Guillermo del Toro is that most irritating of creatures; a man whose vision and ambition regularly outstrip the coherency of his thinking. Nowhere is this more obvious than in his Hugo and Oscar-winning film Pan’s Labyrinth (2006). Visually amazing and textually deeper than the Mariana Trench, Pan’s Labyrinth showcased del Toro’s ambition by layering fantasy and horror tropes on top of a psychological thriller dealing with the links between hard-line politics, escapism and madness. As I said when I reviewed the film the first time round (apologies for horrid blue fonts), it is a frustrating watch as the film’s astonishing ambition ultimately breaks upon the wheel of del Toro’s occasionally clumsy story-telling. Hellboy II: The Golden Army benefits hugely from its comparative lack of ambition as it comes across as a far more coherent and well-written film than the franchise's first outing. However, by setting the bar so low, the film is infused with a sense of a punch pulled and a tongue bitten as del Toro trots out a load of characters and arguments he clearly does not believe in.
The first Hellboy film suffered immensely for its closeness to the source material. The comic itself (particularly in the early days) owes a huge creative debt to Spielberg’s Indiana Jones films. Aside from the pulpish blend of action, archeology and mythology, Hellboy also included Nazis as villains, a choice that was largely unfashionable prior to their resurrection as all-purpose bad guys in Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). As a result, when the first film in the series brought its Indiana Jones influence back to the big screen, its all too obvious homage to another blockbuster made the film feel lazy and derivative. Mercifully Hellboy II moves on from paying homage to Indiana Jones and sets its sights at another classic of contemporary mythology, J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord Of The Rings (1954).
The film begins with Hellboy’s father telling him a story. A beautifully animated infodump, the story fills in the world’s backstory by suggesting that the world we currently inhabit is a lot more magical than we might think. Far from being a world into which monsters occasionally intrude as in the first Hellboy (whose tag-line was “Here to Protect”), our world was once shared between elves and humans. However, due to some basic human failing, the elves and the humans warred until the elves and the other magical creatures pooled their resources and constructed a vast army of magical clockwork warrior who were indestructible. Faced with annihilation, the Humans signed a truce that allowed the Elves their own sphere of action, separate from that of the humans. However, as the centuries ticked by, Human culture encroached again and again upon that of the elves and the magical folk until the magical creatures were all either dead or living in the cracks of human society (a set up John Clute calls a Wainscot world). Having decided that Humans have gone too far, the Elven Prince Nuada ‘Silverlance’ (Luke Goss) declares war on the Humans and sets about finding a magical crown that will allow him to control the dormant clockwork army.
After dealing with the army of tooth fairies left by the Prince as a warning Hellboy (Ron Perlman), Liz Sherman (Selma Blair) and Abe Sapien (Doug Jones) wind up outing themselves making the previously secretive BPRD organisation into a government agency with a public face (Jeffrey Tambor) and a no longer secret demon. Against this background, the Prince and Hellboy fight a number of early engagements through which the Prince communicates the great richness of Elven culture as well as the threat posed by human encroachment.
As the public unfairly lash out at Hellboy and his companions, the group start to realise that they have a good deal more in common with the culture of the Elves (a vibrant if poor culture expressed by the Diagon Alley-like Troll Market). The unease felt by the group is then exacerbated by the presence of the ectoplasmic Dr. Krauss (Seth Macfarlane) who is installed as team leader, proving himself a stickler for protocol and the chain of command. This all comes to a head with the film’s climax which results in the destruction not only of the clockwork army and the Prince but also his twin, the Princess Nuala (Anna Walton), an outcome that so disgusts the group that the film ends with their resignation from the BPRD.
Hellboy II: The Golden Army is a far less ambitious film than The Dark Knight (2008). Where The Dark Knight struggles to find a coherent plot through which to explore its ideas, Hellboy II has a far more traditional action film plot that deals with a set of tropes that are familiar and therefore instantly accessible. This formal conservatism allows the film free reign to ‘spin’ the familiar tropes as the basis for an exploration of the politics of cultural identity.
The film’s protagonists are all pointedly not at home in the world of humans and they all react to this situation in different ways.
