Ghosts of The Past and Present (Del Toro)

International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts
Brian Attebery, as Editor, for the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts
Ghosts of the Past and Present: Hauntology and the Spanish Civil War in Guillermo del
Toro's "The Devil's Backbone"
Author(s): Anne E. Hardcastle
Source: Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, Vol. 15, No. 2 (58) (Spring 2005), pp. 119-131
Published by: International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/43308735
Accessed: 25-04-2016 19:56 UTC
REFERENCES
Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/43308735?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents
You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted
digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about
JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts, Brian Attebery, as Editor, for
the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts are collaborating with JSTOR to
digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts
This content downloaded from 128.192.114.19 on Mon, 25 Apr 2016 19:56:12 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Ghosts of the Past and Present:
Hauntology and the Spanish
Civil War in Guillermo del Toro's
Anne E. Hardcastle
TAA he voice-over narration that begins

Guillermo del Toro's 2001 film The Devil 's Backbone challenges its audience
with the question, "What is a ghost?" While this perplexing query is certainly
designed to help introduce the mysterious ambiance in which the film takes
place, it also explicitly proposes an investigation of ghostliness and haunting
as the central thesis of the work. The narrator then offers some possible an-
swers to his own question and, in doing so, defines ghostliness less as the un-
quiet dead than as an evocation of the past: "An emotion, a terrible moment
condemned to repeat itself over and over? An instant of pain, perhaps?
Something dead which appears at times alive. A sentiment suspended in time
. . . like a blurry photograph . . . like an insect trapped in amber."1 And yet, the
past invoked in the course of the film is double-coded: on one hand, for the
characters, it is a specific instance of murder and betrayal; on the other, for the
audience, it is a larger history of the national tragedy of Spain's 1936-1939
Civil War during which the film is set. Appropriately, the cinematic montage
that accompanies the voice-over conjures up images of war as an overhead
shot follows a bomb dropping from a warplane onto the courtyard of the Santa
Lucia orphanage. The camera cuts away to a medium shot of a boy lying
bleeding to death on the cobblestones, linking his death to the bombing of the
previous sequence. With the opening montage and voice-over, del Toro ef-
fectively introduces the viewers to the two juxtaposed worlds, one of ghosts
and one of war, that comprise the rest of the film. Nevertheless, as I will argue
in this study, by the end of the film these two worlds become intertwined so
that both the ghost story and the war story participate in a representation of
haunting that allows the viewers a cathartic confrontation with the traumatic
past of the Spanish Civil War.
Del Toro has explained the dual inspiration for The Devil's Backbone
saying, "the whole idea was to create a ghost story where the war was a back-
ground but eventually crept into the foreground" (Chun 29). The first part of
the film depicts the arrival of young Carlos at Santa Lucia, an orphanage run
by Republican sympathizers, in early 1939 during the last days of the Civil
War. Soon after, Carlos discovers that the place is haunted by the ghost of
Vol. 1 5, No. 2, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts

