Disclaimer: I have a degree in sociology, not psychology, neuroscience, history, or philosophy! However, I LOVE reading and research, and I did a lot of both to prepare for this essay. If any of my interpretations of these concepts are erroneous, I humbly welcome corrections.
As detailed in past reviews and podcast episodes about Billlie’s musical world-building, their work draws on the views of seminal psychoanalyst Carl Jung. the collective soul and unconscious: chapter two era still does, and its reasons for doing so make the most sense when considering how the material would strike an entirely different tone if it instead more closely followed the ideas of Sigmund Freud. Understanding the contrasts between Jung’s and Freud’s views clarifies why Billlie apply the ideas of the former more than the latter.
To make a long story short, Jung and Freud used to be on good terms and shared some broad views, but their relationship fell apart over time due to increasing interpretation divergences. Freud was deemed much more worth taking seriously and stuck to analysis mode far more than Jung, who found greater value in the realm of the mystic. Jung was more “out there” in his descriptions of the psyche, which is suitable for a musical universe as entertaining and eccentric as Billlie’s!
What was Done Versus What is Destiny
Both Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud agreed on some fundamentals: that the psyche involves interconnected but distinct systems, that the past influences the present and the future, and that the unconscious mind is worthy of immense study. But Freud was much more analytical and focused on the past, whereas Jung put much more stock in all things mystical and abstract. Freud viewed the substance of humans’ dreams as memory repositories and suggested that the way to move past trauma was to extract those contents and scrutinize them, considering the process of doing so to be relatively easy. Jung did not think it was that simple, and he viewed the substance of humans’ dreams as less of a trauma-dump site and more of a clue-laden realm, a place full of allusions and advice pertaining to the future. If one were to ask for advice about how to move on to a brighter and better life, Freud’s recommendation would be to search one’s psyche and see what insights could be gleaned from its memory-derived contents. Jung’s recommendation would not be so backwards-looking; he would advise someone to search the psyche for clues as to what one’s “bigger and brighter future” might entail. To paraphrase, Freud would suggest, “It will be therapeutic to retrieve and analyze the wisdom that past memories have prepared for you,” while Jung would suggest, “It will be therapeutic to spend time unwrapping and wondering about the wisdom that is hidden within those memories’ signs and symbols.”
Because Freud saw the psyche’s contents as more straightforward and prescriptive and Jung saw its contents as more ambiguous and prognostic, psychologists took Freud more seriously. It is harder to defend Jung’s conclusions, because they are less, well, conclusive! They pertain more often to hypotheticals, allow for more opacity and subconscious trickery, and are overall difficult to either concretely prove or disprove. The plots of Billlie’s songs, music videos, and short films have stayed in a compatible realm of mystery, a realm where they cannot just see things and instantly know what they mean. Everything they see and experience requires some kind of unwrapping first, and this process of both abstraction and extraction is precisely the thing for which Jung vouched. For Billlie to trust their own instincts and memories, they have to stay psychologically open to theories and humbling revelations.
In Billlie’s world, narrators change — a sister telling her little brother, parents telling their daughters, the members of Billlie telling one another — and details stay elusive. The plot is in some sense straightforward: Billlie Love has gone missing, and everyone speculates what happened to her and what she was really like. Far more questions than answers abound, so each chapter in the saga circles around new theories more than it finds new puzzle pieces. The short film titled “what is your B? - the collective soul and unconscious: chapter one” offers many examples of recalling a story without being very specific, a story that everyone seems to both know and not know at all:
“The time with her that adults didn’t acknowledge. I had to hide it, so the lies got bigger…”
“I had to hide the time we were together. I had to lie, and no one easily noticed her absence…”
“I know the secret;” “We? What do you mean by that? Who is ‘We’?”
“I cried for an unknown reason.”
“I’ll hide. Because I know everyone’s secret.”
“Did you forget? It’s you who made Billie disappear… The way you look is not everything, the things you know are not everything. The memory we already forgot, the memory we forced ourselves to seal… Do you really forget?”
