By Joshua Rivera
“When I was a child — a very young child — a hairline fracture became evident in my soul. I felt growingly disenfranchised, puzzled, and at odds with the adult world. It was made up of rules and notions that were both alien and unexplained, and life came to feel like a rigged game. It was almost entirely composed of lies.”
—Guillermo del Toro
I.
Guillermo del Toro, people will tell you, is deeply in love with monsters. After all, he never shuts up about them. He happily divulges the contents of his notebooks, full of designs that he has lovingly realized in films like Frankenstein and Hellboy, and many more he has not. He will wax poetic about the Gothic literary tradition and the ways monstrosity has been depicted and understood throughout history, and why that resonated with him as a weirdo from Guadalajara who never felt like he fit in. Then there's his movies, which often feature a sympathetic creature beset by cruel humans eager to indulge in the oppression of a being on the margins.
Analysis of del Toro's body of work often stops there, with this singular obsession. It's an understandable impulse. The craft and dedication to which del Toro brings his films – often sold as horror films but better understood as fairy tales in their original, more dangerous form – makes him truly singular among Hollywood filmmakers. I love this about his work. But it also holds him at a distance, renders him inert, toothless. He is reduced to being a man who loves his toys, and not a prolific Mexican artist with something to say about the world.
This couldn't be further from the truth. The man has a target, a very modern concern, a contempt as consistent as his affection for monsters: Guillermo del Toro abhors liars. This is what makes him a vital voice in a post-MAGA world, a consistent spinner of moral fables about the evil of falsehood in a culture that has been robbed of truth.
Pan's Labyrinth (2006), widely regarded as his masterpiece, burrows deep into this a full decade before the first Trump presidency. The film is a fable about Ofelia (Ivana Baquero), a young bookish girl who goes with her mother (Ariadna Gil) to live with her cruel new stepfather in the countryside. It's 1944, and the stepfather, Captain Vidal (Sergi López) is a proud Falangist, an adherent of the fascist ideology that fueled Spanish dictator Fernando Franco's military regime for over thirty years. At the start of the film, Franco has been in power for five years following the end of the Spanish Civil War. But there are still rebels, the Maquis, who engage in guerilla tactics, jamming the gears of fascism.
That's what Vidal is doing in the countryside: Hunting antifascist rebels. He has summoned his new wife to his side because she is pregnant with his child, and he wants to be present when they are born. We see all this through Ofelia's eyes, who then encounters something stranger: A faun hidden in a garden labyrinth, who gives her three dangerous, magical tasks to complete.
Liars and fascism are intricately linked in del Toro’s work. Lying with impunity is, in the worlds he imagines, the root of fascism’s appeal, both to assert one’s desire to dominate others as the natural order of the world (“These people labor under the illusion that all men are created equal,” Vidal says at a dinner party, disparaging the Republican rebels) and to overwrite the moments of your history that would appear weak. This moral rot manifests physically, when Vidal’s mouth is sliced open by his maid, Mercedes (Maribel Verdú), and he spends the remainder of the film feeling the sting of liquor leaking through the stitches with every drink he takes.
The inability to face the truth about your own frailty, to choose to embrace a lie instead— that is the animating force driving nearly all of del Toro’s villains, from Dieter de la Guardia in Cronos to Richard Strickland in The Shape of Water, to the deluded Stanton Carlisle in Nightmare Alley (his only film expressly about a liar). This fixation in del Toro’s films has inadvertently made him the fabulist of our times, crafting these unabashed fairy tales about the evil liars render into the world at a time where liars reign with impunity in the United States, and the truth has been diminished as a virtue.
A monster cannot be anything other than what it is. Society will not let them. A monster is truth, and the beauty or horror of that truth is in the eye of the beholder. A liar, however? A liar chooses. Over and over again, they choose to diminish others, to remake the world out of vanity.
II.
The first thing Ofelia’s mother asks her to do is lie.
“It’s just a word,” she says, gently pressing her to acquiesce to what is untrue, to call the man she is about to meet her father. Because the fairy tale begins with its ending, we know tragedy awaits. That Ofelia will eventually be found in the forest, bleeding out into the mossy earth. One wonders if this is where it all starts to go wrong.
When we were teenagers, my little sister developed a case of achalasia — a nerve condition which leaves the esophagus unable to relax, causing all manner of discomfort related to digestion. It started slow, when she was about fourteen. At first it didn’t seem like much, just minor difficulty swallowing food, a curious sensation that felt like a mouthful just wouldn’t enter her stomach.
