Always No.1

So many goodbyes lined up for the next couple weeks and BBC decided to help out with song choice – Always No.1 by Alistair Griffin.

So long, farewell, but not goodbye

I know we’ll meet again

‘cos I’ve seen in your eyes

the spark that lights the dreams of rocket men

And you still chase that light

That takes you to the place you’ll always know

Takes you home

I don’t know if I will make it

All I know is that the sun

Keeps on shining when you’re gone

So I ride the wave that takes me

To that time when we were young

And you were always number one

They say it’s too late to write your

name in lights across the sky

That you’ve had your time

But you’d risk it all for one last chance to fly

And you still chase that light

That takes you to the place you’ll always know

Takes you home

But I don’t know if I will make it

All I know is that the sun

Keeps on shining when you’re gone

So I ride the wave that takes me

To that time when we were young

And you were always number one

It’s a brand new life

It’s a glorious day

It’s a golden sun

They’ll write your name

In the fire & blood

When we’re long gone

You will always be… number one.

You will always be…number one.

Black Swan & Shutter Island: The Little Basement in all of Us

“Dreams are often most profound when they seem the most crazy.” -Sigmund Freud

Introduction

The idea of repressed personality within an individual is nothing new as far as cinema is concerned. Pioneered by the renowned Sigmund Freud, it has been incorporated by various directors from Alfred Hitchcock to Christopher Nolan. This essay will focus on two features by two different directors – Black Swan by Darren Aronofsky and Shutter Island by Martin Scorcese. Black Swan centres on a ballet company preparing to open its new season with a production of Tchaikovsky’s famous Swan Lake. The director wants a new leading lady who can take on both the innocent, composed White Swan and its dark, sensual twin, the Black Swan. Among those competing for the role is Nina Sayers – highly skilled but uptight – and Lily, a newcomer to the studio. Nina eventually wins the role, but as the opening looms nearer and her training gets more intense, she begins to lose her grip on reality, falling into a labyrinth where she comes face to face with her inner self. Such theme of unravelling is also present in Shutter Island. Set in 1954, the protagonist is a U. S. Marshal named Edward “Teddy” Daniels assigned to a mental institute on Shutter Island to investigate the disappearance of one of the patients. However, it soon becomes clear that the incident is merely a part of an elaborate role-playing scheme designed for Teddy to come to terms with who he really is.

Freud based his theory that all humans have suppressed thoughts and desires on the id, ego, and superego – components of the personality structure. Primitive and pleasure-seeking, the id is made up of unacceptable sexual and aggressive impulses that need to be kept away from the open. As a result, the id pushed into the unconscious mind to remain indefinitely. These buried elements sometimes float to the surface via dreams, either in a manifest version (dreams as they are) or latent version (dreams representing hidden materials). The frustration in learning to play the seductive Black Swan corrodes Nina’s perfectionist nature. She becomes increasingly delusional to the point of thinking that Lily is out to get her. On the other hand, Teddy is trapped in his little detective fantasy with his sanity challenged by odd, recurrent dreams. The following analysis attempts to unmask the alternate of Nina and Teddy through their dreams, and to elucidate how they end up being consumed by the very elements they vowed to keep secret.

The Dream

Black Swan opens with a shot of a woman (Nina) standing in the middle of a stage. It is pitch-black except for parts of Nina which are lighted by a source coming from the top left corner of the stage. She is dancing as the White Swan in a prologue from Swan Lake. The low-key lighting remains throughout, creating a somewhat mysterious atmosphere. Notice that Nina is hardly ever illuminated fully. Enough is revealed for the audience to deduce that she is the fragile sister/swan, but look closer and one would realize that it is her costumes that indicate the role while her physical body is largely in the shadows. Such implies that the White Swan is only an external layer whereas the real, permanent skin stands for something sinister like the evil twin. Nina’s inclination towards the Black Swan is foreshadowed by the preceding opening intertitle where the film title appears in white against a black background. The minimalistic design sets the tone for the next two hours: ‘white’, regardless of how outstanding it is, is swallowed by ‘black’. The word “black” stands for itself despite having a white font. Viewers are subconsciously aligned to empower the darker shade more than its brighter counterpart. The subsequent scene shows Nina longingly recalling her “craziest dream” (opening sequence) from the night before. As the movie proceeds, it is obvious the entire episode is a denial of Nina’s desire for freedom. All her life she has been under the watchful eyes of her possessive mother whose past failures cause her to groom Nina with zero-tolerance towards error. Although Nina seems thrilled to be the White Swan in her dream, she acknowledges the “different choreography” compared to her studio’s, suggesting that it was not the ‘right’ swan.

