Abstract
Based on the plot of Swan Lake, Black Swan depicts an ingenue’s metamorphosis into a woman and a prima ballerina that contains a fairy-tale plot in which a naïve heroine overcomes enemies and obstacles in order to achieve success and sexual maturity. Unlike a traditional fairy tale, this cinematic tale concludes with death and the clear distinctions between good and evil, helper and adversary and reality vs. fantasy are fluid. As in many fairy tales, the film criticizes the values of its era, namely, the narcissistic aspects of contemporary society with its excessive worship of youth, beauty and celebrity, and its most pernicious results—escape into fantasy and insanity, aggressive rivalry, violence, and self-destruction.
Highlights
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Nina’s obsessive practicing of her dance moves, her rigid control of her body and of her food and her continual monitoring of her body’s movements in ubiquitous mirrors underscore her compulsive striving for perfection. Her entire life revolves around her goal to become the prima ballerina to the exclusion of everything else
Like many recent retellings of traditional fairy tales, Black Swan can be read as a postmodern revision of a fairy tale, but with a dark undertone that contains a social critique of contemporary life
Summary
Swan as a Postmodern Fairy Tale: Mirroring a Narcissistic Society. Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. In an article in the New York Times, Salman Rushdie (2021) describes the power of fairy tales They depict places of “beautiful impossibility,” they contain truths about human nature that are still relevant and powerful today: The stories that made me fall in love with literature in the first place were tales full of beautiful impossibility, which were not true but by being not true told the truth, often more beautifully and memorably than stories that relied on being true. Those stories didn’t have to happen once upon a time either. I will analyze three aspects of this cinematic fairy tale: the metamorphosis of the heroine from child to adult, a common theme in traditional fairy tales (Section 3); psychological and mythic interpretations of the “anti-fairy tale” aspects of the film, in particular, the ambiguous death scene at the film’s conclusion, (Section 4); and the role of the fairy tale as social critique, in this case, of a narcissistic society (Section 5)
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