Copyright © 2005, Florida Atlantic University. ' » '
Ghosts of the Past and Present
Santi, an orphan boy murdered, we find out later, by the caretaker, Jacinto, on
the same night the bomb fell. Just as Del Toro has explained, in the latter half
of the film, the external events of the war intrude upon Carlos's encounters
with the ghost and precipitate a confrontation between the greedy Jacinto and
all the boys of the orphanage, including the deceased Santi. In her excellent
study Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, Avery
Gordon suggests, "If haunting describes how that which appears to be not
there is often a seething presence, acting on and often meddling with
taken-for-granted realities, the ghost is just the sign, or the empirical evidence
if you like, that tells you a haunting is taking place" (8). While the ghost of
Santi remains throughout the film as the sign of haunting, the lurking presence
of the war gives notice of the underlying cause of the haunting evoked by the
film as a whole, that of history itself.
History's ability to haunt contemporary society has increasingly inter-
ested scholars, many of whom find that traditional systems of knowledge do
not do justice to its particular ghosts. Jacques Derrida has proposed the con-
cept of "hauntology" to describe the philosophical status of the past, viewing
its traces - the traumas, the memories, the ideas, and the dead - as specters
who have returned to the present. He asserts, "Let us call it a hauntology
larger and more powerful than an ontology or a thinking of Being. After the
end of history, the spirit comes by coming back [revenant], it figures both a
dead man who comes back and a ghost whose expected return repeats itself,
again and again" (original italics 10). What Derrida argues for in the term
hauntology is the presence/present of the past; history as something both dead
and returned to life, a state more complex and less certain than Being, but still
capable of a profound influence over us. As Avery Gordon puts it, haunting is
"a story about what happens when we admit the ghost - that spectral instance
of the merging of the visible and the invisible, the dead and the living, the past
and the present - into the making of worldly relations and into the making of
our accounts of the world" (24). Consequently, she concludes, "the ghosts are
real, that is to say, that they produce material effects" (17). But how, then,
does one go about incorporating the ghosts of the past into "our accounts of
the world?" Both Derrida and Gordon suggest the same answer: follow and
talk to the ghost, acknowledge haunting, admit that the past is still a "seething
presence." Derrida entreats against being "witnesses, spectators, observers . .
. [who] believe that looking is sufficient"; instead he urges us "to speak to the
specter, to speak with it, therefore, especially to make or to let a spirit spealť
(original italics 1 1). Understanding ghostly matters "means that we will have
to learn to talk to and listen to ghosts, rather than banish them, as the precondi-
tion for establishing our scientific or humanistic knowledge" (Gordon 23).
Because of its association of ghostliness with Spain's war history, The Devil 's
Backbone reflects a hauntological approach to the past; and, in this case, fol-
lowing the literal ghost, Santi, leads us to the figurative one, the traumatic his-
tory of Civil War.
The film's juxtaposition of the realism of war and the imaginary of ghosts
initially seems to set up the fantastic's careful balance of the uncanny versus
120 Journal of the Fantastic
the marvelous outlined by Tzvetan Todorov in The Fantastic: A Structural
Analysis of a Literary Genre. Todorov' s now canonical definition states that
the fantastic text obliges the reader "to hesitate between a natural and a super-
natural explanation of the events described" (33). He goes on to establish cer-
tain categories of fiction and to determine that "the fantastic in its pure state is
represented by the median line separating the fantastic-uncanny from the fan-
tastic-marvelous" (44). Thus the fantastic has no space unto itself, but rather,
according to Rosemary Jackson's elaboration of Todorov, "exists in the hin-
terland between 'real' and 'imaginary' shifting the relations between them
through its indeterminacy" (35). In a given piece of fantastic narrative, the
real and the imaginary face off (often without resolution) in an effort to gain
our belief. In addition to following Todorov's charted categories of fiction,
Jackson is also well known in fantastic theory for her contention that fantasy,
as she calls it, "is a literature of desire . . . that characteristically attempts to
compensate for a lack resulting from cultural constraints" (3). The Devil 's
Backbone is not just a ghost story, but a historical ghost story set sixty years in
the past; and, accordingly, the lack that motivates this film arises from histori-
cal as well as contemporary cultural constraints. The war story the boys of the
Santa Lucia orphanage participate in plays out as a fantasy of triumph over
fascism that responds to the absence of such a victory in the historical reality
of the Spanish Civil War.2 In del Toro's film a desire to fill the historical ab-
sence eventually overwhelms the fantastic presentation of the real and the
marvelous and, somewhat unexpectedly, reverses our experiences of the war
as real and the ghost as marvelous. By the end of the film what seems real be-
comes imaginary and the supernatural ultimately expresses the only reality
the film portrays.
If, as Avery Gordon suggests, "haunting is the sociality of living with
ghosts," then Carlos' encounters with the ghost gradually define this new
sociality for both the boys of the orphanage and an audience who shares in the
haunting (201). In the first two thirds of the film, including four sequences
specifically dedicated to interactions with Santi, his spectral presence begins
as a source of fear that gradually diminishes. The first night Carlos spends in
the orphanage, the ghost comes to the dormitory, hovers over Carlos's bed
and knocks over the water jugs, precipitating the challenge of the older boys
to Carlos to go to the kitchen to refill the jugs. During this scene, Santi never
appears except as a trace of presence: his name carved on the wall, shadows
and wet footprints; the past he represents is there and not there at the same
time. Once abandoned in the kitchen by the bully, Jaime, Carlos descends to
the basement because he hears the whispers of what the other boys call, "he
who sighs." Finally, the camera cuts to our first clear view of Santi hiding be-
hind a cabinet and moments later reaching out to touch Carlos's shoulder. He
whispers his disturbing warning, "Many of you will die," which prompts
Carlos to flee in terror. This sequence is one of only two in the film where the
ghost actually produces fear, mostly from impressive uses of special effects,
eerie blue lighting, and suspensefiil background music. Still, there is no effort
in the film to provide some explanation other than the supernatural one for
In the Arts 121
Santi; this world of 'real' ghosts is manifestly marvelous in the Todorovian

