Other Pasts: Family Romances of Pan's Labyrinth

Guillermo del Toro's film, Pan's Labyrinth, employs a common childhood fantasy, described by Freud in “Family Romances” as a matrix for the narrative of a young girl's development into an ethical subject of social community. Surreal scenes represent the child's encounters with drive jouissance, issuing in a recognition of shame and a consequent relation to history. Recalling an image of a resistance against Spanish Fascism, the film enacts a collective family romance as a messianic project that proposes a genealogy for a potential future.