagines the world and rebuilds a cognitive mapping of expanding socio-economic relations[63] – undertaking the process of translation, he makes sense of the modern world and acts as speaker for it due to a keen perceptivity only he possesses. It is precisely the aptitude for a specific sight that becomes the vehicle by which the individual can cultivate an understanding of the meaning of modernity to produce for mass demographics[64].

​

Scholarship on flânerie traces the genealogy of Baudelaire’s apprehension concerning technological advancements that affect ways of seeing. In his writing, the figure of the flâneur was attached to a specific time and place: nineteenth-century Paris. Within Baudelaire’s texts one can find his hatred for recording devices to be self-evident. This trait, in turn, is symptomatic of another crucial dimension of the flâneur in Baudelaire’s writings. The flâneur who encounters: the figure who encounters the monstrous within modernity, the elements of disorientation which challenge and exceed the limits of sense and meaning-making. This dimension of the flâneur, one who has these traumatic encounters with the senseless and monstrous in modernity, challenges the limits of meaning-making. A monster alludes to traditional modes of classification. Baudelaire’s flâneur in that line of thought, is always coming across things that are monstrous in his work Les Fleurs du mal. The text recognizes that there are things that completely disorient his figure.  Lending the observation that modernity itself as a type of unclassifiable monster. This in turn, opens up new insights into del Toro’s double use of flânerie as both monstrous and as a mode of meaning-making.

​

The Imaginative World, Set Design, and Character Reflections

​

Del Toro’s known hallmark of his monster-as-mirror serves to provoke his audiences to address themselves with their own frailties or flaws as they are blown up to fantastical size. Where, things are often concealed in the world we live in, his films offer worldly parallels to the one we know. He cultivates worlds and spaces where secrets are buried and a truth can be discovered. Often, del Toro’s character arcs deal with their ability to make choices; the choice to conquer our demons or to let others suffer from their effects is what sets his protagonists and antagonists apart. Commonly, his protagonists are orphans, the person the main character loves the most is either dead or dying, they have an ability that most characters in the universe do not have, and most commonly this trait enables them to see spirits or into another world[65]. Del Toro’s films treat the fantastic as the mundane. In Pan’s Labyrinth, Ofelia’s first encounter is with a fairy and the scene is directed as if to imply that she was expecting to meet the fairy. Del Toro naturalized the expectation by priming audiences with fairy tale texts that point to magic and Ofelia’s absorption of such literature. The magic isn’t treated as anything special and does not have complete control over the characters. The conscious choice to have characters accept magic as normal was to allow the storytelling to be less restricted.

​

Del Toro’s close attention to the world of set and creation have earned his films titles such as ‘art film’ or ‘eye candy’. For the filmmaker, eye candy is not a favorable term as he considers its breakdown as food to be a waste of energy. He prefers to consider his works as ‘eye protein’ because protein adds to and builds up the body – for del Toro, it is the difference in designing something to look aesthetically appealing and designing it to tell the audience something about the character; to add to their story or the overall plot in general[66]. For example, the character Carmen in The Devil’s Backbone, possesses a prosthetic leg that, at a distance looks plain and weathered. Upon closer inspection it is revealed to be beautifully crafted, made of smooth rich wood accompanied by a silver foot and hidden compartment. The costume design of the prosthetic leg acts as a physical representation of Carmen herself: a woman who may look plain, but at closer glance, while weathered, she is quite beautiful, showing signs of formal wealth and is potentially holding a few secrets of her own. It is this level of detail that del Toro puts into all his designs, believing that the set should be its own character. Where every detail has a purpose and is meant to engage the story. Palette colour is also significant and a heavily used element by the filmmaker to tell his stories.

​

Del Toro spares no expense when it comes to colour, bathing his sets in his typical yellow, blue and green tones that often change dramatically from sequence to sequence. In Pan’s Labyrinth del Toro uses two main colour palettes to help tell his story; the colours blue and yellow become most noticeable after Ofelia has undertaken her magical trials. Deep blue tones are associated with the antagonist’s storyline (one that is largely tethered to the ‘reality’ of the story space), involving fascism and wartime. Golden yellows are used in Ofelia’s adventures in the magical world and also its bleeding effect into the real world (often shown in scenes that support the rebel victories). When both storylines start to affect and converge among each other, the colour palettes become more apparent between scene juxtapositions or mise-en-scène sets. Where, settings that were at one point coloured specifically in blue tones are now coloured opposite (or mixed both blue and yellow) to indicate that they have been affected by the actions of fascists (blue) or by the magic (yellow). The filmmaker’s decision for these bleed overs is to show the subconscious affect between these worlds and storylines on to the other. Del Toro often constructs his sets with the intention of creating an emotional and psychic landscape where characters engage and discover their identities as well as exploring personal and historical memory. These landscapes embody the mindscapes of the characters, projecting moods and even denoting historical relevancies. In Pan’s Labyrinth and The Devil’s Backbone, the latter characterized by a vast, empty plain where an orphanage is set, the former, a Republican outpost in a desolate Fascist setting – “as well as a theatre for the playing out of submerged desires and revenge”[67]. The landscapes that del Toro creates in these films simultaneously embody the mindscapes of his main characters, given their isolation and dislocation from the outside world of history and culture – but they also carry with them the imprint of historical memory as well.

