the first rule of black swanis . . .

Music: A Sunny Day in Glasgow: Ashes Grammar (2009)

I returned from screening Black Swan not too long ago, and am working on shaking the icy sting of nihilism. Everyone's talking about this film here in Aus-Vegas, and more than a few urged me to go see it. I like Aronofky's work---well, most of it. I have not read a single review of this film, however, I did hear a review on NPR last week that expressed ambivalence. I didn't like this film, and if you have yet to see it, stop reading now: I'm going to spoil it.

Black Swan is the story of a late teen or early twenties ballet dancer who is cast as the lead in a remixed version of Swan Lake. The story was predictable from the get go (which is why the surprises at the end are really surprises): because the same dancer will play both the white and black swan characters, the ballerina must get in touch with her "dark side." She's innocent and, apparently, never had an orgasm, so the "inappropriate" director tells her to go home and masturbate. Of course, the dancer has an overprotective mother who lives vicariously through her daughter's ascent. Lots of mean girl bitchiness thrown in. Mirrors. And, you know, when there's a mirror you can bet psychosis drops in to say, "Uh-uh, Mother-m-mother, uh, what is the phrase? She isn't quite herself today."

My reaction was boredom for the first hour, if not a little bit of motion sickness from the camera work. I don't have a problem with slow pacing, but this is pretty boring. When things started to get interesting, the film was punctuated by excruciating shots of Portman pulling out toe- and fingernails---a hackneyed torture porn gimmick at best. The hand-motif got a bit old (the comparison was to quills). I confess that I did not expect the gore, and while it was effective and I was shocked like everyone else, I didn't like it. It came off cheap by more than a few hairs. I came away from this film dazzled by Portman's performance, but unhappy with the world, and especially unhappy with Aronofsky's take on women.

So, what's my knee-jerk reading? Mother trouble, of course. With relatively little rearrangement, my and Tom's reading of Fight Club works here. This is the girly version of Fight Club in which we watch a woman, desperate for a paternal figure, descend into psychosis. For readers who are unfamiliar with the argument, it goes something like this: from a Lacanian vantage, the explanation for the psychosis is the lack of a third "term" or figure in childhood. From a semiotic perspective, the mother and child form a binary. The story goes that the child cannot really begin to understand itself unless it knows, somehow, that it is not staring into a mirror (mother). So, another parental figure triangulates relation and the kid goes: "oh, wait a minute. Who is this? This third figure is not me. And I am not mommy. I must be my own self." It's more complicated than this, of course, but that's the gist: the insertion of a "third term" or a "paternal metaphor" opens the dyad up to the social. And once the social is opened up, the child can begin to understand itself (as limited) and develop relations with folks other than mother.

For Lacan, a failure to have a good, strong severing with mom---for him, often the lack of a father figure or a strong father figure---can lead to psychosis. Not flip-out crazy all the time. Some folks can harbor/be animated by psychosis but never exhibit symptoms. Nevertheless, psychosis is a pretty intense form of narcissism because the problem is that "I can't get out of myself/mother"---like standing in a hall of mirrors. It's pretty bad for the kid, too, because it means he or she is pretty helpless to the tyranny of mama; with no second parent to intervene, the mother gets the child all to herself.

That Black Swan is staging psychosis is signaled almost in a ham-handed manner: mirrors, mirrors everywhere. Nina's lover turns out to be herself; faces morph when she looks into mirrors. Her overbearing mum sees herself in her daughter and vice-versa; Nina is under continual surveillance from psycho-mum. When presented with a father figure (played excellently by Vincent Cassel---he is truly odious), she finally has an opportunity to break the psychosis; instead, she splits and "fucks" him, much like the Narrator/Tyler does in Fight Club.

More signs of psychosis: Nina is basically a "cutter," but Aronofsky has her be a "scratcher"---again, the attempt to inscribe the paternal metaphor herself (it's the lye-burn scene in Fight Club).

The strange thing about the film is that Thomas (Cassel's character) sees what's going on and tries to stave off the psychosis. It becomes pretty clear in the film that she's going mad, and with the effects Aronofsky creates the sense of "haze"---beginning with the ecstasy scene and remaining until the end. At the premature denouement, Nina is angry that her mother phoned in to say that she was sick (mom wants Nina to end up a failed dancer like she was), and arrives at the theatre to discover someone was going to replace her. When she protests, Tom says: "the only thing standing in your way is yourself." Well, that let the cat out of the bag. Still 20 minutes to go and the clichéd ending comes, predictably, at the end of 20 minutes. Nina stabs herself with a shard of mirror only to slowly die by the end of the show.

Meh.

So, as clever as I think this feminine take on psychosis was, my problem is that---well, shit, it's that there's no redeeming social possibility here. Fight Club didn't have one either, really, but it did create a national discussion about the source of male violence and the crisis of paternity. This film, while repeating pretty much the same story, doesn't even gesture to an alternative. Nina's character has only one way out of psychosis: Tom. And she rejects him. And why? Well, the dude's a complete bastard and just wants to sleep with her and . . . gasp . . . repeat the cycle of . . . incest.

Mother trouble? or Father fucker?

That I didn't like the movie does not mean I do not think it is interesting or not an artistic achievement. Portman and Cassel have solid roles, and Mila Kunis is pretty amazing. This is the role that will help Kunis to escape That 70s Show. It's just every single character is icky: the mother is smothering; the dance company is comprised of a bunch of back-stabbing mean girls; the Kunis character is about as close as we get to someone humane, but even she drugs poor Nina; Tom is a perv and a sexist and possibly Nina's biological (as opposed to possible symbolic) father . . . . No one in the film is a pleasant person except for the male dancers, and the only memorable line one of them has is, to scold Nina, "what the fuck was that?"

I suppose the presumed social possibility is the message that women are pressed to be perfect---Ophelia syndrome. But there's this nagging lingering feeling that perhaps that's just running cover for misogyny. I could be wrong, and welcome other thoughts to the contrary.