I was lucky enough to partner with both my local movie theater and a good friend to host a talkback series about five monster flicks from the movies of Guillermo del Toro. The films we showed over the course of the month were: Hellboy and The Golden Army, Pacific Rim, Blade 2, and Pan's Labyrinth. My response is that film studios suck and they wouldn't give it to us without an inordinate amount of money. We showed Blade 2 instead. If you want to know why we didn't pick Cronos or Devil's Backbone, the answer is that we only had four Wednesdays to work with.
After the usual trailers, my co-host and I would get up in front of the audience and present the film. We would cover notable actors, timelines, awards, and end with some themes to watch for. Who gets to be a monster? What does telling a story mean in this framework? Why is Ron Perlman in love with the director? There are some unanswered questions, but here are five things I learned from this series.
Before every film, we asked our audience two questions: "Is Ron Perlman in this film?" and "Can we recognize Doug Jones?" The answers were usually yes, and always got a laugh. This was a great way to break the tension, to remind people that this is going to be fun, and that we are not standing up there to do a weird lecture. We were there to facilitate a discussion. When someone asked why del Toro casts him so often, she whipped out her notes, where she had written that she liked the man. He is a big guy.
They show up all the time. All the time. Clocks and gears are in almost all of his films. Doctor Kroenen had a tick-tock heart. The main office and base of personal operations for Captain Vidal from Pan's Labyrinth was in a mill and he was always working on his broken watch. Pacific Rim's Hannibal Chau had a big cyberpunk daddy energy, which is at least adjacent. Cronos is an OG clockwork Leather Daddy. Don't believe me? Here is what our weird king had to say about Kroenen in an interview.
“I was thinking, strangely enough, that Kroenen needed to be sexy. And I know an eyeless, lipless guy is not sexy, but I thought, “There needs to exist some kind of really, really, really twisted girl that is going to get off on Kroenen.” So I said, “For that, my minuscule audience, we have to make him sexy.”
I'm going to say that we learned this in April of 2022. The truth is that some previous Pacific Rim naysayers had previously held opinions that were against the truth. The soundtrack is great, the plot is good, there are some great lines, and it takes guts to present a 20-minute-heavy back story. The emotional trauma of recovery is the main focus of the film, and it is a chance to explore humanity on the edge of crisis. The ending isn't about beating the aliens into submission, but rather about sacrifice, loss, and knowing when it's time to give up.
I want what you have, if you don't remember the Blade 2 review. The review of Blade 2 was published by Ain't It Cool News. The review goes into detail about how Blade 2 is similar to del Toro giving a woman head. It makes a fool out of the film it attempts to encourage viewers to see because it is an over-the-top critique of a film that is not nearly as sexy as its first installments. The depiction of the cinematography in Blade 2 is tame and not pornographic, but the depiction of the skin and flesh in the film is very different. Body horror and pleasure go hand in hand, as some argued in the talkback. Who knows, del Toro is a freakazoid of a film director. Both things can be true.
Showing five films over four weeks and coming up with new things to talk about each time really emphasized the fact that one of the things that makes del Toro unique is his steadfast commitment to his own aesthetic, regardless of the material he has to work with. This is a quote from del Toro, again taken from his book.
“I haven’t made eight movies. I’m trying to make a single movie made of all those movies. To me, it’s like Bleak House. I’m building room by room, and you have to take it as a whole in a way. Does that mean that maybe Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth make Mimic a little less terrible? I think so. Or the echoes of those may make Blade II more interesting? I think so.”
Over five films, I loved exploring this. We didn't watch the films in chronological order at all, and we were able to see kaiju designs in Hellboy, because of this piecemeal examination of del Toro's work. Thinking about having a single film on display was a brilliant way to examine these films, and there were a few people who were able to dig into these themes with us, creating a talkback series that wasn't.
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