[Some edits done 10/2/12 and on 10/18/12. Not sure if more may come.]
I. Intro from an “Establishment stiff”
This whole three-part blog entry may have struck you a mix of ways, positive as well as negative. It certainly turned out more complex and consuming to put together than I expected. But this echoes the nature of the stories—indeed, the life challenges, not just the edited stories—of young women with their troubles such as these movies try to treat. And part of the problem of these pictures of troubles—whether you field them in real life or consider them “from afar” in a well-told story—is that they are simply complex, and require empathy, patience, resourcefulness, and (not least) an important sense of where you stand. This matter means how confident you are in yourself; what troubles of another you are willing to help out with, and where you would draw the line; and so on.
I have mentioned the term borderline personality disorder, which is difficult enough to explain to people in contexts in which it is ordinarily relevant (in a psychological clinical setting; a psychological support group; or one-on-one talk); I have consciously referred to it only in passing, and some may argue it doesn’t so neatly relate to some of the movies to which I’ve related it. For further information on this disorder, if you are interested, you can consult Jerome Kroll, M.D.’s The Challenge of the Borderline Patient: Competency in Diagnosis and Treatment (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1988). I have returned to this book again and again, and as dry as it may seem at first look, it is quite elegant and wise when you use it to help organize your thoughts about people with this disorder, when you have been embroiled in dealing with them. A more accessible book, with useful information, is a paperback: Jerold J. Kreisman, M.D., and Hal Straus’s I Hate You—don’t leave me: Understanding the Borderline Personality (New York: Avon Books, 1989).
The movies in this series of blog posts, of course, aren’t meant to be clinically based treatises, and of course these movies can be criticized for taking artistic liberties, for fumbling certain “typical details,” and so on. But we accord the appropriate level of credibility to a given work, or choose to use it as a measure, based on what standards for depicting an issue we have learned to apply, and here we are dealing with a set of movies that are not all in accord in terms of what they want to say about certain problems, what they should say about them, how to comment on something else outside them; and the problems of young women in particular that are looked at here are by no means regular in their manifestations or easily understood by significant others.
Of course, if you feel I am too much an amateur in this area, you can always seek out a bona fide communications professor at the college of your choice, and audit a few courses if you can on relevant topics: she may be a chubby sort who earned her Ph.D. with a 400-page dissertation titled Etymology, Ontology, and the Eternal Quest for Meaning: The difference between “where I’m at” and “where I am” in the lyrics of K.C. and the Sunshine Band’s song “I’m Your Boogie Man.” (Go easy; this is fictional—a joke.)
The rest of us can pause a bit to review: in Marnie we saw how a young woman’s criminal and sexually frigid personality was hard to portray in Hitchcock’s old, “pure cinema” kind of works, but in that movie we saw a mother whose own sordid past left a traumatic mark on the character of Marnie, and Marnie’s mother’s “complex” about men (over the long term and also the more short-term) impinges on Marnie in terms of hindering the latter’s growth in some way. In Rosemary’s Baby: a waif in the big city comes to terms with insidious evil in her life, with a relatable actress making this credible. Cuckoo’s Nest: meaning about life in general can be gleaned from an ostensibly “mere psych-patient” story, albeit one with obvious political points to make. Thirteen—this one seems to me most relevant to Black Swan: a young woman breaks down without realizing it, and seems a vivid cautionary tale about parents’ being attuned to their children’s wrong paths in passing through puberty (or shortly after). White Oleander: a sympathetic young woman’s story of growth in trying circumstances is helped by an intelligent and emotionally articulate actress’s making her character relatable through thick and thin. Rachel Getting Married: a young recovering substance abuser offers an actress (Anne Hathaway) the same challenge as for Alison Lohman in White Oleander, except that here we are awash in spontaneity, color, noise, and a mix of emotional agendas, and we are challenged to piece together “what it is with this girl, and what we are willing to make common cause with” in order to get what we should get out of the movie.
