Potter's Mirror

On the surface the film is based on the Freudian symbolic structures of the mind and the character that lives in this space  is a representation of the Freudian Watchman -that is- the part of the mind that mediates between the unconscious and conscious, he is in charge of what is allowed pass through the pre-conscious and into our conscious.  It is described by Freud thusly - “We will compare the system of the unconscious to a large entrance hall, in which the psychic impulses rub elbows with one another, as separate beings. There opens out of this entrance hall another, a smaller room, a sort of parlour, which consciousness occupies. But on the threshold between the two rooms there stands a watchman; he passes on the individual psychic impulses, censors them, and will not let them into the parlor if they do not meet with his approval.”  (Freud, S. (1917). “Resistance and Repression,” Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, SE XVI: p. 295) The front of the cabinet is a representation of the curated space of the mind and home. That is, the curation of one’s own history through the objects that we keep, display and tend to as a form of reasserting and rewriting one’s own past, present and one’s own understanding of the self. The back of the cabinet represents the unconscious, the birds in the bell jars that he tends to are memories and eggs in the draws are new thought, ideas, memories that he then nurtures. He’s feeds the chicks, that live in his chair, the pages of the book that represent the Foucauldian institutions of power, i.e. state education, hens the words on the page The Other (known as the big other which is how he terms the idea of us being ‘groomed’ into normative citizens). The adult birds however, that repeat the same actions in the Walter Potter type scenes (loosely representing class through the domestic scenarios and, of course, death and ritual) are no longer nurtured and are fed mechanically and are distanced from him and his nurture. When he is eventually forced to escape through the window due to the deterioration of the mind, represented by the black goo, he enters a space representative of the Lacanian Real, that is, the world outside of perception, on that that cannot be wholly experienced as it sits outside of language. It is this space that he becomes flattened and slips out of the usual experience of times flow whilst what is left behind finally is taken over by the black goo, it finally extinguishing everything within.