- Mar 16
- 6 min read
From Epstein Island to the Depths of the Labyrinth: The Pale Man’s Feast Table Is Never Cleared
On January 30, 2026, the U.S. Department of Justice formally released full documents pertaining to the Jeffrey Epstein case. This archive, spanning 3 to 3.5 million pages, 180,000 images and 2,000 video clips, resembles a candle lit in the dead of night, laying bare a gruesome fraction of this clandestine blood-soaked banquet.
The long dining table on his private island, portraits of children, and pages redacted with thick black ink strip "evil" of its abstract definition found in religious texts. Evil manifests itself as a sophisticated class-based system, a labyrinth transcending laws and national borders, concealed within the cracks of biopolitics.
*Biopolitics
Coined by Michel Foucault in Society Must Be Defended (and referenced in The History of Sexuality), the term describes how modern power no longer merely governs legal subjects. Instead, it imposes meticulous discipline and comprehensive exploitation upon human bodies, biological traits and the full spectrum of human life cycles.
This surreal, nightmarish evil found in reality has a direct counterpart in Guillermo del Toro’s Pan's Labyrinth, embodied by the Pale Man. Del Toro once confessed that his most unsettling monster—the Pale Man—was not drawn from folk tales, but serves as the ultimate distillation of institutionalized evil. This creature, who places eyeballs into the palms of his hands and presses them to his blank face, perfectly mirrors the cannibalistic logic upheld by the Church and dictatorial regimes.
To translate institutionalized evil into visceral, physical terror, del Toro crafted suffocating visual imagery for the Pale Man:
His face is nearly flat, devoid of eyes or cheekbones, with only two black sunken nostrils set within pale, wrinkled skin. This massive blank void disrupts humanity’s innate reliance on symmetrical facial features, triggering overwhelming visual unease.
The eyeballs nested in his palms carry heavy voyeuristic subtext: the creature is blind by default, frozen in a deceptive, saintly stillness. Only when hunting prey—usually defenseless, innocent children—does he use his hands to see. Every single one of his movements strips perception of beauty, driven solely by ruthless purpose and aggression.
This sight is never meant for connection; it exists only to lock onto prey, equating the act of seeing with plunder.
In reality, when elites build their private paradises on secret islands, wealth and social status become those eyeballs cupped in palms, rendering young children and youthful beauty disposable resources laid out on the dining table. This grotesque design encapsulates the bloodstained romanticism woven throughout del Toro’s work as a contemporary visual poet.
In his lens, fictional monsters are often purer and more worthy of compassion than humans; the true monsters are polished, outwardly respectable tyrants and power-hungry schemers hiding brutal cruelty within. With the dedication of a craftsman, he uses practical special effects to transform self-loathing and dread into tangible, visible imagery.
Armed with this bleak observation of real-world power, we turn to Spain in 1944 to unpack the dark power struggle at the heart of Pan's Labyrinth
The young protagonist Ofelia lives in a cold world constructed by her fascist stepfather, Captain Vidal. To reclaim her identity as Princess Moanna of the Underworld, she must complete three trials before the full moon: first, sneaking beneath a dead fig tree, trick a greedy giant toad into swallowing a magic stone, and retrieve a golden key; second, using the key to enter the Pale Man’s lair and recover a ritual dagger, under strict orders not to eat any food laid on the feast table; third, Facing the ultimate test at the labyrinth’s center: choose whether to spill her infant brother’s blood to unlock the gates of the Underworld.
Only by passing all trials can she prove her soul’s purity and return to the underground realm as its princess.
Debate persists over whether the Underworld truly exists, or if the entire labyrinth is merely a hallucination conjured by Ofelia. The answer lies in imagery that defies rational real-world logic: the heavy golden key she retrieves from the toad’s belly, a mandrake root placed in a bowl of milk that miraculously heals her mother’s fatal illness, and magic chalk that lets her draw doorways inside locked rooms.
These objects that defy physical reality act as fairytale tokens deliberately placed by the director amid the brutal fascist regime, hinting that the mysterious Underworld intervenes to correct this cannibalistic world.