Billlie’s story remains a mystery with answers that feel like they should be close yet remain out-of-reach. They have to keep turning over clues in their minds, hence the emphasis on the word “hidden”: “Your sign that has been hidden to me… your hint, ” they reference in “a sign - anonymous;” “the eleventh day” recounts how “horrible” is was when someone “hid” and concludes with repeating the line “Hide somewhere;” both speakers and subjects in “what is your B? - the collective soul and unconscious: chapter one” reference hiding; and hide-and-seek is referred to via the name of a short film chapter (“Run & Hide”), a line in that short film’s sequel (“I thought we were playing hide-and-seek”), the name of a book (in “enchanted night ~ white night”), and even the back of a jacket (in the “RING X RING” music video).
The Billlie members question their own recollections and culpability, having previously had relationships with Billlie Love. They are not neutral observers of this mystery, so it is understandable that their conclusions might be disbelieved in contrast to those of people who have never known Billlie Love personally and thus have never formed a personal stake in what happened to her. But what the collective soul and unconscious: chapter two makes clear is that everyone does have a stake in what happened to her. How Billlie Love was treated sends a message about society as a whole, not just about the main characters. This story is not so much about finding out “who did what,” but about recognizing that a collective “we” put the circumstances in motion. Billlie’s story makes a broader argument that what happens is always more than just a reflection on individuals; it is a reflection of a society at large. As Jung would put it, what happens is not just what meets the eye, but what bigger-picture statements become apparent once one looks more thoroughly into a situation. This thorough look involves a trip into the unconscious.
An Overview of The Unconscious
In Carl Jung’s description, the unconscious mind has two layers. The personal unconscious is self-explanatory. The other layer is the collective unconscious, which he described as an infinite sea of shared information passed through generations. Patterns in human instincts, thoughts, and behaviors over time are what he attributed to “imprinted” ideas, ones so strongly solidified in psyches over time that humans are born already knowing them. Humans can connect with and understand each other thanks to this inherent, universal access to the building blocks of meaning-making. This gives new weight to the elusiveness throughout Billlie’s storytelling. The stories within the stories that the characters recall to each other stay straightforward in one sense and not at all in others. The strange mix of knowing something intuitively yet not fully consciously makes certain comments come across as allusions to the personal unconscious, to temporarily-repressed memories. For example, the song “nevertheless” recalls a “secret I think I know, this somewhat unfamiliar feeling” (emphases added). But other songs allude to the collective unconscious, with references to “pressed-down meanings,” “guess[es],” and “unknown sign[s]” that still somehow trigger “deja vu” (“a sign - anonymous”). Furthermore, Billlie reference the shared realm of understanding in “overlap (1/1),” through lyrics about seeing themselves in one another:
“Thin but deep mirage / Billlie, I know you… resembles me the more I look…”
“Two of us have the same sign… We feel the same.”
Despite being a natural part of people, Jung insisted that the collective unconscious could not simply be accessed like anything else. One cannot just pull the contents of the collective unconscious out of a mental filing cabinet like they would a specific memory. Its contents are not cleanly labeled and sorted; they can only be accessed through layers of abstract signposts. In other words, retrieving a personal memory is a much quicker and cleaner task than retrieving components of the collective unconscious, because the latter requires unwrapping layers of symbolism first.
