Black Swan

So it's been a couple of weeks since I've seen The Black Swan and I've calmed down a little bit. Thoughts a bit jumbled post-hoc, but here's what I thought, in no particular order.

First, that I can a bit callously but affectionately think of it as descended from Fight Club, for obvious reasons, but also from Full Metal Jacket (so I'll call it "Full Feather Tutu"). At its core, you had a message of an artist -- or a human, or a soldier -- pursuing the obliteration of self to give a truly selfless performance. As a performer, and an off-and-on Kendoka, I related very viscerally to her experience. How many times has a music teacher, coach, whatever, shouted at me to turn off my brain, to stop watching myself and just let my heart move me? At least, like, three.

At a high level, there were a number of surprises in the cast, all good. Characters came in with clear "entrances", and there were subtle, creepy inside jokes based around the casting. Winona Ryder's character is stolen from; Winona's shoplifting fiasco was massively publicized. Murders real or imagined; Mila Kunis' role in the baffling sequel to American Psycho, which originalliy featured similar ambiguity. Barbara Hershey's clearly broken character, and her visibly jarring face, subsequent to obvious plastic surgery, perhaps raising a question of a perpetuation of a cycle of abuse. And while there was no outright discussion of anorexia, the camera lingers for a moment on the loose skin and musculature of an older dancer's back midway through the film. It's impossible not to think of both character and actress, in that moment. Conflation of life and art was a loudly telegraphed theme of this movie. Perhaps unintentional was the subsequent disclosure of Natalie Portman's pregnancy by and engagement to the film's choreographer Millepieds.

Obviously this extended to the whole structure of the film, which followed most of the same dramatic beats as the ballet Swan Lake, which is sketched out by the choreographer -- as played by Vincent Cassel, whom I'd mostly known through his roles in Ocean's Twelve and Irreversible, but who's also Monica Bellucci's husband -- early enough in the film for the audience to play along with the game.

Body Horror was all over this movie. Darren Aronovsky is a huge fan of that idea -- Requiem for a Dream was wrapped around it all the way through. Interestingly, it intersects with Kafka's approach in a funny sort of way, with rather than a man becoming a cockroach, a woman becoming a swan. This invites consideration of the Ugly Duckling, although the "ugliness" of the Black Swan herself was actually a sort of repressed carnality, which then calls up all those questions so tritely trodden on in The Da Vinci Code, about sacred versus worldly, religious and intellectual orthodoxy versus the "evil" impulse of human lust. As for the "horror" itself, the movie had some amazing gimmicky shock/jump moments; tension was maintained with fairly expert acumen.

Three more things I want to touch on: first, the question of Black Swan in the context of Nicholas Taleb. Something totally unpredictable? But maybe also something you planned to happen and chose to maximize? Something only possible in "extremistan"? Something real but almost never really glimpsed? A question of a fading elite, with diminishing crowds in the ballet perhaps representing a "thanksgiving event"?

Second, the transformation. How real was Lily? Was her tattoo something that could ever REALLY be allowed on a dancer? Why did she have a tattoo so explicitly tied to a single ballet; didn't she think she'd ever dance The Nutcracker? You'd need a lot of concealer to tread that (though I suppose if Nina could have covered her scratchy scarring/emerging feathers, Lily could have obscured her wings). Pursuant to that there's the amazing transformation Natalie helps Nina undergo, by totally changing the character's physicality in the last scene of the movie, fully embracing the character and disappearing into it, but doing so twice -- both Natalie AND Nina disappear, leaving only this alien creature of supreme sensuality and power. Chilling.

And the third thing, the name "Nina". Yeah, I know it means "child". I know it's one of Columbus' three ships. I also know it's slang (at least, Dr. Dre uses it thus) for a 9mm automatic pistol, a concealed, dangerous weapon. But the weirdest thing is how it lines up with two Ninas in my own life: one of whom is a dancer, and another of whom has undergone a dramatic physical transformation. This movie is full of weird resonance with the real world and the world-within-a-world of the Swan Lake ballet's story. It's only fitting that it should still be stuck in my head weeks after I've seen it.