Black Swan and the Darker Side of Existence

by Christopher Barr

 

"There are no limits.  There are plateaus; but you must not stay there, you must go beyond them.  If it kills you, it kills you."  - Bruce Lee

Black Swan was a challenging, dark psycho-drama descending into the scornful world of competitive ballet.  This extraordinary film tells the story of a fragile ballet dancer that becomes the lead in the New York production of Tchaikovsky’s ‘Swan Lake’.  She is tasked to play the gentle white swan but slowly goes mad as she frighteningly digs inside herself to become the seductive black swan.

“Either through the influence of the narcotic drink, of which the hymns of all aboriginal humans and peoples speak, or with the invigorating springtime’s awakening that fills all nature with passion, these Dionysian impulses find their source, and as they grow in intensity everything subjective vanishes into complete loss of self-recognition. Even in the German Middle Ages singing and dancing crowds, ever increasing in number, moved from place to place under this same Dionysian impulse…. There are people who, from the lack of experience or thick-headedness, turn away from such manifestations as from “folk-diseases,” mocking or with pity derived from their own sense of a superior health. But of course these poor people have no idea how corpse-like and ghostly their so-called “health” looks when the glowing life of the Dionysian swarm buzzes past them.”

–Friedrich Nietzsche

 

This film is also a telling of the Apollonian and the Dionysian from Nietzsche’s stand point.  The sweet girl must alter herself into a much darker more ravenous persona.  This becomes quite difficult for Nina, the lead character, to embrace as it’s hard for her to transform what she is; it’s hard to give up structure to change.  In the beginning Nina is subject to Schopenhauer’s principle of individuation, which stresses a gentler reign of reason, intellect, but ultimately banality.  The sexually-aggressive director of the ballet pushes Nina to explore an uncharted side of herself, for the benefit of the ballet and for her own livelihood.  This iconoclastic man was somewhat of a philosopher in his own right, certainly a selfish one at times, but he like Socrates via Plato, pushed Nina to unleash herself from the shadows of the cave to come into the day of enlightenment.   

 

There is a cost to letting it all go, as we see in the film, where Nina spirals down a path that’s self-destructive.  She begins to hallucinate, seeing herself in the faces of other people looking at her as well as the pink stuffed animals adorning her ‘little-girls’ bedroom and her mother’s self-loathing art all appearing to be looking at her, judging her.   She also has a seductive lesbian love scene with Lily, a pretty young woman in her ballet company that becomes quite revelatory as she continues to feel ambivalence toward her desire to be Lily or kill Lily.  This metamorphous culminates with what appears to be real injuries to her body along with webbed feet and her own legs creepily snapping back into bird-like legs during a very intense moment in the film.  She also pulls black feather stumps out of her back and her skin often ripples into bird-like skin when excited.  She eventually sprouts black bird feathers on stage as she finally becomes the exuberant black swan.   

 

From a Freudian view, we can see Nina as the Ego, Nina’s controlling mother as the super-ego and Lily as the Id, leaving the ballet’s demanding Director as somewhat of a mediator or totalitarian therapist.  Beth, the little princess, was Nina’s future, her sacrifice to the dark side.  Beth was older and because of being pushed out of the spotlight she became resentful, hating Nina for her youth, for her attention.  Nina’s ego was what she was battling to keep the little girl intact, behaving and pleasing her moralistic mother while the more chaotic sexual woman was screaming to surface.  She struggled with Carl Jung’s Shadow, that inside darkness that we all fight to keep imprisoned as we live our so called free-thinking lives within the concrete jungle of modern day society.  

Nina’s mother clearly sees herself as a failure and pushes her daughter, vigorously in a direction to succeed so she can, in a last desperate attempt at fame, live vicariously through her daughter’s achievement, no matter what the cost.  Nina pays dearly for her mother’s selfishness.  Her mother in the bathroom clipping Nina’s fingernails was like her clipping her wings, keeping Nina little, meek and easily controllable.  Lily is Lacan’s object petit a, Nina’s own desire within herself, Nina’s quest for fulfillment beyond the satisfaction of her biological needs.  Nina’s expression of her lack can be seen in Lily’s ability to freely do what she wishes to do.   Nina’s unconscious desire to complete herself drives her subconscious to pursue an unlimited jouissance, total satisfaction.  

This pursuit is impossible to achieve within the limits of reality, it is beyond the pleasure principle which gives it a deadly aspect, in that it operates without regard for the welfare of Nina’s symbolic identity.  So Lily is all the things Nina wishes she could be but can’t so this brings hatred and resentment to fruition.  Nina must kill her desire in order to free herself from her own psychological symbolic restraints, so she kills the Lily in her mind.

Nina spent most of the film trying desperately to please others to become perfect.  Because of such a sacrifice to her own self-fulfillment, she finally let go and started to please herself, she psychologically, symbolically killed herself, falling into a complete psychotic state.  She didn’t have the mental faculty to properly balance the two opposing sides successfully in her mind, resulting in her losing both sides. 

Nina was 28 and living home with her mother in a dollhouse-type environment, where her mother controlled.  Nina’s desire was to please the mother, to behave and essentially be her mother’s walking and talking doll, to become the phallus and continue to search for her lack.  Human beings seem to be sort of doomed to this particular plight.  You are born and envy the mother, she leaves you alone in the room and you cry, she comes back and you are happy, then your father steals her from you so you begin to loath him and compete for her affection, thus castrating yourself from the only real hope for absolute freedom.  As one gets older one develops a desire to please others to make up for the failure at pleasing the mother.  One must share her symbolically with the world and this can be very undesirable.  But yet one longs for the time before time so to speak, the time before castration, before you unknowingly and naturally gave yourself over to your mother, a time where it is believed true peace could have been had.  We all struggle with this in our lives, some of us become aware of this need and an understanding of our inability to completely correct it, and some of us still struggle with it, to the point that we begin to hate others rather than please them as a way of rejecting our sensitive side, in a society that only wishes to swim with sharks.   

 

Nina’s mother exploited her daughter’s need for her, subconsciously for the most part, she imprisoned her to such a point that when Nina finally broke free and successfully preceded her she couldn’t handle it and she symbolically died on that stage.

The film is tragic as it tells the story of failed enlightenment, the side effect to awaking, the problem of conformity.  The film is expressing to its audience the downside to fulfillment, not to say that its wrong but some people are so far gone that the path to the door that one must open, isn’t for everyone.  Some become tragic figures that can’t escape the symbolic cage of linguistic assignment.  Some remain a prisoner of this for the rest of their days.  Black Swan is about the tragedy of a girl that had all the potential for enlightenment but didn’t have the psychological faculty to sustain it, to operate within it and live beyond symbolic freedom.