Unreliable Narration: An Analysis of Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan

Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies, 2015

By coining the term “unreliable narrator” Wayne Booth hypothesized another agent in his model besides the author, the implicit author, to explain the double coding of narratives where a distorted view of reality and the exposure of this distortion are presented simultaneously. The article deals with the applicability of the concept in visual narratives. Since unreliability is traditionally considered to be intertwined with first person narratives, it works through subjective mediators. According to scholarly literature on the subject, the narrator has to be strongly characterized, or in other words, anthropomorphized. In the case of fi lm, the main problem is that the narrator is either missing or the narration cannot be attributed entirely to them. There is a medial rupture where the apparatus mediates the story instead of a character’s oral or written discourse. The present paper focuses on some important but overlooked questions about the nature of cinematic storytelling through a re-examination of the lying flashback in Alfred Hitchcock’s Stage Fright. Can a character-narrator control the images the viewer sees? How can the filmic image still be unreliable without having an anthropomorphic narrator? How useful is the term focalization when we are dealing with embedded character-narratives in film?

Capture : Jurnal Seni Media Rekam

Black Swan is a psychological horror movie by Darren Aronofsky. This movie tells of a ballerina named Nina Sayers, who desires to be a perfect ballerina. On her way to achieving her desire, Nina experiences psychological problems where she often hallucinates and even hurts herself. It results from Nina’s anxiety that causes her to be afraid that her desire will not be fulfilled. This article aims to examine Nina’s psychological state during the process of achieving her dreams. To reveal the psychological issues experienced by Nina, a characteristic analysis was carried out using Sigmund Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis, the theory of human defense mechanisms, and the cinematographic aspects of this film. The results showed that uncontrolled desires could cause psychological disorders that influence a person’s characteristics.

Perturbatory Narration in Film, 2017

The motif of a human transformed into a swan is commonly found in European fairy-tales and it has inspired Tchaikovsky's ballet Swan Lake, a novel titled Black Swan and the film Black Swan by Darren Aronofsky. This essay analysis the motif using Jungian psychology.

Literary Horizon , 2022

The initial purpose of this article is to mould the 2010 psycho-horror thriller Black Swan in the canopy of Freudian interpretation of the Uncanny. It tends to put forward the key elements of the theory of the Uncanny through shotby-shot analysis of certain scenes that relocate some possibilities of the Freudian psychoanalytical interpretation. Through a minute analysis of the motifs of the Doppelgängers, Mirroring, Female Castration Complex the paper performs an intertextual reading of the nourish film. To be more specific, the paper proceeds to explore the tightly angled use of camera and Polanskian use of diegetic sounds that Darren Aronofsky deliberately engineers to make a detour to the paranoiac, schizophrenic psyche of the protagonist Nina.

Epistemology & Philosophy of Science, 2022

Highlighting the, as called by Emar Maier, blended perspective shots in cinematic narrative with an unreliable narrator allows us to escape the dilemma of the omniscient cinema-eye (Kino-Glaz, 1924) and of the false narrator's paper eyes (Бумажные глаза Пришвина / Prishvin's Paper Eyes, 1989). The following commentary on Maier's paper detects the performative nature of the contradictions generated by using blended perspective in cinema narration with an unreliable storyteller. It also demonstrates the heuristicity of the concept of blended perspective to Cartesian philosophical narrative analysis.

In the film BLACK SWAN, the protagonist Nina is forced to play the roles of both the naive and controlled White Swan and also the seductive and mysterious Black Swan. The character of the White Swan is very much similar to that of Nina’s. However, the struggle lies in her portraying the Black Swan. Nina undergoes a character metamorphosis in the process and eventually gets detached from reality. The study uses psychoanalytic method to analyze the changes in the character of the protagonist at different stages in the film. The analysis is done using scene by scene interpretation.

Journal of Film and Video, 1990

Semiotica, 2007

The concept of the unreliable narrator is among the most discussed in current narratology. From being considered a text-internal matter between the personified narrator and the implied author by Booth, or the implied reader by Chatman, cognitive and constructivist narrative theorists like A. Nünning have described it as a reader-dependent issue. The detection of a narrator's unreliability is an act of 'naturalization,' he claims, with reference to Culler.