division between the marvelous and the uncanny. However, to interpret the
encounters with Santi as a spine-tingling foray into a supernatural world sepa-
rate from our own misses the film's assertion that the ghosts are among us, in
effect, that the past is among us. Santi's ghost represents a traumatic past
- "a terrible moment condemned to repeat itself over and over" as the
voice-over explains - and fear comes not from its spectral presence, but
rather from the unknown, the repressed and the would-be-forgotten that it res-
urrects. Accordingly, fear of Santi gradually disappears (even as Santi him-
self appears more solid, more "there" by the end of the film) as Carlos learns
his sad history and restores his lost memory.
Imbued with undue bravery or curiosity or both, Carlos embarks on his
quest to uncover the secret of Santi in the next sequence involving the ghost.
He goes to the cistern in the basement, and perched on the edge with his fin-
gers trailing in the water, effectively reaching out to the ghost, asks, "Do you
live down here?" Later, the viewers see the affirmative answer as we glimpse
Santi looking up from the bottom of the tank when Carlos rescues the drown-
ing Jaime. Despite the implication that the cistern is a place of danger, no real
threat to Carlos from Santi manifests itself. And again in the next ghost se-
quence, regardless of special effects and Carlos's own apparent fear, the
ghost, which seems to chase Carlos into a closet to hide, never actually offers
any threat to the boy. Carlos has, in fact, invoked the ghost this third time,
praying to the bomb to show him where Santi is. When one of the ribbons
blows off the bomb and into the kitchen, Carlos again descends into the base-
ment, begging Santi, "Talk to me." Even though Carlos loses his courage and
runs from Santi, his seeking out the ghost and its lack of aggression make it
harder and harder for the audience to be afraid of an increasingly sympathetic
spook. The reason hauntology suggests we talk to ghosts comes from a need
"to exorcize not in order to chase away the ghosts, but this time to grant them
the right ... to a hospitable memory . . . out of a concern for justice" (Derrida
175). Instead of increasing fright, the ghost sequences in the film diminish
any fear of him by bringing about a gradual familiarization with haunting and
an understanding of the ghost's desires. Loss of fear and the eventual empa-
thy for the ghost shared by Carlos and the audience become the first steps in
acknowledging the horror of the past and preparing a just and hospitable
memory for it.
When Derrida recommends that we follow and speak to the ghosts of the
past, he understands that this activity is more complex than it would seem:
"What does it mean to follow a ghost? And what if this came down to being
followed by it, always, persecuted perhaps by the very chase we are leading?"
(10). Carlos attempts to follow Santi and seeks out knowledge of the past;
and, like Derrida supposes, he switches between follower and followed in dif-
ferent sequences. However, it is Jaime who is genuinely persecuted by the
memory of Santi's death: he both refuses to acknowledge the ghost when the
other boys mention it and at the same time keeps hidden a drawing he made of
Santi's murder. Viewed in this light, the second scene in the basement shows
1 22 Journal of the Fantastic
Jaime literally drowning in the guilt and burdens of the past symbolized by the
cistern, which is, not co incidentally, also Santi' s tomb. Having cradled the
dying Santi in his own arms, Jaime is too close to the disturbing events and in-
stead becomes paralyzed/traumatized, unable to pursue the justice Carlos
eventually seeks. Carlos (like the young, democratic Spain he represents) has
neither participated in nor witnessed the trauma that initiates the film, the dual
horror of the bombing and Santi's murder. Instead, his courage and distance
from the events allow him to save Jaime, uncover the past, and restore justice
to the ghost's memory. Carlos's journey (and, in effect, that of the entire film)
is not the journey of the Spanish people who fought the Civil War, but that of a
new generation that, having inherited a legacy of trauma, seeks to resurrect
the past and learn to live with its ghosts.
Finally, the last time Carlos sees the ghost, armed now with knowledge of
Santi's murder by Jacinto the night the bomb fell, he declares, "I'm not going
to run from you any more," and asks, "What do you want?" The past is now a
story Carlos understands and wants to redress, not the scary monster of a dark
