In The Wrestler, Aronofsky gave the audience an entertainer past his prime, wallowing in the remnant glow of stardom, listening to the death-rattle din of a once mighty cheering section. In Black Swan, we are offered a glimpse at Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman), the performer who teeters on the precarious apex of her prime, one younger, fresher face away from plummeting to obscurity, like Beth Macyntire (Winona Ryder), the prima ballerina Sayers replaced as the lead in Swan Lake.
This competitive dynamic isn’t new, and Aronofsky offers nothing novel to the conflict between the once-prized and the currently-prized, but he is wise to focus on the maintenance of being prized. As a ballerina, Sayers is consumed by dance, and more so by the pursuit of perfection. Like the rotating figurine of the music box next to her bed, Sayers’ every movement is methodical, clean, and porcelain-like. And, this is where Aronofsky goes a bit deeper than the bulimic-based narratives of many ballerina tales.
Clad in pinks and whites throughout the film, Sayers lives a pre-pubescent girl’s dream, with flower-laden curtains and blankets covering her room, a melodic music box on the night stand, dozens of plush, smiling stuffed animals at bedside and a doting mother who tucks her in at night. In this perpetual childhood we see the stymied confidence and social retardation of Nina, who has isolated herself in a mother-constructed world of dance, her sole purpose to achieve perfection.
Sayers’ perfection overtakes her as a character and leaves the audience feeling as if they are watching a marionette on stage, pulled to and fro by preternatural strings, following the whims of a dozen other agents. One agent in particular is Nina’s mother Erica Sayers (played magnificently Barbara Hershey), a former ballerina who had to retire when she became pregnant. Ostensibly, this narrative creates the common theme of resentment toward a child that impeded previous success, but Black Swan takes this a bit further. Erica is certainly resentful and vacillates between encouraging Nina’s success while passive aggressively rooting for her failure as she suggests that Nina should be in line for the role of the White Swan because she had “been there long enough,” suggesting both that seniority outweighs ability and that Nina has toiled long enough as an underling.
At the same time, Erica Sayers brings to focus the primary theme of Black Swan – one that illustrates an artists’ inability to realize that he or she has begun to descend the aforementioned apex. This is seen primarily when Nina’s mother warns her against throwing everything away like “[she] did” by “getting pregnant,” which is clearly a shot at Nina, but to which Nina responds, “You were twenty-nine,” implying that Erica was already past her prime and was ready to be cut loose. What’s doubly interesting within this exchange is that it conveys how cognizant these artists are of the numerical age follows them around as if they are tattooed with this prescription on the foreheads.
As opposed to being pristine, porcelain dancers, Black Swan gives us products with shelf-lives that often do not correlate to ability but to beauty and familiarity, and it is in familiarity that a number of dancers seem to find their demise as illustrated by Macyntire, who was the lead dancer in Thomas’ (Vincent Cassel) previous production. Her retirement is forced and is unforeseen by Beth as she trashes her own dressing room before storming out of the studio. What’s more, Thomas gives the public announcement of Beth’s retirement while introducing Nina as the new prima ballerina. This leads to a tragic fate for Beth who decides to stumble in to traffic. Of course, among the ballerinas, this accident is rationalized as a drunken lack of coordination, but the voluntary voyage into oncoming traffic – and the subsequent pins that are placed in her fibula and tibia – provides Beth with a personal justification why she will never dance again. Rejected and scorned, Thomas has not prevented her from dancing; instead, Beth has replaced rejection with violence and disfigurement, and in this manner, her shattered legs mirror Erica’s transference of rejection onto Nina.
In such a fragile existence, there has to be a catalyst to push Nina to look over the edge, and in Black Swan, this catalyst is Lily (Mila Kunis), a dancer Thomas has imported from Los Angeles, one with a flair for the unconventional, a non-traditional ballerina who doesn’t strive for perfection but moves with guile and cunning, a perfect replacement for Nina who is tasked with not only playing the serenely innocent White Swan in this production but also the seductive Black Swan. Without getting too much into the events that unfold within the friendship (?) of Nina and Lily – I’m sure you’ve all seen the steamy clips on other film-related sites – I’ll just note that Kunis does a fine job as Portman’s doppelganger, a sexier, more fluid dancer drives Sayers in a variety of directions. Some real, some imaginary, all enthralling.
DYL MAG Score: 8
