This lushly inventive and moving fable, set in Francoist Spain during World War II, tries to pull off the combining of fantasy and harsh, relentless wartime reality, and the result is entirely that of its director, Guillermo del Toro, whose international career has been pockmarked with stories of monsters and crawlers in the darkness. The film is filled with his signature costumes and a sincerity of feeling for the childhood experience of curiosity and wonder—even if this curiosity tends to become noxious. The critical issue of Pan’s Labyrinth, an emotive, vigorous, and slightly shallow recreation of its period, is not whether this peculiar combining of fantasy and reality works well…
-
-
I Years before the onslaught of a madness that was to incapacitate him, voiding his intellect like the snapping of a high wire of isolation and brilliance, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote a book by the name of The Gay Science featuring the parable of the madman leaping into the marketplace, bearing a lantern in the morning hours. Its echoes, reverberating through the decades to come, would sound across the wasteland of the twentieth century whose cruelty and slaughter would eclipse all conceptions of the 19th-century imagination: “The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. ‘Whither is God?’ he cried; ‘I will tell you. We have killed him—you…
-
“That a man can take pleasure in marching in formation to the strains of a band is enough to make me despise him.” —Albert Einstein Joseph Heller published his epochal novel sixteen years after the end of World War II, having afforded himself a humane interval during which all the horrific bloodshed, nationalism, and bloodthirsty ideologies could fructify in the dust of the greatest boneyard that had ever existed. The euphoric and irreverent heights of black comedy had never been attempted with so merciless and unsparing a wit, applied to the great era of modern warfare, the twentieth century. This novel could be said to constitute the novel of modern…