As Billlie take the necessarily lengthy amount of time to travel into and understand the collective unconscious, they see themselves in each other more and more. What is collective about the unconscious becomes more and more apparent, hence all of the references to mirrors:
“Found Billlie, and it seems like it’s me;” “Who’s this Billlie in the mirror?” (“GingaMingaYo (the strange world)”)
“When I open my eyes wide / Everyone is Billlie…” (“RING ma Bell (what a wonderful world)”)
“Now I can see / What I’d been searching for was / Me in the fog / When I become stronger / And meet [me] as my real self.” (“lionheart (the real me)”) (It is worth mentioning a fog reference also appears in “MOON palace”: “Is it a passing coincidence? / This unanswered question… Keep walk[ing] in the fog…”)
Mirrors have a critical presence in Billlie’s videos as well as lyrics and short film quotes. In “Snowy Night,” a member of the group walks over to a mirror upon waking up and sees her reflection still wearing the rabbit ears from her dream (more on this detail later). The mirror that a member touches in “GingaMingaYo (the strange world)” ripples like water after she holds up a fortune-telling card. Cracks repeatedly emerge in a mirror in “what is your B? - the collective soul and unconscious: chapter one.” And in “the end of the world and the awakening,” someone removes a mask while standing in front of a full-length mirror.
Perhaps the most significant of all the allusions to seeing oneself in others, though, is in the short film called “Bi11lie chapter one | the Billage of perception : chapter one.” A member reads the name outside of Billlie Love’s abandoned house, and when she reads what it says out loud, “Love?,” the subtitle says “Me?” instead.
One of the collective soul and unconscious: chapter two era’s videos, “cartography of the unconscious ‘$ECRET no more,’” is worth watching with this in mind. Here is part of a screen filled with text in that video:
“At the deepest point, there was a mask. The shape of anxiety made visible. She had spent years walking around it, finding elaborate routes that led anywhere but there. It had become a kind of architecture in itself, this avoidance… She had always assumed that if she ever found the courage to look directly at it, she would find another mask beneath… An infinite regression of concealment, each layer purchased at the cost of something she could not name. But when the last layer finally gave way, what stood on the other side was not another mask. It was Billlie Love… The one she had sought in dreams and in symbols and in the narrow spaces between one memory and another. She had imagined her somewhere distant, somewhere requiring an extraordinary effort of will to reach… There was only the self she had been circling all along…”
An excerpt from later in that same video:
“The deeper you go inward, the wider the world you see. Not narrowing. Opening. Past the edge of consciousness, through the confrontation with fear, to the moment the last mask breaks. Only then does the world reveal itself as it truly is. And at the end of that map, there is only one coordinate. Myself.”
This exchange between a brother and sister (in “Bi11ie chapter two - the Billage of perception : chapter one”) who are talking about Billlie Love’s disappearance bears greater significance with the above quotes in mind. The young boy insists, “There’s no attic in this house!” His sister responds:
“Are you kidding me?! Making something that doesn’t exist exist?! We call it ‘desperate.’ Are you desperate now? Then close your eyes, wake up your senses, and open your mind. Can you see it?”
Answers have been there all along for those who venture to look for them while shedding pretenses. The world is ready to “reveal itself as it truly is” to those who recognize the metaphorical mirrors all around them.
Looking for the world’s truths is time- and labor-intensive, and it requires patience and stamina to continuously unpack the layers in which each truth comes wrapped. This remains the case even as Billlie give the “cartography of the unconscious ‘$ECRET no more’” statement that feels like their “A-ha!” moment. That video is a mix of animated scenes with key color choices, surreal twists, and go-to symbols. They do not simply see themselves in Billlie after venturing to look; they see themselves in Billlie after venturing and analyzing, and after doing both extensively. That drawn-out nature of internal searching is represented in the video called “RAW PROJECTION TO UNIFIED CORE.” The camera pans from left to right panorama-style, as one member walks briskly towards where the others appear in white dresses. She stops once she gets to an open doorway, bringing to mind a mirror because of the similarly-dressed members on the other side of it. The movement only stops once she sees herself in others, and even then, as the empty door frame indicates, the journey’s end is neither fully coherent nor concrete.
Moving things in and out of the collective unconscious is ongoing.
