Black Swan (2010)

by Darren Aronofsky

An Analysis

"I had the craziest dream last night." Black Swan expresses and examines the physical, psychological, familial, and sexual pressures on a ballerina, Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman), who has been chosen as a prestigious New York City ballet company's featured performer in this season's re-imagined production of Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake. To become the Swan Queen, Nina must exude the delicate purity of the White Swan then ascend as the Black Swan by corralling and evincing her dormant aggression and libido. In his fifth film, Darren Aronofsky's directs his second consecutive Best Acting nominated performance (Natalie Portman, Mickey Rourke). Black Swan follows Aronofsky's Pi (1998), Requiem for a Dream (2000), The Fountain (2006), and The Wrestler (2008).

<<<  SPOILERS BELOW  >>>

Please see the film before reading further

Aronofsky-as-Auteur

Clint Mansell

Aronofsky welcomes several of his regulars to his fifth film, including good luck charm, actor Mark Margolis (albeit as a scene-cut extra, he's in his 5th film with Aronofsky), director of photography Matthew Libatique (4th film), producer Scott Franklin (4th), actor Stanley Herman (3rd, who amusingly reprises his role as subway weirdo "Uncle Hank"), and parents Abraham and Charlotte Aronofsky (5th and 3rd, respectively).  Perhaps most important is Clint Mansell, who scores his fifth Aronofsky film. Though Mansell maintains some chords and progressions heard in Requiem, he re-writes Tchaikovsky in a new, dark mood.  

After a respite in The Wrestler, Aronofsky revisits his method of fusing real, in-film action with one character's fantasies, dreams, and paranoid delusions--in this film, they belong to Nina. Viewers cognizant of Pi will be prepared to handle another experiencing of this technique, and will be better able to perceive Nina's feelings and demons. None of his films are so terribly confusing as The Fountain, but newcomers to Aronofsky need a bit of prior warning or post-viewing guidance for Black Swan.

Requiem (above), Black Swan (below)

Though there is great stress between Nina and her mother Erica (Barbara Hershey), Aronofsky chose not use the same techniques that portrayed the Requiem relationship between Sara and Harry. No split screens, and no 180-degree camera swings.   


Nina's grapefruit breakfast reminds us of Sara Goldfarb's eggs-and-grapefruit diet in Requiem. We know what price Sara paid for such food controls. The fall-out of Nina's stricter diet is tempered by Nina's greater purpose, physical activity, and a hope for something achievable and earned, as opposed to Sara's TV appearance wish, which can only be bestowed.

Aronofsky's camera techniques create much of the film's mood. Aronofsky rightly uses the camera to present a very unsettled, confidence-lacking, on-the-brink-of-breakdown, paranoid Nina. Aronofsky also uses a steadicam that revolves around Nina when dancing, creating a visual maelstrom. 

The Camera "Following" Nina

Aronofsky continues his "following" technique he developed in The Wrestler. As we experienced Ram's point of view, most interestingly navigating the backstage corridors of boisterous arenas, we get a remarkably similar experience with Nina's navigating Lincoln Center's cinder-block underbelly.


One of Aronofsky's smartest habits is teaching us about worlds unfamiliar to most of us. He has taken us behind the scenes of professional wrestling, shown us mathematics, and taught us specifics of heroin addiction. In Black Swan he shows us the the little things that all dancers know but the rest of us do not. For instance, he shows us three scenes of Nina preparing ballet shoes--the first a montage of breaking down, scoring, and re-sewing them, the second a scene of Nina and Erica scorching ballet shoe ribbons, and the third a shot of Nina grinding her ballet shoes into a sand/glass mixture. These little teaching moments make us feel a part of Nina's world, and help us connect to Nina.

Last Aronofsky returns to his fade-to-white technique used in Pi and Requiem. Upon Nina's ascendancy as the unfettered Black Swan, Aronofsky ends the film with a fade to white to indicate, not a blinded-by-the-sun moment, but a more transcendent, triumphant moment. She has overcome adversity and demons, and has unlocked long-repressed personal and sexual strengths. She, like the Swan Queen, may have also killed herself.