unknown. Santi reaches his hand out to stroke Carlos's cheek, displaying on
his sad face an almost tender desire to rest once justice has been done. For it
is justice this ghost wants, and he answers Carlos's question calling for his
murderer: "Jacinto .... bring him to me." By now all the boys have realized
that it is the living, not the dead, that threaten Santa Lucia. In fact, the shift of
menace from the ghost to Jacinto is foreshadowed throughout all the se-
quences where the appearance of the ghost is always linked to an appearance
from Jacinto.3 The night of the water jugs, Jacinto hears the noise, and Carlos
must hide in the kitchen to keep from being caught. Jacinto's interruption ex-
plicitly divides the sequence into two parts and draws out the first appearance
of the ghost. Yet again, after Carlos saves Jaime from the waters of the cis-
tern, Jacinto catches the boys. In an overt display of his fearsome power, im-
plicitly magnified by his intrusion into and domination of the medium-shot
frame, he cuts Carlos on the cheek with a knife. By the final appearance of
Santi, Jacinto has interrupted all aspects of life at the orphanage by exploding
the gasoline canisters and bringing about the many deaths Santi had warned
of. Above all, in the encounters with the ghost we experience a progressive
realization that Santi does not offer the real threat of the film; the consistent
juxtaposition of the ghost's lack of menace with Jacinto's repressed rage and
cruelty suggests a much more potent source of danger than the tragic Santi
ever does.
Just as Guillermo del Toro promises, the war inexorably intrudes on Santa
Lucia's ghost story. One of the most powerful images of war in the film is the
unexploded bomb from the opening montage embedded in the stones of the
courtyard. Now adorned with ribbons, the bomb has become something of an
idol to the boys who claim to "hear her heart still beating inside." Its conspic-
uous presence in so many shots attests to its symbolic importance; moreover,
subjective camera work where low angle shots show the bomb and Jacinto
looming equally over the boys links the bomb's threat of violence to Jacinto.
Jacinto, the real "ticking time-bomb" of the film, becomes metaphorically al-
In the Arts 123
lied with the fascist origin of the bomb and eventually does more damage to
the school when he finally explodes than the alluded to but seldom seen Na-
tionalist forces.
The literal, historical war gets only as close as the local village where Dr.
Casares witnesses a Nationalist firing squad executing members of an interna-
tional brigade. Although he sets the entire school into an uproar of evacuation
because he expects soldiers to invade the orphanage, the feared Nationalist
troops never arrive. Jacinto, however, takes this abandonment personally and
demands that the principal, Carmen, hand over the Republican gold she has
been hiding. The resultant confrontation and exile of Jacinto cause him to set
fire to the gas canisters and blow up half the orphanage. After the explosion,
the remaining boys and teachers try to prepare for Jacinto's "invasion," but he
easily overpowers them, killing the young teacher, Conchita, and Dr. Casares,
locking the boys in a storeroom while he digs through the rubble in search of
the gold. A one-man army, Jacinto fulfills the threat of violence implied by
the Nationalist bomb since the opening shot of the film.
Although Jacinto is not explicitly named a fascist or member of the Na-
tionalist cause in the film, this designation surfaces in interviews with the di-
rector and in symbolic associations within the film itself. Guillermo del Toro
offers an almost allegorical interpretation of all the characters: "the older pro-
fessor being the republic and the young, class-conflicted fascist being the fas-
cists, and the young children being Spain, essentially" (Chun 29). The
director's identification of Jacinto as an embodiment of fascism even more
firmly roots the source of the film's evil in fascism, with Jacinto embodying
the weapon against the children and acting out the destructive Nationalist
agenda of historical record. In this sense, regardless of the metaphorical di-
mensions, the film continues to represent history in a realistic fashion. There
is nothing fantastical in Jacinto's actions; and indeed, for a very long stretch
of 29 on-screen minutes, the ghost story recedes to the background, and Santi
himself all but disappears in the immediate build-up to and aftermath of the
outbreak of 'war' in the orphanage. The minimal fear generated by the ghost
has given way to a more immediate and terrifying reminder of the war itself.