Teddy experiences multiple flashbacks and dreams but one dream in particular says a great deal about the true reason behind his coming to the island. The dream sequence occurs in the development – roughly an hour into the movie – when a severe bout of migraine forces him to rest. It takes place at an abandoned Nazi concentration camp with piles of corpses lying around. As Teddy strolls past, he seems to recognize one of the victims – a little girl – and turns back for another look. The girl suddenly sits up and says to him, “You should have saved me … you should have saved all of us.” The scene then cuts to the mansion where Teddy meets Andrew Laeddis, the arsonist who set the fire that killed Teddy’s wife. After a brief encounter, a woman’s scream breaks Teddy’s concentration and Rachel Solando (the missing patient) appears with her three children whom she killed. Once again viewers see the girl from the camp, this time asking why he did not save her. The camera cuts to a lake in which Solando drowned her kids. The girl’s words at the camp mislead viewers into thinking that she meant the victims at the camp when what she really meant is her siblings and herself. This dream is a condensed form of Teddy’s latent memories, specifically feelings of repressed guilt; he is haunted by recollections of his involvement at the Dachau liberation reprisals (hence the setting), and the little girl is actually her deceased daughter, Rachel. She and her two siblings were drowned by their mother, Dolores whom Teddy killed in retaliation. “Teddy” here is also misleading because his real name is Andrew Laeddis. Laeddis blames himself for his children’s deaths because his heavy drinking caused him to ignore signs of Dolores’s mental illness. In extreme denial, he created an alternate character, Teddy for himself and an alternate version of Dolores’s murder in which she was killed in a fire by “Andrew Laeddis”. He has placed himself in a looping fantasy of hunting down “Andrew Laeddis”, ‘looping’ because Teddy is essentially searching for himself. “Andrew Laeddis” and “Edward Daniels” are anagrams as are “Dolores Chanal” and “Rachel Solando”, with the latter pair explaining why Solando appeared in his dream instead of Dolores.

The Ending

The denouement of both films illustrates the destructive forces of both protagonists’ repressed desires and identity upon discharge. The opening night finally arrives; during the intermission prior to the final act of Swan Lake, Nina suddenly realizes that she has stabbed not Lily but herself. Not only was the earlier fight between the two an imagination, the conspiracies and hate and jealousy she felt directed to her all this while were her own creations and hallucinations. Despite the swans being polar opposites, Nina desperately wants to perform both with utter perfection which is exactly what caused her to be so caught up in her new roles, especially the Black twin. She has to let loose of herself, trade in her rigid and composed mentality for a lustful, hedonic personality in order to be play the Black Swan. Her investment paid off; her exquisite performance in dual roles garnered thunderous applause and cheers. But by the time she makes the final jump, Nina is already bleeding heavily. The movie ends with Nina exclaiming, “I felt it. Perfect. It was perfect,” a reference to Thomas Leroy (her director)’s earlier remark that “perfection is … about control … [and] letting go.” Unfortunately, the perfection came at the price of death (implied by the blinding white lights and the profuse bleeding). By releasing the sensuality she has imprisoned for so long, her innocence is in turn held captive by it. The end credits summarize Nina’s journey since becoming the new Swan Queen. Beginning with black-coloured words on a white background, it shows Nina taking on the roles leaning towards the white twin. White feathers slowly emerge in the background with distinct black ones appearing randomly, an allegory for her gradually surfacing darker traits. More and more black feathers appear until they cover the screen entirely. At last, the background becomes black with white feathers coming up aimlessly, marking Nina’s complete transformation into the Black Swan.