​

From Filmic Adaptation of the Fairy Tale to the Museum Exhibition

​

As a collector of the bizarre, del Toro encourages his viewers to ignore traditional narratives as he blends and reinvents conventional genres. His preference for collapsing time and space, history and fiction, reality and fantasy speak towards cinema’s importance as an art form; film is a medium of emotional and intellectual affect/sustenance, on par with other modes of visual expression[68]. Britt Salvesen, department head and curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), co-writer of the Guillermo del Toro: At Home with Monsters catalogue, adds in her essay Chaotic Passions: Guillermo del Toro and Collecting, the importance of film in the museum exhibition. Recognizing that film has made a late appearance into ‘encyclopedic museums’ due to the previous lack of support for film to be properly showcased. With increasingly refined conceptual frames and tools as well as new installation approaches, there breeds more potential for sharing the art of film in the museum. Salvesen notes that working closely with del Toro produced favorable results as he gave access to his creative process that far enriched the exhibition beyond that of secondary source material could offer – this is also considerably true of the AGO’s exhibition. The exhibition Guillermo del Toro: at Home with Monsters is a collaboration between three institutions: by Britt Salvesen of the LACMA, Mathew Welch of Mia and Jim Shedden of the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), hosting approximately 500 objects[69]. Interest in this essay will focus on the latter institution and its curator Jim Shedden’s approaches that showcase del Toro’s inner mind to the public. The exhibition hosted at the AGO ran from September 30th 2017 to January 7th 2018[70].

​

The AGO’s exhibition gathered elements from del Toro’s films as well as objects from his extensive personal collections, attempting to recreate his Bleak House in Los Angeles – not unlike the previous museums. Housed within the exhibition is a diverse range of media – from sculpture, painting, prints, costumes, books, film and even ancient artifacts that reflect the broad gaze of del Toro’s insight[71]. Jim Shedden’s sentiments on the exhibition follow suit with the AGO’s desire to explore creative imagination in its many forms across time and place to immerse their visitors into the fantastic realms of Guillermo del Toro’s mind. The exhibition is sectioned into eight thematic parts, arranged to motivate the observer to discover while they travel through the gallery: 1. Childhood and Innocence (exploring the central role of the child in del Toro’s films), 2. Victoriana (loose references to the Romantic, Victorian and Edwardian ages – as well as latter-day interpretations of the Victorian era), 3. Rain Room (a recreation of his favourite room in his personal residence ‘Bleak House’), 4. Magic, Alchemy, and the Occult (featured puzzles, talismans and the quest for forbidden knowledge that appears frequently in his films), 5. Movies, Comics and Pop Culture (focusing on his obsession with cinema and pop cultural influences), 6. Frankenstein and Horror (exposing the filmmaker’s love affair with Mary Shelley’s famous novel, with keen focus on her monster), 7. Outsiders (created to consider del Toro’s fascination with monsters across all media; in horror movies, literature, myth and art), 8. Death and the Afterlife (addressing confrontations with death that del Toro experiences growing up in Guadalajara)[72]. Del Toro reflects on the exhibition as presenting a small fraction of the things that have inspired him as well as console him; “It’s a devotional sampling of the enormous love that is required to create, maintain, and love monsters in our lives”[73]. A curator of his own home, Bleak House, the exhibitions hosted from LACMA to the AGO, expanded on the idea of del Toro as a curator and artist who created his own cabinet of curiosities[74].

​

When approaching the exhibition, it is pertinent to consider collecting and curating; del Toro’s intimacy with artifacts from a multiplicity of cultures and traditions attests to the influences and palpability of the worlds he cultivates in his films. Cinematic form – from colour and sound to mise-en-scène – are carefully arranged around objects and bodies[75]. Del Toro’s designs, his costumes and sets exist in full three dimensionality. The objects in his films should be seen as more than props, they are manifestations of characters and their worldviews. These objects act as a narrative strategy that is especially powerful in fantasy genres. Here, one can consider the exhibition’s overall layout; the sequencing of space is organized by the curator (and by extension, del Toro himself) to “spatialize a message, narrative, or rational argument”[76]. In general, the exhibition’s layout is designed to choreograph the audience’s movement, perception and behaviour throughout its space. Audio and visual components transform the interior and stimulate the fictive environment. This cinematic presentation cultivates engaged viewing, while also communicating the works and personality of the artist. Within this exhibition, the message from the curators and del Toro himself are the desire to implement patrons into his world; to see monsters as points of social reflection and criticism. It then, is only obvious that the design is choreographed similarly to his Bleak House. Props and artifacts are situated to suggest accessibility, but still held behind cabinets and on pedestals similar to their presence in their original home. Museum-goers are put into a state of closeness with the works, allowed to dig through the filmmaker’s comic book collection and read portions of his fairy tale books, see sketches or stand in close proximity to the monsters conceived from the del Toro’s mind.

