A Tall Tale

Garrett Lambur

Upon watching Pan’s Labyrinth in class I was blown away by the reactions the film got having seen it before and, yes, I did react but they were all staged. I had forgotten how much fun one could have seeing a film before watching it within a group setting such as that one. But I digress from the most intriguing question I got from the movie. Was the fairy tale straight from the girl’s head or was it real?

This is more of an opinion question but I feel that the answer may have significant impact upon my own beliefs. For instance if I start to doubt this fairy tale then do I have to start doubting Santa? That may sound satirical but I assure you it is not for my belief in Santa is something that I do take seriously. Every Christmas there are still presents from Santa under the tree and I realize that they are not from Santa but from my parents or relatives. It is not the present themselves but the idea behind the presents, the underlying meaning. I am not going to dissect this meaning but continue upon the impact of the answer to the stated question. If I decide it was real than many other fairy tale characters such as Santa solidify themselves and their impact within my world. But if I decide that there was no real fairy tale then the impact of the all fairy tales begins to lessen, including the lessons that many of those tales teach us in life.

In class we discuss the ability of myth to impact a human life. Yet in order for this impact to truly be felt there has to be some part of you that believes in the myth. If you discount the entire myth as fibble fabble then how much will you allow the lessons within the myth to impact you? As idyllic as it is look at the movie Tall Tale (way back in ’95) where the young boy Daniel lives a mythic tale that represents a real life fight he is engaged in. The ending blurs the line between the mythic characters and real life but is this not how lessons from myth are passed on. Without any belief in the myth Daniel may never have had the courage to fight for his farm because he would have thought the myth was fictitious and none of it applied to his current day situation.

As such I have to answer my question that the fairy tale within Pan’s Labyrinth was real. Now some may think this stupid because hey, it’s a movie, of course it can’t be real but it’s not the fact its real it’s the ability to believe in the fairy tale. Believing in a fairy tale allows it to help you develop your own beliefs along with helping to solidify any other beliefs not related to that fairy tale. By believing something that others may not you establish your own beliefs because without beliefs a man loses the ability to be an individual.