After “Teddy” is revealed to be Laeddis at the lighthouse, the film cuts to the hospital ground with Laeddis sitting by himself on a building entrance. A long shot follows, showing Dr. Cawley and Dr. Naehring watching him from far. Dr. Sheehan, his primary psychiatrist comes to sit beside him and when Laeddis calls him “Chuck” – Sheehan’s name as “Teddy’s” partner in his fantasy – Sheehan turns to his superiors and gently shakes his head. This suggests that Teddy is still unable to “accept the reality” that he is in fact Laeddis. The camera then shows a visually disappointed Dr. Cawley; everything that took place on the island – the search for Rachel Solando, a mysterious 67^th patient, the rule of 4 – is a customized treatment plan designed by Cawley and Sheehan to aid Laeddis in escaping his neurotic delusions. Now that things have failed, Laeddis would have to be lobotomized as the institute can no longer cope with his erratic and often violent behaviour. Laeddis is led away by the guards and the movie ends with a shot of the lighthouse, implying an inevitable surgery for Laeddis. However, the question remains of whether Laeddis really regressed into his fantasy again. The answer lies in “Teddy’s” last words to Chuck: “To live as a monster, or die as a good man”. Andrew Laeddis is a man burdened with infinite pain and guilt while Teddy has none of those, only a thirst for truth; Laeddis knowingly chooses to remain as Teddy (the good man) which in effect allows himself to be lobotomize, thus putting an end to Laeddis’s (the monster) existence (Holtreman). The irony is that the treatment to free Laeddis from his detective utopia is the same one which made him even more terrified of himself.

Conclusion

Black Swan and Shutter Island started with a quest; the former seeks perfection while the latter seeks answers. Come the end, what the protagonists discover are far from their original goals. Each has his or her inner self released from years of suppression and the end results are devastating to say the least. Nina could not strike a balance between her innocent and sensual facets leading to a triumph for the darker side. Laeddis’s incapacity to comprehend the past as it is threw him into a limbo of endless search for the ‘real’ answer. Both films demonstrate the notion of repressed elements in human minds, and how dreams can serve as important tools in deconstructing personalities to the core. What makes movies like these so appealing is how people seem to connect with the struggles the protagonists are going through. If anything, Black Swan and Shutter Island are gentle reminders of the little basement locked away in all of us.

 

Works cited

Holtreman, Vic. “Shutter Island Ending Explanation & Discussion.” ScreenRant. N.p., n.d. Web. 06 Dec. 2012. <http://screenrant.com/shutter-island-spoilers-discussion-vic-46052/&gt;.

(ET 12) An “M” within an “M”

Prior to the infamous Third Reich Cinema, Germany gave the world its equivalent of America’s realism in filmmaking called German Expressionism. Although both attempt to present the same substance that is reality, realism requires it to be done as accurately as possible whereas Expressionism utilizes extreme distortion of events to create a subjective surrounding. Among the more prominent directors during the Expressionist era is Fritz Lang. His repertoire of motion pictures includes The Nibelungen (1923-1924), Metropolis (1927), and M (1931), with the latter being the subject of discussion in this essay. Essentially about the hunt for a child murderer on the loose, M stretches Lang’s directorial skills to a whole new level with its potent combination of cinematography, editing, and sound that creates an account that has more than meets the eye. The film also adopts a narrative-within-narrative structure, especially in its exposition. A closer look at the opening eight minutes will reveal a tale so compelling it can pass for a cinematic short.

The sequence opens with an image of a palm emblazoned with the film title, followed by an intertitle stating that this is a movie by Lang. As the screen fades out, a loud gong is heard. This is the very first sound in the film and it initiates the entry to the plot. A little girl’s chanting plays as the screen fades in to a group of children playing in a courtyard. The camera slowly pans left and tilts upwards before stopping at a shot of the balcony. A lady appears, tells the children to stop singing, and leaves. An instrumental motive here is the initial “M”, which appears three times in near succession. In the first appearance, the white font makes the letter stands out against the grayscaled palm and background. In the second, the letter is slightly bigger-sized compared to other alphabets in the title card. In the third, it is formed by a piece of clothing hung upside down at the balcony (see Figure 1). The initial’s prominence is reduced with each passing display, suggesting that it stands for something significant yet concealed. Indeed, the balcony shot remains in place long after the woman has left the screen as if to urge viewers to search for a hidden “item”. Given that “M” stands for the word Mörder (English: murderer) which is the subject of that “awful song” (“M”), the film is implying that the “nasty man in black” (“M”) is lurking around the neighbourhood like how the initial is camouflaged at the clothesline.

