Texts:

• King Lear – William Shakespeare (his family treated him poorly and abandoned)
• Black Swan – Darren Aronofsky (obsession with being perfect – her mother tried to live her dream through Nina)
• Nosedive – Joe Wright (wanting acceptance and approval from other)
• Oedipus Rex – Sophocles

Link: we feel sorry for all of the tragic heroes because of their human flaws

Convention: plot – catharsis and character is hamartia

“through the conventions character and plot”

http://www.classics.upenn.edu/myth/php/tragedy/index.php?page=oedhero#:~:text=Oedipus%20fits%20this%20precisely%2C%20for,no%20responsibility%20for%20his%20flaw.

Nosedive Analysis: Links to black swan through perfection and wanting to be accepted.

• The episode is set in a world where people can rate each other from one to five stars for every interaction they have, which can impact their socioeconomic status. This episode of Black Mirror was a very interesting critique of what could happen if social media ran your life and if the only thing that mattered is how people superficially see you. The purpose of this society is to encourage politeness and kindness, but also promotes extremely unrealistic expectations. The purpose of “Nosedive” is to show a utopian society that functions perfectly, but then Lacie’s life in the episode ultimately goes downhill. It results in her being free from the masking of her fake society. The title of the episode is a conclusive giveaway that all doesn’t go according to plan. Lacie’s brother (James Norton), a snarky kid who hates how fake she’s become, gives her 1 star after an argument, as does a cab driver whom she keeps waiting. When her rating drops below 4.2, and her flight to the wedding is cancelled, an airline representative can no longer book her on another flight because her number is too low. It’s at this point that “Nosedive” truly descends into the nightmarish territory, but it does so without scares or psychological horror. Rather, it’s the recognizable parts of Lacie’s story that sting: feeling excluded, feeling disliked, feeling downgraded and categorized as a second-class citizen.

Black Swan Analysis:

• Nina lives the destructive life of a perfection obsessed ballerina. She is so absorbed with the idea of becoming the best dancer and always calculating her every move to be perfect that her identity becomes almost non-existent outside of ballet. Her mother Erica become pregnant with Nina while she too was a young ballerina and now out of her failed desires, her sole purpose is for Nina to achieve the dream Erica so desperately craves. We feel sorry for Nina because of her mothers smothering nature. Erica pressures and pressures Nina to be a tidy controlled practically innocent little girl. Nina’s obsession with perfection ultimately destroys her sanity and the film ends with Nina bleeding out on the stage of her black swan debut. Perfection is her flaw.

King Lear Analysis: Links to black swan because both lose their sanity

• Lear is a king who struggles with his arrogance and excessive pride. His youngest daughter Cordelia is good and refuses to lie to her father and so Lear banishes her and divides his kingdom to his two evil daughters. This sends the kingdom into chaos and eventually, Lear is kicked out from his daughter’s castles into a storm where he struggles with his mental stability. The storm embodies the power of nature, which forces the powerless king to recognize his own mortality and human frailty and to cultivate a sense of humility for the first time. The storm may also symbolize some kind of divine justice as if nature itself is angry about the events in the play. We feel sorry for Lear as he didn’t deserve to be punished by his own family in the way he was. In the end Cordelia the only family that truly loved him dies. Pride is his flaw.

Oedipus Rex Analysis: Links to lear through arrogance and pride