Inner Turmoil (Blog Entry 10)

As a movie snob, most movies tend to disappoint me. Even if I like a film, there’s usually something about it I would change, something that I think would make it better. However, I can’t think of a single thing I would change about the Black Swan. This movie is beautiful, hauntingly dark and absolutely perfect.

The way Aronofsky directed this film is inspiring. He took a well known ballet, Swan Lake, and transformed it into a modern day psychological thriller, on the same level of excellence as Psycho or the Shinning. In the movie, the camera never really detaches from the main character Nina, which makes it seem almost like the whole story is from her point of view. Since there is such an intimate connection with the character throughout the movie, the audience gets to see all of the dark recesses of her mind.

The way that Aronofsky shows all of the psychosis of Nina is through subtle and reoccurring details within the film. He shows her compulsive behaviors with scenes where she carefully lays out the items she stole from her idol, the aging ballerina, and scenes where she obsessively washes her hands. These are behaviors that are not always compulsive, but the careful, methodical way  that Natalie Portman acts them out clearly defines them as such. He shows her desire for perfection, brought on by her mother’s need to live through her daughter, by her bulimic behaviors and inability to lose control. Her fears and psychosis are shown in subtle ways as well. Sometimes the person she sees in the mirror just doesn’t match up with her own movements, or she finds herself doing this unconsciously, often things to hurt herself. By the end of the film, after drugs and stress have brought on the full onset of her illness, the fears she has lose their subtlety. As she descends into madness, there are whole scenes of her hallucinations, making the audience question what is real and what isn’t. The music and the use of shadows show her slow transformation into the dark side of herself. In the beginning, this dark side is hinted at by the woman Nina sees on a dark street with her own face. It is also hinted at by Nina’s idol’s own descent into madness in the beginning of the movie, when the director says her self destruction leads to her perfection. This character, as well as Mila Kunis’s character and her mother, show different sides of Nina.  The aging ballerina is her future, and her fear of the future. Mila Kunis’s character is Nina’s sexuality that she cannot consciously accept. And her mother shows her drive for perfection and obsessive tendencies. The duality of the two swan queens is an expression of the turmoil in Nina’s head. She wants to be the white swan, perfect, untarnished, but through this desire she rejects all aspects of herself that don’t fit this image. When she works to try to be the black swan, after rejecting all the negative things about herself for so long, instead of no longer repressing those things, they completely take control of her. She becomes this dark side of herself that she cannot consciously accept is part of herself and so Nina then loses herself. She struggles throughout the final performance to regain control, but she is already gone, and she dies at the peak of perfection. This is exactly what she wanted, she finally attains the perfection that she always strived for and she dies right after, knowing she could never do anything as magnificent again.