Review: Black Swan
Doppelganger
Let’s begin by acknowledging the uncanny resemblance that Black Swan bears to another film. I’m not talking about The Red Shoes or Repulsion but Perfect Blue, the psychological thriller by Satoshi Kon, the revered Japanese animator who passed away only last year.
Aronofsky has categorically denied any conscious connection between the two films but the similarities are striking. Both films follow naïve, virginal artists (ballerina Nina/pop idol Mima) whose subjectivities splinter in the course of realising their artistic ambitions. In both, the female artist is coerced into exploring “dark” material by her handlers (Nina’s choreographer/Mima’s manager). In both, the protagonist encounters her evil doppelganger in mirrors, a doppelganger capable of the most transgressive behaviour.
However I don’t wish to dwell too much on the similarities between the two films because it’s really in Black Swan’s deviations from Perfect Blue that the truth of its particular worldview is revealed. The differences between the two films is starkest at their emotional climaxes. In Black Swan, Nina receives her much sought-after applause while dying from a self-inflicted wound. As the camera adopts Nina’s subjective viewpoint, we look into the stage lights as the frame becomes engulfed in white and Nina dies happy, knowing that she has achieved “perfection”. This moment mirrors (pun intended) a scene in Perfect Blue that is almost identical except that when the performer in Perfect Blue faces the lights she has not achieved any kind of artistic transcendence – she has merely committed herself fully to the artistic delusions that have brought about her madness.
Transcendence vs. delusion
It’s clear that Black Swan and Perfect Blue are concerned with psychopathological symptoms. But symptoms of what? In 2006 following the anti-Semitic outbursts of Mel Gibson, Slavoj Zizek took to task the quick acceptance of Gibson’s subsequent apology:
Foxman’s reaction to Gibson’s outburst was not too severe and too demanding; on the contrary, it let Gibson all too easy off the hook. It accepted Gibson’s refusal to take full personal responsibility for his words (his anti-Semitic remarks): they were not really his own, it was pathology, some unknown force that took over under the influence of alcohol. However, the answer to Gibson’s question “where those vicious words came from?” is ridiculously simple: they are part and parcel of his ideological identity, formed (as far as one can say) in large extent by his father. What underlies Gibson’s remarks was not madness, but a well-known ideology (anti-Semitism).
Consequently, what Gibson needs is not therapy, it is not the admission that “he has a problem,” but the acceptance of his responsibility for his remarks – concretely, what he has to do is to ask himself in what way his outburst is linked to his version of Catholicism, and functions as its obscene underside.
The theme here is that by rendering the symptom as individual pathology, one is able to leave intact the institutional/social processes that produce the symptom.
Don’t we see a similar kind of reduction in Black Swan? The construction of Nina’s madness as individual pathology (repressed sexuality, mother issues etc.) operates to maintain a particular delusion of Aronofsky: His belief in the institution of the culture industry as the engine for creating “transcendent art”.
What goes unquestioned in Black Swan is the effect of profit motive on art (the dancers of the ballet company are deeply concerned about their dwindling ticket sales); the implications of the company’s insistence upon whoring Nina out to the New York aristocracy in order to gain funding; in effect, the structurally necessary events that all lead up to the artistic decision to create a “visceral and real” production of Swan Lake.
“I’ve never seen you lose yourself.”
The tragic quality of Black Swan reveals itself when we consider the idea that Nina does not achieve artistic transcendence at the end of the film. She has merely allowed herself to be sexually molested by her boss and pushed to suicidal limits in order to realise some mediocre artistic statement about the duality of the human psyche. The film takes for granted this idea that true art involves some balancing act between control and chaos, light and dark. But what if chaos and darkness is not the truth of Nina? What if she is not really a repressed lesbian raring to rub herself silly? The image of Nina’s artistic development becomes very different. The image is not one of liberation, but of control.
Far from restricting sexual expression, contemporary popular culture demands that the artist produce ever more shocking sexual spectacles: Madonna and Britney Spears did not perform their “daring” lesbian makeout session at the 2003 MTV Music Video Awards in spite of popular taste but because of it. (There is of course a limit to this logic: We demand lesbian spectacles from women but the image of two men spontaneously kissing at the most recent Oscars was deemed too controversial to be shown.) It is with this in mind that the contradiction in Black Swan becomes apparent: the film advocates for a liberated art but this can only be achieved by obeying the demands of the super-ego (embodied in Vincent Cassel’s domineering choreographer).
On one level, I do agree with Adrian Martin who was full of good things to say about Black Swan: Its hallucinatory madness, hysterical tone and disregard for highbrow taste do work in its favour. But I also agree with Ignatiy Vishnevetsky: The art of chaos and disorder is Black Swan’s subject, but not its definition. The tragic irony of Aronofsky’s career is that as he pursues the subject of an art willing to risk itself, he has been steadily adapting his cinema to suit the demands of the Academy: clichés executed with a merely adequate amount of danger.
Yosh
14/03/11 - 8:38 AM
Do you believe it’s possible for the culture industry (or whatever we want to call it) to produce great art? I doubt it can produce “transcendent” art – art which, say, transcends (ie renders irrelevant) the violence or sacrifice or unhappiness which went into its construction. But I don’t think profit motive automatically invalidates the artistic act/object. (I’m not saying that’s what you were arguing, necessarily, I’m just curious what you think.)
Having said that – I haven’t seen “The Fountain”, but its dismissal by the mainstream has convinced me that it must be Aronofsky’s best film. I don’t know if that’s logical.
Brad Nguyen
14/03/11 - 7:36 PM
Of course, Hollywood has created sublime moments of cinema – even films we might call masterpieces. But the demands of capital have to weigh heavily on all film production within the institution. I think this is equally true for Transformers 2 and Citizen Kane.
Aronofsky is obviously trying to say something significant about art with his one two punch of The Wrestler and Black Swan. But by conspicuously ignoring the commercial imperative of art, he misses that area where his vision of the artist as tortured martyr coincides with the commercial exploitation of performers. The way I read the film, it is obvious that Nina is being exploited by the dance company (and the camera! Note the loving closeups of Natalie Portman’s ass). But all this is somehow redeemed because it all goes towards fuelling the neuroses that produce the work of art.
On The Fountain – It’s probably his most beautiful film but also his most inhuman. His characters seem to have no life beyond executing the film’s grand theme. And this rigidity is reflected in his insistence on tightly controlled symmetrical framing.
I think the mainstream dismissed it because it was impossible to connect with the film in that direct emotional way that Hollywood films usually allow. And on this point I don’t think the mainstream was necessarily wrong!
I would recommend it just for the visual wow factor, but on the level of ideas Aronofsky remains fairly adolescent.