Nightmare Alley is in theaters now.
No working director can meld disparate tones into harmony like Guillermo del Toro can. Del Toro has an imagination worthy of a child; his films are populated by monsters, fairies, ghosts, vampires, robots, and clockwork machinery, but never fall into camp. If anything, his films are earnest to a fault, not to mention terrifying, whimsical, and sometimes all of those things at once.
Despite how stylistically unique del Toro’s films are, they are also built on homage. Pacific Rim is a mecha anime brought to life, The Shape of Water is a spiritual sequel to The Creature From The Black Lagoon, and Crimson Peak might as well have a Hammer Horror logo in its credits. In a nutshell, del Toro’s style fuses together the gothic with the fantastical imagery and childlike innocence of fairy tales. The gothic is, like del Toro, fixated on the past and mixes together both horror and romance. He also has great empathy for freaks and outcasts. There’s one fairy tale whose themes and motifs appear time and time again in del Toro’s work, one he almost directly adapted - The Beauty And The Beast.
The Beauty and the Beast goes back to 18th century France. First scribed by Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve, the story has been retold countless times. In 1946, Jean Claude Cocteau rendered the story in haunting black and white, while in 1991 Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise immortalized it in animation. The archetypes of the story are also ones that del Toro has visited many times.
Hellboy introduces a romance between the titular hero and the pyrokinetic Liz Sherman that wasn’t present in Mike Mignola’s original Hellboy comics. This relationship is the cornerstone of the film though.
There is a pretense of a love triangle between Hellboy, Liz, and the wet blanket audience surrogate, John Myers. After seeing Liz and Myers together, Hellboy admits to Liz that “I wish I could do something about [the way I look],” and tells her he understands why she’d be drawn to someone normal. “Myers makes you feel like you belong.” Even in these moments, there’s never any doubt about which of the men Liz loves. In the film’s final act, Hellboy and Liz share a kiss while wrapped in blue flame as Myers looks on. Narrating the scene in voiceover, he says “What makes a man a man? Is it his origins? The way he comes to life? I don't think so. It's the choices he makes. Not how he starts things, but how he decides to end them.”
This ending, two “freaks” embracing while a normal man is left alone, speaks to the difference between the director’s vision and the original fairy tale. Beauty’s love restores the Beast to his true form, a handsome man - normalcy is the beast’s reward for mending his ways and a virtue in and of itself. Not for del Toro, though.
Del Toro has recounted the first time he watched The Creature From The Black Lagoon. As Julie Adams’ Kay Lawrence glides across the surface of the Amazon river, the creature observes her from below. “I felt an almost existential desire for them to end up together,” del Toro recounted in a 2017 Hollywood Reporter interview. “Of course, it didn’t happen.”
This is the thesis behind The Shape of Water. It’s not only del Toro’s most overt spin on The Beauty and the Beast, it applies that archetype of the monsters from del Toro’s youth: Frankenstein, King Kong, and of course Black Lagoon. Instead of the creature’s fascination with the female lead being met with rejection and horror, it leads to a tender romance with no need for normalcy.
If The Shape of Water followed the fairy tale to the letter, the fishman would shed his scales to become beautiful to everyone, not just Eliza. Instead, he gifts Eliza gills so that she may join him in a life under the sea. Rather than the Beast reintegrating into society, he and Beauty retreat from those who can’t see the power of their love, content in being alone together.
A theme of the Beauty and the Beast is that old adage, don’t judge a book by its cover. To emphasize this, the story almost always has Beauty pursued by a handsome but vile man. The Cocteau film has them played by the same actor. This contrast, a kind soul shunned for his ugly appearance against an evil soul with a beautiful shell, clearly fascinates del Toro.
In The Shape of Water, that disparity is personified by Colonel Richard Strickland, an upstanding picture of mid-century America’s ideal (white) man. He also tortures the Asset, has a perverse attraction to Eliza, and is described by Eliza’s friend Giles in the opening narration as “The monster who tried to destroy it all.” Every sympathetic character in The Shape of Water is of a group marginalized in America. After all, del Toro has said he drew on his experiences as a Mexican-American immigrant when making the film.
