I saw Black Swan recently, which is a supernatural pseudo-thriller set in the world of ballet with lesbians overtones. Which, yeah, is a mouthful as far as genres go. Darren Aronofsky, the director of Swan, previously knocked out movies like The Fountain, Requiem for a Dream, and Pi. So the man's pretty familiar with every subsection of that aforementioned genre, except maybe ballet.
I loved Black Swan. Natalie Portman's performance was out-of-her-mind good. If you ever watch sports, they like to use the term "in the zone" to describe a fantastic sports performer playing at a near-perfect level. I'm a Packers fan, and the perfect descriptor of "in the zone" for a sports performer was Aaron Rodgers in the Atlanta Falcons game. Natalie Portman in Black Swan was the cinematic equivalent. She's always been an excellent actress, but Black Swan was so far beyond anything she's done previously that it was like seeing her for the first time.
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And, as always, Aronofsky is a truly excellent director. He's always had a gift for translating an emotional idea into a visual one: check out Requiem for a Dream's pupil dilation close-ups for one great example, and that fantastic prologue scene in Swan for another.
But in terms of movies that I liked in this Oscar season, I still have to give a nod to both Inception and The Social Network. Inception is a completely different kind of movie for this argument, however, so I'll reduce the discussion to just The Social Network.
The last time I discussed The Social Network I talked about how it took me a few separate viewings for me to discern an underlying meaning, and how I appreciate there being an underlying purpose to the art that I consume. But Black Swan was much the exact opposite: I discerned a purpose (I won't be arrogant enough to call it the purpose) to the movie's existence as soon as the movie's finale scene faded to black.
Essentially the message I inferred from Black Swan was this: Creating perfect art will kill you every time.
That's a heady message to communicate, to be sure, but the fact that I picked up on it-- and I'm sure many others did too-- so quickly and easily, made it seem to be indescribably less than The Social Network.
I think this is essentially because of effort. I had to put time-- and wonderfully enjoyable time it was-- into The Social Network. I kept coming back to it in my mind, turning around the characters' actions and ideas, and just thinking about that movie. But until the idea for this blog post struck me, I hadn't thought once more about Black Swan.
By offering me an understandable answer immediately after its conclusion, Black Swan ruined its own rewatch value. By making itself essentially one long, easily-understood extended metaphor, I didn't visit the idea any further. By contrast, The Social Network's meaning was subtle and hidden, and I had to plumb its depths to dig it out, an experience both rewarding and satisfying.
See, I disagree. I felt there are many messages within Black Swan, but the main one to me was less about the fatal nature of perfect art (which paints artists as victims) so much as the impossibility of a perfect identity.
ReplyDelete*Spoilers*
It's only by killing herself (or "letting herself go") that she's able to deliver a perfect performance, but it must be noted that this perfection is not her as herself, but rather as a new and false persona. A great deal is made of the film's dualities of light and dark and love and lust and art and pressure. But what took me time to consider and connect (this is where the work came in for me) was the amount of the film that is spent contrasting between real and fake.
In her psychosis, it becomes increasingly difficult to know what is real and what isn't. Consider her mother in the audience at the end of the film. Is she really there, particularly after what may or may not have happened to her hand?
Consider Winona Ryder's character. Many people have pointed to her performance as the weak point of the film, and at first I agreed. But I now believe the melodrama of her character is intentional; she's not just a cautionary tale for Portman's character, she is yet another version of herself.
The mother, Ryder, and Mila Kunis all can be seen as extreme versions of how Portman perceives herself or fears she will become. In one way or another, each one of them both attracts and terrifies her. And each one is subject to Portman's delusions. The mother's voice follows her, the voice of pressure and insecurity, and the mother's very presence is a reminder of what Portman is afraid awaits her future. She has sexual fantasies of Kunis that turn to paranoid mania. And what of Ryder? Her position in the company is the one Portman covets, but we have to wonder to what extent her interactions with Portman are real. Does she really stab herself in the face? Not to mention the denial the characters seem to be in about her mental state when she walks in front of the car.
Consider the dance that opens the film, a perfect production that exists in a vacuum, the lighting harsh and obviously false, the staging adding to the disingenuous nature. This scene implies the artistic beauty and personal meaning of performance art but also its inherent falsehood. This makes her performance later, when she envisions herself becoming a swan as she dances, all the more surreal and striking, so that the viewer, watching the opening dace sequence again, finds it somehow more real and graspable despite its obvious fallibility.
In short, if anything, Black Swan isn't saying that perfect art is fatal, but rather that it is impossible.
A really well thought out response, but it makes me feel as though certain implications were not executed like I would have wished. Namely, your last line is kind of what I was trying to imply. Aronofsky killed off his character that created perfect art; thus, perfect art is impossible.
ReplyDeleteSecond, I never meant to imply that my reading was the ONLY interpretation of Black Swan's story. There is, for sure, a lot going on in that film. I just intended to note that because I did not have to dig in to find a meaning, it made me less inclined to dig in at all. Especially in comparison to Sorkin's work.
Thirdly, I didn't mean to discredit Black Swan in any way. It's a fantastic film, it was just of interest to me how quickly it slipped from my mind, especially in comparison to some of the other films I loved this year.