​

Bruce Ferguson’s Exhibition Rhetorics, is a useful outline when reviewing the desire for appropriate distance between art and the individual for maximum affect. To be too close to the object would be fetishistic – causing one to “blindly identif[y] with the objects” without really seeing them in their entirety[77]. To be too far is to be voyeuristic and lack empathy or relationality to the objects. Distance regards the object as foreign, repeating too closely symptoms associated with superiority or imperialism[78]. Ferguson suggests that the exhibition, as material speech, should speak in a voice that is sensitive to the audiences’ want for cultural distance where they can learn and enjoy meaning made and presented to them. An effective exhibition that regards the voice as a medium, will expose this tension between the unconscious as well as the known and unknown[79]. Patrons in the del Toro exhibition are encouraged to explore and understand what they are seeing, hearing or reading, but within limitations and distance. An individual can interact with del Toro’s comics just as they can press their hands upon the glass cases, but they cannot touch his Poe or Pale Man monster sculptures. Jennifer Lindblad’s article Stretching the Window, sheds light on the importance of considering the gallery context and object placement in Guillermo del Toro: at Home with Monsters. Lindblad notes that traditionally, sequence was used in galleries for artwork placement chronologically based on the dates they were produced. In contemporary exhibitions – and in this particular one -, the practice is rarely found. Instead, the AGO opted for an ahistorical format even though the exhibit deals with historical perspectives, preferring to focus on narrative and thematic organization.

​

A defined sequence is still present in order to produce meaning – this sequence is not wholly characterized by the organization of artworks but also by the careful attention to the arrangement of space, animated by the visitor’s movement to present a narrative[80]. The animation of space shapes the visitor’s cognitive reading. Curator Robert Storr’s conception of galleries as paragraphs lends understanding to the ways in which one reads an exhibit; the walls and floors are subdividing sentences and the individual objects operate as nouns, verbs, adjectives etc. in accordance to their context[81]. Storr’s association of the exhibition space and its syntax explains that placement and spatial contextualization controls the reading and understanding of the exhibit. A large part of del Toro’s fascination with collecting fragments and suturing them comes from his love of Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein. Her monster is a collection of parts – the ‘ultimate fabrication’ as Salvesen coins it. In similar fashion, the exhibited collection of del Toro features his works and objects, juxtaposed with each other in the space, acting as sutures coming together to create a whole body of meaning. Where del Toro’s collections are an assemblage of parts just as Frankenstein’s monster was. His films are riddled with questioning what happens when opposing worldviews confront each other. It is common for his protagonists to struggle against forces of disorder – some never admitting that the struggle is useless while others learn to use the chaos to become powerful; the viewers are able to find within his works, glimpses of how these collections are formed with/by the characters in their world; the antique shop in Cronos or the auction market in Hellboy II for example. Collections garner strong visual and affective presence in his films. Del Toro’s immortality-seeking characters desire to build strongholds around their possessions, yet these detainers can collapse. In Cronos, the main antagonist lives with a collection of organs that were removed from his fading body. These collections are housed in a building that was once a factory, bearing the name ‘Del la Guardia’ (implying protection). The collections, as well as the del le Guardia men are doomed due to their selfish drive for possession – one that ultimately controls them and their fate[82].

​

As it is widely recognized, films, like objects, are not only seen but felt. Genre’s power in aiding this ‘gut-level response’ comes in forms of narrative, sound, lighting as well as colour. All of which serve to trigger spectator expectations and reactions. Salvesen suggests that it “is impossible to witness eye gouging or teeth clamping without experiencing a mirroring response to protect our own bodies and to reassure ourselves that we remain intact even while the creatures onscreen are torn apart”[83]. Del Toro is careful in his presentation of choregraphed struggle and triumph in spectacular form; to externalize anxieties that are inherent to the human condition. The collection of objects are endowed with properties that link two disproportionate states together; that of fantasy (of the moviegoing experience) and that of the harsh uncertainty and reality of our known world. Salvesen’s text lends the understanding that due to the object’s material and existential value, they bring one back to the rationale of collecting. By this logic a conceptual link is recognized between museums and the horror film; “both of them emphasize the latent power of objects, whether by bringing them to life or keeping them for posterity”[84]. Del Toro’s collection grew not haphazardly as the filmmaker is involved in arranging and maintaining it – just as he is in gathering his ideas for his films and notebooks. For him, the items in his house and how they are arranged is not arbitrary. Del Toro does the same of his movies wherein he treats his movies like his residence. Famously known as ‘Bleak House’, named after one of Dicken’s greatest novels, a ‘mancave’ to del Toro, the house’s interior hosts a vast collection of pop cultural curiosities which include props, posters and memorabilia that the filmmaker claims feed his creativity. Acting as its own version of the earlier museum – a cabinet of curiosities -, Bleak House’s presence exemplifies how central collecting is to his creative process. This precision for organized collecting and purposeful representation are essential to his working process. These collections create his environment and, grouped into thematic libraries, they reference various genres and subgenres “he wanders among as a storyteller”[85].

​

​