Billlie’s Collective Soul

A thorough analysis of the girl group’s psychologically-dense story

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.

Read the rest of this essay on Substack!