This distinction recurs throughout del Toro’s work. Devil’s Backbone is a ghost story, but the spirit is benign, desiring only to move onto the next plane. The real evil is Jacinto, the orphanage’s groundskeeper and a murderer with the face of an angel. Del Toro repeats this trick in Crimson Peak. There is an evil dwelling in Allerdale Hall, but it’s not the ghosts, grotesque and frightening as they may be. They’re just victims of the Sharpe siblings, and are trying to warn the film’s heroine, Edith Cushing, so she may avoid their fate.
Across del Toro’s films, the villains are human more often than not: Jacinto, Rasputin, Lucille Sharpe, Strickland, and worst of all, Captain Vidal in Pan’s Labyrinth. The only evil monster in Pan’s Labyrinth is the Pale Man, and even then, he’s a stand-in for Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, the great evil behind the Fascist garrison Vidal commands. Fascism is an evil from the human world, and it’s worse than anything dark magic could conjure.
Indeed, the most sympathetic villain of del Toro’s filmography is an inhuman one: Elf Prince Nuada in Hellboy II: The Golden Army. Nuada is disgusted by mankind’s greed-fueled destruction of the natural world, and seeks to wipe them out for it. Nuada is never outright proven wrong about humanity, with the film ultimately ending with Hellboy, Liz, and Abe Sapian quitting the BPRD and deciding to retire to quiet, isolated lives. Still, the greatest moment of pathos comes not from any human characters, but yet another one of del Toro’s monsters.
When Nuada unleashes a forest elemental on the heroes, it rampages across Manhattan. Though most films would solely use such a thing for spectacle, del Toro made a different call in Hellboy II. The destruction of the elemental — the last of its kind — is met with mourning rather than celebration. The city is saved, but at a deep emotional cost that the director made a conscious decision to highlight.
This brings us to del Toro’s upcoming release: Nightmare Alley. Though the Beauty and the Beast theme is less present here than it may be in his previous work, you can expect plenty of complex exploration of what has always been the villain in del Toro’s work: mankind.
Continue reading...
No working director can meld disparate tones into harmony like Guillermo del Toro can. Del Toro has an imagination worthy of a child; his films are populated by monsters, fairies, ghosts, vampires, robots, and clockwork machinery, but never fall into camp. If anything, his films are earnest to a fault, not to mention terrifying, whimsical, and sometimes all of those things at once.
Despite how stylistically unique del Toro’s films are, they are also built on homage. Pacific Rim is a mecha anime brought to life, The Shape of Water is a spiritual sequel to The Creature From The Black Lagoon, and Crimson Peak might as well have a Hammer Horror logo in its credits. In a nutshell, del Toro’s style fuses together the gothic with the fantastical imagery and childlike innocence of fairy tales. The gothic is, like del Toro, fixated on the past and mixes together both horror and romance. He also has great empathy for freaks and outcasts. There’s one fairy tale whose themes and motifs appear time and time again in del Toro’s work, one he almost directly adapted - The Beauty And The Beast.
Internal vs. External Beauty
The Beauty and the Beast goes back to 18th century France. First scribed by Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve, the story has been retold countless times. In 1946, Jean Claude Cocteau rendered the story in haunting black and white, while in 1991 Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise immortalized it in animation. The archetypes of the story are also ones that del Toro has visited many times.
Hellboy introduces a romance between the titular hero and the pyrokinetic Liz Sherman that wasn’t present in Mike Mignola’s original Hellboy comics. This relationship is the cornerstone of the film though.
There is a pretense of a love triangle between Hellboy, Liz, and the wet blanket audience surrogate, John Myers. After seeing Liz and Myers together, Hellboy admits to Liz that “I wish I could do something about [the way I look],” and tells her he understands why she’d be drawn to someone normal. “Myers makes you feel like you belong.” Even in these moments, there’s never any doubt about which of the men Liz loves. In the film’s final act, Hellboy and Liz share a kiss while wrapped in blue flame as Myers looks on. Narrating the scene in voiceover, he says “What makes a man a man? Is it his origins? The way he comes to life? I don't think so. It's the choices he makes. Not how he starts things, but how he decides to end them.”
