Grieving, Therapy, Cinema, and Kieslowski’s Trois Couleurs: Blanc

Abstract This analysis of Kieslowski’s Trois Couleurs: Blanc prioritizes Winnicottian theory in accounting for the arrested development of the film’s tepid hero, Karol, and his recourse, in the interest of survival, to a false self. That aspect of the paper complements a Jungian examination of the collective significance of this chameleon figure. Trickster-like and alternating between unctuous ingratiation and bullish exuberance, he finds himself contributing to the massive socioeconomic changes sweeping through his native Poland. While the old, downtrodden peasant culture is ceding its rickety hegemonic authority to dubious commercial adventures, the nation teeters on the threshold of entry into a brash European Union. In the confusion, does Karol discover his true self?

natural growth, it adds to the sense that moving through psychological transitions is a natural aspect of personal growth. e green is all the more noticeable because, when the plot commences to unfold, we see careful references to the colors in the trilogy's titles. White is frequently caught between blue and red: for example, among the vehicles in a car park or in the clothes worn to court by Karol's wife Dominique Vidal ( Julie Delpy). Perhaps this device (since white is the palette on which other colors may be laid) hints that not only is the hero in transition but also the lm itself represents a way marker in the progress through the trilogy.
We enter Karol's story as he arrives at court to defend divorce proceedings instigated by Dominique. A pigeon ies up as he crosses the quad and his eyes follow, looking perhaps for an omen of peace and love, but from on high the bird drops white shit on his shoulder. Color coding, here as throughout the trilogy, spans associations ranging across archetypal opposites. Denotatively the lm variously registers white in bird shit, Dominique's car, the couple's wedding, a porcelain gurine, grubby snow and ice, and stylistically in fades to a white screen. White's associations and connotations will develop to include traditionally positive qualities such as femininity, delicacy, innocence, purity, beauty, truth, transcendence, virtue, the Madonna, milk, and spirituality. O en the characters' behavior (as when Dominique forces Karol to listen on the phone while behind her white curtained window she brazenly fucks a new lover) negates these values by running quite contrary to them. But even this cruelty fails to shake Karol's need to believe in his wife's essential purity. Yet, as this painful episode insists, the obverse facets of whiteness are in play too, carrying associations with surrender, loss of blood or passion, the couple's mariage blanc, coldness, emptiness, fear, and death. e lm plays with both these sets of values, nally extending them (by fading to white when nally the couple achieve orgasm) to suggest the coming of light and rebirth.
Richard Dyer (to whose work on whiteness the foregoing lists are indebted) remarks that, unlike every other color, white as a designated hue is generally accepted to have an opposite, black (1997,48). Indeed, in opposition to its title, this lm is commonly referred to as a black comedy. e color black gures in its own right. It does this visually with silhouetted images, with scenes of deep chiaroscuro, and through fades to black when Karol's mind blanks an intolerable memory. ematically, black embellishes Karol's work in the black market, the recurrent contact with death, the unconscious, and his false funeral.

On Impotence and Falseness to Self
Confronted by Dominique's charge that he has failed to consummate the marriage, Karol proves painfully passive. Impotence pervades every aspect of his life, but he tells the court that things were di erent when he and his wife met. eir back-story emerges only a er Dominique has won her divorce, but it con rms what Karol has said. Formerly a prize-winning hairdresser, he met her at a competition where she was modeling for one of his rivals. In his Polish homeland in those days, he abounded in creativity, an authoritative gure, whereas she was his beautiful idol. At that time, their lovemaking was mutually pleasing.
Karol's con dence sank a er they moved to Paris. Although he had to cope in a language in which he is far from uent, Dominique's actions the moment she secures her divorce prove that this was far from the only cause of his downfall. A er the hearing, Karol (so dependent on her that he has not even memorized his PIN) tries to withdraw cash from an ATM. It rejects his card: Dominique has frozen him out of their joint account. She retains possession of the hairdressing salon (despite the fact that the business must have been established on the back of his expertise) and boasts cruelly that she now controls everything. However, although she has seized nancial power, we need to note that Karol had already surrendered it. us his impotence is not simply sexual: With his tacit permission, if not active encouragement, his pale wife has taken his money. Despite his implicit collaboration in his downfall, this is one of the signs that will pressure him to change his idea of her from impossibly pure wife to whore.
Karol's family history has encouraged his assumption that expressions of devotion should infallibly bind her to him. He learned from childhood to ingratiate himself in this way, as we can tell when his brother Jurek ( Jerzy Stuhr) acts in the same manner to get Karol to oblige him. But, adopted as the habitual mode of response, fawning ingratiation leads by de nition to the development of a false self. D. W. Winnicott described this phenomenon as one of the most successful defense mechanisms in protecting the true self. It performs that function at high cost to the sense of feeling real, however, because when the individual's operational center is in the false rather than true self, a sense of futility arises (Winnicott 1971, 292). "An individual may be successful in the world, but success based in the false self leads to an intensication of the sense of emptiness and despair" (Winnicott quoted in Abram 1996, 84). And again, "the false self, however well set up, lacks something and that something is the essential central element of creative originality" (Winnicott 1960, 152;cited in Mitchell 1993, 23).