In Black Swan, a young woman is so dedicated to her art of ballet, that in meeting the demands of a newly assigned, hugely challenging part (which she is determined to master), her plate—and the movie’s—is quite full: the trope of a vicariously living and intrusive mother; the relative waif of a girl who must prove at least equal to her challenges; the director’s aim: a moral truth about life is to come out of an ostensibly smaller-scale story; and, not least, a good actress (Natalie Portman) gives us a handle to hold onto to allow the story to speak to us as needed.
But this story, unlike the more “slice-of-life” stories of Thirteen and Rachel Getting Married, has a number of agendas braided into the tapestry that it is, and I don’t think they all work well together. And one of the agendas, that of appealing to a mass audience, I think corrupts what could have been a quite good artistic statement.
II. My somewhat bitchy review
Darren Aronofsky makes “indie”-type films and works to be artistic rather than big-budget, etc.; though he’s made several films, the only other one I saw is The Wrestler (2008), a “cinema verite” type of affair following an over-the-hill professional wrestler who makes the rounds on the lower-tier, “chitlins-circuit” level—whatever you want to call it—in which boxers, apparently has-beens and/or less capable, ply their trade to avid fans in small venues, the whole scene being on the tawdry side, almost like cockfighting. The situation is made worse by the wrestling—which is seen as ludicrous even in cleaner venues—apparently being more apt to be violent and degrading on the lower level. Mickey Rourke, looking like a refugee from such a world already, plays Randy Robinson, a wrestler who aims for a kind of comeback in the form of a rematch with someone he vied with in the 1980s, which is scheduled in a future that becomes foreclosed career-wise after he has had a heart attack; and yet he returns to wrestling, and keeps the rematch date, after frustrations on the interpersonal/family-related level. (Evan Rachel Wood plays his estranged daughter, with whom he has a brief rapprochement.) Long story short: famous for his move the “Ram Jam,” with which he jumps off the ropes onto his opponent for one final crushing blow, Randy, who has a heart attack about midway through the movie, maintains his dedication to his art so far that, in his final self-launch into one more Ram Jam, we fear he is going to have a heart attack that will kill him.
It’s been said (I think by Aronofsky) that Black Swan is a thematic companion to The Wrestler, and in a way this is obvious. Not only are both movies filmed in a sort of “real-time, ‘you are there’” style with the camera following the dogged protagonist, but both concern an artist who is so dedicated to his or her art that he or she engages in self-harm, if not even risking death, in pursuit of some kind of perfection or self-transcendence in this art. Black Swan is a sort of female, upscale companion to the male, blue-collar Wrestler.
I was impressed with Black Swan when I first saw it, though I had some reservations. When I re-viewed it, its flaws became more apparent. As with White Oleander, positive reaction to this movie would appear to split along generational differences. Leonard Maltin (who seems generally to reflect baby boomer tastes) gave it a mere two stars, and called it overwrought; Videohound, which seems to reflect the taste of a demographic of about 30, gave it three and a half stars (or “bones”). The movie does have a saturating esthetic style, with rich visuals and dense sound editing (not just with music, but with musical-type accents underneath visually conveyed, short-term reactions, or underscoring the mood meant to be understood as generally accompanying a certain character).
A ballerina basket case; thematic goal is set
The lead character, a young ballerina named Nina Sayers and played by Natalie Portman, not only is fanatically attached to her art, but appears to have personal vulnerabilities played on by the demands made on her by a newly assigned part: the “Swan Queen” in a performance of Swan Lake being prepared for. She both drives herself and is driven (to some extent, too heavily) by her coach (whatever you call the equivalent in a ballet company) Thomas, played often with a mentorly power by Vincent Cassel; she also has a rival for her position, Lily, played by Mila Kunis, about whom Nina’s paranoia seems to have grounding and reality, and yet not.
