THE USES OF DISENCHANTMENT
Accepting the Golden Lion at Venice for The Shape of Water, Guillermo del Toro magnanimously offered this piece of advice to young filmmakers: “Have faith in whatever you have faith in.” This bit of winner’s-circle tautology was surely not meant to be condescending. As with his fellow awards-ceremony-orator Lin-Manuel Miranda’s observation at the Tonys that “love is love is love,” del Toro’s platitude seemed to come, like every other incessant, perhaps only incidentally self-aggrandizing public expression of his cinephilia, from an honest place. Besides, it’s churlish to be annoyed when nice guys finish first.
Del Toro’s front-runner status is undeniable, and a top prize at a major film festival puts even more distance between him and a new cohort of art-horror hybridists faithfully following his example, if not quite yet nipping at his heels. Twenty-five years after his ingenious, expressionistic debut Cronos (1993)—which is still an absolute hoot by the way, and the most persuasive expression of its maker’s faith in monsters as mascots and metaphors—del Toro looms like a benign kaiju on either side of the Atlantic, if not the Pacific Rim.
The title of a 2014 Palgrave MacMillan anthology parsing the director’s output in terms of style and sociopolitical import (sample chapter: “Between Fantasy and Reality: The Child’s Vision and Fairy Tales in Guillermo del Toro’s Hispanic Trilogy”) is Part of what’s at stake in this particular filmmaker’s ascendancy is the attractive, reassuringly auteurist idea of a culturally specific but globally saleable vision. More than Bong Joon-ho, Park Chan-wook, or his buddy Nicolas Winding Refn (and distinct from an English-language contemporary like Peter Jackson, whose own lo-fi breakthrough didn’t enter the marketplace saddled with subtitles), del Toro has spearheaded the gentrification of genre cinema. The there-goes-the-neighbourhood moment was the 2006 release of , a Spanish Civil War-era fantasia that was also a model transnational co-production. The critical narrative was that, after decamping to America (at the invitation of Miramax) to helm slightly eccentric studio product like (1999) and (2002), del Toro returned home to apply his expanded skill set (and bankability) to a more “personal” project. was duly sold in the US as an exotic import demonstrating to Hollywood hacks how neo- Spielbergian wonderment should be done. In this at once lofty and modest context, the film’s nightmarish monster known as the “Pale Man”—an elongated cipher with eyeballs crammed into his palms—appeared as the ideal avatar for del Toro himself: a detail-oriented filmmaker dealing in “handmade” aesthetics.