Despite what at first seems to be a very realistic rendition of the intrusion
of the Civil War into the somewhat rarified atmosphere of the orphanage, the
historical vision very soon turns away from any sense of documented reality
to an imaginary fantasy about the war. Although raised in the orphanage,
Jacinto turns against the home that has nurtured him and chooses to sell it out
for his own personal gain. Through Jacinto's greed, fascism is depicted as a
betrayal of the people (the boys) and a self-serving bid for money and power
rather than as an ideological position. At this point, the historical underpin-
nings of the story become an increasingly invented portrayal of the war and
Spanish fascism that departs from any kind of faithfulness to history. For ex-
ample, there is very little evidence in the allegorical story of the film that the
war was a Civil war, that millions of Spaniards fought on the side of the Na-
tionalists. None of the boys, who according to del Toro represent Spain,
choose to support Jacinto. Instead the war story of the film is transformed into
a fantasy of unified resistance against a despotic fascist tyrant that wholly
misrepresents the deep, emotional and political divisions across Spain before,
during and after the war.
Nowhere is this fantasy of the Civil War more apparent than in the death
of Jacinto. After Jacinto kills the remaining adults in his attack on the orphan-
age, he locks the boys in a storeroom. Remembering their lesson on prehis-
toric peoples using spears to kill a mammoth, Jaime rouses the boys to action
arguing that although Jacinto is better armed (he has the shotgun), "There are
more of us."4 Released from the storeroom by the ghost of Dr. Casares, the
boys trap Jacinto in the basement by the cistern, stabbing him with their
homemade spears until he falls into the water. In perhaps an excessive case of
poetic justice, he is both weighted down by the gold bars in his pockets and
then dragged down by Santi; both his greed and viciousness bring about his
much deserved demise. Despite an echo of the primitivism seen in novels
such as William Golding's Lord of the Flies or Juan Goytisolo's Duel in Par-
adise, the unity of purpose and righteousness of the boys' group hunt to bring
down the "mammoth" of del Toro's film does not invoke the selfishness, cru-
elty, and will to power of human nature so disturbingly depicted in these nov-
els. Furthermore, no divided loyalties, split families or afflicted consciences,
such as those seen in other Spanish films about the Civil War or the Dictator-
ship, mar the absolute moral clarity of the boys' attack on Jacinto.
In fact, The Devil 's Backbone owes a certain thematic debt to Spanish di-
rectors Víctor Erice and Carlos Saura, whose internationally acclaimed films,
The Spirit of the Beehive (1973) and Raise Ravens (1975) respectively, set a
benchmark for the presentation of fascism through the eyes of children. How-
ever, unlike these films of the early 1 970s, made during Franco's fascist dicta-
torship, in del Toro's 2001 film, the children's reaction to torment and
repression is decidedly different, evidencing the ideological distance created
by a quarter century of Spanish democracy. In Saura's and Erice's films the
monstrous and supernatural come not from some external threat, but as mani-
festations of the child protagonists' anguish over feelings of guilt, rebellion
and complicity as they are torn between the opposing forces- very real trau-
mas faced by several generations of Spanish children. Ana, the protagonist in
both films, feels nothing like the confidence in their own actions and the Tight-
ness of their cause that allow the boys to unite, pursue, and defeat the evil
threatening them. The children of films made during the dictatorship carry
the painful burdens of the Republican defeat and the inescapable oppression
of Francoisi societyhi - storical events, again, entirely absent from the literal
or symbolic levels of The Devil 's Backbone. Instead, we witness a clear liber-
ation as the boys leave the school behind and walk confidently into the warm
Spanish sun; there is no suggestion of the historical reality that these "children
of reds being raised by reds" are walking into a world now controlled by the
fascists.5 Finally, then, in the context of Spanish history, the war story, once
the 'real' side of the film, turns into fantasy as the boys' triumphant execution
of the fascist menace represents what one might wish had happened, but is no
longer faithful to the events of 1939.
In the Arts 1 25
Despite its problematic representation of history, The Devil 's Backbone