While every healthy individual owes his or her development to a mother gure's devotion without which that development could not have occurred (Winnicott quoted in Abram 1996, 125), this di ers from Karol's obsessive behavior. Fawning devotion such as his presents as having been founded during childhood in desperate attempts to assuage the mother. at behavior ultimately forms a complex that freezes Dominique out of their relationship because it prevents her being understood for who she is. She tries to tell Karol this the morning a er the divorce when she nds him asleep in the salon. Newly homeless and broke, he had sheltered there the previous night. Although Dominique's rst thought is to call the police, Karol seduces her with sly humor, and they commence lovemaking. But then the intense anxiety aroused in him by her need for the sense of connection that he cannot supply lets him down once again. Dominique, both angry and sad, tells him (in what amounts to a catechism of their failed relationship) that he has never understood anything between them: "If I say I love you, you don't understand. And if I say I hate you, you still don't understand. You don't understand that I want you-that I need you." And when she asks whether she scares him, Karol can only stammer that he doesn't know. Dominique tests his mettle by setting re to the salon's curtains ( re perhaps acting symbolically as an agent of cleansing) and telling him that she will inform the police that he has done it. Rather than trying to put the ames out, the coward runs away. e horrid debacle con rms that divorce has merely enacted the dynamic of their relationship.
What brought about the reversal from their early time together in Poland? Although Karol is wholly focused on Dominique, the only thing he can say when asked to describe her is that she is beautiful. No less striking, he has made no friends or acquaintances in Paris and now has no one to turn to. Karol's mother complex seems to have been activated from the moment he fell in love with his goddess and regressed into a position of being wholly dependent on her.
Karol can think of nowhere to go except the subway station across the road. Like many other heroes 1 he has to go underground to discover what darkness lives in his unconscious. Inevitably, some days a er she has kicked him out, he turns back to Dominique. He phones her, hoping that the silhouette of a man shadowing her white curtains is not a lover. Far from reassuring him, she congratulates him sardonically on his timing and forces him to listen while her moans and cries pitch toward an enthusiastic orgasm.

On Transitional Objects
Almost immediately a er this gross humiliation, Karol steals the plaster bust of a young woman wearing a mob cap. Carrying it with him in his retreat to Poland, this grotesquely romantic gurine becomes a transitional object for Karol-a concretization of the cold white goddess ideal (part mother, part lover of impossible purity) that Dominique represents to him. In psychoanalytic theory, the term object refers to whatever is an object of attraction, love, or hatred for the subject-as in "the object of my passion." e contingency of the object does not mean that any object can satisfy the instinct. Rather, according to Freud, the instinctual object, o en distinguished by highly speci c traits, is determined by the history of each individual subject and particularly by his or her childhood history (Laplanche and Pontalis 1973, 273-275). e bust's signi cance as a transitional object can be ampli ed through D. W. Winnicott's theoretical work critiquing the commonplace thought that there are two realities, inner and outer. Winnicott explored an intermediate area of experiencing to which both inner reality and external life contribute. Here the distinction between perception and apperception takes on signi cance. Apperception requires conscious perception with full awareness and is the ultimate goal of individuation. It has been described as "an inner faculty which represents external things as perceived by the registering, responding psyche; therefore, the result is always a mixture of reality and fantasy, a blend of personal experience and archetypal imago" (Samuels et al. 1986, 25).
For Winnicott, "creative apperception more than anything else . . . makes the individual feel that life is worth living" (1971,65). By using apperception to relate an object to past experience, an individual can discover newly observed qualities in that object and gain fresh understanding. Consciousness achieved via self-re ection is a creative process that integrates understanding with a ect and ultimately releases energy from di cult complexes. Winnicott's model marries with Joseph Campbell's argument that the aim of individuation is not to search for the meaning of life but to feel our own aliveness (Campbell with Moyers 1988, xvi). In theory, the more we work through our personal histories and psychological angst, the more we should feel that life is worth living. Such a thrust toward personal growth is the obverse of Karol's psychological recidivism.
According to Winnicott, developing infants tend sooner or later to weave otherthan-me objects into their personal pattern. ey identify these so-called transitional phenomena at an intermediate state between their initial inability and their developing capacity to recognize and accept reality. To some extent these objects stand in for the breast and thus belong to the realm of illusion. ey become vitally important as defenses against anxiety, especially anxiety of the depressive type. e relevance of this phenomenon for White lies in a variant manifestation in which the need for a speci c object sometimes reappears regressively at a later developmental age when deprivation threatens. e depressive Karol undergoes just such a regression a er the break up of his marriage (Winnicott 1971, 5).
