When we went to MoMA to see Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio stop motion exhibit, I took some pictures I will prize for… maybe the rest of my life? I didn’t expect that, to be sure.
The Pinocchio stop motion exhibit featured all manner of behind-the-scenes ephemera that I might not have encountered otherwise. For a writer, I found their storyboarding technique — both on the conception level and on the execution level of the shooting schedule — to grow more and more insightful the longer I stared at it:
That included a bit of mapping, some color palettes, and the like:
But it also featured entire behind the scenes video of not only stop motion, but certain lighting fixtures and color grading applications, not least of which was the stop motion rig:
Certain smaller artifacts like the fish amber, the rabbits, or even a single doll from every side character made an appearance:
Which… I found all to be rather delightful, considering I only expected to see a couple of Pinocchio dolls.
Even got to check in on the netherworld folks:
But in the process, I started to revisit the way I thought about the entire narrative of Pinocchio. Not the old one. Plenty of folks have done that in… weird ways… not the least of which includes one pseudo Jungian.
In any case.
I remembered the first time watching the film, I literally cursed Guillermo’s name aloud. My bride turned rather shocked. “What?” she asked. She has a way of asking it that’s half-scoff, rather disappointed in me. But then, once I’d explained, she understood.
I wasn’t cursing the man. Nor his project. More the way you appeal to a higher being by curing yourself. “He’s so good.”
“What?”
“He’s going to use that pinecone,” I said. “And I can’t even conceive of a world in which I grew into the kind of storyteller who could pull something so simple like that out of my hat.”
This too was the point of his story.
See — and this is where things start to get spoiler-y if you’re the kind of person who cares about that. As one of the co-hosts of Rancid, I do not.
So.
You have a version of Geppetto who’s old, a widower, but delights in his young son Carlo. And Carlo’s helping him carve a wooden sculpture of Jesus in their local parish.
In a small Italian villa.
In Italy during the rise of fascism in World War II.
The Hitler youth kind of environ.
And over that small parish, Carlo forgets his little pinecone.
He runs back into the chapel to recover what he might lose.
And in the meantime, some bombers drop their payloads in order to conserve fuel.
It bombs out the building.
Destroys the sculpture.
And the sculptor’s little boy.
The only thing to roll out of the wreckage is the pinecone. Geppetto not only buries his boy, he plants the pinecone.
And one night, in his drunken grief, he cuts it down.
As he does so, the yellow floating smoke eyes of some… it seems to be some Hyakume swirl in the trees. Now normally Hyakume guard a temple from thieves, but there’s no temple. The church has been bombed out (the only thing to steal is the statue of Jesus itself) and the tree. If a person approaches within a few feet, one of those eyes tend to detach and stick to aid person, literally keeping an eye on them while they’re in the area.
I thought at first they’re there in order to watch Geppetto.
But they’re not.
They’re there to watch Sebastian J. Cricket as a budding novelist. Now this is some self-deprecating humor on Guillermo’s part, but not unlike both The Chamber of Secrets and The Silkworm, three texts operate in this film. There’s the text of propaganda, the text of Pinocchio’s mouth, and the text of the film itself as told by Sebastian J. Cricket. They’re watching him because he has invaded a temple to rob it. The hole in the wood of the sacred tree.
And the temple is the sacred world tree wherein the ghosts of the ancestors live. The burning bush, so to speak.
He’s set up camp there for nothing else than to recount his memoirs… the memoirs of someone who writes memoirs, which is some ourborosian nonsense if I’ve ever heard of it. He literally tries to blow the eyes away, worried about their watching — they’re unbiased observers, see. He has a spin, Sebastian J. Cricket.
And so you see the typical story play out: that trunk becomes the wooden boy through Geppetto’s hand. That wooden boy wants to be the real boy, Carlo. But it’s not simply the circus run by some fox he abandons school to join. It’s actually a hawk tailed fascist war effort, propaganda and violence entwined. The theater master tells lies to prop up the killing and the sacrificing of sons (is there any difference from the senseless killing of Carlo and that of the general’s son, in the end?). Pinocchio, however, tells lies first to get himself out of trouble.