Limitations on Meaning-Making
Even if and when one does visit the collective unconscious, one cannot manipulate its contents. It is like the hair or eye color that one is born with (to avoid getting sidetracked, the concept of gene-editing will be pushed aside for now!); it is just the way it is. Destiny is out of one’s hands, which explains why Billlie lack control of their own literal story when trying to write it in “GingaMingaYo (the strange world);” pressing the “?” key suddenly turns their typewriter into a one-eyed rabbit (more about this rabbit later)! A lack of control over outcomes is also subtly mentioned in these lines from “the end of the world and the awakening” :
“My B-side, revealed while trying to erase…”
“Today, after eleven summers since I erased the memory of her, from the farthest corner of my memory, the world called us… Declaration of the end of the world that Billlie is buried in, and howling of the halted memory returned.”
Some other examples of Billlie mentioning symbols that are not of their own making: singing about feeling as if they are acting under a “spell” (in “everybody’s got a $ECRET”); walking, walking, and walking some more yet ending with the question “Where am I?” (in “$UN palace (Stroop effect)”); and the ultimate message in “FILM 3 : $ECRET no more”:
“At the deepest point of the map, there are no more symbols. Only the face you have been avoiding, which turns out to be your own.”
It is worth remembering Billlie’s recurring use of dollar signs in short film and song titles, an example of an “imprinted” understanding of something: currency. This example of a component of the collective unconscious taking on a tangible, universally understood format — money — is also shown via coins and a coin-operated machine in several videos (not to mention that they have a song called “flipp!ng a coin”). Below are many more examples of the masks that the collective unconscious’s contents wear so as to be perceptible in the physical world, and so as to be digestible for those who fear more direct internal confrontations with what emotions have been driving them.
Stories Within Stories
While a motif is a recurring symbol or theme in both literature and psychology, the latter subject focuses more on the “theme” aspect, on the ways they serve as templates. Motifs are forms without contexts; they are the mental outlines that can be used to brainstorm processes for how to make sense of contents within the human mind. Basically, symbols allow the contents of the abstract world to make disguised appearances in the physical world and therefore become accessible to humans.
Since the unconscious’s contents require a mediator between the abstract and physical worlds, and since that mediator is either a dream or a story, it makes sense that Billlie frequently sing about and show their music video characters both literally dreaming and literally telling stories. The presence of books is symbolic in short films like “the collective soul and unconscious: chapter one,” when a book is put inside of a prized-possession box (that also appears in the “RING X RING” music video) alongside rabbit-themed fortune-telling cards; “the end of the world and the awakening,” in which a member is seen reading a Roald Dahl book (presumably Matilda — more on this later); and “RAW PROJECTION TO UNIFIED CORE,” which features rows of opened books. Furthermore, books with titles like Hide and Seek and Enchanted Night appear in song visualizers and official music videos alike. (A whole separate essay could be written about themes shared by Billlie’s story and Enchanted Night by Steven Millhauser, but the biggest one to note is that both stories involve extensive symbolism and discarded, forgotten objects.)
Above all others in terms of significance, though, is the reference to reading that is made casually in the short film “Bi11ie chapter two - the Billage of perception : chapter one.” Sisters are either pretending to be or really are none the wiser regarding Billlie Love’s whereabouts that their parents are discussing at the dinner table. They silently listen as their mom recalls:
“Billlie waited for her friends to come home, but no one came — No reading at the table, darling, please…”
Another narrator of this meta-story later says:
“They all became liars. To Billlie… and to the world. Pitiful.”
And:
“Spending each day in sadness, despair, and self-criticism. They are waiting for Billlie.”
“They” are the members of Billlie who are hoping Billlie Love just magically reappears and allows them to pick up their relationships where they left off. The reason they seek this miracle is the same reason they habitually escape into books, and why they seem to be hiding something from their parents: shame. Whether they are ashamed of how they treated Billlie Love, ashamed of themselves, of the mind that those two possibilities are closely linked, or something else entirely is beside the point; shame stops them from fully diving into the collective unconscious. They are afraid of what they will find. In the words of Carl Jung:
“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely.”
