Broken Mirrors, Broken Minds, Broken Wings: Black Swan Review
December 8, 2010
The story revolves around Nina (Natalie Portman), who has just been appointed prima ballerina at the New York City Ballet — taking over from fading star, Beth (Winona Ryder). As the dancers approach the performance of a dark reimagining of the classic, Swan Lake, Nina’s world becomes more like a fever dream than a dancer’s paradise. The pressure to perform as the more sensual half of her stage persona, the Black Swan, becomes more than the sheltered ballerina can bear and her internalizing, masochistic personality rears its ugly head (it’s interesting to see Portman in a role that mirrors her artistic career in some ways — the child actress who never quite made the adult breakthrough everyone had hoped for, relying mostly on her White Swan image in a Black Swan industry). Nina is forced to contend with the presence of a new dancer, Lily (Mila Kunis), who embodies all the qualities the company’s smarmy stage director, Thomas (Vincent Cassel), is looking for. Soon, the psychologically fragile ballerina becomes reckless as her relationship with Lily — and her overbearing, veteran ballerina mother (Barbara Hershey) — starts to transform her.
Aronofsky’s tortured artist melodrama (which feels more like a horror movie at its core) explores well-trodden territory — presenting us with familiar plotlines and themes surrounding artistic rivalry, art imitating life, the nature of the creative mind, and the sacrifices artists make. However, he introduces something even more compelling when he begins to navigate us along Nina’s phantasmagorical journey. While the film is drawing comparisons to everything from The Red Shoes and Repulsion, to Mulholland Drive and Dostovesky’s The Double, you’d do yourself a service to abandon most of the pervading familiarity of Black Swan’s predecessors and let the film overtake you as it was meant to. For some, Black Swan will dwell uncomfortably close to horror cinema and for others Aronofsky will not have pushed things far enough. By refusing to tether himself in either direction, Black Swan’s tension deliciously teeters between the visible reality (the gorgeous, competitive, and strenuous world of ballet) and the hidden netherworld (the anxious, repressed, and viscerally terrifying traumas of ballet’s inhabitants) of Nina’s subconscious.
Claims of misogyny are already surrounding the film. There are those who say Black Swan feels more like an exploitative, male-laden fantasy, but this “other” perspective — which sometimes feels like an outsider’s view of a feminine world, quite deliberately — plays with the notion that Nina is always living her life on the outside, through the wants and needs of others. Also, some of the issues regarding female insecurity felt very honest: the uncomfortableness of leering subway passengers, the awkwardness of confronting uncertain or inappropriate sexual aggression, and female body image issues. You’d be hard pressed to find a woman who hasn’t dealt with at least one of these.
This isn’t to say that the movie is without flaws (the dialogue had a few less than stellar moments, for example), but Black Swan’s ambition and operatic scale is so exquisitely potent it’s damn near perfection. While there are a bevy of psychologically charged signs and sigils that introduce some complex ideas and subtext, not all of them worm their way through to completion. Still, the trail is ripe and ready to explore.
