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.

12 Years a Slave and the Authority of the BIG Other

by Christopher Barr

“When we speak (or listen, for that matter), we never merely interact with others; our speech activity is grounded on our accepting and relying on a complex network of rules and other kinds of presuppositions. That is to say, our communication with others (and with our self, perhaps) is grounded in and acted out through ‘the big Other.’ The big Other comes through us in how we speak and in how we comprehend the other.”  -  Slavoj Zizek

12 Years A Slave was a brilliant film depicting a point in early American history that most people would wish to forget, but should never want to.  It’s based on the autobiography of Solomon Northrup, a black man that lived in New York State with his family as a free people.  He dined and wined and played violin while living a life of a cultured man in an intellectually growing society.  He was then sold into slavery and lived 12 years as a beaten man that was the property of his white masters.

Solomon was a bit unique in the traditional telling of this story, the story of black people during slavery.  Unique because unlike the stolen black people shipped to American from Sierra Leone, Africa, Solomon was already an American enjoying the wealthy fruits of the new world.  He was pulled from that life and transported to a life of living hell, a hell thanks to the white people that believed that these black people they had purchased were their property.

One thing I found most interesting about this film was the authority a human being held over another, simply as a point of rule.  There was no actual universal rule that justified why one race of people held dominion over another race of people.  There were a number of times throughout the film I was thinking, ‘storm the master, kill him or her and then be free.’  But the slaves didn’t, these plantations and cotton picking fields didn’t have barbwire fences like prisons do today.  There were no walls, no prison guards, just obedience, fear of the Big Other, fear of grand authority when none existed in the real world but only within the Symbolic Order, the rule was that those black slaves were property.  Not only did the masters know it but the slaves knew it all too well.

I’m reminded of a book I read when I was studying criminology about police detectives commenting on troubling cases they had.  One such case was of a man with a knife that broke into a house during thanksgiving and held a whole family at knife point.  There were five little kids, four women and five men, all varying in age.  This one man with a knife entered their house, overtook everyone, tied them all up and proceeded to murder them one by one.  He started with the youngest, two little girls, cutting and slicing them and then worked his way up to the oldest.  It took him all night but he slaughtered and tortured them all, then left, never to be caught.  The cops on the case were horrified, as anyone would, but they were perturbed about one thing, after realizing the perpetrator held only a knife, why didn’t they jump him?  There were five grown men and four grown women, why not jump him?  Surely one or two might’ve been killed but they would have eventually overpowered this man.  But they didn’t, their collective fear of the authority of the Big Other kept them, unfortunately in their place long enough for this crazed man to fulfill his sick fantasy.

What I find thought-provoking about the Big Other is it only exists within the Symbolic Order and outside that, it is meaningless.  It’s us who give it meaning as did the black people during the slave days.  Through our ignorance, either self-imposed or governmental, we simply comply because we don’t know better.  We do this with areas that don’t harm us directly like religion and government in most cases, but yet we comply because they seem to know better and we don’t question it.

No human being should have to be subject to slavery no matter what their race, but we live in a world of slavery.  We always have and always will.  The elite will continue to enslave its populace, but the difference from now and then, is we are unaware of that slavery.  Unlike inmates in prisons who are aware of their incarceration, we are unaware of our own slavery and servitude to the corporate and governmental system, which pays us enough to make us feel free but never enough to rise up above the system and revolt.    

The only point to tell a true story of slavery is to juxtapose it with the state of today.  People need to reflect on themselves and their station in modern society, where they work and who rules over them.  This film was about the death of cultivation, the death of learning so the so-called strong can hold supremacy over the so-called weak.  This is the story of today as it was the story then, not to take way from the atrocities of that time in American history, but it’s important we don’t think of the film as simply a period piece that society has grown and evolved out of.  I think we should see the film as something contemporary and present, we should see the film as a telling of how we are capable of treating each other, and how the aspiring man can become victim to those that have fallen, not religiously but intellectually and logically.

Religion in this film plays the part of mediator; it allows the white man power over their black slaves without dogmatic judgment.  As religion is not an actual real phenomena outside the imagination of men, the ruling class were able to make their laws on slavery divine, simply because they said so, before they wrote the book in the name of a divine creator they themselves created.  Black people followed this white man’s bible as scripture from the lord and savior without ever realizing that they as a race were scammed two fold, not only do they follow it but they followed it into their own servitude.  It can be said that it wasn’t up to them to understand that they were to become victims of property labor law in the early days of the United States.  Ideally the innocent should be free of such thoughts but in the time of slavery it simply wasn’t the case.