Winnicott summarizes the special qualities in the relationship with a transitional object, several of which touch on Karol's use of the bust. e infant assumes rights over the object just as Karol possessively keeps the gurine to himself. Nevertheless, some abrogation of omnipotence is a feature from the start: Karol only seizes on this marble piece because he has lost Dominique. e object is a ectionately cuddled as well as excitedly loved or even mutilated, and it must have qualities that seem to show it has a vitality or reality of its own. Just so, late one night back in Poland, while trying to improve his French to impress Dominique, Karol is almost magnetically attracted to the bust and kisses it tenderly. A transitional object must never change, unless changed by the infant-witness Karol's distress when the thugs who steal his trunk toss the bust onto a rubbish heap and break it. Finally transitional objects are gradually decathected: In the course of years, they lose their energy charge and become not so much forgotten as relegated to limbo. ey lose meaning because the transitional phenomena have become di used and spread over the whole intermediate territory between inner psychic reality and the external world, that is, over the whole cultural eld (Winnicott 1971, 5). is too eventually occurs in White when Karol moves toward a healthier relationship with Dominique and the bust (hitherto the frequent focus of his lonely, nocturnal attention) becomes peripheral to his life. e bust represents an early stage on Karol's journey from the purely subjective narcissistic wound he experienced from Dominique's rejection of him, to one of objectivity (or the movement from perception to apperception already mentioned). e bust as transitional object is what we see of Karol's progress toward experiencing realness-and it gains additional signi cance from the fact that he has felt the need to steal it. For Winnicott, thieving by a child originates in emotional deprivation and expresses profound need. e deprived child who behaves in an antisocial way is, in fact, more hopeful than the child who cannot behave badly. For the latter, hope has gone and the child has become defeated. So the antisocial tendency implies hope (Winnicott quoted in Abram 1996, 47), an early sign that something positive is stirring in the psyche of the hitherto infantile Karol.
Dominique's sadism, meanwhile, is driven by rage and despair over their failed relationship. Responding to Karol's projection onto her of his colorless, empty Animathe cool white goddess-she expresses her hungry needs by taking to bed a lusty human lover. e stark contrast between her beauteous perfection and her calculated cruelty driven by the irresistible need for completeness makes her resemble a character in a fairytale, a phenomenon to which we shall return.

On Poland as a Transitional Nation
Later we must examine how the trauma of the humiliating phone call to his sexually active ex-wife triggers Karol's own reaction. However, his anguish carries with it more than personal su ering. As Slavoj Zizek remarks, White is the most political lm in the trilogy, being embedded, as Janina Falkowska notes, in the context of the unequal relationship between France and Poland (Zizek 2001, 177;Falkowska 1999, 147). 2 e lm's story world repeatedly touches on the political and economic impotence from which Poland was emerging in the late 1980s when France (and Western European capitalism) seemed to many Poles to provide a clean, white ideal (Falkowska 1999, 147). is vision of purity is instantly obliterated when Karol returns to Poland and coincides with the breaking of the bust.
Yola Schabenbeck-Ebers describes "history" as the key word for every Polish intellectual. ey subscribe to a well-established set of ideas about Poland in the nineteenth century-ideas driven by the nation's experience of partition between three great neighboring powers and the subsequent tragedies of failed uprisings in which every new generation lost its most noble characters. e belief held in common was that this su ering was not in vain and that God had chosen Poland to su er for other nations in the war against despotic, oppressive empires. rough ghting those powers, the nation was supposed to attain democracy for the whole continent. Although World War II smashed Poland's newly won sovereignty and its outcome did not bring full independence, the same pattern of thinking continued to prevail through the twentieth century: sustaining the totalitarian rule of the Cold War period would reinstate the nation's dignity (Schabenbeck-Ebers 2006). As Norman Davies says in the concluding words to his monumental account of the nation's reemergence: To everyone who knows its history, . . . Poland is a repository of ideas and values which can outlast any number of military and political catastrophes. Poland o ers no guarantee that its individual citizens will observe its ideals, but stands none the less as an enduring symbol of moral purpose in European life. (1982,642) e parallel between Poland's relations with France and the unbalanced marriage of Karol and Dominique is plain. Complete relationships, whether personal or international, must be equal in nature (which does not mean that they occur o en). is brings with it the uncomfortable thought that su ering and sacri ce are necessary to the quest for completion. is is what Dominique and Karol both long to have, but a complete relationship must bring the feminine and the masculine together in a natural t like the symbol of yin and yang. e unselfconscious, yet ingratiating defeatism evident in Karol's behavior as an expatriate Pole maps neatly onto the backdrop of the nation's ideological history. If con rmation were needed, it comes from the intervention of a somber fellow-expatriate visiting Paris to make money as a bridge player. Mikolaj ( Janusz Gajos) stumbles over Karol in the underground station. e latter's inanition has reduced him to a lamentable parody of a busker, with only a trunk for his few possessions. To gain coins for survival, he renders on his comb a highly appropriate, mournful tango, famous among Poles of a certain age. According to Marek Haltof, the suicidal lyrics of " is Is Our Last Sunday, " though voicing desperate hope for a last chance, contemplate separation forever (2004,(133)(134). Mikolaj (who, naturally, recognizes this sorrowful tune) soon mentions that he has a faculty essential for a bridge player-an excellent memory. But in the context of the Polish nation's history prior to the fall of communism, memory is also an essential trait of the archaic sorrowing Pole because the national culture has imbued him or her with the knowledge that su ering cannot be escaped. And so it proves with Mikolaj when, much later, he reveals a desire for assisted suicide, explaining that he wants less su ering. Locked into its ever-increasing fund of memories that he cannot let go, his psyche ceaselessly augments his pain. Not until he grows in maturity through individuation will he develop an internal container large enough to bear his pain. en he will cease to feel the impulse to act out the process of ridding himself of his su ering. Prior to that, like other would-be suicides, he just needs it to end. Now, however, early in the acquaintance, Mikolaj (perhaps seeing his own su ering mirrored in Karol) generously o ers to repatriate him. Easier said than done because Karol has mislaid his passport (a nice metaphor for his lost identity) and believes the police are a er him (his projection of internalized Polish fear of oppressive, despotic powers). However, this time he does not succumb to misery, thanks ironically to Dominique herself. He makes the fateful phone call only a er trying to show o her beauty to his new acquaintance. Unlike the devotion-blinded Karol, Mikolaj notices that she has another man with her. Although Karol cannot release his anger while she forces him to listen to her orgasm, when he ends the call he lets go for the rst time ever. e phone box withholds his change and his awful humiliation explodes in rage, albeit displaced onto a surly o cial. Nor does his fury wither quickly. Forced to a psychological turning point, Karol can no longer passively accept su ering this extreme. Anger awakens a trickster in him, and he shows his new friend how he will get into Poland as passenger baggage, enclosed in the trunk-metaphorically a co n for his past self and womb from which his future will gestate.