She didn’t think much of it. That’s how most things start, really — with the notion that what you’re feeling is normal, unexceptional. That nothing is really wrong, and you just have to get used to whatever it is that’s bothering you. This of course, is accompanied by the lesson many young women learn early on — that your misery is not real, or does not warrant serious attention.
Things got worse, but gradually. When she’s 15 or 16, after a year of minor discomfort, she felt it was finally worth bringing up — the backups were getting worse, like little plugs keeping anything from entering her stomach at the far end of her esophagus, where the esophageal sphincter would normally contract to let food enter the stomach. Instead, it would just pile up, filling her esophagus until she had to spit up. This slowed her eating considerably, causing her to cough and spit and croak if she wasn’t careful.
Her burgeoning problem was met with little sympathy. Our mother was not compassionate in our upbringing. She believed in tough love, in not quitting, in mind — and God —over matter. Our father was not terribly present, always working and perpetually unavailable. Neither were nurturing, supportive, nor gentle. They didn’t really know how to be.
The void we felt because of this drew us closer as siblings. We didn’t start that way — we bickered and fought and drove each other crazy. But then we got older, and found no one there to help us when the world came bearing down. We looked to each other instead of our parents. That’s what happens. You build a smaller family to survive the one you were born in.
So when my sister started to develop what seemed like a nascent disability, the help she needed was far from her. Our mother would not offer sympathy nor understanding — she would not even begin to take her daughter’s condition seriously until it got far worse — and as for myself? I was about to disappear. I had plotted an escape, as the first in my family to go away to college. My sister would stay local, living at home, dealing with the parents I got away from while also dealing with this strange affliction that made a simple pleasure of life a source of constant misery for her. And I couldn’t help, because I was already gone.
Who is lying to Ofelia? Who is telling her the truth?
The story begins with a fable, of Princess Moanna, daughter to King of the Underworld. The filmmaker wants us to believe that maybe this is more than a myth, that Ofelia is this Princess, lost in the mortal world with no memory of her true identity. This is what the Faun tells her, deep in the labyrinth that he says is a secret portal back to her real father’s kingdom.
She can go back, if she wants. She just has to do three tasks for the Faun, terrible things that no one can catch her doing. Maybe she shouldn’t trust the Faun, but if he is lying, it’s a lie far more appealing than calling the man hunting down the Maquis rebels her father. The Faun, at least, is telling her something Ofelia wants to believe.
It does not take much to become a medical mystery. The gap between the realm of readily diagnosed, treatable conditions and one of complete mystery is incredibly narrow, especially if you are young, or appear otherwise healthy. Often, a diagnosis isn’t really a solution as much as it is confirmation that your life is not, nor will it ever be, what you imagined as normal.
When my sister turned 18 and began attending culinary school, normal came to an end. At this point, eating is an ordeal for her. She has to take over an hour to slowly eat a little at a time, with a cup to spit in whenever things refuse to go down properly, which is often. Sometimes she has to rush to the bathroom to clear her esophagus entirely. Our mother assumes bulimia, another mental issue that my sister must simply overcome, and beat back with sheer mental toughness.
Of course, this wasn’t the problem. My sister wanted to eat, and couldn’t. And without treatment, the sickness comes — pneumonia from fluid entering her lungs from a backed up esophagus, long recoveries stemming from malnutrition, terrible weight loss from her inability to get a damn meal in her. Trips to the ER had become a regular occurrence, as was avoiding them, because of their cost. But finally this means she starts seeing doctors who can answer her questions, questions that can validate her and confirm that she’s not making things up. Something is wrong.
Meanwhile, I was adrift. My time away from home left me feeling profoundly alienated, both from my family and among the students I felt little in common with. I had passed from one world into another, but unlike the fairy tales in which young men and women in such circumstances find a sense of belonging, I just felt grotesque.
I had discovered within myself an insatiable search for truth, and like many students pursuing an education, I was angered to learn the currency lies accrued in the world. In this I finally found some kinship with my mother, who converted to Christianity out of a feeling of deep disquiet, a suspicion the world was hollow with nothing real to place her trust in. She presented faith to us as a solved problem — the answer to everything she believed afflicted her, and a protection from the heartache that was doubtless coming our way. It never occurred to her to consider one of the most common morals encountered in a story, that the search for truth is almost more important than the destination one arrives at. She never cared much for fiction.
