Black Swan (2010) As Alchemical Allegory
Inspired by Scott Alexander's post
Let's talk about alchemy! More essentially about alchemy in the movie Black Swan (2010). There Natalie Portman takes on the role of a young ballet dancer who undergoes a big transformation. This is heavily inspired by the Slate Start Codex May 2020 post called My Immortal as Alchemical Allegory. I do recommend this post, please check it out if you haven't. So let's get started. Black Swan is clearly an alchemical allegory. This caught my attention first when I saw the use of color in the movie. As above so below. I remembered the three colors. Here you start with the white color which describes innocence. Then there is the black color which is the shadow self. And then you've got the red color which is the integration, the alchemical union. And there will be SPOILERS.
The Slate Start Codex blog post defines, describes all the stages best. However I will summarize it briefly for you. The idea is in the alchemical world that was known to Jung and other people afterwards. Certainly George Peterson is also familiar, even if he doesn't reference it directly. He prefers the non-mystic, more exoteric framework in the more kind of Christian sense. So we've got three stages with the white, black, red. And the story of My Immortal as Alchemical allegory is a description of a person who goes through those stages. The colors take the form of various persons she meets and those events describe her path. And it's not a straightforward path and there are bits in the story where she has an opportunity to progress to the next stage but she doesn't. So in the alchemical sense those are failed rituals, a failure to integrate something. And My Immortal seems, I haven't read it myself, as something longer than the movie Black Swan. So you'd expect the Black Swan to be a more condensed arc in this alchemical sense. And now is the SPOILER part, this was the last warning.
What we see in the movies is what the character sees, the character of Natalie Portman. So it's not always kind of natural realism. So what she sees is not always what the other people see in there. And there are some non-realistic things in stuff that she sees. There is some kind of wound which is rotting. This is the putrefaction stage where putrefaction is a kind of rotting and it's protein breakdown, like some poisons act. And there's also the character Lily who is a competing ballet dancer who has a more kind of dark feminine energy and that's the black part of the stage and she's kind of her... not nemesis, she's definitely the foil because of the contrast. But there the kind of motive of a lesbian vampire where we see the character has a sex dream featuring this competing ballet dancer. But then we see that it's just another part of herself. So what we see about this other girl is what the main character is projecting on her.
And you've got the white stuff, the innocence part. That's the infantile surroundings that mirror the stunted emotional growth of the main character. And then she's getting new makeup at some stages so this represents a return to innocence perhaps with some new knowledge. And there we've got also red which is the final stage and that would be someone wrote horror somewhere. And there's also red lipstick and self-harm and there's also blood in the movie finale. And we've got also the dragon which is in alchemy one of the kind of first things that you conquer as the initiate. That happens between the white and black stages. The black stage is Nigredo and the black dragon is the violent subconscious. It needs to be conquered at the start so that's what she does kissing him until biting his lips. So there's this red element of blood in there and this is how she conquers the dragon. Here you can compare the ‘My Immortal as Alchemical Category’ by Scott Alexander. In that story there's the presentation of the alchemical marriage. It does not need to be marriage, just some kind of romantic situation to represent the transition between the stages.
Now I could analyze more here... But it's fun to discover stuff on your own. I encourage you if you haven't watched it in a while to re-watch this movie with those lenses and if you haven't at all give it a shot. Here's the kicker . I must say that I got this idea and I thought "all right this movie was so many years ago someone thought about it". Any yes there are at least two blog posts specifically on this and even an article to a literature journal. That's definitely interesting and this raises some questions so who made this? Director Darren Aronofsky, who also directed The Foundain and Requiem for a Dream. I might checkout those movies later.
If we read Black Swan as an alchemical allegory this makes it belong to a specific class of movies. There's something refreshing compared to, say Stanley Kubrick's themes: predictions about technology and (perhaps ) some ideas to expose some groups. This can get out of date but the alchemical allegory won't. This really makes Black Swan something universal and it's very occidental in this nature. The alchemical tradition is very Western, though I cannot think easily of a movie which would present those themes as starkly. There could be more movies like that but it's like another way of telling the same story. On reflection, there are movies of this kind of the East. They which represent buddhist paths and transformations like the Journey to the West. We can see now a whole genre where we see the character and it performs some spiritual path. Das Spoke Zarathustra from Nietzsche has a protagonist and it represents some sort of a trajectory, might be interesting to read it through alchemical lens on another occasion. The Matrix movies are sometimes read as trans/Buddhist allegory however the emphasis on action scenes and technology distract enough, that the allegory is not the main theme as much. That makes three examples. What are some trajectory fictions that you thought of? Let’s discuss in the comments.
Brief list of notes
list of black stuff
- doppleganger
- Lily
- Thomas the teacher is the Dragon
list of white stuff
- purification
- new makeup
list of red stuff
- 'WHORE' written against her as an accusation
- lipstick
- blood from self-harm
- finale blood
- perfection
Mentioned articles
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/26/my-immortal-as-alchemical-allegory/
https://laurencedessureault.wordpress.com/2015/04/21/black-swan-mise-en-scene-analysis/
https://www.academia.edu/5700542/An_Alchemical_Take_on_the_Film_Black_Swan_
https://www.depthinsights.com/pages/blogs/blog-Alchemical_Take_Black_Swan.html