In the process of training leading up to the big performance, Nina appears to slowly disintegrate, briefly hallucinating (e.g., seeing her own face on a number of other people), and getting worse in some symptoms of anxiety (or worse) such as a rash on her back that she scratches; and self-cutting of a sort (such as opting apparently to rip a loose cuticle, and ending up ripping a long strip of skin off her finger)—I think this movie handles the topic of cutting less well than does Thirteen (the latter seems to acknowledge that cutting, as it generally is, is an unhealthy means to reduce stress or a sense of self-dislike or “deadness,” while Nina’s version is a little hard to understand as to cause). And Nina even engages in what looks like purging associated with bulimia, if not simply an aptness to puke due to nerves.
I don’t know ballet, and I don’t know Swan Lake, but I think the movie explains these enough to set up premises that really allow the story to be about Nina’s challenge: can she summon up a certain “dark, sensual side” that will allow her to play the Black Swan, to go with the goodly White Swan whose style and moves she has already mastered? As Aronofsky explains in a DVD extra, the movie is about duality of character; and I think one need not understand this in a way so stupid as “split personality” as in this way: the two sides of human nature that Nietzsche called the Apollonian (rational, calm, etc.) and the Dionysian (the impulsive, dark, etc.)—how can we negotiate with both sides in ourselves?
The movie thus sets up a fairly ambitious (and also not terribly original) theme to this extent, but in conformity with the theme of The Wrestler, the question is raised about whether Nina is right to pursue her art as she does even if it means her deterioration. And what, if anything, does she learn by the end?
Movie’s swim through minutiae gives it originality, but raises problems
With the ballet setting and the classical liberal arts theme, this movie could end up coming off as arty-farty, maybe pretentious, but because it delves into the day-to-day of a struggling young person’s life, it would seem to be a sort of riveting look at middle-class striving as well as the theme I have repeatedly visited here, a young female’s personal crisis. We can accept these two latter ideas as a theme (leaving aside the advisory given with some reviews—to the effect of, “This movie is hard to watch,” presumably for the dark theme; I personally don’t have a problem with this sort of thing, never did, but have to prep myself for a specific run through it). We’ve seen how movies like Thirteen and Rachel Getting Married handled “slice-of-life” portrayals of women under strong personal crisis: how well does this movie do? I think a lot of its problems have to do with ambiguity, which to some extent is an important part of its strategy, but which I think it overdoes.
For example: you want to depict dreaming, or someone “seeing something” that isn’t there. Movies have typically handled this adroitly, so the audience knows what is being meant. After all, if a character dreamed something, and this fact is important to the story, it is best to know this as soon as possible, whether it sets up surprise, a laugh, or whatever.
In Rosemary’s Baby, an experience of hypnagogic dreaming is handled in a way that today seems old hat but may have seemed European-edgy in 1968: Rosemary is lying in bed, looking unable to sleep, apparently troubled by the recent suicide of an apartment-house mate; next-door neighbor Minnie Castavet’s voice comes, “Sometimes I wonder how you’re the leader of anything,” but it appears to come out of a nun’s mouth. The image disappears; about here there’s an image of the deceased, bloody neighbor being covered with a sheet; Rosemary is looking restless as she turns over. Minnie continues in an increasing rant, and then a richer image is shown of a nun complaining, in Minnie’s voice, pointing to window-bricking-up work in a church or other Catholic building; as the nun rants, a male repair worker comes solicitously over toward Rosemary, who is again lying in her bed as in the awake scene, and she starts anxiously explaining apologetically to the worker, as if she mistakes him for a church functionary: she seems to explain out of a guilty conscience.
I think one big problem Black Swan poses is that we can’t always tell what Nina dreamed or imagined, especially when it would be crucial to understanding where the story stands. If it turns out she has imagined more than one would like the story to contain as real, then it makes her look more psychotic (growing so) than it would seem best for the story.
