Maria Schneider, the French actress who shot to fame for her role in the 1972 movie Last Tango in Paris, died this week, another victim of Hollywood’s obsession with exploiting female actresses for pornography. Is Black Swan just another example?
Review By Catherine Gallo Martinez
It seems that nowadays filmmakers are all about ‘the rollercoaster’ films: films that take us into the world of pleasures and violence, where our physical senses are stimulated by raw and explicit visuals that lack depth or purpose. There is no longer any behaviour with integrity, redemption of evil nor dignity to suffering. Such was the case for Black Swan, a film directed by Darren Aronofsky (Pi, Requiem for a Dream).
This dark thriller presents the audience with a story about Nina (Natalie Portman), a dedicated ballerina with a mental illness who is misled into entering a disturbed reality of perfection by ballet company director, Thomas (Vincent Cassel).
Although this destroyed her mentally and personally and ultimately killed her, it seemed that the filmmaker depicted this only to thrill us and provoke our physical senses. He didn’t depict the journey that led to her demise in order to leave us with any moral discernment or valuable lessons. The filmmaker’s technical production seemed to be highly focused on the ‘shock factor’ element: brooding music scores, horror undertoned mis-en-scenes and increasingly explicit sexual and violent scenes. In the process of creating this ‘shock factor’ film, the artists behind the film took away the ‘humane’ side to the issues. In doing so, the audience walked out without any moral conviction. This film is a great example of the relative philosophy in the media: that the road to truth is not thought but feeling.
Like many other young women, Nina struggles with relationships: her mother’s (Barbara Hershey), her rival female ballerina friend, Lily (Mila Kunis) and the relationship with herself. Throughout the film we see Nina trying to find her identity – an identity which is misconstrued by the notion of ‘perfection’: the more you succeed the closer you are to achieving ‘internal’ perfection.
In Nina’s case, success was based on winning the main part in the ballet company’s production of The Swan Queen, a role that was dually good and bad. Nina’s obstacle in becoming the Swan Queen was her inability to be the raw and seductive ‘black swan’.
The film was shot to convey a certain glorification and ‘proudness’ in Nina’s renunciation of her ‘purity’ when she decides to undertake a ‘freeing’ of self – a liberation that will give her the ability to become less ‘frigid’ and portray the black swan in the production. Early in the film Nina refuses to submit to Thomas’ sexual advances; he pointedly tells her “Yes, you are beautiful but …” and gives her a task to sexually experiment with herself. It’s ‘homework for freeing oneself’.
As the story progresses, the film portrays a modern reality of sex and relationships among the unmarried youth. It is as if the violation of purity throughout the story was calculated. Nina experiments sexually with some men at a nightclub and later with her ballerina friend Lily. She wakes up confused, not sure if that part really happened. Again, there was no redeeming side to this part of the story and the audience is left with explicit visuals for nothing.
The film’s screenwriters use the metaphor that art imitates life. The Swan represents Nina: a girl who couldn’t attain self-confidence or become a woman because of her purity and naivety. In this sense, we can say that her purity served as the internal antagonist for her progression, independence and womanhood. We see an example of this when Thomas publically and crudely asks Nina’s male ballet partner if he would “have sex with her”. The partner replies in the negative. The other ballet dancers smirk and Nina is left ashamed and frustrated at herself.
From this point onwards, Nina’s character intensifies and thus her transformation into a ‘black swan’ begins. Through this process we see her garner success; she gains respect from her dancing team and Thomas.
However, the filmmakers were not cautious to separate which side they supported, what actions they condoned. And I think this is where the story failed. There was no redemptive view of the dark world presented, nor is ‘beauty’ of any use unless you have the sexual experience; talent is not enough unless you are willing to overcome your morality and identity cannot be achieved without sexual liberation.
As a technical production, Black Swan was brilliantly done but the narrative aspect of the film was weak; only Nina’s character development kept the story together. There was inconsistency in character portrayals and broken story links throughout the film.
At the end we are left with characters who seemed to be created without any depth and who were used solely as pawns to corrupt Nina’s character and who ultimately fall prey to her violent schizophrenic attacks.
I don’t think the director did the film or audience any favours by filming the attacks with such intensity; there was a lack of complexity in the way schizophrenia was scripted. But, more importantly, if artists are trying to imitate reality, then what message are we sending by taking away the dignity of suffering?
Art imitates life and so with this film, where the protagonist Nina could be a real representation of some of the struggles facing youth today: a generation of youth obsessed with the rediscovery of self, attainment of identity through the feel-good experiences of life, where there is no longer a sense of the common good or consequences of actions, where happiness is a matter of ‘now’ and of ‘me’. This kind of happiness is something to cultivate for ‘today’; the fruit it bears is in the instant, passing pleasures and self-gratification.
At the end of film, Nina realises that she has mortally wounded herself from one of her violet outbursts. The film culminates simultaneously with the tragic ending of the ballet production when the white swan falls to her death. Likewise in reality, Nina also dies.
This could have been redemptive, but instead this was filmed as a heroic death: a wave of applause breaks out in the background, bright light engulfs Nina and as the centre of attention, she dies slowly with a smile on her face. She dies a heroine; she had won the fight; she attained the duality that caused her sought-after success and now she dies in peace.
The message of this film, as it is in so many aspects of the media, is that we cannot go wrong if we just follow our hearts. The danger is that people thus indoctrinated soon believe what they want to believe and never bother to consider the truth in Christianity that is logical and evidenced.
Artists have an enormous ‘moral’ responsibility when they translate and support ideologies.
But in most cases, even this ‘morality’ is viewed as relative or subjective rather than objective.
This tends to mean two things: firstly, that we can’t reason about morality because it’s just a matter of taste and secondly, that morality is merely indoctrinated behaviour regulation.
But if Black Swan is revered as a masterpiece, and I am here watching myself and other people squirm at the visuals exposed in front of us – a stab in the face, sexual experimentation, drugs, brutality – with no conclusive dignity or redeeming elements – we have to wonder, whether it is true that art imitates life.
If so, then what type of life are we creating?