maintains a powerful emotional perspective on the Spanish Civil War. This
sentimental authenticity is precisely what historian Robert Rosenstone has ar-
gued as one of the significant features of historical film. He observes, "Film
emotionalizes, personalizes and dramatizes history. . . . Both dramatized
works and documentaries use the special capabilities of the medium to
heighten and intensity the feelings of the audience about the events depicted
on the screen" (59). In an ongoing debate, historians have searched for ways
to understand the value of commercial historical films that, like The Devil 's
Backbone, often lose touch with the reality of historical events. As Marsha
Landy notes in her introduction to The Historical Film, "The insistence on the
part of traditional historians and film critics for 'accuracy' is a major obstacle
inhibiting a proper assessment of the uses of the past in cinema" (12). The
Devil 's Backbone is, of course, not a mirror or a document of life in Spain in
1939, but that does not necessarily render the past presented in it a meaning-
less fiction. One answer when studying historical film, a position advocated
by Pierre Sorlin, is that it "aims primarily at illuminating the way in which in-
dividuals and groups of people understand their own time" (25). That is, his-
torical films will always tell us something about the time in which they were
made if not about the time in which they are set. In addition to finding value in
the emotional appeal of historical film, Robert Rosenstone recommends that
we ask, "What sort of historical world does each film construct and how does
it construct that world? How and what does that historical construction mean
to us?" (52). If we look for historical accuracy, The Devil's Backbone disap-
points; nevertheless, it does construct an ideology of the Spanish Civil War
and its meaningfulness to today's viewers. Indeed, regardless of its inatten-
tion to history, it is in the engagement with the specters of the past that del
Toro's film succeeds at portraying the horrors of fascism. Through haunting,
the film dramatizes this confrontation with the past in a way that encourages a
reconsideration of the contemporary 'reality' of Spain's historical trauma.
Cathy Caruth defines trauma as "an overwhelming experience of sudden
or catastrophic events in which the response to the event occurs in the often
delayed, uncontrolled repetitive appearance of hallucinations and other intru-
sive phenomena" ( Unclaimed Experience 11). In the aftermath of the horrific
wars of the 20th century, including Spain's Civil War, trauma continues to de-
fine the experience of millions of people. Scholars such as Caruth, Shoshona
Felman and Dori Laub have expanded the study of trauma beyond its clinical
applications to demonstrate how it appears in cultural works such as litera-
ture, film, and history. One of the more significant arguments made by Caruth
is that trauma "is not so much a symptom of the unconscious as it is a symp-
tom of history. The traumatized person, we might say, carries an impossible
history within them, or they become themselves the symptom of a history that
they cannot entirely possess" (Introduction 4). The magnitude of traumatic
events overwhelms an individual's ability to cope with the memory, and so
trauma manifests itself through a distorted, fantasmal perception of reality.
Novels and films about such events are often haunted by ghosts. In The
Devil's Backbone, the trauma of Spanish Civil War history is given image,
and its lingering, haunting effects are given tangible form in the ghost of
Santi. A ghost, Avery Gordon reminds us, "gives notice not only to itself but
also to what it represents" (63). In the context of this traumatic haunting,
Santi comes to represent not merely one unjustly murdered boy, but all the
victims of Spanish fascism relegated to the dustbin of history yet still eerily
present as ghostly echoes of a past not entirely forgotten in the modern, cos-
mopolitan image of democratic Spain.
A superb collection of essays entitled Disremembering the Dictatorship:
the Politics of Memory in the Spanish Transition to Democracy explores pre-
cisely these issues of memory, trauma, and the representation the Civil War
and the Dictatorship in Spanish fiction and film after the death of Franco.
What many of the articles in the collection point out is that the literature and
film of the late 1970s and 1980s in Spain are marked by a curious mix of re-
membering, inventing, and forgetting the past that serves an important politi-
cal purpose. When democracy arrived in Spain in 1976, "the new regime, like
the old one, needed to dress itself in cultural finery" (Resina 1 0). That is to
say, democratic Spain had to build a national, democratic culture out of the
still highly divisive memories of the Civil War and the dictatorship. Conse-
quently, Salvador Cardús i Ros argues, "a sociology of the Transition turns
into an analysis of the processes of erasure and reinvention of the collective
memory" (25). "For a nation," observes Resina, "especially one that emerges
from self-imposed ostracism and international disrepute, does not need his-
torical memories - above all it does not need an accurate representation of its
past - but resonant ones, and those are accrued through heritage building"
(14). Borrowing David Lowenthal's concept of heritage as the "dissipation of
historical memory," or perhaps even a selective historical memory suited
more to "popular self-consciousness" than to history, Resina proposes that
much of the literature and film in Spain of the past two decades - especially
the vogue of historical pieces - has functioned to build a new vision of Span-
ish history (qtd. in Resina 14). I would argue that The Devil 's Backbone par-
ticipates in this trend of heritage building that helps "unify political subjects
around the theme of the democratic, enlightened, modernized, and finally in-
fluential Spanish nation" (Resina 12).6 The distortions of history that we see
in the film also correspond to an erasure of the ideological fractures in Span-
ish society during the Civil War. Instead of a divided, angry populace, the
boys are united against a single oppressor, a dictator, rather than an ideology.
The "democratic" group hunt, made possible because the "enlightened" ghost
of Dr. Casares lets the boys free, again contributes to the desired image of
contemporary Spain in a post-dictatorship culture. Thus, the historical events
of the film are misrepresented precisely where they reflect important changes
in a popular perception in which certain past impediments to democratic sta-
bility have been discreetly forgotten .
In the context of desired versus 'forgotten' images, however, it is interest-
ing to return to our ghost, Santi, and his ever-present foil, Jacinto. In a very
real way, Jacinto, or perhaps more correctly, the fascism he represents, haunts
In the Arts 1 27
the film as much as Santi does. As a specter of the past he is again more fear-
some and more powerful than Santi. Jacinto embodies "the original sin of fas-
cism," as Resina puts it, that mar(k)s Spain's national consciousness for most
of the last century. Subtly evident in both the casting of pin-up idol Eduardo
Noriega as Jacinto and Noriega's very physical and riveting performance is a
fear of fascism's power to seduce its chosen audience. Indeed, in the course
of the film both the naive Conchita and the wise but weary Carmen fall victim
to his/its charms. Ultimately, the film is haunted not only by the trauma of the
Civil War, but also, especially compelling for a contemporary, democratic au-
dience, by the memory of Spain's surrender to fascism. In fact, we might ar-
gue that collaboration with fascism forms as much of the modern sense of
trauma as the death and violence of the war itself. In this sense, the group
hunt, while unfaithful to history, again functions to reinforce a present-day re-
jection of the fascist past, a unilateral exorcism, perhaps, of this particularly
unwelcome ghost still haunting national memory.7
The ghosts of traumatic experiences, however, are not so easily
exorcized. Cathy Caruth observes that a traumatic event achieves "its haunt-
ing power as a result of distorting personal significances attached to it
be traumatized is precisely to be possessed by an image or event" (Introduc-