Hellboy, as we are told at the beginning of the film, is a demon who loves candy and TV. For all his monstrous appearance and violent methods, he is culturally human. Indeed, the images we are shown of his up-bringing are painfully apple pie with the young Hellboy clutching a six shooter while waiting for Santa Clause to turn up and give him presents. By virtue of being kept from Human culture, Hellboy obsesses over it and craves acceptance from it. This is why his bedroom features a wall of TVs and why he engineers being thrown out of a window in front of dozens of cameras. He fights for humanity because he wants it to embrace him.
Liz, by contrast, was brought up as a human but she harbours a deep resentment towards the world of men as a result of their calling her a freak and mistreating her. Unlike Hellboy, she hates the Human world for all of its injustices and petty prejudices. She blows hot and cold on fighting humanity, hence her frequent desire to leave the BPRD.
Abe’s origin is somewhat more mysterious. Discovered in a tank in the basement of a hospital, he has spent his life in government agencies and so fights for humanity because it is what he has always done. However, rather than longing to be a part of the human world, he craves other worlds. When he falls in love with Princess Nuala, he is not so much falling in love with her as he is with the world she comes from, a world where he would be accepted as normal.
Dr. Krauss is arguably the least human of the group as he is just ectoplasm in a pressurised suit. He overcompensates for his lack of humanity by throwing himself utterly into the demands of the BPRD and the other interstitial organisations that inhabit the space in-between the magical and human worlds. This makes him a stickler for detail and procedure as well as a slave to the chain of command.
Hellboy and Krauss represent different sets of minority attitudes and therefore are in constant conflict. Hellboy demands recognition, equality and acceptance from the Humans and, at the beginning of the film, he is foolish enough to expect them. Krauss, on the other hand, is an Uncle Tom-type figure who has surrendered his sense of self to the perceptions of the human agencies pushing him to greater and greater acts of accommodation and ingratiation. He is brought in as team leader precisely because he has internalised the arbitrary rules that Humans have imposed upon the magical creatures under its control. He is literally a company man.
The dramatic motor of the film is the realisation that the world is not the way the Humans have portrayed it. For the Humans, the paranormal is something that intrudes into a world that is manifestly ours. It is dangerous, it is Other and it must be destroyed. As creatures that have all been brought up within the BPRD, the protagonists all accept this vision of themselves as abominations serving the rest of Humanity. Indeed, the basis of the Hellboy mythos in the 1950s conjures up parallels between the creatures of the BPRD and the Nazi scientists who were protected from prosecution by an American government eager to use their skills in the fight against the USSR. In fact, as a product of Nazi science himself, Hellboy is very much like an inter-continental ballistic missile... he is a barely understood horror who appears destined to destroy the world but who, for the moment, is working for us. This vision of the world starts to crumble when the group uncover the existence of a widely peaceful Elven world that once coexisted with the human world until it was pushed further and further back. This is a world where the paranormal is... normal and where monsters are people rather than terrifying fragments of Otherness. This second culture is understandably attractive to the group as it is a world in which they would be accepted as people instead of being treated as secret weapons.
Prince Nuada, is not only a product of this magical culture, he is also a zealot. His father King Balor negotiated the truce between Humans and Elves but soon realised that he did not have the stomach to enforce the truce resulting in a policy of cultural isolationism and retrenchment that transformed a rich and powerful culture into a group of refugees eking out an existence on the margins of Human society (the most obvious cinematic analogue for the magical creatures of Hellboy II are the immigrant aliens in the Men in Black films). Faced with such injustice, Prince Nuada adopts the rhetoric of Samuel P. Huntington’s Clash of Civilisations.
What is most interesting about the treatment of Prince Nuada and the Elves as a whole is that they reflect a deep but by no means uncritical understanding of Tolkien’s Elves.
Where the first Hellboy film drew from the pulp and mythological iconography of the comic, Hellboy II draws from the narratives and ideas of traditional fat fantasy; there are Goblins, Trolls and a magical item that is split into multiple parts and divided up among different people. The film even takes the form of a portal quest with the culturally human magical creatures replacing the Hobbits as protagonists forced to learn the world in order to confront a terrible danger. As in The Lord of the Rings, Hellboy II’s elves are creatures of immense age, beauty and sophistication. They guard their privacy and their achievements where they can but they are also aware that they are living in an age of men and in a world that is no longer hospitable to them. Indeed, the King of the Elves even suggests that it is the fate of the Elven world to “dim”, a word close to that used by Galadriel who decides, after resisting the call of the Ring, to “diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel”.
