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kitchen_kinkI finally saw Black Swan the other night, and I really liked it, as I figured I would. For me, though, this was not the kind of movie that carries me away, the way The King's Speech did, for example, or True Grit. I didn't fall in love with it the way I do with some movies; I wouldn't say I loved this movie. But what I did love was the way it made me think afterward, and I've been thinking about it since.
One of the cleverer things that this movie does is to make the story mirror the story of the ballet Swan Lake, in which its protagonist is slated to dance the lead role. (The verb "mirror" is very apt here; Aronovsky fills the screen with mirrors over and over again, both literally and figuratively. Lily is a dark mirror of Nina; Nina's mother draws and paints countless mirrors of her daughter; Nina spends nearly half the movie staring into mirrors at all of her imperfections, real and imagined; and the climactic scene involves a broken mirror and its rather obvious literal result - the destruction of the self.) The director even makes the parallels explicit in the closing credits, where Nina is also called The White Swan and Lily the Black Swan, and other characters fill other roles from the ballet. On its surface, then, the film is simply a psychological thriller about the way the ballet business drives young beauty into a quest for perfection that sometimes veers into madness and death - the same way the White Swan is driven to her own death when her quest for love fails to free her from the prison of her body.
The thing that struck me so profoundly, though, was the larger tragedy at play here: this movie struck me not just as an indictment of the body fascism and backbiting competition with which the world of ballet is often accused of being infected. Rather, it looks probingly at the terribly few choices young women are given when they are growing up about how they will express their budding sexuality.
In the pressure cooker of the ballet company in the film, any young woman is already starting at a disadvantage: the need to be rail-thin, pale-skinned, tireless, technically perfect yet lyrically passionate, and of course, beautiful, are all expectations for anyone who wants to get beyond the corps and into featured roles. But this film looks at another dilemma that is present in young women's lives well beyond the confines of ballet, in the forms of the White and Black Swans.
These archetypes are simply another case of the virgin/whore dichotomy rearing its ugly head, of course, and in the tale Tchiakovsky's ballet is based on, the parallels are obvious. But again, Aronovsky takes it a step beyond the simple interpretation. Containing this story within such a brilliantly woven, tautly plotted melodrama becomes a paradoxically perfect device for examining themes that resonate loudly in the real world.
In the ballet, the drama plays out simply: the White Swan's evil, seductive sister - the Black Swan - seduces the prince who was meant to fall in love with the White Swan. The White Swan, betrayed and abandoned but still pure, kills herself.
In playing the ballet, the story gets a bit more complicated: the White and Black Swans are played by the same dancer. The dancer must be incredibly talented to get this right: the pathos, purity, fearfulness and delicacy of the White Swan, and in the same performance, the ferocity, sexuality, seductiveness and cruelty of the Black Swan.
In the film, Natalie Portman's character Nina (almost certainly a nod to a certain Zarechnaya, another performer driven mad) is torn apart by her search for the Black Swan: the part of her that is sexual, primal, fierce and free. The trap that is laid for her is the same sinister one that awaits so many teenage girls: she will have to decide whether she is a Prude, or whether she is a Slut. Lily, her rival, has clearly chosen the second option, and seems to revel in it. In a scene where the balance of reality and imagination is uncertain, Lily tries to help Nina loosen up - or perhaps, if we believe Nina's paranoia, to trip her up and make her unavailable for the following day's premiere performance. But as Nina's sexuality bubbles to the surface and becomes more available to her, it seems to simply speed the destruction she was already slowly suffering. In Nina's world, tightly controlled by her mother, kept infantile and disciplined, the consequences of sexuality seem dark and dire. Lily, while she seems free, is playing the Slut role with as much guile and calculation as anyone trying to game the system in a competitive world; she also may never again have the innocence necessary to play the White Swan - in a way, she is a prisoner, too. Nina, though, unsuited to the Slut role, can find no way to give her sexuality healthy expression. Her choices are stay locked down and never succeed fully in her art, or break loose so violently that she goes into a free fall.
By the end, it takes her believing she has killed her rival with her bare hands to find the fire she needs to dance the Black Swan. But it is actually part of herself that she has destroyed - because in this world, as in the real world, she can find no way for the White and the Black to coexist in one body. As soon as the character embraces her sexuality, she kills herself - the prim, repressed perfectionist smothered by a crazy mother and a thousand stuffed animals. When that girl dies, all of her dies: the sacrifice she makes in the name of perfection.
The supreme irony, of course, is that she thinks she has killed the Black Swan - Lilly - when in fact she has killed the White Swan - herself. In killing one, both must die. And in this message is where the film seems the most obscurely pointed: what might this girl have become, had she allowed the Black Swan to blossom, and kept the qualities of the White, too? If both must die if one dies, then doesn't that imply that they could, in fact, coexist in a world better than the one that Nina - and that most girls - must live in?