My search for truth, my education, would bring me in direct opposition to my mother’s faith, a rift that widened each time I came home and saw what it would do to my sister.
Achalasia, as the specialist who finally diagnosed my sister many appointments later told her, has three treatments. One is a procedure known as pneumatic dilation, where a small balloon is inflated at the lower end of the esophagus, stretching and tearing it into shape. Not a permanent solution, as the esophagus can heal, and the problems can persist. Another option is drugs. Third and best is a surgery called a Heller myotomy, which cuts open the lower esophagus to allow food through and grafts stomach tissue to the larger opening to serve as a makeshift sphincter. This has the highest and best success rate.
But it was surgery, and surgery was expensive. So our mother tells my sister they were going to try something else.
Vidal, Ofelia’s cruel new stepfather, is a proud minister of Francisco Franco’s fascist vision of Spain. The captain embraces cruelty in his zealous hunt for Maquis rebels hiding in the countryside and disrupting his operation. He takes pride in his work: torturing prisoners, brutally restricting rations to keep food from reaching the rebels, beating men to a bloody pulp simply because it pleases him to crush those he considers lesser.
“These people labor under the illusion that all men are created equal,” he tells a room full of dinner guests, serving them an opulent feast as he starves the surrounding villages. To him, there is one truth that matters: That he won the war and they did not. His story is the only story, and all of Spain will tell it. One enormous lie, about the quality of his nation’s greatness, and the might of the men who serve it.
In private, Vidal repairs a watch. It is implied that it belonged to his father, who died a war hero, smashing it against a rock so his son will know the exact moment his father died for what he believed. Vidal will not let others tell this story. He calls it a fiction. He goes back to work, meticulously replacing its sprockets and gears.
He called himself a homeopathic healer, and he had been working his way through the family church. This was a congregation that believed in divine healing, and was taught that while doctors served a purpose, it was ultimately God that healed you. This philosophy gave the Homeopath ample room to work, with his blend of wellness doctrine and “natural” cures an appealing supplement to the prayers of the devout.
My sister does not recall what the Homeopath looked like; in her mind he is a void. Maybe he had a beard, some paunch, and stood about as tall as our father, a man of average height. His name was something unremarkable and plain, impossible to recall or pick from a list. What she remembered was his confidence. Where doctors were cautious and gave percentages, he provided certainty, and a plan for achieving it. His plan, however, was misery.
The Homeopath gave my parents what seemed like an affordable alternative to expensive surgery, a regimen meant to help God do his work. He told my parents and my sister that her body would heal itself, she just needed to reset it, and help it along the way. He gave her a strict diet (bird food, my sister called it, for the sheer amount of seeds and grains) and a barrage of pills that, naturally, she could not swallow. So instead she would have to blend them into a paste, and slowly force down the chalky mess.
Most humiliating and difficult were the enemas. Coffee enemas have been a persistently pushed treatment among those who practice natural healing for decades, a reckless faux remedy that is likely to cause serious injury or infection and ineffective at its proponents claims of “detoxifying” the colon. They’ve never done anything of the sort.
I only heard about the Homeopath and his treatments in passing, on brief visits home. For most of my college career, I took every opportunity to avoid returning. I juggled several part-time jobs through all four years of undergrad, which made for easy excuses. I could tie myself up with one thing or another, take a trip to see a friend, work through the summer. I was numbing myself. I wish I hadn’t been.
Because that whole time, my sister was at the mercy of the Homeopath’s lies and my mother’s stubborn decision to embrace them. That whole time my sister was sobbing in the bathroom at six in the morning as she became weaker and thinner and eventually not strong enough to handle the miserable enema bag herself. It was then, at her lowest, she told me years later, that she finally saw some doubt in our mother’s eyes, doubt that was quickly snuffed out by her resolve. Her belief that faith ought to be resolute, that anything contrary to her trust that the divine was guiding her every step was a temptation to be shunned.
When I did come home, I was shocked at my sister’s condition. I asked my parents what it was they thought they were doing, why they thought this man was worth their time and money and they reasserted their faith. That they would never let anything bad happen to any of their children.
Like many parents, they were unaware that they already had. And would continue to.
We never get to know for certain if what Ofelia is seeing — the Faun, his faeries, the strange and terrible creatures he sends Ofelia to confront — is real or not. If she is Princess Moanna or not. In some ways it doesn’t matter. It’s real to Ofelia, and therefore real to us. All stories are real to us when they are happening. This is why it’s important that stories be true.