tion 3). Her language in this description anticipates The Devil 's Backbone 's
portrayal of the hauntological past as a revenant, a trace of a traumatic past
that comes again and again to influence and be perceived by the present.
Still, admitting the ghost and facing the haunting can bring forth a new under-
standing that reconstructs a nation's perception of both its past and present.
As Gordon comments, "The way of the ghost is haunting, and haunting is a
very particular way of knowing what has happened or is happening. Being
haunted draws us affectively, sometimes against our will and always a bit
magically, into the structure of feeling of a reality we come to experience, not
as cold knowledge, but as a transformative recognition" (8). As so often hap-
pens in fantastic art, in del Toro's film, inversions of real and imaginary
events ultimately prove any rigid separation between the real and the unreal,
the present and the past, the living and the dead to be meaningless. The ghosts
of history resist our ability to categorize and to define them because they fall
outside and between the cracks of traditional epistemology and ontology.
Derrida, in inventing the idea of hauntology, also discerns a different kind of
knowledge to be gained from a specter:
It is something that one does not know, precisely, and one does not
know if precisely it is, if it exists, if it responds to a name and corre-
sponds to an essence. One does not know: not out of ignorance
[and I would add in the context of fantastic theory, not out of hesita-
tion], but because this non-object, this non-present present, this be-
ing-there of an absent or departed one no longer belongs to
knowledge. At least no longer to that which one thinks one knows
by the name of knowledge (original italics, 6).
As history becomes fantastical in its haunting, so the ghosts become 'real'
as traces of a past that continue to intervene in contemporary perception.8
While these historical ghosts may elide knowledge, they continue to provide
new meaning for the past and transform the meaningfulness of the present.
As proposed in the beginning of this study, the film's haunting occurs on
two levels simultaneously and involves a complex temporality. The literal
haunting by the ghost of Santi takes place in the past within a historical set-
ting; however, the metaphorical haunting of history itself takes place in the
present as contemporary anxieties about history are shared with the audience.
When the ghosts become more real and history more imaginary, it is clear that
del Toro is not interested in recounting what is 'known' about the Spanish
Civil War. Instead he explores current feelings toward the past regardless of
historical inaccuracies in its representation. In this sense, after twenty-five
years of peaceful democracy, Spain did defeat fascism and kill the legacy of
Franco. In fact, the film insists on this interpretation with the Civil War re-
membered not from the perspective of Franco's fascist dictatorship but from
that of a stable, successful democracy interested in creating a new meaning
for its history. Throughout The Devil 's Backbone both the spectral and the
historical point to the ghosts that the present-day audience must ultimately
come to terms with in order to reconstruct the significance of Spain's national
history. The film's cathartic, fantasized confrontation with the past shows us
how a historical film can portray the on-going emotional dimensions of (espe-
cially traumatic) historical events. In conclusion, through their intertwining
of history and haunting the ghosts of The Devil 's Backbone, although imag-
ined as specters of the past, are perhaps better understood as symptoms of the
present conjured from history retroactively to reflect a continuing effort to
overcome the traumatic legacy of Civil War.
Notes
'The English subtitling of the film is very good and for the most part very accu-
rate; consequently, I have used the subtitles for English translations of the dialogue.
By January of 1939, coinciding with Carlos's arrival at Santa Lucia, the fate of
Republican Spain was all but decided. The Nationalists, headed by General Francisco
Franco and supported by the fascist governments of Hitler and Mussolini, held all of
Spain except the Republican stronghold of Madrid. Republican forces struggled to
defend the capital after the Nationalist conquest of Barcelona had closed the French
border and put an end to munitions aid from the Soviet Union. Infighting between the
moderates and the extremists in the Communist party-led government in Madrid pro-
duced a fragmented resistance that lasted only three months. Having marched into
Madrid the day before, Franco proclaimed total victory on April 1, 1939, and estab-
lished a fascist dictatorship that would last until his death in November of 1975.
'Most often, Jacinto actually enters into the same scene where the ghost has been
sighted. When he does not, however, his implied threat is maintained cinematically
by cross-cutting the ghost scenes with scenes of Jacinto' s other activities so that he re-
mains visually present and associated with the ghost for the viewers.
In the Arts 1 29
4The boys' situation recalls the common perception that the Nationalists, sup-
plied with guns, tanks, troops, etc. by Germany and Italy, were indeed better armed,
