Thursday 6 January 2011

Black Swan

"Attack it! Attack it!"

Black Swan leaves nothing behind the scenes, tearing through its tale with rude ferocity. Life and art flirt gracelessly. They converge magnetically. Performance and reality at long last become one at the top of the steps and consummate, consummately:

"I was perfect"

For Nina, life doesn't imitate art. It reflects it. When she puts on her make up she puts it on her reflection. Nina wants to see an ideal in the mirror. The performers think that they are in control, that they shape it, exercising, stretching, purging. Yet isn't it the image that calls the shots?



People are her mirrors too, changing (but how much?) when she looks at them : a mother whose protective embrace will suffocate and destroy; a friend whose kindness and companionship is distorted by Nina's paranoia and instability. Nina doesn't have control, doesn't take charge until her fear and ambition reaches an operatic pitch only she can hear:

"It's my turn!"

She is a woman who never stopped being a girl. She is suggestible and changeable. She feels imperfect, like a child used to being called a Princess suddenly scolded. There is no love to break the spell or at least love that isn't cloying and conditional.


The first day of the new season and Lily bursts in late. From this moment Nina associates Lily with disruption and begins to view her as a usurper. Lily bursts everywhere - at work, at home, in her bed. With Lily now within it, Nina's unstable mind is at the point of breakdown. The lights of the studio shut down when she is stressed, far more serious than scattered horror beats. She doesn't know what is happening. People seem to invade her or are let in without realising ('Susie in the office' is always ready with information, a slang, a code). She hallucinates. Going out of her mind and growing out of her skin like the butterflies on her wall. She is "moulting", as Sheila O'Malley describes it, into adulthood and into a creature of pure imagination.

"What happened to my sweet girl?" "She's gone!"

Nina is being reborn. She is pushing against the people who manipulate her. The embryonic black swan makes its presence felt in the nightclub, the dull beat and pink haze approximating a womb. Taking a bath she comes gasping to the surface.

[The club scene recalls the opening "Jitterbug" from Mulholland Drive* in its heady colour, its dreaminess, the main characters set out from a background of dancers, silhouettes and images within silhouettes.]

The ballet gives her a character, a new shell into which to grow. She knows that ballet has eaten Beth, the former belle of the stage, and spat her out but she doesn't care. Art makes demands and not only on the body, twisting and cracking. Beth stabs herself with a nail file that could be a beak (as Ed Howard noted), declaring that she is "nothing". They live for ballet. It makes and takes their lives. Nina knows. But she wants to be something.

"I'm the Swan Queen. You're the one who never left the corps!"

Nina is uneasy around men and wary of her mother (always outside the door). She has no-one (her father is never mentioned) apart from Lily, whose uninhibited frankness disturbs her and excites her. The opportunity for rare friendship becomes mixed with nascent and bottled-up sexual feelings (sex is not the kernel of the film but one of the many aspects of Nina's slow-burning maturation/mutation). Something strong is growing out of her brittleness. The wicked rapture on her face as the feathers sprout is something else.


She is so weak, her white swan, that she can be smashed into tiny shards. The only problem is the white swan and the black swan are not the twins Odette and Odile, but the same person. Killing the white swan will kill them both. Suicide with a mirror's blade.

Nevertheless, they will briefly be released.

"...and, in death, finds freedom"

The final twenty minutes are appalling, sorrowful and disorienting. They are triumphant. Finally realising who she is and what she has done to herself, she calmly sits in her dressing room and puts on her make-up. Sadness and relief hiccup out of her and tranquility washes over her eyes. It is magical, as miraculous and spellbinding as her final transformation. By becoming lost in her role, she has found herself.


This is her crowning glory and her farewell. When we get to the end it feels, in retrospect, inevitable. Not predictable. It just had to be this way. There is an awesome feeling of catharsis. Like the ecstasy pill, Black Swan lasts a couple of hours, a perfect storm of extreme sensations (Nina's version of Edvard Munch's scream epitomises this).

She is whole. She is no longer fractured between childhood and adulthood or between potential and fulfilment. Jumping to the mat, a slow motion allows her, for a few seconds, to fly. The camera that stalked behind her head or whose gaze violated is now hers. And she is ready for her Close-Up.



*More often than not comparisons to other films are reductive rather than instructive. Black Swan is its own unique thing and yet I was reminded of All About Eve (the final mirror image especially) and the relationship of pleasure/pain between Norman Bates and his mother, revealed in detail in Psycho IV.