No sooner does Karol touch down in his parental homeland than thieves steal the trunk, discover him, smash the gurine, and (pausing only to knock him around when he tries to stop them from stealing his last two French francs) dump him on a snowcovered rubbish dump. "Home at last, " the battered pauper murmurs, not one whit surprised at a less than propitious reentry to the world that drops him right back into the Pole's familiar painful lot.
He staggers back to the ladies hairdressing salon that his brother still operates. Once recovered from his physical injuries and the rst shocking wave of trauma induced by Dominique, Karol (more popular with the clientele than Jurek) resumes work to pay his way. He is already beginning to get in touch with the feminine by reconnecting to all those women whose needs he has always been able to satisfy by attending to their hair, that symbol of woman's sexuality. However, his mind soon turns to schemes more ambitious than his adipose brother (content with having innovated the salon's name in neon) will ever aspire to.

Breaking the Mold: Trickster Work
Karol soon nds that the rapidly changing political and economic environment o ers him ample opportunity to augment greatly the limited income that hairdressing brings in-and, by no means incidentally, to boost the trickster aspect of his personality. He soon takes on a role to which he is wonderfully ill suited as bodyguard to such a man, a wily money changer (Cezary Pazura) who operates on the criminal margin. As Janina Falkowska notes, values and money that previously had no natural home in Poland are lling the disorder following the fall of the communist regime. Con artists and crooks step in to exploit the vacuum. Already by 1993, harsh juxtapositions result with brash new capitalism sitting alongside rubbish heaps; corruption, poverty and crime go together with luxurious new houses and cars. " e country which openly turned to capitalism a er 1989 is the country of cynicism, betrayal, failure and disillusionment" (Falkowska 1999, 152). As a nation in transition, the Poles have (in White) made a transitional object of the zloty, which they intend to convert to Euros and U.S. dollars at the earliest opportunity. Just like Karol's new boss snatching at piles of banknotes when a gust of wind threatens to blow them out of his steel container o ce, they lunge a er hard currency whenever the opportunity arises.
Karol's intense desire for cash springs from a revelatory moment when he tries to throw away the two-franc piece he got in the Paris underground. It sticks to his palm which he takes as an omen, swi ly cathecting this new transitional love-object so that wealth takes on high signi cance for him as an object to be used in service of the greater goal of securing love. Meanwhile the passions locked in the bust will require more devious pursuit; and their magical powers, although by no means wholly decathected, are beginning to diminish-witness Karol's clumsy attempts to restore the broken gurine. Grubby cash from the black market is beginning to alternate with "pure" white desire as the means to deal with Dominique.
Karol's pursuit of riches does not lack deviousness. He eavesdrops on his boss and an associate who plan to exploit advance information and buy agricultural land cheaply where some of Europe's biggest supermarket chains intend to build outlets. Armed with this knowledge, Karol outpaces them and buys a small plot of land from an old peasant farmer ( Jerzy Nowak) who, a er a lifetime grubbing a livelihood in the backbreaking manual labor of his forebears, is dazzled by Karol's o er of American dollars. But to him the cash, far from being usable, is a mysterious hoard to hold onto by burying it. For his part, Karol (who arrived in Warsaw broke) has nanced the purchase with his brother's savings that, much like the peasant, Jurek had merely stu ed in a box. e di erence in attitude between the old money culture and the unregulated commercial behavior that Karol is adopting exactly illustrates the emergence of a transitional object for the societal collective of the new would-be rich.