Nina's Adversity

Erica, Feeding Her Daughter Icing

From the film's beginning, Nina's timidity seems incongruent with both her talent and success. She has thrived as a delicate, waif-like ballerina whose skills and prominence are only surpassed by an about-to-be-retired 40-something, Beth Macintyre (Winona Ryder). Like Beth, Nina in her new, headlining role soon feels the All About Eve (1950) footsteps of her nearest challenger, Lily (Mila Kunis). Nina also faces the physical pain of being a featured ballerina:  bleeding feet, split toenails, joints relieved by the painful pulling of a physical therapist. Nina still lives with her controlling, daughter-focused, helicopter mother, Erica, an unaccomplished dancer who retired at 28 to birth and raise Nina. Erica now makes paintings of Nina, sleeps in a chair in Nina's room, runs Nina's schedule, calls Nina several times a day, and, perhaps most controlling, undresses Nina to her panties. Erica has kept Nina from having friends. Maddeningly, to celebrate Nina's landing of the Swan Queen role, Erica forces cake on Nina, something very much out of Nina's Erica-monitored nutrition regimen. Last, and perhaps most important, though Nina has landed the role, she fails to convince the director, and herself, of her ability to succeed in the Black Swan half of the role.


The story's construction provides much of the film's brilliance. Early, Nina's primary source of conflict is with her mother. Next we see her start down a path to loosen up, to become independent and an adult. Both conflicts obscure her underlying psychiatric disorder(s). The delay and ambiguity in revealing the disorder(s) probably creates a great deal of strife for viewers who are impatient, new to Aronofsky, or new to any sort of avant-garde cinema. I do not suggest that Aronofsky not stick to his creative guns. Films like this create the opportunity in new audiences for reflection, multiple viewings, and exploration into a director's catalog.   

We desperately want Nina to succeed, to break away from her mother, and to become a sexy, confident woman and dancer. Tragically they converge alongside her peaking psychosis.


Not being a mental health professional, nor a dancing expert, nor familiar with Swan Lake, I shall mostly leave alone those realms in this analysis.


Thomas

Thomas and Nina

Thomas, the French director of Nina's ballet company, is a womanizing, smug, ass who produces great performances. A swan skeleton decorates his office while vaginally-themed art dominates his flat. When we first meet Thomas, he appears silently, standing in the rehearsal space's stadium seating. The dancers immediately disrobe, to a certain extent. We now know his power, and what he expects of dancers, both on and away from the dance floor. He quickly, though incredulously, pegs Nina as a virgin. Both Thomas and Lily, multiple times, tell Nina to loosen up. Thomas instructs Nina, "Go home and touch yourself." Nina allows herself such pleasure when she wakes in the morning in her bedroom, that is, until she notices her mother in the bedroom chair. When Nina eventually succeeds, Thomas transfers his paternalistic nickname for Beth onto Nina, "My Little Princess."


Nina's Hallucinations


Within the context of Black Swan, Nina's hallucinations demand attention and explanation. Two hallucinations deserve the most focus because they confuse, and because understanding them is essential to understanding reality within the film. When Nina and Lily are first introduced, Lily foreshadows, "Are you freaking out? I've been losing my mind."

Nina Hallucinating a Night with Lily

Nina's night out with Lily happened pretty much as shown... until, when Nina's is walking out of the club, Lily sticks her head out the exit door and calls after her. Lily calling after Nina outside the club is the first moment shown that night that never happened. The cab ride seduction never happened because Lily was never in the cab--it was Nina's fantasy. Lily spent that night with Tom, the dolt she met at the club; therefore, she could not have been in the cab. A second viewing of the club dancing scene shows not just Nina's physical comfort with Lily, but it also shows them eventually becoming virtually indistinguishable from one another on the dance floor, a bit of visual foreshadowing that helps us explain Nina's hallucination. Lily's actions in the apartment, particularly the mouthing of Nina's words as Nina speaks them (see Fight Club (1999)), reinforce that Lily was never inside the apartment. Through the hallucination, Nina progresses toward becoming more sexual and more independent, but, sadly, her psychosis is becoming more manifest.


