Dissemination

Identification and Subjection in Black Swan

How do we identify with Nina as the female protagonist in Black Swan? It is not as simple as it may at first appear, in large part due to the unreliability of Nina’s point of view. First of all, there is certainly no Oedipal trajectory for us to rely on, for even though Nina does attempt to break free from her mother by embracing her own sexuality (bisexual, it appears), she also realigns herself with her mother’s expectations of her in the final performance. We see how Nina’s mother sits crying in the audience at Nina’s perfect performance, achieving what the mother herself never managed and so symbolically we might argue that Nina becomes what the mother always wanted to be. Hardly the overcoming of the parent which the Oedipal trajectory signifies, nor are we left with a stable world as the film ends.

If we instead turn to the issue of scopophilia, we do indeed find a male sexual fantasy represented on the screen in the sex scene between Nina and Lily; the lesbian sex triggers the desire of the male viewer who wants to be the third party in the scene and is at least allowed in as a voyeuristic participant. But there is a problem with the scopophilic pleasure taken in the sex scene, for as it unfolds Lily’s face changes into Nina’s in a few flashes, which certainly distantiates us from the pleasure we might be taking in the images unfolding and upon reflection it certainly also disrupts the ease with which we may see the scene as part of our male scopophilic drive. And of course, the tryst is revealed to be precisely a fantasy - it only happened in Nina’s drunken mind and the heterosexual sex which evidently took place is not shown, only the disruption of it. When Nina tells her mother that she fucked two men but we never saw that happen, is Nina lying or did we simply not see? Clearly, Nina is at this point a highly unreliable narrator so we cannot actually know and the pleasure we might derive from the sex scene is disrupted by the uncanny transformation of Lily into Nina, refusing a stable character identification and a stable plot.

For these reasons, I see the sex scene as emblematic of the film’s larger structure as a house of mirrors. I have already pointed out how mirrors and reflecting surfaces occupy almost all the mise-en-scene of the film, often positioned so that we see two images of Nina. Not only does this indicate in the mise-en-scene the running theme of the entire film, but combined with the morphing faces (the girl’s face in the subway corridor changing into Nina’s, Lily’s face changing into Nina’s, Nina’s face changing into Beth’s and so forth), we are forced to face the fact that there is no real possibility for identification in this film. Our aligning ourselves with Nina turns out to be just as disturbing and false as taking pleasure in Lily’s and Nina’s sex scene. It is both necessary and impossible at the same time. The power of the film comes from this transgressive move of demanding and disrupting identification at the same time. The presence of the sex scene, located 69 minutes into the film no less, must be seen as a knowing joke on the desires of the male audience, giving them what they want but at the same time making it disturbing, uncanny and only an embarrassing wet dream.

One might argue, however, that what I have outlined above still follows a psychoanalytic understanding of desire and that even if the sex scene is narratively cast as false and only a dream, this denial still depends on the heightened significance of the scene and the spectator desire which necessarily arises, despite its ambiguous and uncanny overtones. This remains an erotic spectacle meant to convince us of the necessary sex appeal which Thomas constantly insists Nina must feel in order to present it on stage. Yet, as a false spectacle the scene remains an illusion, and “it works only if it persuades as an illusion, deludes; and it works only if we can see that it is an illusion, that we were deluded. The gap between the two moments, Lacan proposes, is the location of desire.” (Belsey, 1994, p. 155)

Certainly the scene fulfills these two requirements, but like the rest of the film it also insists on something more than mere fantasy. Nina is not satisfied with the fantasy of sex with Lily, her desire for Lily is in essence a metaphoric substitution for Nina’s desire to be the Black Swan and so Nina’s desire is not based around the psychoanalytic logic of desire as lack or longing. Instead, Nina’s concept of desire is a Deleuzian desire, which is founded in ascesis. Nina is nothing if not self-disciplined and locates her sense of authenticity in that very self-discipline. It is this self-discipline which drives her to desire an ability to go beyond representation, to be the Black Swan rather than a mere illusion of the Black Swan. If we briefly contrast illusion with that of realism in W.J.T. Mitchell’s understanding as a matter of power, where illusion is power over the spectator and realism is power over the world (Mitchell, 1994, p. 325), this becomes a way for bringing us back to the question of representation and performance. Nina’s Deleuzian desire comes from the discipline to have power over the world, to move beyond mere illusion as the pretense of “this is the way things looks” and instead be able to assert “this is the way things are.”