Karol's exploitation of money con rms that he is developing beyond infantile behavior. Winnicott reminds us that the earlier, infantile phase of development, called object relating, is based on pure projection. It is as if the baby creates the breast, which becomes a cathected object. To make the developmental shi toward creating transitional objects, the infant must have developed the reality principle to the point where he or she has a capacity to use objects. at necessitates relinquishing omnipotent control over what he has now to recognize as something separate from the self (Winnicott 1971, 89).
Driven by the appetite for useable wealth, Karol wants to increase his investment by purchasing additional small holdings strategically placed to frustrate his boss's grand ambitions. Needing more cash urgently, he recalls that in the Paris underground Mikolaj o ered him the well-paid "job" of killing a man who wants to die without sacri cing his life insurance. Karol had previously declined even to consider such an act, but now he smells the money, slyly asserting, "When someone asks for help-you have to help him." He has not yet matured to the extent that moral conscience has emerged. His trickster is deluding even him, concealing behind his hackneyed moral phrase an inadmissible urge. Characteristically the archetypal trickster makes mischief to bring dark impulses to light. e e ect is bene cial to the extent that the person moved by those ugly impulses learns to understand them for what they are. is will be the case with Karol.
Mikolaj sets up a rendezvous with the would-be assisted suicide in the Warsaw underground. e deserted subway is still under construction, darker than the French Metro, suggesting that the protagonists are venturing into new territory in the underworld. And so it proves, for the client is none other than Mikolaj himself. Visibly disturbed, Karol prepares for murder. Urged on by his friend, he shoots him in the chest, catching him when he collapses, while the sound of the shot echoes like life itself departing down the tunnel. However, since accepting the commission, the prospect of extinguishing a human life has evidently driven Karol to consider his moral position and he secretly loaded a blank. A signi cant silent pun is in play here. White is blanc and blank of color, which by extension becomes the color of the void. A blank holds a space to think and can be compared to the Buddhist position of emptiness. A er this pause, Karol requires his friend to understand that the next bullet is real and asks whether he wishes to receive it. Mikolaj, having touched death's cloak, changes his mind. e authentic su ering that the two men experience in this confrontation with death alters them, unblocking their developmentally depressive state. Suddenly they nd it in themselves to face sorrow. Suddenly they nd themselves exultant, sharing life-boozed up and skidding across white winter ice to Preisner's cheerful tango. e relationship between them matures: Mikolaj insists on paying Karol for the contract "murder, " which, although not a physical event, did kill their dead, depressive parts. Karol accepts the money, but only as a loan. When his investment in land pays o , he insists in exchange that Mikolaj becomes his business partner.
In all this, the toughening of Karol cannot be missed. When his boss discovers Karol's land purchases, he and his thuggish associate assault the little man. Karol, however, has prepared for their vengeful brutality and faces it with courage. To cite Jung, he proves to be a true trickster by exposing himself to torture and managing to achieve through seeming stupidity what the others have failed to accomplish with their best e orts (CW 9, ¶456). When Karol declares that he has willed his property to the church, the heavies realize they have been outmaneuvered. No less the con man than they, he sells them the land for ten times what he paid; and in retribution for their aggression reveals with a pleasant smile that he owns more plots than they know.
Suddenly a wealthy man, Karol's image transforms, trickster like. By day, adopting the oiled mane of the high-powered crook, he replaces tatty pullovers and slacks with suits and a double-breasted greatcoat. A new, darker persona-the e cient, ruthless, and successful international businessman-soon emerges. Yet the transformation is not complete and at night he regresses as before to the whining puer. In a further development, at other times his personality takes on a clown's characteristics. For example, as a company director negotiating for an o ce, he has no concept of the basic technology that every secretary and personal assistant depends on. When this facet of his character presents, it reinforces the comic register of White.

e Comic Register
As always, the register of a lm guides its interpretation and Karol's naivety reminds us that comedy distinguishes White from the other parts of the trilogy. It highlights the quirky qualities of certain characters so that, shown up by irony, their complexes stand out in front of the grander backdrop of human potential that they seldom ful ll. In dramas that seek a documentary plausibility, characters' language, speech patterns, and gestures are usually constrained by the requirements of realist conventions. Here, Zbigniew Zamachowski occasionally "over acts" in playing Karol to distance his character from a realist portrayal. For example, when handed a gun and told to guard his money-changing boss discreetly, Zamachowski appears to quote Charlie Chaplin as Karol swells with the delusion of new-found authority and struts his pride so ostentatiously that bystanders shrink from him. In other Chaplinesque scenes Zamachowski makes Karol clumsy, wrecking his pomposity and dropping him into the defensiveaggressive pathos of the narcissism we so o en witness.