Yet the further the story goes on, the more we start to see ways in which “lies” — that is to say myth making, storytelling — can actually be used in the cause of truth. That one might even lie not to save one’s own back, but rather the back of one’s drowning father and friends. In one particularly beautiful scene — it certainly made a novelist like me cry — Geppetto inside the belly of the beast says, “Okay Pinocchio, just this once, lie.”
And the beautiful boy starts to tell all kinds of stories. Stories that are obviously unfactual in the literal, detailed degree that powerbrokers and weathermen demand. But in the whole cloth, end up more factual precisely because they’re pointing at a higher truth than the details: through lying the boy purposefully grows his nose in order to craft a bridge on which his friends can escape through the whale’s blowhole. It’s a masterful moment.
And it follows on the heels of this moment:
Now the crucifixion comparison is obvious to most folks: it’s literally an animate wooden boy on a cross. In fact in the very exhibit, they put it directly across from Jesus.
But they may well miss two very important subtleties:
This.
On the left, you have the liar of the state. This theater producer is so interested in making money — so interested in pleasing Mussolini — that he ends up telling lies that literally kill people. Lies that lead to the dropping of payloads on churches just to save a few pennies on gas.
Meanwhile, on the right, you have Pinocchio, the hole in whose hearts the spirits in the woods guarded — the temple within us all. He lies, by the end, in order to save others. And it’s kind of funny because Jesus himself exaggerated. You have people out there — many pastors, in fact — who pretend as if this isn’t the case, but tell me: how do you expect a man who has been sawn in two to serve out a life sentence in prison? Because that’s what Jesus says happened in one of his stories. And it’s hilarious if you think about it for two seconds: one half of the man rattling the tin cup on the bars, other half of the man with one eye singing in the corner, “Nobody knows the trouble eye seen.”
You have Pinocchio telling the truth, but telling it slant. You have the propagandist saying every detail that Mussolini wants him to say. It is to Mussolini’s face (the man who, historically adored puppets, the sort of person that simply has to be the one pulling the strings) that Pinocchio lies — several lies about poop, to be precise, which, in the longtail of history, is the perfect way to describe fascist thought and rhetoric.
And for that, the propagandist — the sycophant (as far as we know, the nepotist) — crucifies him. Also for money because… y’know… fascism’s all about those sweet eBay deals.
But look closer still at that image:
Does it remind you of something?
It does me:
The propaganda of man that, instead of indifferent and lazily casting a finger, arrogantly defies — even throws the middle finger — to God. Whereas God, still, confidently condescends in the generous and not belittling sense.
I believe Guillermo paralleled the Sistine chapel here — here at the crux of his story — for a very specific reason.
Guillermo gets this idea from the same source as Tolkien — they both get from Chesterton:
Men of the people, like the shepherds, men of the popular tradition, had everywhere been the makers of the mythologies. It was they who had felt most directly, with least check or chill from philosophy or the corrupt cults of civilization, the need we have already considered; the images that were adventures of the imagination; the mythology that was a sort of search the tempting and tantalizing hints of something half human in nature; the dumb significance of seasons and special places. They had best understood that the soul of a landscape is a story and the soul of a story is a personality. But rationalism had already begun to rot away these really irrational though imaginative treasures of the peasant; even as systematic slavery had eaten the peasant out of house and home. Upon all such peasantries everywhere there was descending a dusk and twilight of disappointment, in the hour when these few men discovered what they sought. Everywhere else Arcadia was fading from the forest. Pan was dead and the shepherds were scattered like sheep. And though no man knew it, the hour was near which was to end and to fulfill all things; and though no man heard it, there was one far-off cry in an unknown tongue upon the heaving wilderness of the mountains. The shepherds had found their Shepherd.
