{"id":2905,"date":"2011-02-15T09:00:36","date_gmt":"2011-02-15T09:00:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.badreputation.org.uk\/?p=2905"},"modified":"2011-02-15T09:00:36","modified_gmt":"2011-02-15T09:00:36","slug":"check-out-my-ego-aronofskys-black-swan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/badreputation.org.uk\/2011\/02\/15\/check-out-my-ego-aronofskys-black-swan\/","title":{"rendered":"Check Out My Ego: Aronofsky’s Black Swan"},"content":{"rendered":"

Now, I know we already have our own Film Cricket here at BadRep, and I should really be off writing an alphabetical list of something, but I feel impelled to speech by the power of Swan Lake<\/strong> (and not just because I used to spend hours trying to make my chubby little six-year-old legs form the Cygnet Dance)<\/a>.<\/p>\n

<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>

Oh matron. Natalie Portman in the poster for Black Swan. <\/p><\/div>\n

Black Swan<\/strong>, Darren Aronofsky’s latest filmic offering, hinges upon the idea of a cunning duality running through Tchaikovsky’s ballet <\/em>Swan Lake <\/strong>(1877). We know this because within about fifteen minutes of the film’s opening, the creepy French dance teacher Thomas (Vincent Cassel) has given a rather thinly disguised explanation of what the whole film is about, clumsily telling a room full of professional dancers what the plot of this ‘done-to-death’ ballet is.<\/p>\n

Except he doesn’t. The plot of Swan Lake<\/strong> <\/strong>is a composite of various Russian folk tales and a German short story called ‘The Stolen Veil’. It features Prince Siegfried who is reluctant to marry, despite the wishes of his queen-mother. But one night he meets the swan-queen Odette and is completely won round: alas, tragedy ensues when Rotbart, the evil magician, sends his daughter Odile (the ‘black swan’) off to impersonate Odette at the Prince’s birthday party, which she does so well that he mistakes her for his True Love. Yada yada yada. It’s\u00a0a fairly clear example of the ‘fairy bride’ tradition (where a man meets a magical woman whom he marries and inevitably loses), and\u00a0typical of Romanticism and other Romantic ballets in its interest in man’s relationship with the supernatural and the ideal: Odette is fundamentally unattainable, an imagined perfection, not a representation of\u00a0sexual love<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But not if you’re Aronofsky, who can’t resist a little Psychology 101: the Black Swan (whose appearance on stage in the original ballet amounts to a measly few dances) becomes Odette’s ‘EVIL TWIN’, a good old fashioned Id to Odette’s Ego. Just to clarify, that’s Black Swan = BAD, White Swan = GOOD (repeat ad nauseum). Siegfried, whose own sexual stand-offishness and maternal relationship is a lynchpin in the ballet, is all but gone in the film, where he functions simply as a sort of pole for the prima ballerina to dance around. She, on the other hand, now has all his issues and then some: the White Swan is\u00a0FRAGILE and VIRGINAL (yet has somehow managed to woo her reluctant prince into marriage in the course of a single night), and, in perverted-Ugly-Ducking style, no one wants to fuck her (boo hoo). Meanwhile, the Black\u00a0Swan is a bit oh-matron, a Sexy Seductress. Were she living in 21st century Manhattan, Aronofsky decides, she would be taking drugs, listening to her iPod, sexin’ down the clubs, and carrying a black singlet around ‘in case she ends up somewhere unexpected’. Gosh darn it, isn’t she exactly like this rather pouting ingenue who can’t dance very well, but has lots of passion?<\/p>\n

Thus this Romantic tale \u2013 which actually has much to offer Black Swan<\/strong>‘s premise\u00a0through its use of supernatural and metaphorical elements, illusion, ideals and identity \u2013\u00a0becomes a tired old angel\/whore dichotomy, and an indirect sort of homage to the ur-backstage bitches backstabbing drama, All About Eve<\/a> <\/strong>(1950). I can’t help feeling here, though, that Aronofsky may have arrived at the party a bit late: as Spanish cinema fans will remember, back in 1999\u00a0Pedro Almadovar made a\u00a0brilliant film<\/a> based on just this cinema classic, and also managed to fix the 1950s gender politics in the process, making the whole thing a loving tribute to women’s endurance, rather than a film about how women always screw each other over.<\/p>\n

\"a<\/a>

'Not you, grey swan!' Photo par Hodge.<\/p><\/div>\n

But even if you read Black Swan<\/strong> as a straight portrait of mental disorder rather than a supernatural horror story (a lazy choice to give an audience, and a bit clever-by-numbers, don’t you think?) the whole thing still hinges around a sexual awakening that portrays lesbianism as a freakish Other, sex itself as A Bit Naughty and the definition of a successful woman as ‘a seductive one’. And from this angle, too, Black Swan <\/strong>is derivative of a much finer (and less misogynistic) film,\u00a0Michael Haneke’s La Pianiste <\/strong>(2001), which, er, features as its main character a self-mutilating, sexually repressed champion piano player who lives with her obsessive privacy-intolerant mother who wants to live through her daughter.<\/p>\n

This post has not been attempting a sword-swinging defence of the sacred\u00a0Swan Lake <\/strong>story: as Matthew Bourne has shown<\/a>, it is a skeleton on which vastly different interpretations can hang beautifully. And, yeah, I get metaphor and that. But what really bothered me was this feeling throughout the film that despite the constantly pummeled ‘BLACK SWAN WHITE SWAN’ contrast, manipulation of Tchaikovsky’s music on a scale not seen since Disney’s\u00a0Sleeping Beauty<\/a> <\/strong>(itself based on<\/a> another Tchaikovsky ballet) and the whole ‘ballet theme’ thing,\u00a0Aronofsky really has no interest in any of those things except as they make him look Clever and link up (in a feminine sort of way) with his Grand Theme of\u00a0vocations that require you to abuse your body (a la The Wrestler<\/strong>). A case in point is Nina’s much-touted ‘minor eating disorder’, which is presumably introduced as part of the whole ‘dancers are thin and they lust after physical perfection’ thing, and something\u00a0I have a couple of key problems with. These are: firstly, its yawn-inducing predictability,\u00a0exploiting\u00a0the one thing everyone knows about ballet<\/a>; and secondly the fact that, even though eating disorders are supposedly ballet’s Defining Feature, Black Swan<\/strong> makes no attempt to examine their specific relationship to a career that demands major energy output 24\/7.<\/p>\n

Plus, of course, the whole ‘Ah yes. She’s a dancer who wants to do well in her career. So let’s give her an eating disorder to really symbolise that drive for perfection. But eating disorders \u2013 they’re not all that SEXY are they? The BLACK SWAN must be SEXY… So let’s shove a bit of eating disorder in there, just so we know this is a film about a woman with a perfectionist streak, then forget all about it and focus on the sexy wanking and the sexy lesbian sex.’<\/p>\n

Such heavy-handedness sits strangely at odds with the elegance of the dance-world \u2013 which, of course, does involve great physical hardship, a short career and an inevitable amount of luvvie backstabbing. That said, I’m not going to attempt to deny I had fun: it’s a rip-roaring yarn, and a splendid performance from Portman. But perhaps if Aronofsky had taken less time to think about how clever he considers himself, and more time to consider the intricacies of the ballet he takes as his framework, Black Swan <\/strong>would be less derivative, less cocky and \u2013 as a film \u2013 infinitely superior.<\/p>\n

Hodge’s List of Related(ish) Films That Don’t Leave Her Toffee Nosed<\/strong><\/p>\n