[spoilers ahead]
“The time of a trial [épreuve], whose
profit or remainder will be your image, the image of your ‘living
traits’ [traits vifs] – your death adorns itself [se pare], my beauty:
si vis vitam, para mortem, prepare your death; let us make you an
ornament, a photograph; let us keep everything in images, to preserve
you from all loss through these filmy doubles of yourself that are your
portraits, our portraits.” –Georges Didi-Huberman
Double, Double Toil and Trouble
Ballet itself is full of doppelgängers – sylph-like creatures who on
stage appear nearly identical. However, there are darker reasons why the
female cast of Black Swan resemble each other, as Aronofsky
propels the dichotomy of the White and Black Swan to twisted
psychological effect. Nina is so completely fractured by her own anxiety
on the climb to perfection that she becomes a vessel for those around
her — absorbing their neuroses and complications. This creates a kind of
hive mind — a collective psyche torn and bursting at the seams – where
twinness and duality reign. Creation is only possible by way of
destruction, characters who at first appear to be cruel are later seen
as kind, symmetry is fearful – not comforting, cracked and twisted and
torn limbs belie the beauty of the dance, and the uncoiling of it all is
never-ending.Nina’s strained and suffocating relationship with her mother, Erica, is at the heart of her disintegration. As a former dancer, her mother puts an immense amount of pressure on Nina to not only be the best, but also to never grow up. Nina is referred to as “girl” by her mother, her bedroom is decorated for an adolescent, and the nature of ballet itself is rampant with social physique anxiety – the pressure to maintain a lithe (young, girl-like) figure. As Antonin Artuad describes in his manifesto, The Theater and Its Double, ” … If we address ourselves theatrically to the unconscious, it is merely to take from it what it has been able to collect (or conceal) of accessible everyday experience.” Clearly Nina’s earliest experiences at home have taken their toll. Lily incites feelings of self-doubt, as she becomes the barometer to judge Nina’s sultriness and ability to perform as the darker half of her dance persona, the Black Swan. Nina on her own is innocent and reserved, but next to Lily she’s more than frigid. Thomas, of course, stirs the cauldron of insecurity — acting as a kind of sexual Svengali. We don’t see much of former Swan starlet Beth in the film, but she’s clearly a representation of Nina’s future – put to pasture and unable to cope with her fate. Ryder’s role is a double all of its own since she’s an actress who has become more popular for being a Hollywood casualty than anything else.
The doppelgängers of Nina’s wounded subconscious manifest in a variety of other ways. Aronofsky’s prowling camerawork plays to Nina’s disassociative id. It makes sense that the camera trails behind her — acting as much as a voyeur to the spectacle of Nina’s descent, as a specter of her disconnected sensibility. Mirrors and reflections become other characters in the film, reminiscent of Primo Levi’s story, The Mirror Maker. Timoteo was born in a family of mirror makers, but had a vision of putting his own twist on the looking glass. His “Metamir” was a flexible mirror, that when applied to the forehead would reflect the looker’s perceptions rather than reality. On his mother, Timoteo was reflected as the perfect angel. On his girlfriend, he saw a broken and weak man. On another woman, Timoteo was reflected as the ideal man. The illusions and invented narratives of Nina’s life eventually overtake her, and she becomes a Metamir herself – reaching to preserve her very existence by nature of these doubles.
We’re supposed to be able to rely on the accuracy of mirror images, but Black Swan’s mirrors are pure witchery (also, see Lacan’s theory on the mirror stage and the imaginary order). They remind us that Nina’s point of view is unreliable, as her reflections manifest themselves channeled through the eyes of her mother, her mentor, her rivals, and her audience. That she often double-takes at the appearance of her own mirror image, and identifies herself in the faces of strangers on the street more than her own reflection, isn’t so odd after all. It would be fair to say that the genesis for Nina’s cast of antagonists was created in the ballet studio as a young girl – an inescapable world of mirrors where her inner demons came to life. While there are many triggers that send Nina reeling into this hazy territory — usually denoted by spine-chilling auditory/visual cues from Aronofsky — the pill Nina swallows while at the club with Lily is a conduit to the doppelgängers within (recalling another duality — Derrida’s theory about the paradoxical pharmakon being the poison/antidote). The looking glass is turned inside out and eventually consumes Nina. One can’t help but think of another ballet movie’s best line of dialogue — Suspiria’s “… Broken mirrors … broken minds,” as Nina’s dream-myth personae tempts her into oblivion, materializing at its most horrific and stunning during the film’s final scene.
… If I say it
as I know how to say it
immediately
you will see my present body
fly into pieces
and under ten thousand
notorious aspects
a new body will be assembled
in which you will never again
be able
to forget me
–Antonin Artaud
Psychosexual Devotion: The Ballet Master Conjures Salpêtrière
The twisted relationship that Nina shares with the ballet company’s
artistic director, Thomas, plays upon a kind of Electra complex. The
dancer with an absent father and a psychosexual attachment to the
strong, male figure in her life has her innermost fears and sexual
stuntedness thrust on display. Nina is panicked and bewildered in the
face of exposure, while her secret desires are slowly torn out of her.
Everything she has worked so hard to conceal (the stability in her life
is completely artificial and encapsulated) becomes threatened by a
self-dissolving force that gnaws and swells deep within — fed by Thomas’
professional/sexual cruelty and taunting. This is a role that Lily
assumes control of after an imagined lesbian tryst, which only serves to
deepen Nina’s displacement and sublimation.While Freudian comparisons surrounding Thomas are fairly obvious (Didn’t the Rorschach inkblot print and menacing trap-like sculpture in his apartment give it away?), there seems to be a deeper connection to one of Freud’s teachers, Jean-Martin Charcot, and the women of the Salpêtrière Hospital. Charcot’s groundbreaking studies surrounding neurology attracted worldwide attention, but it was his interest in female hysteria that created a stir in Paris’ public insane asylum. What started as a fortress to shield the indigent Parisian population and “feminine dregs of society” became a theater of the afflicted. Charcot began focusing on a fascinating new disease he coined hystero-epilepsy (a combination of hysteria and epilepsy). The emotionally troubled women of the asylum experienced a variety of symptoms, including extreme bodily contortions, convulsions, blackouts, and generally a confused and fleeting sense of reality. The spectacle of this purported illness was made available for all to witness. The public was invited to attend Charcot’s lectures where hysterical madwomen performed their maladies for the audience. Bribes and exchanges were offered to entice regular hysterical performances. In return, the patients were relentlessly photographed (when photo exposure times lasted long minutes and not seconds — emphasizing the theatrics of it all), hypnotized, posed, manipulated (focusing on the genitals), and brutally experimented on – willing and hungry for their conductor’s praise and devotion, and desperate to be kept separate from the others, the incurables.
While the sexual was always present, it was never consummated (supposedly, and ironically touch was integral in the process of “treatment” – and often questionable), this unfulfilled longing and demented ecstasy was never more apparent than in Charcot’s model patient, the teenage Augustine. The victim of rape who came from a troubled home, Augustine became Charcot’s living masterpiece. Her beauty, gaze, vulnerability, submission, and performances were ritualized madness — mirroring Nina’s fugue of self-destruction — and the stage of the hospital amphitheater becomes the stage of the ballet house. Thomas’ provocations with his female ingénue in pursuit of the Black Swan don’t stray terribly far from Charcot’s methodologies.
Augustine escaped Salpêtrière years later (dressed as a boy, no less), feeling perhaps the same way it’s written that most of the hysteria patients ended up — disgusted and disparaged after they were no longer seen as truly ill and therefore ignored more and more. The performance (hysteria, masturbation, dance) and the spectacle (the transformation to perfection) once completed no longer holds the same kind of power.
“Thou shalt not seethe a kid in his mother’s milk.” –Exodus 23:19
On Abjection & Those Females Who Can Wreck the Infinite …
Julia Kristeva’s essay on abjection, Powers of Horror, seems
to contain the perfect explanation for Nina’s visceral unraveling.
Kristeva describes the abject as that which “disturbs identity, system,
order … what does not respect borders, positions, rules … the
in-between, the ambiguous, the composite.” The abject is the point that
the object (“ … that of being opposed to I … “) is transformed
and “meaning collapses.” It’s an indeterminacy made horrific as the
distinction between the self and the object (the Black Swan)
disintegrates and is lost forever. Kristeva explains further, “Abjection
preserves what existed in the archaism of pre-objectal relationship, in
the immemorial violence with which a body becomes separated from
another body in order to be.” For Kristeva, it’s seeing a corpse that
epitomizes this breakdown, and for Nina it’s flesh and bone – the
simultaneous fear and yearning (purging, biting, breaking, picking,
scratching, fucking) to be free from the confines of her anxious self
(selves). Suddenly the compression and manipulation of Nina’s diaphragm
(and her breathiness throughout the film) takes on a whole new meaning
under Kristeva’s discourse:“The body’s inside … shows up in order to compensate for the collapse of the border between inside and outside. It is as if the skin, a fragile container, no longer guarantee[s] the integrity of one’s ‘own and clean self’ but, scraped or transparent, invisible or taut, gave way before the dejection of its contents.”
