So I just finished watching Pan’s Labyrinth with my Dad and sister. We were discussing the ending (spoiler alert -skip to the next paragraph) and how to interpret the final minutes. I brought up the relevance of the lead character’s name, Ofelia, since the character arguably goes down a spiral of madness and dies in the dripping rain (symbolic of dying in the water).
While I think the film leaves the viewer to decide, I stand by the fact that Del Toro wouldn’t name his lead character after one of Shakespeare’s most famous women by accident. But my family doesn’t agree. When I proposed that many film makers do this (name characters after literary characters), they both scoffed.
So help me out, make a list of film characters with clearly symbolic names!
The Matrix is filled with biblical and Greek references.
Michael Corleone, who later becomes the leader of the most powerful mob and leads it into war, is much like the Archangel Michael who leads the army of Heaven.
In O Brother, Where Art Thou?, the lead character is named Ulysses, the Latin form of Odysseus. Meanwhile the film follows much of The Odyssey epic to a T.
Also, (in relation to Pan’s Labyrinth), for those of you familiar with the film, Ofelia may actually have more in common with Hamlet than Ophelia. The faun is the equivalent of Hamlet’s ghost father, Mercedes is the equivalent of Horatio, Carmen is Gertrude, and of course Captain Vidal is Hamlet’s uncle.
So does anyone else want to help out before this thread fades from existence?
I’m having a hard time coming up with many movie examples… of course, one of the Beatnik G.I.'s in “Kelly’s Heroes” is named Moriarty, which I suspect is a reference to Dean Moriarty, a character in Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road.”
If you’ll accept examples from other media…
In the original French novel “Planet of the Apes,” the astronaut’s name is Ulysses Merou. The symbolism of a lost space traveller named Ulysses is obvious.
In the TV series “Lost,” several characters are named after famous philosophical writers (John Locke,
The guess or notion, not the fact, unless you’ve been able to ask Del Toro. And Ofelia is not mad: the movie is a fairy tale. She “really” is the fairy princess in the same way as Sleeping Beauty “really” wakes up after sleeping for 100 years.
I’ve read the interviews, and you are correct: Del Toro intends the fairytale to be true.
Funny thing is, I did ask him when I couldn’t find the answer anywhere else. He responded last night confirming the link between Ofelia and Hamlet (including a couple finer points I left out). So while the fairytale still stands true, the Shakespearean link was very intentional.
Del Toro says the only truly major character not represented in the film is Laertes, although the guerrillas share a very loose connection.
Here’s another one I came across. In 12 Monkeys, there are numerous Hitchcock references, with a memorable scene involving the film Vertigo. The lead character’s name James is likely a reference to Jimmy Stewart. There are further connections too. This is from Wikipedia:
Not a real surprise here, since the story is a deliberate retelling of the Shakespeare work, but the names of characters in both the very good novel and very mediocre movie *A Thousand Acres *all correspond to character names in King Lear. Lear becomes Larry, the daughters (from eldest to youngest) Ginny, Rose, and Caroline are Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia, etc.
Kinda weak, I know, but it’s an interesting thread topic and I’d hope I could come up with more.
In the book and musical Wicked (which will someday be a movie) the Wicked Witch of the West is named Elphaba, a tribute to the initials of Oz writer L. Frank Baum.
Fictional detectives Philip Marlowe and Spenser were named after Elizabethan poets.
Or, rather, Robert B. Parker was a huge fan of Raymond Chandler, and since Chandler had named Philip Marlowe after Elizabethan poet Christopher Marlowe, Parker saluted Chandler by naming his own detective after another Elizabethan poet: Edmund “The Faerie Queene” Spenser.
The 1943 Mickey Rooney movie The Human Comedy (based on a novel that was simultaneously written with the screenplay) has references to The Odyssey.
From the Wikipedia entry for the book:
“The Human Comedy also has several references to Homer’s Odyssey. Homer is both the name of the author of the Odyssey and the main character in this novel. Homer’s young brother’s name, Ulysses, is the Roman form of the name Odysseus, the Odyssey’s protagonist. The theme of both of the books is going home. Ithaca, is both Homer’s and Ulysses’ home-town in the novel, and Odysseus’ home-island in the Odyssey. Helen Eliot, referring to Helen of Troy, is used as the girl that Homer is in love with.”