Second is the broken mirror episode during the opening night performance. We see Nina attack Lily, stabbing her with a mirror shard. But, like all the previous times when Nina thought Lily was there yet saw a flash of herself (Nina's self) in Lily's place, we know that Lily once again is not really there. Nina of course has stabbed herself instead, and I believe it to be the work of her psychosis. 

Nina's Psychosis

There are other hallucinations one can misunderstand without compromising one's understanding of the film. Nina's cuticle mangling of course never happened--Aronofsky was kind enough to show us the reality, to let us in early on her penchant for hallucination. The woman who appears twice, once over Nina's bathtub and once in a corner of Nina's apartment... I have no idea who that is. My best guess is that she is Nina's mother, Erica, at the age when Erica retired to give birth to Nina. Nina seeing Lily and Thomas having sex off-stage was Nina's paranoid delusion. Nina's several mirror hallucinations suggests that Nina probably has some sort of dissociative or schizophrenic disorder. Last, and remarkably unimportant, is the final scene involving Beth and Nina. Though we see Beth self-mutilate, we also see Nina drop the bloody weapon as she flees into the hospital's elevator. It seems odd that Nina would not be tracked down by police before the end of the opening night performance, but I am willing to allow that such investigations take more time. More important, not only do I believe Nina stabbed Beth, it is also at this point in the film that I first suspected that Nina pushed Beth into traffic, causing her hospitalization in the first place. That last tantalizing question may be unanswerable, but it is worthy of a good smoke.   


Leitmotifs


Though not in the strict musical sense, Aronofsky's mise-en-scène uses leitmotifs of color to convey Nina's descent into psychosis, into sexuality, into the Black Swan. One is tempted to cry "cliché!" if not "racism!" with the white equals good, black equals bad formula, but Aronofsky can be excused easily, for the color palette set forth by Tchaikovsky's ballet is rather unavoidable. The embodiment of sexual confidence, Lily is always shown in black.  Nina is mostly in white or other light colors (including a very light-colored pink overcoat). Nina's first appearance in grey happens in Nina's first rehearsal in which she makes an attempt to liberate her sexuality, resulting in Thomas's funny in-joke, asking Natalie Portman's husband, "Would you fuck this girl?" 

Nina first dresses in black at the dance club, appropriately in a naughty little number supplied by Lily, which, along with similar hair, allows them to become indistinguishable on the dance floor. Indeed, during the club dancing scene we get a flash of Nina in her Black Swan makeup--her transformation has begun. Later, in the cab ride hallucination, we also notice Nina's black pants, perfect for her first sexual touching by someone else. We ultimately see her in her fully-clad black glory in opening night's second act as the Black Swan.

Lily, Hair Down

Hair also plays an important role in shaping our understanding of what Nina is feeling. We first notice a difference in hair when Nina sees Lily rehearsing with her hair down, something atypical among dancers thus far in the film. The night that Lily comes to take Nina out partying, we see Nina with her hair down already. She is ready to go. As mentioned above, the hair, along with the matching black outfits, allow Nina and Lily to become indistinguishable on the club's dance floor--Nina has absorbed Lily's level of sexuality. The symbolism of literally letting one's hair down may be too obvious, but it bloody works. Who among us was not immediately drawn to the hair-down dancing of Lily in that rehearsal?


Conclusion

Nina, Perfect

Nina's triumph is the peaking of her talent, her sexuality, and of her psychosis. Thomas asks as she lies bleeding, "What did you do?!" Nina responds, mostly to herself, "I felt it. I was perfect." I do not remember a film with so tragic a triumph. Even The Wrestler's Randy "The Ram" Robinson was tragic, but ended without triumph. Denouements with the simultaneous feelings of regret and success tend to be found in war movies. I welcome suggestions of films with similar endings.


Aronofsky continues to make challenging, brilliant films.  Here is to hoping his productivity moves toward Woody Allen's and away from Terrence Malick's (or at least the Malick of old), while continuing with the same level of innovation and creativity he has always given his grateful audiences.

Trailer to Black Swan (2010)