Identification in Black Swan is therefore located in desire but this desire is not that of lack or longing. It is instead a relationship of power; Nina’s desire for power over the world, the spectator’s desire for power over the screen based on the scopophilic urge to control the images but which becomes frustrated by the mirror motif and the banality of the images in front of us, the easy lure into male fantasy which only works as means to take power over the naive (male) spectator. Classical spectator identification becomes a trap which does not enable us to understand or properly explain the way the film structures its affect and through this affect takes control over the spectator, which is exactly its function as a body genre film as Steven Shaviro points out. As body genre, the film jerks at the spectator’s emotions and intends to overpower the spectator, which in essence is the very opposite of classical film identification’s powerful spectator in control of the images. Identification in Black Swan is replaced with subjection.

Lake Mungo (Joel Anderson, 2008)

Lake Mungo is one of several mockumentary horror films to come out in the past decade, a trend set by The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick & Eduardo Sánchez, 1999) but perhaps especially popularized by the recent two Paranormal Activity films (Oren Peli, 2007, Tod Williams, 2010). Unlike the previously mentioned films, Lake Mungo looks like an actual documentary, not simply found footage but rather a collection of interviews complete with questions from an interviewer. The following is rather filled with spoilers, so read on at your own risk.

The film does depend on found footage, especially in terms of the surveillance footage kept by the family or family videos from before. Essentially, the film proclaims to be a documentary about a family of four, where the daughter dies. Especially the mother refuses to accept the death of her daughter when strange pictures surface showing the daughter Alice after her death. The son Mathew even catches Alice on video. An exhumation reveals the corpse to be Alice, so evidently she is dead.
Here, the first interesting twist occurs because we are told that in fact these photos and videos were doctored by the son Mathew to console his mother. Intent on discovering what happened, the mother June reviews the footage intently and discovers that in the video where Mathew posed as Alice, their neighbor is hiding almost off-camera. Clearly, Alice’s last name is not Palmer for no reason, as there are clear references to Twin Peaks here, with Alice having flirted with illicit sex with the older neighbor.

Yet more seems to be going on, as Alice was in contact with a psychic because she had seen herself die. For this reason, she was unhappy and buried her dearest belongings on a school camp, including her cell phone. When these belongings are dug up, a video on Alice’s phone reveals a figure walking towards, a figure the father recognizes as the corpse of Alice.

In an astounding final scene, we see an old videotape of Alice alongside the final session her mother June had with the psychic. The scene is crosscut between Alice and June and we hear them tell the same story from different points of view, ending with a cut to June and the rest of the family moving out of their family home, which is the dream Alice related to the psychic. As the credits roll, we see the same photos with the fake Alice but a zoom to a different part of the photo, where another ghostly presence of Alice is evident.

What is so special about Lake Mungo, then, is that it dares trust its own story for long enough to not reveal anything before the final scene and so keeps the viewer in the dark about the actual status of the supernatural in the film. There are no flashy effects or shocks, only a creeping, unsettling mood which is resolved in a very unspectacular but chillingly effective way.

Secondly, it is also a film which employs a form of unreliable narration yet only embedded within the frame of the documentary, for Mathew’s tinkering with the photographic image makes us realize that we cannot take any image for granted as they might all be manipulated or fake.

This, then, is a film about the anxiety of the photographic image. The close relationship between photography and death is not new but has existed for as long as the medium of photography. Lake Mungo itself stages the opening credits with ghost photography and so generates a symmetrical closing, where the film is revealed to itself have been part ghost photography.

Like many of these other recent ghost films, the very status of the photographic medium is in question and it is no coincidence that the film itself employs a range of different image media, such as regular film (the documentary filmed on celluloid), TV images, cell phone images and video images (all filmed on digital video). The Ring cycle might be the best known example of these image anxiety films but also the whole Pulse cycle, White Noise, Shutter and even Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 (Joe Berlinger, 2000).

These films all engage in what I have called the hauntology of the photographic image, exuding a severe anxiety about the reality status of the image in the age of biocybernetic reproduction (W.J.T. Mitchell’s term). What do we do when we can no longer tell original and copy apart, when it no longer even makes sense to speak of such a difference?

Lake Mungo is interesting in this scenario because it deliberately stages the entire discussion within that of a documentary film, a genre which inevitably relies on the authority and authenticity of its images. In a way, authenticity is bracketed by Lake Mungo refusing to decide on the authenticity of the image; by moving the second ghost into the end credits, we do not know to whom we should attribute these images. The implied narrators of the documentary filmmakers or some narrator existing outside the documentary frame? It is precisely this tension which gives the film its powerful effects.