Why do we fear a man with a gun, because he may shoot us?  Why do we fear a man with a voice over a hundred people because he has the power to kill us all?  Or does he, I’m thinking there might be a bluff in there somewhere.  Maybe the point of the story is the person we fear the most when it comes to how we look at the world is ourselves.  The Big Other is how we look at the world and not how the world is.  Slavery exists today and is hidden from our first world purview, so we can all sit and lament about how bad they all had it, as we watch our 300 channels and wear designer clothing, manufactured by modern day slaves that live during our time but simply out of our view.

“My narrative is at an end.  I have no comments to make upon the subject of Slavery.  Those who read this book may form their own opinions on the ‘peculiar institution.’  What it may be in the other States, I do not profess to know; what it is in the region of Red River, is truly and faithfully delineated in these pages.  This is no fiction, no exaggeration.  If I have failed in anything, it has been in presenting to the reader too prominently the bright side of the picture.  I doubt not hundreds have been as unfortunate as myself; that hundreds of free citizens have been kidnapped and sold into slavery, and are at this moment wearing out their lives on plantations in Texas and Louisiana.  But I forbear.  Chastened and subdued in spirit by the sufferings I have borne, and thankful to that good Being through whose mercy I have been restored to happiness and liberty, I hope henceforward to lead an upright though lowly life, and rest at last in the church yard where my father sleeps.”     - Solomon Northrup  (Closing passage to his autobiography.  1853)

Horror Films in all their Existential Guts and Glory

by Christopher Barr

Dr. Sam Loomis:  I met him, fifteen years ago.  I was told there was nothing left.  No reason, no conscience, no understanding; even the most rudimentary sense of life or death, good or evil, right or wrong.  I met this six-year-old child, with this blank, pale, emotionless face and, the blackest eyes…the devil’s eyes.  I spent eight years trying to reach him, and then another seven trying to keep him locked up because I realized what was living behind that boy’s eyes was purely and simple…evil.    – Halloween (1978)

 


Horror films are at their best when they chill you to the bone, successfully make you feel fear.  These days however we are getting startle movies, which jump out at you but don’t resonate.  Real horror films have to rip your guts out before you leave the theatre or they failed at their job.  So real horror I think is left to the imagination, this was perfectly executed in The Blair Witch Project (1999), where you never see the Blair Witch, but what the film does give you is a blank platform for the audience member to fill in with their own deepest darkest fears. 

Jaws (1975) did this brilliantly as well, as half the film goes by before you see the shark, but you know it’s there because of the masterful score of John Williams.  Blair Witch had a low enough budget that they couldn’t afford a monster so they worked with what they had, nothing.  Jaws did have the budget but the animatronic shark kept breaking so Steven Spielberg, in his genius kept filming anyway with less shark and in the case of both films, this little set back turned them into horror classics.

There is something inherently sexual about slasher movies.  Something pumping and pounding about people being chased down and slaughtered.  This of course is never to be confused with real murder in the real world, which is something that 99.9% of the horror movie going public would never wish to see.  But we love these movies because they aren’t real but feel like they are.  I think it’s like the ‘Brain in a Vat” philosophy where the relationship between mind and body come into question.  You became a witness to what is happening to you, in some cases sexually and in other cases, more unfortunate cases, you witness your own murder.  Your senses inform you of every slash to the face and stab to the body before the brain dies into nothingness.  So watching this on screen can liven up all your senses without all the real death and nothingness.

The granddaddy of horror has got to be Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), a film loosely based off the real life killer Ed Gein.  Psycho, to this day remains a tense and nerve-wracking experience, it also marked the birth of the suspenseful slasher film and became a horror classic, a model of how future filmmakers could scare the living hell out of their audiences.  An argument can be made for Peeping Tom, also from 1960 as being the first to ignite the slasher craze, but Psycho is known all over the world as the first film with a psychological twist that made a man into a maniac, slashing his victims with a long shape knife while dressed as his dead mother.