but that the Republicans carried the overwhelming support of more people, nationally
and internationally.
5The composition of the closing shot when the boys leave the school at the end of
The Devil's Backbone in some ways parallels the girls' exit from their house at the
end of Saura's Raise Ravens; however, del Toro's version departs from the disturb-
ingly ambivalent conclusion of the older film. In Saura's film, the girls exit down-
ward to the bottom of the frame, while the house of their oppression still looms in the
dominant upper half of the screen; del Toro's surviving boys exit upwards, towards
the open landscape at the top of the screen leaving their ghosts behind and moving
forward until the orphanage disappears off the edges of the frame.
6 Although the Mexican del Toro wrote and directed The Devil's Backbone , the
film was produced by the Spanish Almodôvar brothers and shot in Spain with a
largely Spanish cast and crew. The current interpretation moves away from a focus
on auteurism and considers the final film in the context of Spanish cultural and politi-
cal history.
7Jo Labanyi also notes this vacillation between acceptance and rejection of the
past since the advent of democracy in Spain: "While agreeing that contemporary
Spanish culture-obsessed with creating the image of a brash, cosmopolitan nation-is
based on a rejection of the past, I want to stress the engagement with history by a con-
siderable number of directors and writers, both older and young" (65).
8In fact, the last line of the film reveals that the narrator is himself the ghost of Dr.
Casares, the ghost of the lost Republic. All of his story proclaims the ghostliness of
history - the haunting voice of the dead emanating from out of the dark places of na-
tional memory.
Works Cited
Cardús i Ros, Salvador. "Politics and the Invention of Memory. For a Sociology of
the Transition to Democracy in Spain." Disremembering the Dictatorship: The
Politics of Memory in the Spanish Transition to Democracy. Ed. Joan Ramón
Resina. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003. 17-28.
Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience : Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore,
MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996.
(1991): 1-12.
Chun, Kimberly. "What is a Ghost? An Interview with Guillermo del Toro."
Cineaste 27.2 (Spring 2002): 28-3 1 .
Del Toro, Guillermo, dir. El espinazo del diablo. 2001.
Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and
the New International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge, 1994.
Erice, Víctor, dir. El espíritu de la colmena. 1973.
Felman, Shoshana, and Dori Laub, M.D. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Litera-
ture, Psychoanalysis and History. New York: Routledge, 1992.
Golding, William. The Lord of the Flies . New York: Putnam, 1954.
Gordon, Avery. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination.
Minneapolis: UP of Minnesota, 1997.
Goytisolo, Juan. Duelo en el paraiso. Barcelona: Destino, 1974.
Jackson, Rosemary. Fantasy : The Literature of Subversion. New York: Routledge,
1981.
Labanyi, Jo. "History and Hauntology; or What Does One Do with the Ghosts of the
Past? Reflections on Spanish Film and Fiction of the Post-Franco Period."
Disremembering the Dictatorship: The Politics of Memory in the Spanish Tran-
sition to Democracy. Ed. Joan Ramón Resina. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003.
65-82.
Landy, Marsha. "Introduction." The Historical Film. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
UP, 2000. 1-22.
Medina, Alberto. Exorcismos de la memoria: políticas y poéticas de la melancolía en
la España de la transición. Madrid: Ediciones Libertarias, 2001.
Moreno, Francisco. " El espinazo del diablo : Inspirado cine de géneros." Reseña 327
(2001): 5.
Resina, Joan Ramon. Introduction. Disremembering the Dictatorship: The Politics
of Memoryin the Spanish Transition to Democracy. Ed. Joan Ramón Resina.
Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003. 1-16.
Rosenstone, Robert. "The Historical Film: Looking at the Past in a Postliterate Age."
The Historical Film. Ed. Marsha Landy. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP,
2000. 50-66.
Saura, Carlos, dir. Cría cuervos. 1975.
Sorlin, Pierre. "How to Look at an 'Historical' Film." The Historical Film. Ed. Mar-
sha Landy. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2000. 25-49.
Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Trans.
Richard Howard. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1971.
In the Arts 131

Ghosts of The Past and Present (Del Toro)

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Ghosts of The Past and Present (Del Toro)

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts

TAA he voice-over narration that begins

Vol. 1 5, No. 2, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts

120 Journal of the Fantastic

In the Arts 121

Santi; this world of 'real' ghosts is manifestly marvelous in the Todorovian

1 22 Journal of the Fantastic

In the Arts 123

1 24 Journal of the Fantastic

Despite its problematic representation of history, The Devil 's Backbone

1 26 Journal of the Fantastic

be traumatized is precisely to be possessed by an image or event" (Introduc-

1 28 Journal of the Fantastic

1 30 Journal of the Fantastic

In the Arts 131

You might also like