— Chesterton, The Everlasting Man
And the thing they found was of a kind with the things they sought. The populace had been wrong in many things; but they had not been wrong in believing that holy things could have a habitation and that divinity need not disdain the limits of time and space. And the barbarian who conceived the crudest fancy about the sun being stolen and hidden in a box, or the wildest myth about the god being rescued and his enemy deceived with a stone, was nearer to the secret of the cave and knew more about the crisis of the world, than all those in the circle of cities round the Mediterranean who had become content with cold abstractions or cosmopolitan generalizations; than all those who were spinning thinner and thinner threads of thought out of the transcendentalism of Plato or the orientalism of Pythagoras. The place that the shepherds found was not an academy or an abstract republic; it was not a place of myths allegorized or dissected or explained or explained away. It was a place of dreams come true. Since that hour no mythologies have been made in the world. Mythology is a search.
We all know that the popular presentation of this popular story, in so many miracle plays and carols, has given to the shepherds the costume, the language, and the landscape of the separate English and European countryside. We all know that one shepherd will talk in a Somerset dialect or another talk of driving his sheep from Conway towards the Clyde. Most of us know by this time bow true is that error, how wise, how artistic, how intensely Christian and Catholic is that anachronism. But some who have seen it in these scenes of medieval rusticity have perhaps not seen it in another sort of poetry, which it is sometimes the fashion to call artificial rather than artistic. I fear that many modem critics Will see only a faded classicism in the fact that men like Crashaw and Herrick conceived the shepherds of Bethlehem under the form of the shepherds of Virgil. Yet they were profoundly right; and in turning their Bethlehem play into a Latin Eclogue they took up one of the most important links in human history. Virgil, as we have already seen, does stand for all that saner heathenism that had overthrown the insane heathenism of human sacrifice; but the very fact that even the Virgilian virtues and the sane heathenism were in incurable decay is the whole problem to which the revelation to the shepherds is the solution. If the world bad ever had the chance to grow weary of being demoniac, it might have been healed merely by becoming sane. But if it bad grown weary even of being sane, what was to happen, except what did happen? Nor is it false to conceive the Arcadian shepherd of the Eclogues as rejoicing in what did happen. One of the Eclogues has even been claimed as a prophecy of what did happen.
But it is quite as much in the tone and incidental diction of the great poet that we feel the potential sympathy with the great event; and even in their own human phrases the voices of the Virgilian shepherds might more than once have broken upon more than the tenderness of Italy . . . . . Incipe, parve puer, risu cognoscere matrem . . . . . They might have found in that strange place all that was best in the last traditions of the Latins; and something better than a wooden idol standing up forever for the pillar of the human family; a household god. But they and all the other mythologists would be justified in rejoicing that the event had fulfilled not merely the mysticism but the materialism of mythology. Mythology had many sins; but it had not been wrong in being as carnal as the Incarnation. With something of the ancient voice that was supposed to have rung through the groves, it could cry again, ‘We have seen, he hath seen us, a visible god.’ So the ancient shepherds might have danced, and their feet have been beautiful upon the mountains, rejoicing over the philosophers. But the philosophers had also heard.
It is still a strange story, though an old one, bow they came out of orient lands, crowned with the majesty of kings and clothed with something of the mystery of magicians. That truth that is tradition has wisely remembered them almost as unknown quantities, as mysterious as their mysterious and melodious names; Melchior, Caspar, Balthazar. But there came with them all that world of wisdom that had watched the stars in Chaldea and the sun in Persia; and we shall not be wrong if we see in them the same curiosity that moves all the sages. They would stand for the same human ideal if their names had really been Confucius or Pythagoras or Plato. They were those who sought not tales but the truth of things; and since their thirst for truth was itself a thirst for God, they also have bad their reward. But even in order to understand that reward, we must understand that for philosophy as much as mythology, that reward was the completion of the incomplete.
There’s a letter C.S. Lewis wrote soon after a conversation with Tolkien.