Jerzy Stuhr inscribes complementary traits even more broadly on Karol's brother Jurek. He pro ers the world a morose moon face, but his sympathetic gestures toward his brother do not quite erase his opportunism. Meanwhile Karol's black-and-white mental picture of Dominique (until the lm's climax the only available point of view of her) switches so radically between whore and innocent that in Julie Delpy's presentation the character appears to be untouched by routine daily life. Our picture of Karol's wife is his projection from a psychological position entrapped in the age-old male split between virgin and whore from which he attempts to preserve the good mother. e sharp reversals that transform the protagonists' personalities complement the reversals of their fates and a ord further clues to the lm's register. e characters live in a comic world that has the qualities of fable. e plot is structured around archetypal oppositions, and these resonate as variants of the enantiodromia familiar in fairytales. Each of the two unformed heroes, Mikolaj and Karol, o ers to assist the other by "killing" him; and this exchange of "deaths" leads to new life for both. e incompetent little citizen wins power (the king or prince of the old stories becomes the boss here) and then gives it all away. e ice-cold beauty loses her throne (the salon she has appropriated) and ends up (not exactly a maiden, but certainly in distress) locked in a tower (an upper oor of a gloomy prison) looking as though (a necessary precursor to true intimacy) she has surrendered psychologically and emotionally to their union. e nearness of those older archetypal gures cannot be missed, but Kieslowski undercuts the simple oppositional patterns of the fairytale allowing his characters to show the complex drives that move them. Karol, the not so handsome prince, far from being damsel's liberator, has brought about her incarceration through Machiavellian trickery. And the damsel (a virgin in that her psyche has never been broken into by a lover) has been made into a cruel witch by unrequited love. ese variations from the old stories speak meaningfully of the psychological development of the protagonists because, as Mario Jacoby puts it, "From the vantage point of depth psychology, fairy tales can be understood as depictions of psychological processes" (1992,3).
Zbigniew Preisner's melodies color the fabric of all three movies in the trilogy, helping the viewer experience the avor of the inner-world landscape of the characters. e drawn-out notes of a clarinet played without vibrato deepen the audience's compassion for Karol's feelings of isolation. is lament's function in the dynamic of plot and character development can be compared with the street musician's melody in Blue except that the latter bears the promise of grief surmounted. Karol's lament also resembles to some degree the musical accompaniment to Valentine's loneliness in Red except that in the latter instance strings lead the melody with ensemble playing that makes an appropriate accompaniment to the young woman's fundamentally gregarious nature.
White features a second musical theme that contrasts the isolation of the clarinet-a tango. To foreign audiences recalling the dance's Argentinean origins, it may seem culturally misplaced. In fact, the tango became immensely popular in Poland and by the 1930s had evolved its own, distinctively Polish traits, evoking (no surprise here) both yearning and nostalgia (Placzkiewicz 2007). However, Preisner's tango, scored for a vigorous string quartet, has abandoned sorrow in favor of a con dent, cheeky rhythm. 3 Sustaining the comedic momentum, it underlines Karol's intermittent rediscovery of a cheerful humor. It also alerts us to his growing readiness for the psychosexual struggle in which lovers must engage if they are to be equal partners. But as mentioned previously, Karol's advances are not constant. By day ebullient in his role as boss and riding the wave that sweeps him to stupendous business success, his movement toward psychological integration is periodically interrupted when Urszula Lesiak edits in deep low-key shots (silhouettes of Karol and Dominique fading from obscurity to black), and these evoke their despairing fantasies of each other. At night Karol the puer, trapped under the bust's remorseless gaze, is o en ooded in narcissistic misery-cue reprise of the lonely clarinet.

Finding the True Self
Having studied hard to improve his French so he can communicate with her better, Karol phones Dominique and begs her to speak to him, whereupon she cuts the line without saying a word. He has failed to understand that she does not particularly want him to address her in con dent French. She wants to be recognized as the woman she is rather than as an idol of freezing marble that has to be shattered if she is to claim her own true self. But paradoxically her summary rejection of his whining call saves him from further pained self-regard. Once again, her callousness pushes him too far, but this time he has the con dence in his new role as a businessman to be able to react e ectively. Anger revives trickster wit and he cra s a revenge calculated to reverse the power imbalance between them. He rst makes a will naming Dominique as sole bene ciary and then sets about staging his own death. A er warning the phlegmatic Mikolaj to expect to see his obituaries in the papers, he instructs his chau eur to register his death and buy a corpse for burial in lieu of himself. Mikolaj (a man accustomed to unexplained "deaths") completes the arrangements.
We referred earlier to Winnicott's concept of the false self as a structure rst erected in infancy to defend the true self. At that stage in development, the child shapes his or her defenses in response to his or her early environment. However, when the false self dominates the individual's responses, as with Karol in Paris, a sense of unreality and futility results. e false self, however well set up, lacks something-the essential central element, creative originality. In contrast, the true self feels real. Only this self can be creative: Spontaneous gestures and personal ideas always reveal the true self in action (Winnicott 1971, 102, 148;Mitchell 1993, 23).
Karol and Mikolaj had touched their own true aliveness when the former prepared to kill the latter. Now, delivering Karol his new passport, Mikolaj asks (clearly perceiving the thrust of Karol's plot), whether he is sure he wants to follow through with it. e echo of Karol's question to him in extremis seals the deep trust between them. Meanwhile Karol's rebellious decision to stage his own death indicates the revival of his true self. e di erence on this occasion is that the boyish derring-do that characterizes his black-market business deals will not su ce in facing the challenge of remaking his damaged relationship with Dominique. A complete renewal is necessary.
