Bloody, grisly repetition. Turn, leap, spin, lift, again and again and again. Go to bed, wake up early, go to practice, return home, eat dinner, wash, go back to bed. The daily recurrence of rehearsal until toes are bleeding, until arms shake uncontrollably, until one vomits with fatigue and queasiness. What one will do for art. Constant practice in order to gain perfection. Pushing oneself to the brink of exhaustion with the process. Burn the memory of each movement into one’s body and mind. All for that one performance, one moment when everyone is watching and waiting. The pressure of this moment lives within one’s chest, growing, weighing against the ribs as breath is brought in and pushed out. Will the moment be breakdown or breakthrough?
Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan tells the story of a young prima ballerina’s rise to this moment from an intensely close angle. Nina, played by Natalie Portman, has just been given the role of her life, the Swan Queen, in the New York ballet season opener, Swan Lake. The problem is that the Swan Queen is a dual role—there is the virginal and refined White Swan, for which Nina’s obsessive perfectionism is well suited—then there is the Black Swan, seductive and fevered. The lecherous company manager, played by Vincent Cassel, has doubts that Nina can find the passionate abandonment and dark sexuality required for the part.
There is little uncertainty that Nina is sheltered. Frigid is a word that falls from the mouths of others in the company. She lives with her mother who has put everything into Nina’s ballet career and is always there to fret over any sign of problem with her daughter’s being. So little space exists between them that one can safely assume that Nina has never been out with a boy, let alone had any sexual encounters before now. She watches the newest company member, Lily, as she dances the Black Swan effortlessly. She covets Lily’s easy sexuality and lack of inhibition.
Nina is neurotic with inhibition. She dreams vividly about the production. The intense process of practice and the pressure of the starring role begin to wear on her psyche. There are paranoid and strange visions, heightened experiences, instances of self-afflicted harm that turn out to be suspect, people speaking things that may have never been said. Is Nina hallucinating? This mystery is vital to the story’s unfolding. It goes back to that moment of performance; is it breakdown or breakthrough? There is something beyond perfection in art, where one reaches a place or moment of transcendence—muscle memory, echoes of training, take over and we are lost in what is occurring at our hands and minds. It gives one the power to create something that pulsates within others, leave them breathless for however long. Nina finds this space of transcendence, where she is more than perfect and her performance guides the throbbing of the audience’s collective heart. But is it to the demise of her sanity?
Aronofsky wants to say something profound about the process of art, and he goes about it with a nightmarish and lurid style that is sure to leave the audience disarmed. It is a fascinating film, at times darkly and passionately absurd as well as beautiful and viscerally affecting. But is it wrong that the director does it using such sexist tropes? Black Swan’s story centers on feminine breakdown, but it seems like such a man’s view. This throws off my notion of the film as saying something true. It’s certainly sincere and well done. However, the dated use of the virgin/whore dichotomy is far from groundbreaking. There is also the overbearing and emotionally stifling mother, the lecherous father figure, and the abundance of neuroses overly-attributed to women throughout history.
Perhaps I am simply overanalyzing that which is just supposed to be fiction. I tend to do that a lot. But I do believe it’s important to view pieces of popular entertainment with some degree of healthy scrutiny. Movies are vehicles of our collective culture, and they say something about the way in which our society thinks about certain subjects. Perhaps this is simply and only Aronofsky’s angle on femininity, but, considering he is a much-lauded filmmaker, I find Black Swan curious and engagingly problematic. That is not to say that I don’t admire its audacity.
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