It is an interesting redirect for Billlie to not treat books as a conduit to the unconscious so much as a distance-maker, keeping them removed from fully looking fear and shame in the face. Books are a shield for them, and as they unpack the symbols their collective unconscious entails, they witness more and more examples of things that can sometimes be shields but at other times can be final curtains, the last layers before a final reveal. In other words, what they use to conceal they can also use as an impermanent veil.
Then again, some books do give Billlie a sense of knowing themselves more deeply. The most symbolic citation: Matilda by Roald Dahl. They have a song called “B’rave - a song for Matilda,” and the novel also comes to mind in many indirect ways throughout Billlie’s universe. Matilda’s central premise comes down to the credibility of young people. Until the young genius protagonist finds an outlet for her intellect and emotions, her energy bursts out of her in the form of telekinetic powers. It makes her recollections sound surreal and impossible to believe, much like the recollections of her peers who are mistreated by the evil headmistress. The headmistress’s unspoken goal is to dole out such extreme punishments (for example, shoving students into a nail-filled closet, and spinning a girl around in circles by holding her by her hair) that when the students go home and tell their parents what happened, their parents don’t believe them. The children’s perceived lack of credibility relative to the grown-ups parallels the perceived lack of credibility of Carl Jung when considered in the same conversations as the much less “far-fetched”-thinking Sigmund Freud. It makes sense for Billlie to see themselves in Matilda the character and Matilda the book, as young people who think that if they struggle to know who they are and why they are like that, how can anyone else claim to know for sure?! Real or fictional, everyone seeks recognition of their innate potential and authentic selves. Everyone wants to be believed.
Billlie’s Motifs
Besides literal books, there are five core motifs shaping Billlie’s conceptualization of reality: color choices, animals, physical images, the woods, and miscellaneous non-human characters.
The color purple tends to represent things from their past, from the days prior to Billlie Love’s absence. Their memories when she was still in their lives involve purple rain (mentioned in “the eleventh day” and several short films), “a purple message” (in “Bi11ie chapter one - the Billage of perception”), a purple guitar pick that says “Bravery” on it (in “RING ma Bell (what a wonderful world)”), a teddy bear (in “what is your B? - the collective soul and unconscious: chapter one”), a butterfly sticker (in “EUNOIA”), and tissue paper meant to look like it is bouquet wrapping (“the end of the world and the awakening” — which also mentions a “violet past” that is “[b]uried [so] deep [that] no one can look.” The bouquet also brings to mind the purple flowers in “RING ma Bell (what a wonderful world)”).
The color blue tends to be associated with signs of the present or future, representing possibilities: blue rhinestones spelling out Billlie’s name (in “RING X RING”), a way of keeping her presence with them going forward; lyrics about blue days (in “flipp!ng a coin” and “enchanted night ~ white night”); a blue colored pencil (in “what is your B? - the collective soul and unconscious: chapter one”), which brings to mind the many references to “drawing the future” that Billlie make in their songs (addressed more later); blue bedsheets under which a member is pulled into an alternative world (in “GingaMingaYo (the strange world)”); and a present-day balloon (in “the end of the world and the awakening”), as opposed to the red balloons in a flashback (in the same short film).
The prominence of the color red in the collective soul and unconscious: chapter two visuals is notable, as well as the return to the color purple, via stormy skies in “ZAP.” A red substance that could be interpreted as either paint or blood splatters on the members both in “ZAP” and “RAW PROJECTION TO UNIFIED CORE.” The former features red clouds, red lighting, and red sand, while the latter has a red wall. (Although an individual stands before a blue wall later on, key group scenes are in front of the red wall.)
The times blue and purple come together are also notable, and the most recent example comes from the eye shadow of the main character in “cartography of the unconscious ‘$ECRET no more.’” The main character has one blue and one purple eye, matching the multicolored eyes of the cat mask under which Billlie Love used to hide.
