A friend of mine who didn’t care for “Black Swan,” Darren Aronofsky’s masterful new ickfest, complained that the movie is “all on one level.” This is true, but it’s quite a level. Like Aronofsky’s last movie, “The Wrestler,” “Black Swan” is a tragedy about a performer maniacally obsessed with her craft. Both films construct their dramatic worlds around the work of lead actors—Mickey Rourke in “Wrestler,” Natalie Portman in “Black Swan”—who are so committed that their devotion scares you a little. The films are distorting mirrors of each other, with Rourke as a hulking rage-filled beast, scarred by a lifetime of hard living, and Portman as a painfully delicate, stick-thin thing, warped by being sheltered too long. “The Wrestler” is shockingly dignified for a movie about professional wrestling, while “Black Swan,” a movie about the high art of ballet, is emphatically trash, a grab-bag of tropes from horror movies and pop psychology. “The Wrestler” is suspenseful because we’re not sure what will happen; “Black Swan” is suspenseful because we know exactly what will happen. Rourke’s wrestler wages a long, rough struggle toward his destination, full of messy but meaningful choices and relationships; Portman’s ballerina, by contrast, makes a graceful swan-dive straight into hell. Unlike “Black Swan,” “The Wrestler” is complex and plausible. We want Rourke to accept the redemption he is offered, and when he rejects it, we mourn because we don’t get what we want. Yet “Black Swan” is unique, and uniquely intense, because it gives us exactly what we want and horrifies us in that way.
It’d be hard to argue that “Black Swan” is not a powerful movie, one that succeeds in getting under your skin. Aronofsky fixates on the uncomfortable self-intimacy of the dancer—the sensitivity to blemishes of skin, to body weight, to the shape and flow of limbs, to the need for control over the minutiae of flesh. The script, by Mark Heyman, Andres Heinz, and John McLaughlin, gets a lot out of creepy body image motifs, and the film’s sound design attunes us to tiny noises like the soft crack of flexed bone or tense hidden breaths. Portman’s performance, too, is astonishingly small and intimate, perfectly reflecting and feeding Aronofsky’s grippingly hyper-sensitive style. Every time she cries, her face clenches inward; when she is faced with horror, she stares, her eyes wet but painfully still. This is why the film’s overripe Freudian symbols—fragmenting mirrors, doppelgangers, exaggerated manifestations of predatory sexuality and sexual repression—are viscerally effective nonetheless. Both Aronofsky and Portman are willing to probe and expose all the way; thus the heavy-handed symbols and themes, ones that could easily seem artificial, are defined in relation to feelings that are insistently, uncomfortably real.
For that very reason, it is quite possible to argue that “Black Swan” is a scummy movie, morally speaking. One person I know accused it of “equating female sexuality with self-destruction,” and that’s accurate if you take the images raw; Nina, our ballerina protagonist, does descend into madness via sexual fear, and many moments in the film link masturbation, lesbian sex, and sexual jealousy with horror. On the other hand, someone could easily object to the movie on the opposite grounds that it demonizes sexual repression; Nina’s journey into a narcissistic underworld (including her tortured search for sexual fulfillment) is portrayed as more or less a result of her seclusion from the big, dark, scary world of sex, drugs, and men by her uptight mother (Barbara Hershey). I don’t take issue with the movie from either of these angles, exactly—I think the movie’s depiction of sex as scary and dangerous is basically a show of proper reverence for that towering part of human experience, and I think its depiction of the mother’s well-meaning but suffocating moralism is admirably sympathetic even as it condemns. But, I squirmed a bit at the way the intimacy of Aronofsky’s camera borders on fetishism and visual invasion.
Nonetheless, the movie is far from thoughtless in its decision to be icky. On one side, it presents Thomas (Vincent Cassel), the dark and suave director of the ballet company who, it’s implied, screws as many of his female dancers as he can. He is the kind of artist who places art high above morality; he’s always telling Nina to “let go” and to stop being a “coward.” On the other side, we have Nina’s mother, who coos about her “sweet little girl” and worries (correctly) about Thomas taking advantage of Nina. These two characters are the “monsters” of the film, but they are, of course, opposite monsters, and we’re always aware that their monstrosity is filtered through Nina’s fears and desires. Beth (Winona Ryder), a faded and bitter ballet star, once exalted and exploited by Thomas just like Nina, is an object of pity who also, occasionally, becomes a monster, and perhaps the scariest one of all because she is most like Nina (only older). Although Nina often expresses sadness and sympathy for poor, washed-up Beth, she shows a deep and cruel indifference when faced with Beth in person, especially in a scene where Thomas callously takes Nina to his apartment for drinks while Beth seethes in a corner. Thomas and Nina’s mother are scary because they threaten to thwart Nina’s desires; Beth is scary because she reveals where they lead.
Nina, of course, is also a monster, though an impregnably innocent and vulnerable one, one who can kill and remain frighteningly spotless. In fact, the only character who is not a monster here, oddly enough, is Lily (Mila Kunis), the “bad girl,” the character who most obviously represents the “evil forces” that ultimately overwhelm Nina. As Nina prepares to play both the white swan and the black swan in “Swan Lake,” Thomas urges her to imitate Lily, who is effortlessly, naturally naughty and sexy and sly—yet, ironically, she’s also the film’s nicest character by far, one who, unlike Thomas and Nina’s mother, tries to be gentle and caring toward Nina. Lily, for all her transgression, shows herself—even in Nina’s distorting and jealous view, which sometimes makes Lily a temptress or vixen—to be harmless. I’m not sure whether this makes her the hero or the villain of the movie. Lily has some claim to rationality, unlike the rest of the movie’s population—but also unlike the movie itself, which is in such fervent mourning for ethereal things like beauty and innocence. Because Lily is sane, she can’t understand Nina’s obsession, her passion and fears; but the movie can, and that’s its great strength.
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