A conversation that led Tolkien to write this poem, a poem he wrote as the “Myth-lover” to the “Myth-hater” — Philomythus to Misomythus:
— Tolkien, Mythopoeia
You look at trees and label them just so,
(for trees are ‘trees’, and growing is ‘to grow’);
you walk the earth and tread with solemn pace
one of the many minor globes of Space:
a star’s a star, some matter in a ball
compelled to courses mathematical
amid the regimented, cold, Inane,
where destined atoms are each moment slain.
At bidding of a Will, to which we bend
(and must), but only dimly apprehend,
great processes march on, as Time unrolls
from dark beginnings to uncertain goals;
and as on page o’erwritten without clue,
with script and limning packed of various hue,
an endless multitude of forms appear,
some grim, some frail, some beautiful, some queer,
each alien, except as kin from one
remote Origo, gnat, man, stone, and sun.
God made the petreous rocks, the arboreal trees,
tellurian earth, and stellar stars, and these
homuncular men, who walk upon the ground
with nerves that tingle touched by light and sound.
The movements of the sea, the wind in boughs,
green grass, the large slow oddity of cows,
thunder and lightning, birds that wheel and cry,
slime crawling up from mud to live and die,
these each are duly registered and print
the brain’s contortions with a separate dint.
Yet trees are not ‘trees’, until so named and seen –
and never were so named, till those had been
who speech’s involuted breath unfurled,
faint echo and dim picture of the world,
but neither record nor a photograph,
being divination, judgement, and a laugh,
response of chose that felt astir within
by deep monition movements that were kin
to life and death of trees, of beasts, of stars:
free captives undermining shadowy bars,
digging the foreknown from experience
and panning the vein of spirit out of sense.
Great powers they slowly brought out of themselves,
and looking backward they beheld the elves
that wrought on cunning forges in the mind,
and light and dark on secret looms entwined.
He sees no stars who does not see them first
of living silver made that sudden burst
to flame like flowers beneath an ancient song,
whose very echo after-music long
has since pursued. There is no firmament,
only a void, unless a jewelled tent
myth-woven and elf-patterned; and no earth,
unless the mother’s womb whence all have birth.
The heart of man is not compound of lies,
but draws some wisdom from the only Wise,
and still recalls him. Though now long estranged,
man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed.
Dis-graced he may be, yet is not dethroned,
and keeps the rags of lordship one he owned,
his world-dominion by creative act:
not his to worship the great Artefact.
man, sub-creator, the refracted light
through whom is splintered from a single White
to many hues, and endlessly combined
in living shapes that move from mind to mind.
Though all the crannies of the world we filled
with elves and goblins, though we dared to build
gods and their houses out of dark and light,
and sow the seed of dragons, ’twas our right
(used or misused). The right has not decayed.
We make still by the law in which were made.
Yes! ‘wish-fulfilment dreams’ we spin to cheat
our timid hearts and ugly Fact defeat!
Whence came the wish, and whence the power to dream,
or some things fair and others ugly deem?
All wishes are not idle, nor in vain
fulfilment we devise – for pain is pain,
not for itself to be desired, but ill;
or else to strive or to subdue the will
alike were graceless; and of Evil this
alone is dreadly certain: Evil is.
Blessed are the timid hearts that evil hate,
that quail in its shadow, and yet shut the gate;
that seek no parley, and in guarded room,
though small and bare, upon a clumsy loom
weave tissues gilded by the far-off day
hoped and believed in under Shadow’s sway.
Blessed are the men of Noah’s race that build
their little arks, though frail and poorly filled,
and steer through winds contrary towards a wraith,
a rumour of a harbour guessed by faith.
Blessed are the legend-makers with their rhyme
of things not found within recorded time.
It is not they that have forgot the Night,
or bid us flee to organized delight,
in lotus-isles of economic bliss
forswearing souls to gain a Circe-kiss
(and counterfeit at that, machine-produced,
bogus seduction of the twice-seduced).