Billlie Love’s cat mask is just one example of the animal motifs in Billlie’s story. There are also owls, which play a prominent role in “EUNOIA,” appear as part of various videos’ logos, and appear in the latest era in several videos (“cartography of the unconscious ‘WORK,’” “RAW PROJECTION TO UNIFIED CORE,” and “ZAP”). Insects are another recurring presence, from the purple butterfly sticker on a digital camera in “EUNOIA,” to the butterfly tattoo in “Bi11ie chapter two - the Billage of perception : chapter one,” to the butterfly net Billlie Love carries in a “RING ma Bell (what a wonderful world)” post-credits scene. Most recently, in a bit of chronological confusion, “cartography of the unconscious ‘WORK’” features a black-and-white image of a grasshopper.
Then there is the one-eyed rabbit! He plays a mascot role similar to the owl’s and appears in different forms, from fortune-telling card IP (in “EUNOIA”), to a stuffed animal (given to a sleeping girl in a short film flashback), to a full-fledged character (in “GingaMingaYo (the strange world)”)! In “Snowy Night,” when a member sees in the mirror she is still wearing the rabbit ears from her dream, it brings home the fact that the rabbit motif is a connector between a world with a physical presence and the one in imaginations.
A bridge between memories and dreams and the physical, visible world is also represented through physical images. There are framed photos in the “extra-ordinary” visual, the “GingaMingaYo (the strange world)” music video, and the “RAW PROJECTION TO UNIFIED CORE” concept video. (Note that the framed photo in “RAW PROJECTION TO UNIFIED CORE” appears on a wall in a scene where two members stand and stare in different directions; they are not yet on the same page.) There is a digital camera in “EUNOIA,” playing cards in “what is your B? - the collective soul and unconscious: chapter one” and “GingaMingaYo (the strange world),” and Polaroids in “GingaMingaYo (the strange world)” and “the end of the world and the awakening.” These lines from that short film now seem like foreshadowing:
“Origination of shadow. The world is destroyed, and my mature self is born. An old vow is reborn as a new oath. You can wait right there [picks up a group photo on the ground]. I will go rescue you.”
Also in that short film, Billlie Love connects past and present when throwing Polaroids in the air in a flashback, which then scatter on the present-day ground, on a day with purple skies.
One more key image is the Joker playing card, which is compared to a shadowy existence in the song “Mcguffins - who’s the Joker?” A Joker card is a sort of shape-shifter in games, matching the trickiness of nailing down what is in people’s “shadows” and holding it up to the light.
The motif of the woods offers further source material for Billlie to mine. They reference exploring a “dense emotional forest” in “my B = the Birth of emotion” and a “far-away, veiled woods” in “enchanted night ~ white night.” That forest is externalized in “Snowy Night” (with chapter titles including “Meet the Forest” and “A Discovery and Awakening”), “GingaMingaYo (the strange world),” and countless other videos. After all, Billlie Love’s empty house sits in the woods, making it an accidental historic sight that compels Billlie and other characters alike to visit it.
Lastly, one of Billlie’s go-to motifs remains miscellaneous non-human characters! A red-eyed character with a baseball for a head stars in “GingaMingaYo (the strange world),” and an abominable snowman is a main character in “Snowy Night”! The snowman’s role as a literary device explains the mention in “cartography of the unconscious ‘TBD’”:
“The theme park where Billlie stands is a world of her own making. An accumulation of her consciousness… For a long time, I perceived the SNOWY man’s act of hurling her into the roller coaster as an external shock. But it was not. It was something long-accumulated inside Billlie that finally forced its way out.”
Billlie engage with all of the above signs and symbols as a means to the end goal of engaging with the abstract world, which holds the secrets as to both what happened to Billlie Love and the stuff of which Billlie’s reality really consists.
Complexes and Archetypes
Jung viewed the personal unconscious as including temporarily repressed memories that might eventually expose themselves via the conduit of complexes: an inferiority complex, a warrior complex, a victim complex, and so on. While parts of the personal unconscious become interpretable via complexes, parts of the collective unconscious do so via archetypes, which can be story characters (like “the mother”) or patterns (like “rebirth”).