Script-based stuff is OK: basic milieu and characters
I recall that Olympic athletes at one time were analyzed for their “narcissism” (as if work toward achievement didn’t involve some kind of heightened self-concern); whether this is a fair assessment to make about ballerinas, certainly the movie takes it as a given that the potential for this is there. The movie is good, I think, in portraying a world that seems cloistered, if not claustrophobic, while being much about self-image (striving for a certain perfection in oneself). To this end, mirrors are key to imagery; while mirrors are a hackneyed method in movies, as Aronofsky admits in commentary, he aimed for a more original use of them, and I think this is (when not involving digital retouching) one of the more effective uses of “special effects” in the movie. Many scenes use mirrors that tend to add a certain beauty and sense of space, and yet also suggest fragmentation, dislocation—heightening a sense of claustrophobia. This I applaud as a method. And an early scene introducing us to Nina and colleagues, with quick-cutting amid sometimes-catty talk about the aging star Beth, shows how mirrors can create excitement and articulate the orienting “drama” helpfully.
Things get weird with the mirror method late in the movie, when a repeated mirror image shows Nina to be in a different position/motion than she really is—which is meant to reflect her fragile psychology. This gets to pile on this thematic motif a bit thick, but it’s tolerable.
Barbara Hershey, looking definitely 25 years older than she did in Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters, is the doting (if not suffocating) mother—a bit trite as the mother who couldn’t make the big time in ballet, so she’s vicariously living her dreams through the struggling Nina. (The music that accompanies her is a somewhat odd, rhythmic, Middle Eastern type, almost suggesting “the atmosphere freezes when the intense Mother Dearest is on hand”).
Winona Ryder, who is about 40, plays Beth McIntyre, the over-the-hill ballerina whom Nina idolizes, and who is struggling with the twilight of her career through drinking (turning up in Halloween-face mascara in a large reception hall, to confront Nina with soused voice—Ryder still has that girlish timbre to her voice). Beth ends up with broken leg in a hospital after running into traffic following the drunken reception-hall scene. Sometimes in a hospital bed she looks like an at-repose version of the dark spook she ends up becoming when the movie takes a turn for the more horror-like.
So Nina doesn’t lack for a range of standards-imposers, if not foils/stumbling blocks with their own ways of threatening her own prospects: fawning, sometimes grumpy mother; jealous trailblazer on her way down; and Mila Kunis’s competitor for the Black Swan role. Add the random other ballerinas who engage in their own competitive bitterness toward Nina. Nina’s not only hemmed in by mirrors but by other females whose motives regarding her do not comprise all unconditional love.
The dramatic quotient is high, and Nina’s health problems certainly come in spades; in fact, you begin to wonder—as you didn’t with the broken-down Randy of The Wrestler—why, if the Swan Queen role is creating such a nervous mess out of Nina, why doesn’t she drop out of it? Are ballerinas really that fanatical?
Lead actresses, here, invigorate roles of younger women
So, the movie lays it on thick: Nina’s problems, Nina’s striving—and I haven’t even looked at, and will defer discussion of this, how Nina seems perpetually packaged as a “girl” by her significant others: bedroom full of stuffed animals, “depersonalizing” ballerina on a music box (used somewhat tritely in a symbolic way), people calling her “sweet girl.” Nina’s role model Beth was called by Thomas “Little Princess,” about as ambiguous as to whether it’s endearing or degrading as is much else per the agenda of this film, and it seems (to at least one in the story) as if maybe Nina is up for this “title.”
And the visual style could be called equally “thick”: almost kaleidoscopic imagery, musical touches sometimes seeming like overdone rouge: to a large extent, the heavy esthetic approach of this film may be a matter of taste, appealing more to the young than to the older.
It’s been said the performances are worth seeing, if nothing else: and Natalie Portman is good; indeed, all generally are. Portman has the hardest role and handles it well. I’ve seen her in several movies, including Zach Braff’s Garden State
Also, though Portman’s role—and that of Mila Kunis—seem to be those of a hopeful 21-year-old, Portman (age about 30) seems a little old for the part. She sometimes looks tired in the way of a thirty-something. Kunis, who is about 29, seems a little old for her part, still gets away with it with her youthful air. Portman (check out the DVD interview) seems like the kind of young woman who can wow you with a dissertation on Flaubert, while Kunis seems much more equipped to throw the good party (though her speedy talking in a DVD spot makes her seem as if she’s on her 10th can of Jolt).