This ending, two “freaks” embracing while a normal man is left alone, speaks to the difference between the director’s vision and the original fairy tale. Beauty’s love restores the Beast to his true form, a handsome man - normalcy is the beast’s reward for mending his ways and a virtue in and of itself. Not for del Toro, though.
Del Toro has recounted the first time he watched The Creature From The Black Lagoon. As Julie Adams’ Kay Lawrence glides across the surface of the Amazon river, the creature observes her from below. “I felt an almost existential desire for them to end up together,” del Toro recounted in a 2017 Hollywood Reporter interview. “Of course, it didn’t happen.”
This is the thesis behind The Shape of Water. It’s not only del Toro’s most overt spin on The Beauty and the Beast, it applies that archetype of the monsters from del Toro’s youth: Frankenstein, King Kong, and of course Black Lagoon. Instead of the creature’s fascination with the female lead being met with rejection and horror, it leads to a tender romance with no need for normalcy.
If The Shape of Water followed the fairy tale to the letter, the fishman would shed his scales to become beautiful to everyone, not just Eliza. Instead, he gifts Eliza gills so that she may join him in a life under the sea. Rather than the Beast reintegrating into society, he and Beauty retreat from those who can’t see the power of their love, content in being alone together.
Of Monsters and Men
A theme of the Beauty and the Beast is that old adage, don’t judge a book by its cover. To emphasize this, the story almost always has Beauty pursued by a handsome but vile man. The Cocteau film has them played by the same actor. This contrast, a kind soul shunned for his ugly appearance against an evil soul with a beautiful shell, clearly fascinates del Toro.
In The Shape of Water, that disparity is personified by Colonel Richard Strickland, an upstanding picture of mid-century America’s ideal (white) man. He also tortures the Asset, has a perverse attraction to Eliza, and is described by Eliza’s friend Giles in the opening narration as “The monster who tried to destroy it all.” Every sympathetic character in The Shape of Water is of a group marginalized in America. After all, del Toro has said he drew on his experiences as a Mexican-American immigrant when making the film.
This distinction recurs throughout del Toro’s work. Devil’s Backbone is a ghost story, but the spirit is benign, desiring only to move onto the next plane. The real evil is Jacinto, the orphanage’s groundskeeper and a murderer with the face of an angel. Del Toro repeats this trick in Crimson Peak. There is an evil dwelling in Allerdale Hall, but it’s not the ghosts, grotesque and frightening as they may be. They’re just victims of the Sharpe siblings, and are trying to warn the film’s heroine, Edith Cushing, so she may avoid their fate.
Across del Toro’s films, the villains are human more often than not: Jacinto, Rasputin, Lucille Sharpe, Strickland, and worst of all, Captain Vidal in Pan’s Labyrinth. The only evil monster in Pan’s Labyrinth is the Pale Man, and even then, he’s a stand-in for Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, the great evil behind the Fascist garrison Vidal commands. Fascism is an evil from the human world, and it’s worse than anything dark magic could conjure.
Indeed, the most sympathetic villain of del Toro’s filmography is an inhuman one: Elf Prince Nuada in Hellboy II: The Golden Army. Nuada is disgusted by mankind’s greed-fueled destruction of the natural world, and seeks to wipe them out for it. Nuada is never outright proven wrong about humanity, with the film ultimately ending with Hellboy, Liz, and Abe Sapian quitting the BPRD and deciding to retire to quiet, isolated lives. Still, the greatest moment of pathos comes not from any human characters, but yet another one of del Toro’s monsters.
When Nuada unleashes a forest elemental on the heroes, it rampages across Manhattan. Though most films would solely use such a thing for spectacle, del Toro made a different call in Hellboy II. The destruction of the elemental — the last of its kind — is met with mourning rather than celebration. The city is saved, but at a deep emotional cost that the director made a conscious decision to highlight.
This brings us to del Toro’s upcoming release: Nightmare Alley. Though the Beauty and the Beast theme is less present here than it may be in his previous work, you can expect plenty of complex exploration of what has always been the villain in del Toro’s work: mankind.
Continue reading...