There are many archetypes, but there are just three worth understanding in Billlie’s story. One is the self, considered the midpoint between one’s unconscious and conscious sides. Another is the persona, the “mask” one shows to the world. The parts people play in public — the appearances they keep up and norms they uphold — form their personas. Lastly, there is the shadow, which includes everything that the persona omits. What resides within one’s shadow is everything one keeps private, so while shadows often have a negative connotation, they can actually represent the good and the bad. This is alluded to throughout their songs:
“Flip-flop… Blowing hot and cold… You’re blue, I’m purple / We become one eunoia;” “lighting up the darkness…” (“EUNOIA”)
“Even though there’s something / Wriggling inside me / I hold it in like a grown-up…;” “Curiosity is getting bigger… It’s confusing.” (“GingaMingaYo (the strange world)”)
Light, shadows, and their interactions are mentioned countless times in Billlie’s work, with references including the following:
“The noise of four footsteps / Clearly exist[s]… As close as a shadow… Connected rings overlap us…” (“overlap (1/1)”)
“I can’t find her anymore. The child hiding in the shadow of the room…” (“what is your B? - the collective soul and unconscious: chapter one”)
“Where Billlie arrives is an inverted realm of darkness. An unmapped territory… where light and shadow exchange their places and nothing retains the form it held before. The boundary where consciousness ends and the unconscious begins… At first it bears every resemblance to a fight. But the realisation settles in. There was never anyone else to fight against. It was all me.” (“cartography of the unconscious ‘WORK’”)
A significant word choice in that third statement is “fight.” “The Fighter” is an archetype that Billlie deploy throughout the collective soul and unconscious: chapter two era. One can interpret them as having used the archetype before, with lyrics that presume there was a bloody conflict in “RING X RING” (“[I]s it blood?;” “Is she dead?”), but it is explicit and more widespread now. The members physically fight one another in “RAW PROJECTION TO UNIFIED CORE,” and there are fight scenes in “ZAP” and “cartography of the unconscious ‘WORK.’” “RAW PROJECTION TO UNIFIED CORE” has the most significant one-on-one brawl. It ends in a burst of light that shows two flame-lined figures becoming one, before splitting back in two. The “Fighter” persona is the vehicle through which Billlie are able to access a piece of the intangible world: the concept of victory. Here is an extension of the above statement:
“There was never anyone else to fight against. It was all me. And when that truth finally reaches you, the battle is at last complete.”
The more one takes out of the persona and pushes into the shadow, the closer to bursting that shadow is. Some shadows, therefore, end up overpowering people to the point that they manipulate their behaviors, as if that person is taken over by a possessive force — like the “enchanted” spells referenced throughout Billlie’s story. To prevent a shadow from being so all-consuming, balancing it out with lightness is in order, hence not only Billlie’s frequent references to light and shadow interplay, but the interactions between colors and creatures. Their persistent openness to exploring a wide variety of identity facets and forms of those facets is a definitive element of Billlie’s story and emulates the core of Jung’s worldview.
The “Objective Psyche”
Carl Jung actually eventually took a liking to the term “objective psyche” over “collective unconscious.” He wanted to ascribe the collective unconscious with a stronger sense of authority, because he saw it as more revealing than other parts of the self. He considered the unconscious to be the guide of the conscious, akin to a mentor/mentee relationship that warrants calling the “mentor” more objective than the “mentee.” The fullest, most objective way possible to view something is through a collective experience. Ironically, that means that the most accurate big-picture takeaway of “what really happened” comes from a stew of speculators’ takes — the stuff of the song “the rumor”: “Did you know her?” “Who didn’t?;” “Maybe she ran away;” “That’s her…” That is just one of many songs in which Billlie attribute the highest degree of influence to the unconscious, the collective understanding of how something may or may not have happened.
The text on the screen during “RAW PROJECTION TO UNIFIED CORE” underscores the truth that getting at the core of something requires transcending an analysis of what one can plainly see:
“This is not a metaphor. It is physical. It is immediate. It is everything, all at once… Only after passing through everything does a single, unified self finally come whole.”
