Sometimes we create words that we cannot fully understand its meaning, and I believe that labyrinth is one of those words. It’s just something we use to fill in the gaps to an assortment of questions and dilemmas. It could be a maze, or it could be just the way we perceive the world.
Anyway, I saw Pan’s Labyrinth one of the first days it came out, so it’s not completely fresh in my mind, but I know that it was a beautiful piece of cinema. And I read The Garden of Forking Paths which was a nice little read. To me, the connection between these creative works is unknowingness. Things aren’t always what they seem, and that our lives are colossal labyrinths if we’re able to open our eyes and minds to it. Time doesn’t relent, and things are always changing, but you end up back at the same places, at different times. Life has many directions, although we only exist in the paths we choose, we are constantly choosing new paths, which means that there are billions of uncharted paths that could be walked down.
Our personal universe and the universe itself is a Labyrinth according to the short story. “A book whose last page was identical with the first, a book which had the possibility of continuing indefinitely.” Our first and last page are the same, meaning there’s non-existence, existence, then non-existence. Same applies for the universe, thus everything in between is a labyrinth, and the cycle will continue ceaselessly. The movie takes a more literal approach to the word Labyrinth, and delves into a word where anything can happen (girl’s world) and the world that overshadows it (mother’s world), and both can exist simultaneously, unaware of one another. The girls gets absorbed in the labyrinth of life because she chooses to, and the mother ignores it.