Dracula (1931) was pretty freaky to watch, especially when I was young but I think out of them old horror black and whites, I’d have to say Frankenstein (1931) was my favorite.  It was very odd to me that a person could be made in a lab by another person, by way of various body parts.  I did like the parts with the little kid, where you know the monster wasn’t going to hurt the kid because he in some ways envied him, also the monster seemed to only have issue with the institutional men, those that wished to control him or kill him.  The kid didn’t fear him like the town folk did, and therein lies the tragedy and message of the film, we fear the things we don’t understand and we hate the things we fear.  Also we have a responsibility when it comes to science and in this case biology.  There are certain roads not ethically meant to go down and Dr. Frankenstein paid the ultimate price for going down that road.  This also reminds me of another horror movie about not leaving the dead as they are, dead.  Pet Sematary (1989) was about a place you can bury a dead body and the person would later magically come back to life.  This story, like Frankenstein was about forbidden knowledge, it was about not letting go and becoming desperate in the face of fear, the fear of loneliness.

We are animals and come from a long line of evolutionary violence as a stronger species wiped out a weaker species.  In spite of the fiction that religions hold, that we are birthed out of divine design, we are actually blood thirsty animals that have become domesticated and tranquilized in modern society.  But underneath all the fashion design and the technology lies a curiosity about death, pain and the fear that permeates within us all, a fear of our own death and the pain it might take to get there.  There is something to be said about voyeurism and violence, which dates back to the very birth of civilization and even before then, when we lived in the bush. 

In the case of the Zombie genre of horror films, the fear is being bitten by one and coming back as a brainless, flesh eating, reanimated corpse.  I love zombie movies because you can’t negotiate with zombies and to me, that’s pretty scary and it’s exciting to be scared.  I also enjoy the social commentary often underlying a zombie movie, like with all the Romero films; the zombies are a metaphor for the direction consumer culture is leading us.  We as a society are becoming more and more apathetic to our fellow human beings and more attached to the products corporations advertise to us.  Romero seen this as the death of humanity and that’s why his films often ended with Zombies overtaking the remaining survivors, assimilating them into their collective of bloody conformist.

Alien (1979) is up there, not only as one of my favorite Science Fiction films but also one of my favorite horror films.  It doesn’t get any better than a group of people locked in a confined space with a slimy creature that doesn’t appeal to reason.  One by one, this creature fulfills its evolutionary purpose of expanding its species by killing a weaker species along the way, hiding in the shadows as its terrified prey lurk through the steel, cold hallways of the space mining vessel, Nostromo.  This brilliant use of claustrophobic terror was also seen in John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982), where a group of men in the freezing cold artic fall victim to a multi shape shifting alien that acts like a virus, also mimicking its victim’s likeness in order to jump from one to another to survive.  This fear of isolation follows a family to the Overlook Hotel in the Colorado Rockies over winter in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980).  Jack Nicholson plays a man hired to be the caretaker as the hotel is closed for the winter.  He’s a writer that suffers from inadequacy and alcoholism which as a result of his failure in life, goes insane and attempts to kill anything and anyone around him as psychotics tend to do. 

The Exorcist (1973) tells the shilling story of a little girl possessed by a demon and the exorcism required to get that demon to hell out of her.  This film is sick, in all its horrifying glory with the little girls head spinning around on her neck and all the vomit projecting, all over the two thankless priests.  This is one of those movies that a person should do a movie than dinner and not the other way around. 

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) dealt with a disturbing level of sadism, also very realistic and scary as shit.  This film, like Psycho, was loosely based on the necrophilia, cannibalism of real life crazy man Ed Gein.  With Leatherface wielding a chainsaw along with all the meat hooks and graphic violence, if you walked out of the theatre emotionally unscathed then…well…you might want to check yourself into a mental institution for the criminally insane.  This film also acknowledged a change in the current social climate, it showed its audience a form of violence that was a reminder of the direction society itself was heading.  A place where any kind of craziness a human being could think up to do to another human being, was possible.  After two World Wars and the Vietnam War just wrapping up at the time of this film’s release, people were getting the picture that the World is a pretty sick place and it isn’t because of God or vampires or aliens, it was because of us, we did this.  The human being is the monster and 70’s cinema was not sugar coating it anymore.  As in the case of John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) where a psycho killer stalked his victims wearing a white mask.  Evil psycho, Michael Myers was the failure of the American dream and as that failure; he spreads his dread to his unsuspecting babysitter victims.  He carries a knife to make his kills up close and personal as humanly possible, so their fear would be their cause of death if he hadn’t got to it first.

