New Taste in the Myth of Swan Queen in the Film Black Swan: The Inner Conflict of Nina Reflected in the Mirrors

Abstract

This paper aims to share how the long-lived myth of the Swan Queen has been interpreted and reproduced by a group of artists from different disciplines including comparative literature, film, and media studies. Inspired by Tchaikovsky’s well-known Swan Lake ballet, Darren Aronofsky, who is a well-known American film director, creates the film entitled Black Swan in 2011 in close cooperation with the screenplay writers, Mark Heyman, Andres Heinz, and John McLaughlin, who jointly published the script in 2009. Once the outstanding performance of the cast is added to this creation, the whole film extends itself to different interpretations and insights along with Tchaikovsky’s music. Among so many of them, this paper primarily focuses on how this myth of the Swan Queen shapes the inner conflict of a young girl who tries to become a passionate and womanly being from a psychoanalytic perspective that problematizes the issues of the “double”. Different from the previous productions which mostly intend to evoke horror, this double image can be followed throughout the film through the reflections in the mirrors, at any rate on any reflective surfaces and this enables us to see how fragile a human being is to differentiate the real from the surreal.