13 comments:

  1. I've read so many great takes on this movie but this is one of the most thoughful yet (I haven't been able to see it yet-work issues-but I absolutely can't wait!). Maybe tomorrow night...

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  2. Thanks Rob.

    I hope you feel the same way after you've seen the film(!)

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  3. Ah Stephen,

    Extremely well written, especially the opening that really caught me unawares.

    Now, on to the gripes, all the claims here are perfectly valid, but the film's biggest weakness, IMO, is that it is precisely built around this response. It wants us to see and interpret, every second is loaded with meaning, choking the life out of the film. Every shard of the screen is a symbol, everything is shorthand-ed into representation and everything is calculated for a predetermined response.

    Allow me to sum up my negative response to the film in your words:

    Kane smacks of the work of a student of film not yet a film-maker. The compositions do not derive from the characters' internal world (like a snow globe smashing, spilling the internal out) but are imposed externally, untethered to what they mean to speak of. On first viewing I missed an entire scene's worth of dialogue, distracted by overblown expressionist design. Time and again the acute chiaroscuro, the giant sets, the muddying echoes fall into parody. The film essays foreboding grandeur but the text is simply drawn and its illustrations seem ridiculous in their imposition of hifalutin, steroidal 'meaning'.



    Citizen Kane does not engage. All we may gain from it is academic ideas of feelings and not the feelings themselves, scooping tiny insects with our net on the surface of a thick and opaque swamp. I should want to know about Kane, I should feel for him. I should worry for his abused wife. I should be transported by the tale of a man at the coalface of history, sculpting both it and himself. A modern Midas indeed. Citizen Kane is an intricately carved and gilded shell with nothing within. It has no heart and I confess that I was bored. It has studied and pioneering technique but to what end? Without a purpose, an achieved aim, technique is nothing. Welles shows off in the same way Kane does when he poaches seasoned journalists from the Chronicle. It is not a great film and I couldn't, in all sincerity, call it a good film. It is a peacock display for the cameras by the cameras.


    But may it's all that Aronofsky wants. May be I can live with that.

    Terrific article here nevertheless. I see a good discussion at the horizon.

    Cheers!

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  4. Thanks JAFB.

    "It wants us to see and interpret, every second is loaded with meaning, choking the life out of the film."

    I see what you mean. It is loaded with meaning and symbolic shorthand. As opposed to CITIZEN KANE, though, I don't think these symbols carry the weight of the film or present a 'meaningful' surface that hides hollow depths.

    The film's representations worked in creating a witch's brew = an in-your-face and intense feeling of disintegration.

    During CITIZEN KANE I was abundantly aware of what it was trying to say at all times whilst in BLACK SWAN it washed over me with pure emotion and the symbolism really only sunk in afterwards. This shows me that it was well-integrated and that the symbolism wasn't making up for anything.

    It's possible that the simple lack of engagement with CITIZEN KANE led me to be overly harsh on its symbolism (though it is ham-fisted regardless) when, if the character and story of BLACK SWAN had not gripped me I may have made those same criticisms.

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  5. Nevertheless, as I say, I believe moments like the switching off of the lights REVEAL instead of REITERATING or GLOSSING OVER.

    Also, though I am loath to infer a Director's intentions (and here I can talk about a film's intentions), I didn't get a feeling of smugness in the film - of self-satisfaction. BLACK SWAN is a barrelling and very entertaining film whose strong symbolism (cliched and slightly unrefined) matches the film's feverishness.

    I think it has a foundation and a use.

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  6. It's a great review Stephen, especially that you don't really tip your hand till the last paragraphs. And your defense of the film does make those who didn't buy into it (myself included) think they are missing something. I have been hammering away at the film for weeks, and will reiterate that I found it mean-spirited, and too smug and self-aware, and a cryptic blend of classic elements and the slasher film. I went back to see it a second time and again had the same issues, though was more impressed with Portman's work and Matthew Libatique's often exquisite compositions. Your fondness for the use of symbols here is fair enough, and I know many have seen greatness here. But for me, I must say I was disappointed after other Aronofskys, one of which blew me away: THE FOUNTAIN.

    But again, you show some masterful writing talent here once again!

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  7. Cheers Sam!

    I see where you are coming from on this. There are some films I get lost in or so engrossed by that I can't see outside, to why someone would dislike it. With BLACK SWAN though I am well aware of the elements that could turn people off.

    I didn't think it was smug or self-aware but a no-holds-barred operatic tale told with much flourish around the edges but, when it comes down to it, simply.