Sexual theme—in its minor respect
The biggest problem with this film, I think—and what really inspires me to want to come back to it in the future to reassess it (because I’m increasingly inclined to agree with Leonard Maltin on it)—involves its sexual themes, which I presume the producers and maybe Aronofsky saw they had to weave heavily into its tapestry to get a big audience—a reflection on our times, I think, showing how far we’ve come from the casual and relatively unpretentious aims of Thirteen in 2003.
The issue of a “work mentor” or “career mentor” sexually coming on to a young female underling—whether or not some “didactic” objective is intended, such as to “spur the Black Swan in her”—is tricky. Of course, if this were the type of work environment as a bank or government office or the like, then if Thomas stuck his tongue down Nina’s gullet under the guise of being an innovative mentor, Nina (or her equivalent) would slam him with a sexual harassment lawsuit so fast, his dance tights would snap like a banjo string. But the arts fields—and even more “professional” media workplaces—are a little different. Of course, how much one is apt to engage in a little sexual boundary-crossing depends on the individual, with more general excuses about how “the arts are apt to make such juices flow” only going so far (depending on who wants to buy into them). Does the depiction of Thomas trying to jump-start Nina’s “inner Black Swan” with come-ons deviate from how it really is in ballet? I don’t know. Does the movie probably take it a little far, to carry a sort of prurient interest? Probably. I don’t want to sound like a prude, and again, this may reflect generational differences in taste, but I think the sexual aspect so far in this film seems a little heavy.
Sexual theme in its major respect: a big lapse?
Where things really go out of bounds, in my opinion, concerns the character of Lily, “filling in from San Francisco
OK, Lily is a competitor with Nina; Nina becomes afraid Lily is trying to take the Swan Queen role away from her. Lily seems so much a natural for the Black Swan role, as Thomas un-subtly points out to Nina.
When Lily invites Nina to a night out—as coincidence would have it, playing on Nina’s wanting to get out from under her mother’s suffocating embrace—we first are in a dim club: dinnertime, chitchat. Kunis as Lily is good in basic-American young-woman-speak: meanings not just with simple words, but an imploring tilt of the head, or a change to wordless skepticism. White capsules of uncertain provenance come out of a cigarette case. Nina begs off. Time passes, circumstances change; Lily with two guys, drinks, another imploring to come and party; “You want to go home to Mommy?” Then we are in Thirteen territory. Sweaty palms, Nina cozying up to Lily (lesbianism?). Colorful/strobe-lighted dance floor scene…Nina making out with a fella in the can. Nina and Lily hurrying out into the cold night to a taxi.
Once home, Nina, drunk or whatever, brags to her mother about her sexually adventurous night. Slap in face. Nina to her bedroom, with Lily in tow; two-by-four is placed to keep door closed. Then comes what for some is the movie’s piece de resistance.
Shakespeare wasn’t merely whimsical in spicing some of his plays with the likes of penis puns; he had to keep the attention of the blue-collar types of his time, the ones munching on chestnuts in the pit or whatever contained the rabble at The Globe, to keep the books balanced. So it has gone since, movie-makers knowing this all too well: however artistic the tapestry, it must contain a thread of sex or violence to endear itself to those who are less like Henry James and yet still with money to spend.
Indeed, Black Swan raked in $329,398,046 (the latest available figures, and worldwide, I assume), according to a Wikipedia article. This is several times the box office totals for all of White Oleander, Thirteen, and Rachel Getting Married, combined, according to their respective Wikipedia pages.
