Pinocchio's Labyrinth

It might be a bit early in the morning for big swings, but it’s my personal opinion that home invasions are bad. I’m pretty much categorically anti-home invasion and have never really had any interest in steel manning any opposite views. That is at least until I read this story a couple of months ago about a fateful break-in during a period in Guillermo del Toro’s creative development when the various period-specific planes of his particular genius were sputtering to life in their hangars and taxiing into the queue for the runway. Which is to say, he was well on his way to being well on his way, but in a different direction.

Del Toro’s first great love, at least from a filmmaking perspective, was animation. He started teaching it in high school at 17 and he had big plans that his first film, which should have landed pre-Cronos, would be an animated film using the more than 100 clay models that he, his girlfriend at the time, and his brother had made. That all changed when they went out for an evening and came home to discover that someone had broken in, destroyed his models, and pooped and peed on pretty much everything. He took it as a sign that he was supposed to make live action films instead, and it’d be 30ish years or so before he’d circle back around to animation in the form of his recent adaptation of Pinocchio.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to unpack Pinocchio in public and make you sit through it. I loved it a lot, my wild smart girlfriend thought it was OK, and you’ve been bleached with it by Netflix’s marketing machine for the last few months if you’re a subscriber, so you’ve likely either already seen it or decided not to. Instead, I wanted to rotate the body of our wide-angle lens a few clicks and look a bit closer at the aftermath of his break-in.

It would be naïve to try and simmer that moment down into some kind of didactic little glaze we can spread over what almost-necessarily must have been an incredible disappointment. The relatively complete destruction of your life’s work up to a certain point is never going to go down well no matter the outer coating. But I do want to point something basic but profound (to me) that was perched on the window sill and watching all of this unfold: the fundamental outcome here was inevitable. Guillermo Del Toro was going to get his insatiable visions out one way or another. It just wasn’t going to be through the avenue he would have chosen for himself, at least not for a long time.

On the other side of that apartment was Pan’s Labyrinth, Pacific Rim, and a number of other outlets through which his creative energy has thunderfucked the film space for the last 3 decades or so. It’s hard, at least for me, to imagine modernity without him and his work continues to give us a yellow brick road to follow into the darker places of our psyches, both individual and collective. And this story reminded me that the point of acceptance and healing isn’t to let out a yeehaw every time our heart breaks. I’ve spent a great deal of time and energy pretending to celebrate not just my wounds but the wounding process itself. In fact, it showed that often times these moments don’t even have a point in any capital P sort of way. Instead, it felt like a perfect example of what can come from these sorts of things if we let go and let the great river continue to carry us along.