    I think we are diametrically opposed when it comes to BLACK SWAN and THE FOUNTAIN(!)

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  8. I realised what this reminded me of: Perfect Blue (another Satoshi Kon movie which I didn't like much at all; I'm yet to get down to the second half of Paranoia Agent).
    Both movies were about women trying to push the limits of their selves for the sake of their art and being troubled by it (the fact that PB had a crazy fan and an overprotective agent are to me but asides).
    And in both, whenever there was a hallucination, I cringed at how irritatingly obvious it was. Significantly less in the anime (Japs are awesome), but I certainly did.

    [Aside]The only way in which BS is better was that I knew it would end like this from the beginning (to e precise, the moment that guy narrated Swan Lake), whereas the end of PB was really a major letdown.

    Haven't watched (or even heard of) All About Eve, but I see it cropping up in every review. Which just lessens my interest in it.

    And, since I haven't yet deigned to comment on your actual review, let me point out a truly charming part of it, a line which would have made me watch the movie if I hadn't already (and actually slightly increased my respect for it now):
    "She is so weak, her white swan, that she can be smashed into tiny shards. The only problem is the white swan and the black swan are not the twins Odette and Odile, but the same person. Killing the white swan will kill them both. Suicide with a mirror's blade. "

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  9. Ronak,

    Yes, it reminded me of PERFECT BLUE too. However, as I said, I try not to compare films like this because it can blind you to the many differences and unique touches each film has.

    I thought the ending of PERFECT BLUE was a letdown the first time I saw it. On a second viewing, for the animation countdown I did, it felt right.

    ALL ABOUT EVE is very good and not really much like BLACK SWAN except in cosmetic details. PARANOIA AGENT is Satoshi Kon's best, I think, and one of the best TV Series I have seen.

    "...let me point out a truly charming part of it, a line which would have made me watch the movie if I hadn't already (and actually slightly increased my respect for it now):"

    Thanks very much. I'm always happy if what I write can somehow give the reader (you) a new look.

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  10. "And in both, whenever there was a hallucination, I cringed at how irritatingly obvious it was."
    This statement was beautifully brought out by 127 Hours* (which I watched earlier today); in that, there's nothing obvious about the hallucinations, there's in fact no sensible connection between them, and that makes them feel real (I suspect it's because it was adapted from a real account). Madness is free association; these movies are just association.
    In reality, the things that haunt us work in a much more roundabout way than Kon and Aronofsky seem to think; you can't just draw a simple map of the things in the brain.

    *There's also 8 1/2, but it's been a while since I watched that.

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  11. Ronak,

    Sorry for the late response...I agree that the 'hallucinations' (I think they are too but must they be not real?) are quite obvious and hackneyed, especially the mirror/doppelganger effects and moving paintings.

    However I thought they were more artfully done than usual. It didn't bother me at all that I'd seen similar things before. In fact I enjoyed those parts. What BLACK SWAN does sometimes state rather than reiterate through its symbolism - the turning off of lights at moments of psychological pressure/trauma revealed the extent to which she was on the point of breakdown and how her mental state impacted on the real world (an impact noticed by everyone if not understood).

    Free Association can feel random and not tied to anything in particular. Satoshi Kon's films and 8 1/2 both encounter the same problem: the weirder everything is, the less we care because there is no norm or tangible base reality to grope for.

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  12. Hello, watched Perfect Blue again, and feel like an idiot for my previous comment about it.

    The most important question to ask about the movie is: whose head have we been in all this time? (Why, in the climax, are we partaking in an illusion that is not that of Mima?) This, I never even thought of last time.

    And as for the end, this time it felt right for me as well, primarily because of the cropping up of the mentioned question.

    A dimension of that last dialogue that struck me very strongly this time was as an answer to the recurring refrain, "Illusions don't come to life."
    It fits in so seamlessly in that position... that fact really leads you to think.

    (Off-topic. I hope you don't mind. I would have commented on your review of PB but I wanted to refute what I'd already said.)

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  13. Ronak,

    "The most important question to ask about the movie is: whose head have we been in all this time? Why, in the climax, are we partaking in an illusion that is not that of Mima?) This, I never even thought of last time."

    Very true. I hadn't either.

    "Off-topic. I hope you don't mind. I would have commented on your review of PB but I wanted to refute what I'd already said"

    I don't mind at all. I suppose you mean my review at Wonders in the Dark. If I write something I change my mind on or realise was foolish then I want to set the record straight too.

    Thanks.

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