It matters, then, that Ofelia is asked to buy into a lie, no matter how small. Vidal isn’t her father. And he’s not interested in the role, either.
One day my sister tells our parents that she can’t do it anymore. She had gone along in part because she trusted them, because surgery was in fact frightening, because she was scared of going against our mother’s convictions, and too ground down to fight them. I still feel guilt over this, that I wasn’t around to do anything, that I didn’t raise hell, make everyone as miserable as they made her.
She got the surgery, the Heller myostomy. We never heard from the Homeopath again. With my sister back under the care of medical professionals, he was of little use to anyone, and receded to the void. I had stopped going to church at this point, and I didn’t know if he was still seeing other congregants. Every now and then I would see remnants of what I presumed was his work. Women who would recommend silver water for the immune system, or slip vials of dubious herbal supplements in their tea.
I wish I had gotten a look at him. I wanted to stare him in the face, to see if he really believed in what he was doing. If he knew he was lying. Or if he had forgotten what the truth was. I wanted to know if he ever stuck around to see someone get better, to take credit for work that wasn’t his, or if he always planned an escape.
That’s the thing about liars. They always have a way out.
Ofelia is killed in the end. Shot by Vidal in a pathetic attempt to wrest back control, to pry Ofelia’s newborn brother from her arms, claim a child that might be his by blood but he knows he has no future raising. The rebels have arrived. They will not reclaim Spain — the Francoist regime has only just begun, and will endure for another thirty years — but they will take the farm. Vidal will die here, and as Mercedes, his former servant, tells him, his son will never know his name. But there is no saving Ofelia.
This is the way of the world: the liars will kill your children, if given the chance. With their own hands. They will rewrite the history of the world and talk out the side of their slit mouths, they will take food from the hungry and feast on it in their own homes. Pale Men in halls of opulence, turning away from all that sustains and is good, in favor of adding another pair of empty shoes to the pile, another child’s life snuffed out by their appetites.
There is nothing more monstrous than a liar.
One of the terrible things about working in journalism — the field all that troublesome curiosity led me to — is that you spend too many of your days watching the bad guys win. You labor every day in the service of candor and veracity, and every day you see dishonesty win, by a landslide. That’s always been the roughest part of the job. Knowing when someone in power is lying, and being unable to say so, because the standards for people who seek to tell the truth are so much higher. You must have evidence, you must be ready for legal scrutiny, you must contend with a fickle public who must then be convinced. Which of course, presents another terrible possibility: People that just don’t care.
They have so many reasons to not care, so many stories they’ve told themselves about how they will outsmart an illness or earn their way to heaven or take their country back. They have forgotten how to say anything true. The homeopaths and preachers and politicians have severed their connection to their own hearts, giving them pills and dogma and demagoguery to turn to — and away from the suffering of someone looking them in the eye. Someone that they’re supposed to love.
The guilt of surviving an abusive upbringing can blindside you when you’ve got siblings. It’s something you struggle with together, but also separately, each relationship between parent and child turning sour in its own way. You want to help each other but you are also doing everything you can to just get by. As you grow and heal, you wonder if you did enough for them.
I never felt like I did. I’m bad at keeping in touch. I moved to a new city to put distance between past and present. Start over, like everyone else who runs off to a new town. I can be quite distant, even to those closest to me. My wife is always looking at me, asking where I am.
My sister bends my ear a bit when I go too long without calling, but not too much. I feel bad about it constantly. She’s probably the one person who knows me best in the world, and I can barely talk to her. I wonder if there’s a world where we’re closer, or if this is what closeness looks like for us.
One spring day not long after I’ve moved to Philadelphia she tells me she wants to come visit. It’s a beautiful day, perfect really, and she’s wearing a purple dress that drags the season in with her — she’s always been like that, the change of seasons in human form. She wants to tell me something, something that she hasn’t told anyone else because she’s scared, because it’s about to upend the peace she’s fought to achieve for herself, about to once again bring her into conflict with our mother, to dredge up pain, and she wants things to be different this time. She wants to start with someone she can tell the truth to, and hear it back in return. So she tells me that she’s pregnant, and I tell her the simple, uncomplicated truth, free of the demands of church and faith and moral judgment that warps everything, makes you feel smaller: That I love her, and that I can’t wait to meet my nephew.
Joshua Rivera is a critic and essayist whose work has been featured in Slate, New York Magazine, Vanity Fair, and elsewhere. He lives in Philadelphia.