The Elves in both Tolkien’s work and that of del Toro (both here and in Pan’s Labyrinth) are fading in the face of humanity’s ruthless expansion and, in all three worlds, the retreat of magic is presented as a terrible, saddening thing. When Hellboy kills a forest elemental, he is acutely aware of having killed the last of its kind and he is genuinely touched by the terrible beauty of the elemental’s blood turning the streets of New York into forest glades. Indeed, so persuasive is the Prince’s argument that humanity’s actions are harming the world that the film ends with all of the magical creatures quitting the BPRD, utterly disgusted at the price to be paid for Human safety. A glance around the internet reveals that this argument has carried significant weight with the fans too.
The one narrative that is utterly lacking from The Lord of the Rings as well as Hellboy II is that of multiculturalism. Tolkien’s world is littered with xenophobes as it would simply not have occurred to Tolkien that these races and peoples could not only coexist peacefully but actually forge a common culture. Figures such as Elrond and Aragorn who blur the lines between Elven and Human cultures are presented as unearthly and transgressive characters and even then you do not see either of them falling in love with a Halfling or Dwarf.
The Prince’s argument is persuasive because Huntington’s Clash of Civilisations rhetoric is persuasive. If we place an absolute value upon our culture and see other cultures as having similar attitudes then it seems only natural that we should drift into a situation where we either bend the knee to another culture or we use force to push the other culture back and force it to bend the knee to us. Within the context of Hellboy II, this argument makes perfect sense as Multiculturalism is absent from the picture. There is no question of the Elves integrating human society, there is no question of Humans becoming more tolerant of the weirdness of the Elven realm.
The best example of fantasy multiculturalism is Justina Robson’s Quantum Gravity Series. In these books, following a huge catastrophe, the walls between worlds come tumbling down allowing travel between our World and those of Elves, Fairies, Demons and the Undead. While the Elves remain predictably guarded and xenophobic, Earth is a melting pot for different peoples and cultures.
The model of multiculturalism provided by Robson is so obviously absent from Hellboy II that I cannot help but feel that the film is the first premise of an argument that will conclude with the integration of the Elven and Human worlds in Hellboy III. Indeed, it is no accident that Liz is pregnant. She is a (largely) human female who now bears the children of a demon. Like two warring clans inter-marrying in the hope of peace, these children seem to suggest the possibility of integration, adaptation and the peaceful coexistence of Multiculturalism.
Indeed, it is easy to see in Hellboy II images of the War on Terror. In the wake of September 11, many Americans saw Muslims as this utterly intransigent and terrifying presence in the world. As such, the threat of Islamism could only be faced with maximum military force and the movement towards what the military theorist Carl von Clausewitz called Absolute War; a state where the political and moral aspects of war are forgotten in an all-out campaign to force the opposition to bend to one’s will. We see this slide to Absolute War in America and her Allies’ decision to destroy not only many of their domestic civil liberties but the legal, political and moral frameworks constructed during the 20th Century as bulwarks against Absolute War.
We can also see similarities between the Prince’s criticisms of Hellboy and the charges of false consciousness levelled by Al Qaeda at Muslims who want peace with the West. Because he wants to protect Humans, Hellboy is accused of denying his true nature. Just as he sees Krauss as an Uncle Tom, so the Prince sees him in similar terms.
The problem with Hellboy II is that it is a giant straw man. While beautifully shot, well acted and coherently argued, the film's failure to address the issue of multiculturalism leaves a huge question mark where the point of the film should be. This is a question that is clearly meant to be answered in a planned sequel in which the interstitial characters and their interstitial children find a way for the two cultures to co-exist. But until this film is made, we are left with what feels a lot like half of an argument as a load of familiar ideas are trotted out and done up in spectacular CGI before being returned to the thematic waste-basket of a previous generation.
However, it is interesting to consider the extent to which del Toro is pulling his punches when you consider that the next films he is due to direct are the adaptations of The Hobbit. Del Toro clearly has a problem with the provincialism that defines Tolkien's work and it will be interesting to see how this pans out in his direct take on Tolkien.
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