Figure 1

With the story arc in place, the camera cuts to a staircase where the lady from the balcony is seen ascending the steps holding a basket full of clothes. She knocks on a door and another lady appears to claim the basket. The former then complains about how the children would not stop chanting about the murderer to which the latter replies, “If they’re singing, at least we know they’re okay” (“M”). The second woman carries on with her chores until the clock chimes signifying noon, bringing a smile to her sullen face. This is followed by a long shot of people waiting outside a school which suggests that the protagonist is anticipating her child’s return. The cross-cutting, however, perplexes viewers: Why isn’t the lady picking up her child in person like all the other parents when everybody is on high alert for the notorious killer? Another element of intrigue is the point-of-view shot of her looking at the clock. Again, this particular shot, like its balcony counterpart, lasts longer than average inviting careful examination of its composition. The lighting here is manoeuvred such that the cuckoo clock forms a shadow against the wall, with the shadow shaped like a figure extending his or her hand (see Figure 2). Perhaps it is trying to say that the murderer is out there somewhere ready to leap at its prey again.

Figure 2

Immediately after the twelfth chime, the audience’s attention is brought to a girl – possibly the lady’s daughter – all alone trying to cross the road. There is a killer in position, and here is an oblivious target out in the open. With her mother still setting the dining table at home, viewers begin to fear for her safety as she walks along the pavement bouncing a ball. But instead of going straight home, she stops in front of a pole and continues bouncing the ball of the pole, each time hitting the reward notice pasted on it. Moments later, a man approaches her and initiates a conversation. Lang not only used shadows to foreshadow the killer’s appearance, but also to reveal his identity. When that stranger first comes into the picture, his shadow falls on the word “Mörder” on the notice. As he bends down asking for her name, his shadow covers the words “Wer ist der” (see Figure 3). As a result, viewers are led to read the notice as “Who is the (man)?” followed by “(this man) is the murderer.” Tension and panic ensue as it becomes clear that little Elsie is standing face to face with the “nasty man in black” (“M”).

Figure 3

It is 12.20pm and her daughter is not yet back. The mother does not know why unlike the audience who are getting more and more tensed in assuming Elsie’s fate. The scene then cuts to a balloon vendor where the man buys one for Elsie while whistling In the Hall of the Mountain King. The mise-en-scene here is interesting: the screen is lighted towards the left, emphasizing a stairway on Elsie’s left. Its upward-narrowing steps suggests that her life is coming to an end, that she is going to ‘see the light’ soon. Even the left position means something – the stairway on the left, Elsie on his left – which is that everything happening to her now is not ‘right’. Notice that the balloon she gets has paper-thin limbs and the playful, childlike music is slightly missing a few notes; the lack of strength and the incompleteness of the tune (hence, incompleteness of a childhood) respectively further exert the idea that she would succumb to the murderer. Next, the mother is seen getting a visit from the newspaperman with whom she has her third conversation for the day. The first one was with a fellow lady tenant while the second was with two neighbouring kids who were going upstairs. The lady and the newspaperman both brought her something – basket full of clothes and newspaper – but the children were running away from her doorstep. Maybe this signifies that her monotonous daily schedule would continue even as her child is slipping away from her.

Mrs Beckmann goes to the window and calls out for Elsie. The scene is cross-cut with a bird’s eye view of the apartment stairways, the attic, and the dining table, all featuring unoccupied space. Lang played with the idea of space to stir up feelings of emptiness, decreasing its size and specificity as he goes from a multi-level stairway to the single-floor attic to the dining table. The final piece to the viewers’ little puzzle comes in the form of Elsie’s ball rolling away on a patch of grass and her balloon getting stuck in the telephone lines overhead. Those spell out the tragic end of Elsie Beckmann.

The innovative directorial and cinematic techniques created a story within a story, an M within an M. The absence of a closure leaves a bitter taste in the mouth, but that is precisely what Lang wanted. Such powerful eight minutes serve more than just another breakthrough in filmmaking; they are designed to be a message to parents and children alike. Mothers and fathers should never take for granted the safety of the neighbourhood or think that any atrocity would somehow elude them. Children on the other hand must always listen to advices given to them, lest the cliché ‘never talk to strangers’. Had she gone straight home from school or had the lioness been there to look out for her cub, the hyena would never have dared to tread an inch closer.

 

Works cited

M, 1931. [Film] Directed by Fritz Lang. Weimar Germany: Nero Film A. G.