Winnicott indicates that invariable compliance with the pressures exerted by other people is incompatible with the true self. Always associated with living through the false self, compliance (Karol's predominant manner in Paris) is connected with despair rather than hope. Yet it attracts individuals because it brings immediate rewards and is thereby all too easily mistaken by parents or authority gures for growth (Winnicott 1971, 102). Nevertheless, although Karol is now acting in accordance with the demands of his true self, it is equally obvious that the person who functions exclusively in self-centered terms cannot be a member of society. Winnicott concludes that to live healthily the infant must develop the ability to compromise, but he or she must also be able to refuse compromise when the issues being faced become crucial. en the true self should override the compliant self (1971,(149)(150). Trickster energy, we hardly need to note, is invaluable in breaking away from compliance.
Posed in Winnicott's terms, the question that arises at the conclusion of White is whether Karol, having veered away from the false toward the true self, has advanced to the point where he can compromise. As a trickster he has arranged to die in order to be reborn-putting an end to the old Karol. When closing the co n on the corpse that will substitute for him, he slips his lucky coin under the lid, his symbolic farewell to money making and the archaic psychological organization that has hitherto formed him. Indeed, he cannot return to a life focused on international business because he has willed his share of the company to Dominique. In the event, though Mikolaj has set him up with a false identity(!) and a house in Hong Kong, he will even abandon his plan to leave Warsaw and bury himself instead in the family home. He has arranged things so he must be reborn-but will he emerge from his transformation as prince or monster?
Before discovering the new Karol, we need to pay attention to a change in point of view involving Dominique. e shi is striking in that it rst occurs only a er she learns of Karol's "death." At the funeral the viewpoint remains where it always has been, with Karol who, moved by her sorrow, spies on his ex-wife through binoculars from afar. e point of view remains his when she returns to her Warsaw hotel room that night to nd him alive and in her bed. Now she is scared by him (just as he has been of her) and they both know it. But once he has supported her through the shock of a reunion from beyond the grave, his con dent kindness reaches her and they make love successfully with unfettered passion.
A erward she agrees when Karol murmurs that her cries of ecstasy were more intense than with her Parisian lover. So he has not let that humiliation fall from memory and her words now validate their mutually satisfying reunion. Nevertheless, come the morning, he hesitates before leaving. He gazes at her lovingly where she sleeps between sheets of aming orange that (in the color's naked violation of the lm's repressed tonal scale) cry out the shocking impact of their passion. But although he does not go through with his carefully laid plan in its entirety, neither does he give up his revenge. Fondly he smoothes away a curl of hair blown by her breathing 4 and exits the suite just before the police, summoned by Mikolaj, arrive right on cue to spring Karol's trap.
is moment of getting even and moral reversal coincides with the change in point of view. Just as Karol had once been alone, a stranger in Paris, so now Dominique will su er an emotionally similar fate in Warsaw. e switch to her point of view makes her appear all the more vulnerable when she wakes alone and, wrapped only in the orange sheet, answers the suite's doorbell to be faced not by her returning lover but the cops. e police, having received reports that Karol died an unnatural death, have obtained a search warrant. ey seize her passport which, despite her denials, proves to their satisfaction that she came to Warsaw before Karol's death. Unleashing the clipped fury that her ex-husband knows all too well, Dominique begins to rebut the charge. However, when awareness suddenly dawns that Karol has falsi ed her date of arrival to spring a trap, she falls silent, surrendering to his vengeance.
Jung observed that, "One does not become enlightened by imagining gures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. e latter procedure, however, is disagreeable and not popular" (CW 13 ¶335). John Beebe (2007) parses Jung's observation, as meaning that spirit enters the psyche through the shadow-the compensation for su ering that may yet prove as attainable for Dominique and Karol as for the devout contemplative.
eir love can't blossom until they know more about themselves and each other. However painful, their su ering will bring the clari cation needed to secure their love. e introduction of a quasi-religious dimension to our analysis responds to a tactful crescendo of signs that are incipient in the lm from its start. Here, too, a shi in the lm's point of view provides a key. Occasionally during Karol's long exile from Dominique's a ection and in the depths of his loneliness, his point of view has been intensi ed by a montage of the mind-the silhouetted image of her entering a dark room and moving into blackness. At the moment they occur, these inserted fragments read like somber waking reveries underpinning Karol's dark side. However, they anticipate an almost identical repetition of the shot when Dominique returns to her hotel suite a er the funeral, so these eeting moments have to be recognized eventually as synchronicitous. If they comprised an isolated episode, claiming this might be injudicious, but there are several corroborating moments that imply the shared psychological turmoil of the couple.
When Dominique enters the hotel room a er the funeral, the blackness that surrounds her implies the darkness of her own mind, rather than as in his previous visions of this scene, Karol's grieving. But in the next few minutes of screen time, the point of view is further disturbed. When their lovemaking climaxes, the dark room fades to black, and then mixes through to white before reverting to black and a dissolve back into the room. e device is so unusual that it draws attention to itself. It is congruent with the idea that darkness must be rendered conscious before one awakens, an immolation that Dominique (like Karol before her) now begins to undergo.
