Black Swan
Jan. 25th, 2011 01:32 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
arf_she_saidI take back what I said about Black Swan being old-school Hollywood camp. The excess is there, yes, the big female performances, the heavy-handed symbolism, the archetypes -- stage mother, aging actress, temptress, seducer/abuser.
But it's too interior a film to be camp in that sense. These figures are not unruly women, they're categories filtered through a mind under increasing strain. Watching it again I see how completely Nina's psychotic break overwhelms and dictates the movie. Cracks appear early, before the pressure really starts to mount. The paintings move the first time you see them. Her shadow haunts her in the subway (embodied and reflected) before she even hears they'll be doing Swan Lake.
Mirrors and reflective surfaces (present of course in almost every shot) hitch themselves effectively to the hoary theme of white/black selves/doppelgangers; on top of that, they do good work doubling and fracturing people (mostly Nina). But they also serve the larger purpose of systematically undermining reality right from the start -- there are some shots at the beginning where you think you're facing Nina, but you're really facing her reflection; her back is to you. But it doesn't matter; maybe we never even meet a singular Nina. This has been brewing for a long time.
Nick at Nick's Flick Picks has a great review, but I don't buy that Aronofsky doesn't "direct outward from her gut", that he's too distanced from her. On the contrary, Aronofsky is not interested in anything except how Nina experiences the world and herself.* We are in Nina's head more than any Aronofsky protagonist since Pi.
Literally: we start inside Nina's dream, and we continue inside her hallucinations -- he never betrays her by sitting us outside, watching her react to nothing. They don't shirk POV (including the penultimate shot), and those long following sequences, with Nina centre-frame, are not steadicam but handheld, so that the frame dips and rises with every step; theres a similar effect in the rehearsals. During the rehearsals, we hold on Cassel, his reactions, because that's what Nina is dwelling on in that moment. We hear Tchaikovsky constantly, even in scenes where it doesn't match tonally to what's happening on screen, because it's also running through Nina's mind. The club scene captures perfectly the stroboscopic experience of intoxication and the coming-to-self as you sober up. The last half hour is an exercise in hallucination, the internal becoming external: psyches split, tears become makeup, wounds breathe, and finally reintegration happens.
For all its bells and whistles, the direction is completely straightforward; it has one mandate: to write Nina large. That's a pretty solid coathanger off which to hang a movie, right? That foundation is how come he gets away with pushing it so far into a freefall mishmash of referentiality, genre staples, melodrama and horror and delirium. That excess gestures towards camp (and winks at kitch) but there's no irony in its sincerity, even when that sincerity is amusing; the viewer relationship it cultivates is narrower, bounded, based in vicarious experience. Nina is pressed into every corner of the movie; her experience determines every second. How many films have their protagonists' brains -- their guts -- splattered across every frame?
---
* Except, maybe, for a couple of edits, mostly forgivable: the masturbation scene, where we get an ill-advised shot of her ass, nothing but objectifying; the zoom-in hands-over-ears scream that is pure genre indulgence; the wide shot of her final black-swan pose that exists because someone wanted to compose it and thought the swan-shadow was a cool idea, when really it's imperative that we be with Nina at that moment.
But it's too interior a film to be camp in that sense. These figures are not unruly women, they're categories filtered through a mind under increasing strain. Watching it again I see how completely Nina's psychotic break overwhelms and dictates the movie. Cracks appear early, before the pressure really starts to mount. The paintings move the first time you see them. Her shadow haunts her in the subway (embodied and reflected) before she even hears they'll be doing Swan Lake.
Mirrors and reflective surfaces (present of course in almost every shot) hitch themselves effectively to the hoary theme of white/black selves/doppelgangers; on top of that, they do good work doubling and fracturing people (mostly Nina). But they also serve the larger purpose of systematically undermining reality right from the start -- there are some shots at the beginning where you think you're facing Nina, but you're really facing her reflection; her back is to you. But it doesn't matter; maybe we never even meet a singular Nina. This has been brewing for a long time.
Nick at Nick's Flick Picks has a great review, but I don't buy that Aronofsky doesn't "direct outward from her gut", that he's too distanced from her. On the contrary, Aronofsky is not interested in anything except how Nina experiences the world and herself.* We are in Nina's head more than any Aronofsky protagonist since Pi.
Literally: we start inside Nina's dream, and we continue inside her hallucinations -- he never betrays her by sitting us outside, watching her react to nothing. They don't shirk POV (including the penultimate shot), and those long following sequences, with Nina centre-frame, are not steadicam but handheld, so that the frame dips and rises with every step; theres a similar effect in the rehearsals. During the rehearsals, we hold on Cassel, his reactions, because that's what Nina is dwelling on in that moment. We hear Tchaikovsky constantly, even in scenes where it doesn't match tonally to what's happening on screen, because it's also running through Nina's mind. The club scene captures perfectly the stroboscopic experience of intoxication and the coming-to-self as you sober up. The last half hour is an exercise in hallucination, the internal becoming external: psyches split, tears become makeup, wounds breathe, and finally reintegration happens.
For all its bells and whistles, the direction is completely straightforward; it has one mandate: to write Nina large. That's a pretty solid coathanger off which to hang a movie, right? That foundation is how come he gets away with pushing it so far into a freefall mishmash of referentiality, genre staples, melodrama and horror and delirium. That excess gestures towards camp (and winks at kitch) but there's no irony in its sincerity, even when that sincerity is amusing; the viewer relationship it cultivates is narrower, bounded, based in vicarious experience. Nina is pressed into every corner of the movie; her experience determines every second. How many films have their protagonists' brains -- their guts -- splattered across every frame?
---
* Except, maybe, for a couple of edits, mostly forgivable: the masturbation scene, where we get an ill-advised shot of her ass, nothing but objectifying; the zoom-in hands-over-ears scream that is pure genre indulgence; the wide shot of her final black-swan pose that exists because someone wanted to compose it and thought the swan-shadow was a cool idea, when really it's imperative that we be with Nina at that moment.
