Black Swan 4

Postmodernist feminist critical discourse asserts that a text is necessarily a seduction. If we look at Black Swan as a text, a visual language translated through the subtext of dream representation onto a media field, then Black Swan could represent a subliminal desire for psychic wholeness, not necessarily a desire to seduce a male or female viewer. By viewer, I refer to someone who completes the text by insertion. If by seduction, the female critic is asserting that all masculine art is necessarily a phallus, an assertion of male dominance onto a media, then she may have a point.

Let us now examine Black Swan as a dream representation of Freudian and Jungian psychology synthesized. Dreams express repressed content in a mode that is aesthetic. Even psychic realities like ego and alterego can be represented as images. The Ego consists of a collection of experiences, ideas, and thoughts that recur through time in an individual. The Alterego, contrary or similar thought, experience patterns which can be taken apart and examined by capable psychologists, reinterpreted to create a new ego, new modes of experience, etc.

The author of Black Swan interfaces a mirror as interior existence (the part of ourselves we do not show to the outside world) citing Picasso's painting of the young pregnant girl looking at herself in the mirror. This is Eros looking at Thanatos, a mirror darkly indeed, almost Bergman-esque in its nakedness.