So when a small-budget indie film’s distributor is the likes of Fox Searchlight, owned by Fox, obviously some marketing types are going to want to know what to season this kind of film with, in order to be able to shake the shekels out of Joey Beer Ball, Tyler Mosh Pit, and Jared Mouth-Breather. So…the famous lesbian sex scene—
OK, it fit with the obvious themes of the double, with Nina’s fear of being replaced by her rival…but did we have to have such “you are there” sound effects that they make you think, “I’ve got to go, you girls need your privacy”? I watched this whole scene once, but with subsequent viewings of the movie, I chose this scene to be when I went to use the plumbing, or put the laundry in the dryer. Call me a wimp, but not my cup of tea.
(By the way, Lily’s line, after she has spoken as if Nina only had fantasized about her, an avid “Was I good?,” brings the only bark of a laugh from a watcher of this film—but it also echoes a George Carlin joke from the early 1970s.)
Redeeming features, remaining qualms
This I felt was lacking in taste, or was a blunt marketing sop. The other feature of the film I thought was odd was (via special effects) having Nina turn into a bird—with backwards-jointed legs at one point, and stretching neck at another, and her rash turning into growing feathers near the climax, so when she completes the Black Swan dance, she looks positively ready for photoing by the National Audubon Society. This seemed to me a concession to the current obsession with fantasy figures and tropes, across all sorts of arts genres, that I don’t think suits this film. (It’s as necessary a putting a cod piece on top of someone’s head, I think.) I think we understand Nina’s emotional breakdown and the burden of the Black Swan role without the full complement of CGI feathers. (You know what should be a small art film is in a little trouble when the DVD extra about the earnest CGI programmer talking about how he made the feathers for the film seems more interesting in its way than it does as an element of the film.)
By the end, Nina has apparently killed Lily—her dark rival—which somehow has set off her final achievement of the Black Swan “spirit”—and then she finds Lily is still alive. Well, where did the piece of broken glass go? Into her own stomach, it turns out. Hence her White Swan costume glows unseemly red with her draining blood. The artist has reached what she feels is perfection by the end of the premiere performance, but lying on the mattress to which she has dropped in her character’s death, she seems almost to be dying as Nina. “I felt it—I’m perfect. … I was perfect.”
And when she discovered that the glass was in her own stomach, Portman gave her a poignant sense of realization that—I think this is the most “spiritually edifying” point the movie conveys—Nina has reached her goal of perfection on a stubbly road of self-harm: a paradox, yet—as we know from some schools of thought in psychology (such as Kleinian therapy), a return to integrity and resolution of a breaking-down personality comes with a shift from the “paranoid/schizoid position” to the “depressive position” (Kleinian terms)—a state of greater compromise or adjustment to the world, and reached by allowing yourself to feel pain. In one form or another, the latter part of this--the restorative nature of pain, or getting to truly feel your pain--is an old theme, not just within psychology but also within literature.
But did the movie have to have so many special effects, ambiguities, red herrings, and so on to get there? And did Nina really have sex with Lily or not?
An interesting film, worth probing for its meanings, but with a little too much tinsel of atmospheric underscoring, ambiguities, and red herrings…and with a sex scene that strikes me as a big lump of indigestible dumpling in the stomach after an otherwise intriguing meal.
Maybe I’m getting too old. Maybe Thirteen was suited to my standards of what makes a stirring story of a young Odyssey-pursuer in murky conditions, but Black Swan is for the younger set still ripe for mixing it up sweatily on the dance floor, more into “sound and fury” than into signifying…whatever.
Black Swan takeaway: a densely sensual look at young woman’s severe personal trial, amid a history of the damaging-and-exalting relation between an artist and her artistic ideals, is compromised by pornographic elements meant to appeal to the “lowest common denominator” in its audience, and by a lame-brained fantasy aspect.
New movie theme entries to follow:
Movie break: Win Win (2011), Tom McCarthy’s pleasant look at a lawyer’s life
and
Served. Witnessed. Have a Nice Day: The Coen brothers’ edifying portrayal of practicing lawyers in their movies