Friday the 13^th (1980) followed the tradition of Chainsaw and Halloween where the psycho killer that just wants to slash you to death.  This film presented more gore than Halloween and more special effects, with arrows in the eye, hatchets to the face and throats being slashed on film.  Madman Jason, in his hockey mask became the Crystal Lake killer that murdered screaming teenagers, robbing them of a future of pencil pushing and machine operator professions, but really he robbed their naiveté.  He was the mutated side effect of the industrial revolution; he was nihilism and indifference in an ever expanding concrete and cold technocracy.

“1 – 2 – Freddy’s coming for you, 3 – 4 – Better lock your door, 5 -6 – Grab your crucifix, 7 – 8 – Better stay up late, 9 – 10 – Never sleep again…”

A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) was one of the greats in the Horror genre, a fresh story about a crazy man that attacks you in your dreams, so much so that the attack is manifested to your waking life thus killing you.  Freddy Kruger with his bladed fingers terrified a group of teenagers in the worst possible place, a place you can’t escape, your mind.  Freddy at the end survived because like in the case of Leatherface, Jason and Michael Myers, nightmares don’t die, fear is everlasting.  But fear is only everlasting through ignorance and these films are well aware that their target audience are impressionable teenagers, who themselves are still finding their legs and learning how to navigate an increasingly complex world, and are easy suckers for fearing what they don’t understand.  The social economical zeitgeist is what works best in films like A Nightmare on Elm Street, rather than a typical slasher movie this film expanded to the mind and the fear of not being conscious during your murder, being helpless to the psychological workings of the unconscious.

After the Horror genre bled itself dry with many sequels and rip-offs, it was looking like it was dead in the grave until Scream (1996) breathed new life into its dying corpse.  That movie succeeded by being aware of the horror movie genre itself, where the killer would quiz his potential victims on horror movies and if they got the answers wrong, they would die a horrible agonizing death.  The movie also didn’t take itself too seriously which is part of what made it work because a lot of those older horror movies are a bit laughable when you look back on them.  The social climate was changing with the advent of the internet and the use of cell phones; altering forever the way we communicate.  Modern victims had to be tricked a different way than they did in the 70’s, the information age demanded that they should know better.  So victims tripping and falling over themselves with a slow moving attacker pursuing them had to be done away.

Horror porn came with the likes of Saw (2004) and Hostel (2005), two movies that didn’t use fear in its traditional sense.  These movies showed everything up close and in bloody detail, leaving nothing for the imagination.  Maybe they were pushing beyond the imaginations of the typical movie goer.  I think these films also represented what Romero’s Zombie movies warned us about, the death of humanity.  We live in a time now where nothing is sacred and everything is permitted.  Facebook and Twitter sealed the deal on that, with all the confessions and the full disclosure now seen on the internet.  People appear to have lost their uniqueness for the Faustian deal we all made with consumer culture; we have become Romero’s Zombies, aimlessly moving around from dead-end jobs to shopping centres to watching mindless TV with a lost sense of hope.  Like the Zombies, we have no future to thrive for anymore, we have squandered the gift of civilization and mental growth, we don’t read anymore which I think is death to the imagination, so now we have movies like Saw and all its sequels to just show us what our imaginations couldn’t.   No wonder Zombie movies are so popular in our vain narcissistic society, we love watching things about ourselves.

The one thing I find odd about Horror films is why would we put ourselves through watching them?  Maybe it just confirms the sick side of humanity and a side quite possibly worth celebrating.  There’s a lot to be said about these films.  Do they exploit women; do they punish women for being sexual beings?  Do they fulfill a violence obsessed culture with more brutal violence?  I think in the end they are about life, they are about feeling alive in a directly non-violent way.  It certainly may be true that those in the Roman Empire days, that went to the Coliseum to watch Gladiators actually slaughter other people, are themselves complicit in the act of murder but that can’t be said about Horror films.  What you are watching on the screen is not real, so that can make something that looks brutal and violent actually fun and enjoyable escapism.