Pan and Cherry


Last night I finally saw "Pan's Labyrinth," the film by Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro set in post civil war Spain. It's been sitting on the Tivo for awhile, sort of like when you know you put a pint of Ben and Jerry's in the freezer but have been ignoring it until you were alone, with some smooth music on the stereo. You hear the special doorbell you've rigged in the freezer and you open the door. "Why, it's Cherry Garcia!" You originally installed the freezer bell after your parrot froze in there with no way to call for help.

Let's get the parrot story out of the way and then have the ice cream and movie, shall we?

The parrot was a talker but she'd lost her voice so she had to sign. That was okay because she'd developed the ability to sign with her wings. She'd walk around the apartment making elaborate gestures and shapes with her red and white and blue and yellow plumage like some exotic midget trolling for sailors. Her original owner was a sailor and I guess he must have been one of those guys who'd fuck a rat if it held still, and his language was to say the least colorful. This was all picked up an echoed by Margene, whose only ambition in life was to be a bad girl.

She worked at it like any actress with a live in arrangement; she walked around practicing her lines, most of which involved bodily functions and forced feeding of some stripe. It was obvious that she had followed the sailor down into the labyrinth, where things are not what they appear to be, and thus where decisions are not pre-made by the exclusion of alternatives. In other words they went on shore leave together in cities where they had no reputation to protect, and would be riding just ahead of consequences like an action hero on the outer edge of a blast wave.

At first I didn't catch on because I'd never understood signing. I'd seen people do it and I even knew a woman who worked with deaf people. I hadn't seen her for a long time but she was a fire fighter, and seduced a friend's wife in a toilet at an upscale restaurant. Those were the old days when we were young and people were coming together, mixing, and new combinations were formed. The short version is that I met a doctor and his wife, who was a nurse, when they came to the city. They were sort of like Brad and Janet, but I was no sophisticate myself, because I hadn't been there that long. I think they were even from the midwest.

Cherry was too hot to handle. She was a short blonde who was built for speed. She was a looker, and she was running on a fuel rich mix.

So Cherry came to see me because she had a back problem nobody seemed to be able to fix, but it wasn't a disc, so I worked on it for her. Actually I knew what it was when we talked on the telephone and it wasn't that hard to fix, but she thought it was genius, and we starting drinking wine and the energy started to flow and pretty soon we were entertaining each other by dancing with the parrot. The three of us danced around the living room and it was a riot until Cherry got pissed off at something.

She started signing at the parrot, and her hands were as busy as they were that night she stole the doctor's wife in the ladies in the women's room. It was amazing. The nurse walked away from the table one person and she came back a different person. She'd found what she liked and it was Cherry. The doctor looked like that line by Paul Simon, "sad as a lonely little wrinkled balloon." Was she stealing Margene away from me, now? "What are you doing Cherry?"

"This bitch isn't a parrot, she's about the most low life trash I've ever run into."

"Well, I don't think she dances that way deliberately. She's a parrot. She doesn't know she's being lewd."

"Fuck how she dances, she's signing with her wings. She's nasty, Dan."

"Really? What's she saying?"

Well, I don't want to repeat the conversation that was going on between Margene and Cherry, because thanks to the filters between me and you, on the internet, context means nothing. We have reverted right back to the Hickman rule, where one fuck takes down an entire piece of work. From the machines we came and to the machines we return, like the Colonel with his watch in Pan's Labyrinth. There is no more perfect symbol for the rightist than a mechanical timepiece, unless it is a train running down a track.

So consider the diversion like the camera shot that moves away when the serious games begin, cutting away into into a shot of a little girl being led away by an earth spirit, into Pan's Labyrinth. Pan right and the Colonel is standing in front of his mirror, drawing a needle and thread through his cheek to sew up the insult from a woman's paring knife. Sometimes a woman breaks the projection of the man's feminine with one stroke.

When the right wing came to power in Spain and individual liberty was lost in favor of a military government, it was the beginning of a movement toward efficiency and the military taking power from a more democratic process in Europe and the United States.

That's why some of our best writers and artists went to Spain to help the resistance. That's why most of our best writers, artists and musicians are still working in the resistance. The power of the right is in the pocket watch the Colonel holds. He has been told that his own father died bravely, breaking his watch, there, at the moment of his death, so that his son would know the time he died. And when he faces his death he holds the watch to follow this example. But it's all just a myth of self importance, and in the end the girl who goes with the faun into the earth dies with her own myth, as the Colonel does with his myth.

We all die. But Margene the parrot's death didn't have to happen. There was some pot involved, and a second bottle of wine. When Cherry told me what Margene had been saying with her little tittie bar lap dances, it pissed me off. "I know how to cool you down," I said, putting her in the freezer beside the frozen chicken. I left her there for five minutes and opened the door. She moved her wings around while Cherry and I looked for signs of an improved attitude. "What did she say?"

"She wants to know what the chicken said."

Then she moved her wings around some more. Cherry reddened and slammed the freezer door. "I have one other place that's been bothering me," she said.

I don't know how we forgot she was in there, but Cherry said it was one of those things where the unconscious does it and there's nothing you can do. It's like an act of God.

Anyway, Margene ended up as a popsicle for the cat and Cherry went off to do whatever she does down in the underground, aka labyrinth. She swings a double bladed axe in a circle to create her own spotlight, and she dances in it. She's a total exhibitionist of course.

Margene used to dance that way. In fact, it was almost like Cherry was copying Magene's dance. You know how you see something and it sort of gnaws at the edges of consciousness but you don't want to see it because you feel like such a fool?

It took awhile before I realized how much I missed my parrot. As long as I didn't understand what she meant it was just fine. And then I started thinking about Cherry, and how I met her through a friend who's about as dumb as a post about women. She'd been using him for stud service and he was thinking along traditional lines, like they might be a couple. When I thought it over I realized the parrot might have been completely innocent, just feeling good and dancing around the house because she was a happy bird.

And then in comes this woman who has had some pretty questionable behaviors, all of which point to her being capable of just about anything that catches her fancy, and she's always leading with her fancy. And she tells me that my parrot is saying all that filth to me, and there I was looking at the parrot. It was her getting to say it to me. The bitch was getting off on it.

Okay, I guess the ice cream has softened a little bit, to that just right place. You know what I mean. So the movie shows what Joyce calls the secret cause. It shows the symbol of the matriarchy, the labyrinth, and the symbol of the patriarchy, the watch. And between them there, the truce negotiated by Eros holds until it doesn't, and they turn against each other.

The parrot is dead, but I still have some videos of her dancing. I'm going to get a second opinion on what, if anything, she was actually signing with her wings. In the meantime I installed the buzzer in the freezer in case anybody answers my ad for a dumb erotic dancing parrot, and things go out of control.

Posted: Mon - September 3, 2007 at 01:32 PM