In Spanish these past few weeks, our class has been studying the Spanish Civil War. In order to demonstrate the impact of the war on its youth and Ana Maria Matute (who's stories we've been reading for the past two months), we watched Pan's Labyrinth. The movie centers on a young Ofelia, who is journeying with her pregnant mother to the countryside to live with her stepfather, an influential general of Francisco Franco.
In the several carefully crafted scenes that focus on the Captain, we learn that he is extremely obsessed with leaving a legacy to his son, like his father did to him. On the day of his death, the Captain's father took his pocketwatch and smashed it into a rock, to be collected by one of his men so that his son would know the exact time that he died. In the specific scene where time and control become extremely related, we see the Captain continually glancing at his watch (the ticking is the only real sound we hear) as he shaves using a razor blade. At the end of the scene, he puts the razor up to his neck in the mirror and slices.
I think that this scene in particular shows how time and control inform each other. The dialectic of control and time shows how people obsessively control and record every aspect of their lives until they die, so as to record the precise moment of their death to be remembered forever. I also think that in this particular situation, we see how (later) the captain uses his stopwatch as a way to control the situation around him even when it's not in his favor.
I think the real connection between time and control is that as time goes on, one gains more control over their life until their peak, when they once again lose control (like a parabola). In the case of the Captain, I think that his obsessive mindset over controlling his life until the moment he dies is what really creates the dialectic here: control is what time really is. Time is a way of controlling exactly when something happens, or when someone is born or dies.
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