One of the cleverer things that this movie does is to make the story mirror the story of the ballet Swan Lake, in which its protagonist is slated to dance the lead role. (The verb "mirror" is very apt here; Aronovsky fills the screen with mirrors over and over again, both literally and figuratively. Lily is a dark mirror of Nina; Nina's mother draws and paints countless mirrors of her daughter; Nina spends nearly half the movie staring into mirrors at all of her imperfections, real and imagined; and the climactic scene involves a broken mirror and its rather obvious literal result - the destruction of the self.) The director even makes the parallels explicit in the closing credits, where Nina is also called The White Swan and Lily the Black Swan, and other characters fill other roles from the ballet. On its surface, then, the film is simply a psychological thriller about the way the ballet business drives young beauty into a quest for perfection that sometimes veers into madness and death - the same way the White Swan is driven to her own death when her quest for love fails to free her from the prison of her body.
The thing that struck me so profoundly, though, was the larger tragedy at play here: this movie struck me not just as an indictment of the body fascism and backbiting competition with which the world of ballet is often accused of being infected. Rather, it looks probingly at the terribly few choices young women are given when they are growing up about how they will express their budding sexuality.
In the pressure cooker of the ballet company in the film, any young woman is already starting at a disadvantage: the need to be rail-thin, pale-skinned, tireless, technically perfect yet lyrically passionate, and of course, beautiful, are all expectations for anyone who wants to get beyond the corps and into featured roles. But this film looks at another dilemma that is present in young women's lives well beyond the confines of ballet, in the forms of the White and Black Swans.
These archetypes are simply another case of the virgin/whore dichotomy rearing its ugly head, of course, and in the tale Tchiakovsky's ballet is based on, the parallels are obvious. But again, Aronovsky takes it a step beyond the simple interpretation. Containing this story within such a brilliantly woven, tautly plotted melodrama becomes a paradoxically perfect device for examining themes that resonate loudly in the real world.
In the ballet, the drama plays out simply: the White Swan's evil, seductive sister - the Black Swan - seduces the prince who was meant to fall in love with the White Swan. The White Swan, betrayed and abandoned but still pure, kills herself.
In playing the ballet, the story gets a bit more complicated: the White and Black Swans are played by the same dancer. The dancer must be incredibly talented to get this right: the pathos, purity, fearfulness and delicacy of the White Swan, and in the same performance, the ferocity, sexuality, seductiveness and cruelty of the Black Swan.
In the film, Natalie Portman's character Nina (almost certainly a nod to a certain Zarechnaya, another performer driven mad) is torn apart by her search for the Black Swan: the part of her that is sexual, primal, fierce and free. The trap that is laid for her is the same sinister one that awaits so many teenage girls: she will have to decide whether she is a Prude, or whether she is a Slut. Lily, her rival, has clearly chosen the second option, and seems to revel in it. In a scene where the balance of reality and imagination is uncertain, Lily tries to help Nina loosen up - or perhaps, if we believe Nina's paranoia, to trip her up and make her unavailable for the following day's premiere performance. But as Nina's sexuality bubbles to the surface and becomes more available to her, it seems to simply speed the destruction she was already slowly suffering. In Nina's world, tightly controlled by her mother, kept infantile and disciplined, the consequences of sexuality seem dark and dire. Lily, while she seems free, is playing the Slut role with as much guile and calculation as anyone trying to game the system in a competitive world; she also may never again have the innocence necessary to play the White Swan - in a way, she is a prisoner, too. Nina, though, unsuited to the Slut role, can find no way to give her sexuality healthy expression. Her choices are stay locked down and never succeed fully in her art, or break loose so violently that she goes into a free fall.
By the end, it takes her believing she has killed her rival with her bare hands to find the fire she needs to dance the Black Swan. But it is actually part of herself that she has destroyed - because in this world, as in the real world, she can find no way for the White and the Black to coexist in one body. As soon as the character embraces her sexuality, she kills herself - the prim, repressed perfectionist smothered by a crazy mother and a thousand stuffed animals. When that girl dies, all of her dies: the sacrifice she makes in the name of perfection.
The supreme irony, of course, is that she thinks she has killed the Black Swan - Lilly - when in fact she has killed the White Swan - herself. In killing one, both must die. And in this message is where the film seems the most obscurely pointed: what might this girl have become, had she allowed the Black Swan to blossom, and kept the qualities of the White, too? If both must die if one dies, then doesn't that imply that they could, in fact, coexist in a world better than the one that Nina - and that most girls - must live in?
