European Narcotics: One more thing . . .

European Narcotics: One more thing . . .

Black Swan - A Review

Darren Aronofsky's fifth feature-length film is Black Swan, showing the physical and psychic degeneration of Nina Sayer (Natalie Portman) in her guilt-ridden attempt to portray the Swan Queen from Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake. Nina, though talented, is emotionally inhibited and dominated by her mother (Barbara Hershey) who, thwarted in her own ballet career by pregnancy, brutally manipulates her daughter into destroying both her body and mind in pursuit of an impossible dream. Nina's mother infantilises her in an attempt to re-establish the symbiotic relationship of mother and child in utero, where the daughter's identity is completely subsumed within the mother's. The mother's symbolic aim is achieved precisely at the end of the action when both the Swan and Nina Sayer die. Black Swan is ultimately a film where a new generation is confronted with the spectres of an older one and is completely annihilated by them. This is not to say that Nina herself can be conceived of in other way than as complicit in her own destruction.

Nina may be a techinically perfect ballerina, but she initially lacks the emotional depth to portray the both the White and Black Swans (perfect casting btw). However, her melancholic attempts to perfect her performance lead to self-mutilation; violent, sexual hallucinations; paranoia; and eventually suicide. It is then fairly simple to trace a performative continuum between Black Swan and Swan Lake. That is, that Nina's enactment of the roles of Princess Odette and her evil sister, Odile, causes a psychic split in her personality. Put in other words, the film depicts Nina's “transformation” into the Black Swan which ironically culminates in her stabbing herself in the stomach with a shard of broken mirror. Which leads to my first and major criticism: Black Swan is effectively an aesthetic splatter of Freudian imagery, which in itself is no bad thing, but Shakespeare taught us more about than Freud, than Freud could ever teach us about Shakespeare.

Nina's actions follow a predictable course of degeneration, mirroring not only that of her mother, but also the other woman she supplants, Beth Macintyre (Winona Ryder). Beth, a prima ballerina for years is replaced due to her age by the male-dominated industry of ballet represented in all its sleaze by Vincent Cassel as Thomas Leroy. It becomes quickly evident that Nina identifies Beth as a role model and ersatz maternal figure. She goes into Beth's private dressing room to steal her expensive make up, subsuming her own personality within Beth's. Later in the film, after Beth has been hit by a car in an apparent suicide attempt, Nina attempts to return the things she stole, explaining that she wanted to be “perfect” like Beth. In response to this, Beth starts stabbing herself in the face with the returned nail file screaming “I'm nothing!”. The symbolism, then, is heavy handed at best: maternal hubris leads to self-destruction, but does Black Swan allow any potential for narrative movement?

Not as such. As in other Aronofsky films, particularly Pi, the downfall of the protagonists is agonisingly slow and gradual, but always rooted in some form of childhood trauma and represented through persistent hallucinatory episodes. In Pi, we learn that as a child Max Cohen stared at the sun against his mother's warnings and caused his subsequent agoraphobia and social paranoia. We see how an initial childhood rebellion can lead and solidify into a self-destructive quest for self-discovery, but we never see the drill coming. Black Swan, though intermittently shocking, has no real dramatic momentum and fans of Aronofsky's previous work will feel there is something missing.