Next morning, at the moment of her arrest, a pigeon can be heard ying away from her window ledge-the clatter of wings being accompanied by the lonely tune on the clarinet that had previously haunted Karol. At the same time the recollection of their white wedding thrusts into her mind. e scene links her to Karol not only in the past but also in what appears to be the present (actually the future) as he stands in his brother's window abstractedly gazing at the comb that brought him and his wife together in the rst place. While he muses (not for the rst time) on this memory identical to her own, we notice that the implement has become grubby through use. Perfection in the mind juxtaposed against imperfection in life.
At the remembered wedding, a mob of pigeons scattered as the couple were leaving the church to greet their supporters. e symbolism of the birds has obverse facets. Pigeons also rose up noisily when Mikolaj and Karol begin to understand each otherthe latter's rst meaningful contact with anyone since Dominique threw him out. All these occurrences, and another in the warehouse when Karol closes the co n on his substitute corpse, appear to suggest, as Joseph Campbell mentioned, that the ight of birds implies the freeing of the spirit (1988,18). However, we need to observe that, although White does not refuse that connotation, it does not make the association comfortable. ese tough city birds not only shit on people but also survive by scratching through garbage-light and darkness linked again. e shared evocation of the wedding provides a moment of synchronicity more emphatic for the audience than for the characters. e link it forges between the couple masks the chronological elision between Dominique's arrest and Karol in his brother's salon getting ready to visit her in jail-plainly some time later. We perceive that Karol has become snared in his own trap and that his love for Dominique has denied him the escape from Poland he had planned. 5 In White (as opposed to Red where they are plainly marked), synchronistic moments pass eetingly. It is as if they hint at meaning, the deep value of which, while tied to their mutual struggle, Karol and Dominique's psyches are ill prepared to receive. Kieslowski, in allowing us to observe their fates unspool, gives us a slight advantage over his characters; but while these synchronistic moments hint at the spiritual riches that could open for them following integration, their brevity-their almost unremarked nature-perhaps also suggests that although a positive resolution is possible, it nonetheless still remains uncertain.
A refugee at in his home town, Karol skulks along the sidewalks clad once again in drab clothing and keeping away from public transport. Sidling up to the steel portal of a jail, he buys entry with a small bribe of Jurek's freshly made bread and cherry jam. It looks as though among common folk the mores of the old Poland have not expired. We already know that, ampli ed a hundred-thousand fold, greed animates the nouveau riche, so when the expensive lawyer hired by Mikolaj and Jurek says to them that "he sees a little light at the end of the tunnel, " perhaps he means that altogether bigger bribes paid to the right people might free Dominique. e clang of metal doors behind Karol resonates hollowly through the prison's gloomy inner yard. The architecture presents a macrocosm of the emptiness to which want of love has delivered husband and wife. They are now physically so distant from each other (she at her high, barred window, he in the yard below) that to be sure of obtaining a close view of her Karol must once again with unconscious irony use bird-watching binoculars. As the familiar sorrowing music resumes (but transferred to a flute for its more delicate timbre), Dominique mimes their break up, but only in order to negate it. Then, making a circular movement with her hand before dressing her bare finger with an imaginary ring, she proposes that they complete the circle to remarry. 6 Her circular gesture can be read as implying not only the togetherness for which she hopes, but also the circular journey that Karol and she have taken from Poland through France and back to Poland and the sharp reversal of both their fortunes. It corresponds too to the psychological activity that impels change in both of them-namely, the movement to a more differentiated self. Dominique ends by seeking his recognition with a tentative smile, while the melody passes to an oboe (possibly for the hint of confidence that its harder edge communicates).
Winnicott remarks that the change from object-relating to object-use requires the subject to destroy the object in fantasy, yet the object must survive. " is destruction becomes the unconscious backcloth for love of a real object, that is, an object outside the area of the subject's omnipotent control" (Winnicott 1971, 94). is is exactly what Karol has had to live out with Dominique in order to make her something real and separate from him. In this journey, as an imago in Karol's psyche, Dominique has developed her own sense of autonomy in connecting to him more fully. e question that remains is whether Karol has learned how to live with Dominique as woman rather than archetypal imago. White leaves the issue undecided with contrary indications as the contest in his heart pulls him rst one way and then another.
True, he knows now that he loves her dearly. True, he weeps copiously when Dominique makes her appeal. True, too, he smiles back at her, but just before the image fades for the last time, he averts his gaze and resolve braces his lips. Instead of giving in to his desire to free her, he seems likely to balance it against the recognition that to do so would be premature. He seems to know that she must feel the strength of his new sense of self, just as he was injured by hers, if they are to understand themselves and each other more fully. us White ends with hope, but no denouement. at ts not only the state of the couple's relationship but also that of the collective. In resisting any temptation to round o White with a fairytale ending, Kieslowski has kept faith with the then political circumstances of Poland. In the lm Poland remains a nation still in transition from the communism it had abandoned only ve years earlier in favor of a corrupt and corrupting free market-a period when Poles had hopes but not yet the certainty of entering the European Union. A denouement postponed until the conclusion of Red.