Such isles they saw afar, and ones more fair,
and those that hear them yet may yet beware.
They have seen Death and ultimate defeat,
and yet they would not in despair retreat,
but oft to victory have turned the lyre
and kindled hearts with legendary fire,
illuminating Now and dark Hath-been
with light of suns as yet by no man seen.
I would that I might with the minstrels sing
and stir the unseen with a throbbing string.
I would be with the mariners of the deep
that cut their slender planks on mountains steep
and voyage upon a vague and wandering quest,
for some have passed beyond the fabled West.
I would with the beleaguered fools be told,
that keep an inner fastness where their gold,
impure and scanty, yet they loyally bring
to mint in image blurred of distant king,
or in fantastic banners weave the sheen
heraldic emblems of a lord unseen.
I will not walk with your progressive apes,
erect and sapient. Before them gapes
the dark abyss to which their progress tends –
if by God’s mercy progress ever ends,
and does not ceaselessly revolve the same
unfruitful course with changing of a name.
I will not treat your dusty path and flat,
denoting this and that by this and chat,
your world immutable wherein no part
the little maker has with maker’s art.
I bow not yet before the Iron Crown,
nor cast my own small golden sceptre down.
In Paradise perchance the eye may stray
from gazing upon everlasting Day
to see the day-illumined, and renew
from mirrored truth the likeness of the True
Then looking on the Blessed Land ’twill see
that all is as it is, and yet made free:
Salvation changes not, nor yet destroys,
garden nor gardener, children nor their toys.
Evil it will not see, for evil lies
not in God’s picture but in crooked eyes,
not in the source but in malicious choice,
and not in sound but in the tuneless voice.
In Paradise they look no more awry;
and though they make anew, they make no lie.
Be sure they still will make, not being dead,
and poets shall have flames upon their head,
and harps whereon their faultless fingers fall:
there each shall choose for ever from the All.
What was the letter both the Chesterton piece and the Tolkien conversation and poem led C.S. Lewis to write?
A very specific a truth C.S. Lewis now understood about the true myth :
“Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened: and one must be content to accept it in the same way, remembering that it is God’s myth where the others are men’s myths: i.e. the Pagan stories are God expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using such images as He found there, while Christianity is God expressing Himself through what we call ‘real things’. Therefore it is true, not in the sense of being a ‘description’ of God (that no finite mind could take in) but in the sense of being the way in which God chooses to (or can) appear to our faculties. The ‘doctrines’ we get out of the true myth are of course less true: they are the translations into our concepts and ideas of that which God has already expressed in a language more adequate, namely the actual incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection. Does this amount to a belief in Christianity? At any rate I am now certain (a) That this Christian story is to be approached, in a sense, as I approach other myths. (b) That it is the most important and full of meaning. I am also nearly certain that it really happened…”
— CS Lewis in a letter to Arthur Greeves, 18 October 1931.
Similar things have been articulated in Hart’s Seeing the God But the point remains:
Pinocchio is a story about what makes stories — myths — true.
- You can tell a story about yourself. But the eyes of the temple will watch you closely, because you’re a thief.
- You can tell a story about your nationstate, your business, your commanding officer. But the eyes of the temple will watch you, because you’re not only a thief, you’re a killer.
- Or you can tell the kind of story that’s more-that true — a cruciform lie, a true myth — that gives up your very immortality for the sake of mortality, that gives up divinity that dead men might come alive.
If you do that, the temple will reward you with eternal life for you and your audience.
This isn’t a story about the rising of Carlo or Pinocchio.
It’s the story of Geppetto’s resurrection.
Rise that old man does. And thrives.
The eyes?
They come together to form the four-winged creatures of Ezekiel: the prophetic angels that see all, the Watchers of Enoch.
And these give a chance for reality, for real life, for real resurrection.
As long as we get the story straight.
Is it true?
Comment early, comment often, keep it civil: