Special Guest Review: I come to bury Black Swan

After over a year of blog silence, V has returned with a vengeance. None shall be spared from her wrath! - M


So, basically, I went into Black Swan with reasonably low expectations, and they were, for the most part, confirmed. Not a particularly epic conclusion, I know -- but after all the melodrama this movie put me through, I’m just tired, you guys.

We'll begin with Natalie Portman, who plays Nina, your typical Dancer Focused On Perfect Technique  But Lacking In Passion, who apparently has been with the company for like a billion years but whose aforementioned Lack of Passion has held her back from a starring role. She soon has to contend with her rival and opposite, Mila Kunis, a Dancer With All The Passion In The World But Also A Bad(ass) Attitude. Nina has this pathologically overbearing stage mom, and she is mean to her in this way that a 14-year-old girl would be -- like her ego is really dependent on her mother's singular focus on her career, but she's so resentful of being suffocated that she can't bother to be more than totally contemptuous. Natalie Portman does a great job of portraying the character's conflicts, as well as the fact that she isn't sufficiently mature to move past rhem -- and, of course, one must give the obligatory nod to the fact that the woman did much of her own dancing. I've never been a Natalie Portman fan, but I think she's really good at this role -- she's capable of portraying the kind of arrested development you'd imagine would take place when a mother has been hijacking her daughter's entire life since well before puberty and at every moment thereafter. (Who plays said mother? BARBARA FUCKING HERSHEY. From BEACHES, y'all. This is so serious. It may be the case that I'm embarrassed about knowing that, but it may also be the case that I'm not.)

But there are some problems.
See, I've seen another movie that had a lot of gen-u-ine dancers doing some gen-u-ine dancing -- done by the actors, worked into the plot, all that jazz. It was called Center Stage, and you probably (hopefully!) saw it, too. 

I want you to really think about whether this Academy is the place for your mid-90s sweatband.

The plot of Center Stage is pretty thin. It’s about dancers, one of whom is Focused On Perfect Technique But Lacking In Passion, one of whom has All The Passion In The World But Also A Bad Attitude. Hmm. But no one really cared about the plot of the movie -- and, to be honest, I didn't care about the plot of Black Swan either. That might owe to the fact that the movie tells you the plot of Swan Lake maybe 10% of the way in and then spends the remaining 90% of the movie recapitulating said plot. And when I say "recapitulating" I do not mean "considering carefully," "elaborating on," or even "exploring in a remotely meaningful way." I mean that the film actually just spells out the plot of Swan Lake in thirty seconds at the very beginning of the movie, and then spends the rest of the movie acting out that plot. It was a plot about as simple, dare I say, as that of Center Stage.

So herein lies my problem with Black Swan -- and, frankly, with everything else I've ever seen by Darren Aronofsky. He does movies whose premises are reasonably simple, and every single element of the movie's direction serves exclusively to club you over the head with said premises. Take Requiem for a Dream. Has a woman's desire to have a perfect body been destroyed by the very diet pills she's been taking to try to achieve it? Have her careening through the streets of New York with her 'goal dress' hanging off of her emaciated frame. My tenth grade English class curriculum called, and it wants its nuance back.

Black Swan falls prey to the clubbing-you-over-the-head problem, too. Hardcore, actually. Have you ever heard of black being used to symbolize the dark side of one's personality, or white representing virginity and purity? If not, you might learn a lot from this movie. Nina wears white almost all of the time -- except, of course, when she's gone bad. By "going bad," I mean that she falls into an ecstasy-induced stupor, which finds her trying in a pretty serious way to mack on her rival character played by Kunis. Because Kunis represents the dark side/black swan/every other possible cliche representing sin, sensuality, or evil, she wears black all the time. Of course, her character is developed by a laundry list of facts: she smokes, enjoys ecstasy and hamburgers, and is an effortless, passionate dancer. Because as Aronofsky will tell you, there are only three or so facts about a supporting character that can reasonably coexist -- and making sure you know these facts is the only way he can help you to get to know this character.

Everything you need to know about these characters is summed up right here.

And you know what? He treats his main characters even worse. I know Marion isn't writing this entry but she said something really smart just now, which is that every main character in an Aronofsky movie has exactly two dimensions: the thing they're trying to achieve, and the way in which their pursuit of that thing prevents them from doing so and --how tragic!-- drives them crazy. In Requiem for a Dream, the characters are going for beauty, love, or acceptance; their use of drugs to try and obtain it finds them all in the gutter. In Pi, it's truth -- the pursuit of which apparently leads you to drilling a hole in your head so that you can spend the remainder of your days blissfully unaware of how to do basic math. And in Black Swan, it's perfection. The pursuit drives you insane, and if you achieve it you have to die.

Ugh. Now I'm all in a fervor about this. I think the thing that makes me the most annoyed is that everyone seems to love this dude and his movies so damn much. And I will say that he makes really good use of light, and that there are haunting images in all of his movies -- and I found a good many of them in this one. It managed to evoke an emotional response, mostly the kind that would be mitigated by a stiff drink, in me and everyone I've talked to who saw it. I’m sure that's what he was going for: making you see how it must feel to be Nina, completely unable to relax or be at ease. This was a cool film, aesthetically speaking, and I enjoyed that. All of Aronofsky's films, at least the ones I've seen, are aesthetically cool.

But everyone else seems to see in them a complexity of story, character, and theme that I don't. Aesthetic coolness does not negate shallowness -- nor does it seem to serve any purpose in this and Aronofsky's other movies than demanding you take the film seriously. And I don't need a film that demands I take it seriously. I'd rather just watch Center Stage.