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Stefan Schubert (Leipzig):
"'I’m Not Perfect. I’m Nothing': Narrative Instability in Black Swan"
Abstract
This presentation analyzes the 2010 film Black Swan as what I want to call a ‘narratively unstable’ text. Black Swan deals with the struggles of the young ballet dancer Nina to perform the dual role of White Swan/Black Swan in Swan Lake, a struggle that also leads her to question her grip on reality, her identity, and the identity of another ballet dancer, whom she increasingly frequently hallucinates as a doppelgänger of herself. The film is continuously narrated through Nina’s internal focalization, which grants viewers insights into her apparent mental instability, but without offering any other, potentially more ‘objective’ perspective. As a consequence of this unreliable, subjective point of view, the text’s storyworld remains fundamentally ‘unstable,’ since a number of significant elements, characters, and events are left uncertain and doubtful.
I thus want to position the film as part of a larger body of texts emerging since the 1990s that narrate instability: Through narrative techniques like unreliable narration, polyfocalization, or multiperspectival narration, such texts prompt frequent fundamental shifts in their storyworld, refusing to portray one stable version of it. The significant surge of texts throughout the 1990s and 2000s that foreground instability in their own narration speaks to cultural concerns that I wish to investigate as distinctly post-postmodern. In a close reading of the film (including a brief comparison to similar films like Fight Club), then, I want to argue that Black Swan consciously refers to previous unstable texts and takes up their concerns about the uncertainty over ‘reality’ and one’s identity, but it refuses to provide any answers to such concerns and instead leaves its own instability very much unresolved and ambiguous, suggesting that trying to find answers to the ontological anxieties raised in a post-postmodern world (‘what is real?’; ‘who am I?’; etc.) is both futile and dangerous.
I thus want to position the film as part of a larger body of texts emerging since the 1990s that narrate instability: Through narrative techniques like unreliable narration, polyfocalization, or multiperspectival narration, such texts prompt frequent fundamental shifts in their storyworld, refusing to portray one stable version of it. The significant surge of texts throughout the 1990s and 2000s that foreground instability in their own narration speaks to cultural concerns that I wish to investigate as distinctly post-postmodern. In a close reading of the film (including a brief comparison to similar films like Fight Club), then, I want to argue that Black Swan consciously refers to previous unstable texts and takes up their concerns about the uncertainty over ‘reality’ and one’s identity, but it refuses to provide any answers to such concerns and instead leaves its own instability very much unresolved and ambiguous, suggesting that trying to find answers to the ontological anxieties raised in a post-postmodern world (‘what is real?’; ‘who am I?’; etc.) is both futile and dangerous.
Bio
I earned my BA (2009) and MA (2011) in American studies from the University of Leipzig. Since October of 2011, I’ve been working on my doctoral project, investigating narrative instability in contemporary texts across different media (specifically novels, films, TV series, and video games). My thesis is being supervised by Prof. Dr. Anne Koenen at American Studies Leipzig. This presentation/paper is the result of some of my investigations so far. Besides looking for instability in virtually all kinds of texts, I’m also interested in narrativity and narrative studies, popular culture (specifically ‘new media’ and ‘cyberculture’), gender, and video game studies.