Black Swan: She Didn't Have to Die

Black Swan ( 2010, D. Aronofsky director, Natalie Portman, Nina) has gotten a lot of attention – a lot of hype, some praise, some criticism, several Oscar nominations. My viewing companion said that he really didn’t like it because he couldn’t get beyond its gimmick-y horror movie aspect. It’s true that I was put off by a similar criticism in at least one review, and there were definitely times where I thought it was just too over the top in that regard. The tradition of Rosemary’s Baby, as more than one critic has said. Then there’s the controversy about its place in the tradition of ballet movies. Is this just a stereotyped rehashing of clichés – the alleged self-destructiveness of the dancer, the tyrannical dance master, the myth of the Red Shoes, the descent into madness?

But the aspect that I found most compelling, that spoke most to me, is one that I have not seen discussed by others: the way in which this film participated in the representation of the woman artist and how it reiterated some of the destructive clichés about women artists’ relation to their art and to those around them. I believe that in this film Aronofsky raised some valid issues, despite in the end, re-inscribing the image of the self-destructive woman artist.

It is to his credit that some of the alleged horror sequences were driven by the plot, despite instances in which they might have been over the top. The sequence towards the end, where Nina is dancing the black swan and with each passage her arms mutate into wings, for example, can be viewed as similar to Julie Taymor’s approach in her film Frida when she tried to show how what Kahlo saw was transformed into what she painted.

Where does art come from, and how does the artist make it manifest are important questions raised in this movie. Nina had no problem in dancing the white swan in a convincing way, but in order to dance the role of the black swan she had to access something inside of herself, an aspect that she didn’t know, of which she was afraid, and perhaps for her own good had kept hidden. Nina was an extremely competent dancer; and while technical competency provides art’s building blocks, art is not a series of mechanical moves. Transformative magic is always necessary to push vision into something beyond the commonplace.

While the “pain” of ballet may be a trite truism in some stories and movies, it is also important to emphasize, as Aronofsky does, the rigorous nature of the medium as opposed to its “pink princess” aspects. Little girls are captivated with the sugar-coated “ballet dancer” reality. Nina was attracted to that view, as indicated through her bedroom full of stuffed animals, the music box with its figurine, the frosted cake with its pink flowers her mother bought to celebrate. Ballet dancing is a discipline. It’s hard work. It’s physically demanding. But does that mean that a successful practitioner needs to push herself to self-destruction?

The film also explored issues around women and their sexuality, particularly the ways in which women artists can draw upon their sexual core in order to inform their work. Nina was a “nice girl” as opposed to Lily – a “bad girl,” i.e. one who experimented with sex and drugs. While I found it somewhat offensive and intrusive that Thomas Leroy, the company’s director, told Nina to touch herself, sexuality has been a boon, a muse for the male artist. For women in our culture sex is still dangerous. Even though the mores have changed so that little girls have now been prematurely sexualized, it still isn’t normal to show adult women pursuing their own desire, as men do theirs, and especially not to constructive ends. Although the film showed that the experience and exploration of sexuality can positively enhance a woman artist’s ability to create, here too, the message was that sexuality led to destructiveness.

Which brings us to the point – she didn’t have to die. If one considers that the film was an evocation and exploration of Nina’s unstable mental state as she tried to access this deep internal space to expand her artistic capabilities. AND. There were many times when her perceived visions or actions turned out to be hallucinations – or concretizations of fantasy (we all have weird, possibly destructive mental images that thank goodness do not actually occur….). Why did the one where she plunged the glass in her gut but kept on dancing and in fact turned out a remarkable performance – why did that one need to be any more “real” than her delusion about having killed Lily, the metaphor of silencing the critical, competitive voice of her rival? Why did the protagonist have to be offered as a martyr? Why did she have to kill herself? Why couldn’t the ending show that she turned out a gut-wrenching performance and lived??