Yet a bitter conflict emerges: sacred relics promising salvation become entirely invisible or tainted in the eyes of adults conditioned by authoritarian power or disillusioned with reality, creating a visual disconnect.
To Captain Vidal and Ofelia’s mother Carmen, the golden key is nothing but mud from a tree hollow, the mandrake root a foul, gnarled dead branch, and the chalk lines meaningless childish scribbles.
This absolute divide in perception reaches its starkest climax in the final trial at the labyrinth’s core.
As Ofelia negotiates her choice with the Faun, Vidal sees no mythical creature or sacred altar—only a little girl clutching a baby and chattering to thin air. The emptiness Vidal perceives stands as proof that power permanently blinds people to transcendental truth. Ironically, the child labeled insane by adults sees the world in its purest, truthful form.
The theory that the Underworld is real is deeply rooted in del Toro’s personal upbringing.
In interviews, he recounted witnessing shootings and beheadings firsthand, and even working beside a mortuary for months. He describes Mexico as an extraordinarily violent place. These searing life experiences anchor his filmmaking, which perpetually balances the core duality of pain and beauty, brutality and innocence.
This unique perspective on life and death birthed del Toro’s dark fairytale aesthetic: death loses its grim connotation of finality, reimagined instead as a grand rebirth and metamorphosis of life.
Unlike Western narratives framing death as hopeless annihilation, ancient reverence for the dead lends divine weight to Ofelia’s ending.
When her mortal body perishes in the cruel real world, the drop of blood spilled at the labyrinth’s center is not a lament for a life extinguished, but proof of Princess Moanna’s awakening in another dimension. Death is redefined as a passport back to the eternal Underworld, granting her uncommodified pure soul its final home.
This also explains why the film is set in 1944, rather than 1939—the year the Spanish Civil War ended. At this point, Francisco Franco’s Nationalist forces, backed by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, had completely defeated the Republican army representing workers and intellectuals, launching a 36-year authoritarian dictatorship.
In 1944 Spain, justice was dead on the ground: Western democratic powers that once championed democracy opted for a cold policy of non-intervention, letting the Republican government collapse amid resource shortages. Remaining guerrillas hid like ghosts in mountain forests, hopelessly awaiting Allied reinforcements that never arrived.
Within this reality, Captain Vidal is far more than a stepfather—he is the physical embodiment of Nationalist ideology. Supported by the Catholic Church and traditional landowning elites, he commands unrivaled armed force, determined to erase all Republican memories of freedom and equality like cutting out a tumor.
The complete collapse of the real world makes the Underworld’s revival necessary and profoundly tragic.
It is not a utopian escape from reality, but a sanctuary preserving human dignity from total erasure under fascist oppression.
With the International Brigades long gone from the real world, Ofelia alone takes up the mantle of resistance in her spiritual realm. Her final choice at the labyrinth’s core—to refuse sacrificing an innocent child’s blood—represents a total rejection of the law of the jungle embodied by Vidal.
If the Underworld were merely a fantasy, Ofelia’s choice would amount to a tragic disillusionment. But because the realm is real, her refusal to sacrifice her baby brother carries divine weight against institutionalized evil. She refuses to spill innocent blood for personal gain, unlike Vidal and the powerful elites feasting at the hidden tables of Epstein’s island.
The film’s final shot lingers on the long-dead fig tree, where a tiny white flower quietly blooms. Unremarkable as it is, it leaves faint proof that Ofelia once lived in this world.
Whether under the crushing violent authoritarian order of 1944 fascism, or the surreal abyss of power laid bare by the 2026 Epstein case archives, systems built on class hierarchy that treat certain human beings as disposable commodities can never fully snuff out glimmers of humanity.
Ofelia’s choice serves as a warning to those staring into the abyss: the path to the eternal realm does not sit atop the heights of power. It only reveals itself to those who, amid fear and temptation, choose to resist and hold fast to their moral boundaries.
Author: Kiwi Gao
Layout: Evonne Dong
Editor-in-Charge: Lu Xuanlong
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