That “not a metaphor” remark reveals where Billlie’s worldview strays from Carl Jung’s. Once one gets to the core essence of the collective unconscious, Jung speculated that one still had to stay a bit removed from its contents, simply observing its uncontrollable material. Billlie seem to be positing that the collective unconscious can be manipulated, perhaps even as much as any memory in the personal unconscious can be. Billlie stop enacting Jung’s views and start putting their own spin on them when they take authority over the unconscious, inverting its contents into their own plaything. After all, they constantly reference drawing, rather than simply discovering, their own destiny:
“Draw you and I together…” (“B@ck 2 where we Belong”)
“... the new universe / Are we picturing it? / Draw it with my fingers…” (“enchanted night ~ white night”)
“I’m being drawn… You colored my five senses.” (“EUNOIA”)
“We’ll draw the day we’ve looked forward to… I drew vague thoughts / In the picture that will be finish[ed] eventually.” (“believe”)
“The picture we’ll draw together / I trust you…” (“various and precious (moment of inertia)”)
Plus, there is literal drawing in short films like “Bi11lie chapter two | the Billage of perception : chapter one.”
This quote attributed to Carl Jung appears at the beginning of “GingaMingaYo (the strange world)”
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
That is what Billlie’s musical universe has been and always will be about: the grueling, relentless, revelatory, world-changing process of making the unconscious conscious.
What is Found in the Collective Unconscious
The “cartography of the unconscious” short films are about what Billlie see at the deepest point within their shadows: themselves, the most frightening and emotionally heavy thing one will ever confront. The key line:
“We did not lose Billlie Love. We simply became too afraid to recognize her.”
It bears repeating Carl Jung’s words: “The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely.”
While seeing and accepting oneself completely is never an over-and-done mission, if there is any point when one can call Billlie’s journey complete, it is here. This is not because they have ventured as far and wide as their minds will allow for, but because they have ventured as deeply inwards as possible. They have found what the collective unconscious is made of by unraveling the answers that were always all around them; they had just been distanced from their innermost selves via the walls made of shame, fear, and insecurities.
Conclusion
Many artists tell a story about learning who “the real me” is, but Billlie’s stands out in part due to them learning who that is and how that is a mirror to how others interpret the “real me” phrase. By coming into their own, they emulate others more, a powerful paradox worthy of reflection. Getting to know themselves inherently causes them to wear the shoes of fellow humans. This is a process that strips away pretenses and facades. This inverts expectations; rather than represent “stripping away” those things with unstained surfaces and bright imagery, Billlie see the truth come into the brightest light by actively making surfaces dirtier and darker. As put in “RAW PROJECTION TO UNIFIED CORE”:
“White was never meant to mean purity. It was just a blank page… But for a long time, they tried to keep it clean. They did not want to be stained. So they hid things. They covered things. They looked away. That was where it all began to crack… They push[ed] and pull[ed] and [sank] into the mud together… completion does not come clean. It comes through the staining… Only after passing through everything does a single, unified self finally come whole.”
While Billlie’s music and videos still dress up psychological and philosophical components in some warmth and whimsy, the collective soul and unconscious: chapter two marks a significant shift. Their story’s core values are now more front-facing, with the academic concepts they used to leave breadcrumbs about in their material now being an overt storytelling centerpiece, and with their typical light and fizzy fun now sharing more space with a grittier, grayer aesthetic. Their new look and approach are simultaneously proof of personal growth and of professional and narrative maturity. This is still the same Billlie, telling the same fictional story about the mysterious “Billlie Love” and her famous disappearance — and in fact, this might be more Billlie than ever! Their story is expounded upon not outwards and therefore further away from its roots, but inwards and therefore closer to its core essence.
It is bearing more fruit than ever to follow Billlie’s journey, as they use motifs, complexes, archetypes, and the related psychoanalytical framework that sometimes skews fantastical to explore the rich treasure trove that is the human mind.
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