History and Trauma at the Crossroads: Guillermo del Toro’s El laberinto del fauno (Pan’s Labyrinth) and Isabel Coixet’s The Secret Life of Words

Abstract

These films’ offer a transnational perspective on historical memory . They blend documentary realism with fantastic or melodramatic genres, blurring the lines between contextual subjectivity and notions of universal being, proposing a reconciliation of these two modes of being in order to work through past traumas, as well as to combat authoritarianism in all its guises. Unlike the fictions in the previous chapter, characters in these films are ultimately able to connect with others by affectively engaging both the particular and the universal within their surroundings and within themselves. But the films end on ambivalent notes, showing that the assemblage is never complete, never seamless. Their endings invoke the affective complexity—joy and sadness, togetherness and separateness—of subjective experience.