As a ballerina, Nina’s body isn’t her own to begin with — she exists to be the seamless connection between the music and the dance. In the throes of her Black Swan she’s at her most fragile — even though it’s her most powerful professional moment (she’s only seen as a true artist when she’s a monster) — as the abject devours Nina within “the threatening world of animals or animalism, which [in primitive cultures] were imagined as representatives of sex and murder.” As the Swan transformation takes hold of Nina, she murders the self with suicidal determination at the peak of her perfection.
Before Nina can make the full metamorphosis to the Black Swan, it’s made clear she has to embrace her dark side – a part of her that is already growing more vital from the very beginning of the film, but is hidden from Nina and those around her (Thomas senses it, but in the most basic and selfish of ways). The disconnect between mind(s) and body veils this fact from her, and she’s is blinded by the same terror, anxiety, and obsession she’s molded from. Someone like Lily poses a threat, not just because there’s room for only one Black Swan in Nina’s eyes, but because Lily represents sameness (the self) and Nina isn’t ready to face who and what she really is. “Abjection … is immoral, sinister, scheming, and shady: a terror that dissembles, a hatred that smiles, a passion that uses the body for barter instead of inflaming it, a debtor who sets you up, a friend who stabs you … “
Kristeva also provides a possible explanation for Nina’s damaged relationship with her mother, Erica:
“The abject confronts us, on the other hand, and this time within our personal archeology, with our earliest attempts to release the hold of maternal entity even before ex-isting outside of her, thanks to the autonomy of language. It is a violent, clumsy breaking away, with the constant risk of falling back under the sway of a power as securing as it is stifling.”
This constant push and pull between Nina and Erica happens throughout the film (strip/shield, heal/harm, etc.). Kristeva goes on to introduce parallels to Thomas — who is at once a father surrogate and the object of Nina’s naïve psychosexual attachment. It’s easy to see how he falls into place surrounding the idea of “Repelling, rejecting … “ This is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg, however, as the analogies between Kristeva’s theories and Black Swan seem endless.
When thinking about Nina and her mother, Louise Bourgeois’ massive and intimidating sculpture, Maman (Mother), comes to mind. It is perhaps Bourgeois’ most well known work and one she created in the memory of her mother – a relationship made stronger by the tortured one she shared with her father. For Bourgeois, the egg sac the spider carries is a symbol of protection, but also the vulnerability of the mother (spiders by nature are very protective – eating disease-causing insects and carrying their young on their backs for as long as necessary). From the bit of dialogue that we catch when Nina is locked inside her bedroom with her mother, it seems as though the traumas of the two were born and created, separate and through their relationship with the other. The drawings, the cake, and the rituals are the spiderling reborn again and again. Many spiderlings don’t survive once the egg hatches – some starve and others are swallowed whole. Your sweet girl, Erica, is indeed gone.
Works Cited
Artaud, Antonin. The Theater and Its Double. Trans. Mary Caroline Richards. New York: Grove Press, 1994. Print.Didi-Huberman, Georges. Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpetriere. Trans. Alisa Hartz. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004. Print.
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Print.
Levi, Primo. The Mirror Maker: Stories and Essays. Trans. Raymond Rosenthal. New York: Schocken Books, 1989. Print.
∴
This post is categorized in: Film, Film Reviews, and it's tagged as , Andres Heinz, Andrew Weisblum, Antonin Artaud, Barbara Hershey, Black Swan, Black Swan Film, Clint Mansell, Darren Aronofsky, Didi Huberman, Invention of Hysteria, Jean Martin Charcot, John J. McLaughlin, Julia Kristeva, Louise Bourgeois, Maman, Mark Heyman, Matthew Libatique, Mila Kunis, Natalie Portman, Powers of Horror, Primo Levi, Salpêtrière, The Black Swan, Theater of Cruelty, Vincent Cassell, Winona Ryder. Read more posts from December, 2010.
No comments:
Post a Comment