this is a post about black swan
I'd call myself an Aronovsky fan, to some degree-- when I watch his films I know what to expect: gorgeous imagery, beautiful music, and all whole lotta fucked up shit. But he's blown me away.
Visually beyond anything I've seen this year-- and yes, I am including Inception-- a score of absurd perfection, the focus on feet weirdly enough, the make up, the art direction, OH GOD THE COSTUMES. This is easily my second favourite of the year and this is probably still the after glow, but I WOULD NOT KILL SOMEONE IF THIS WON BEST PICTURE.
How physically similar Mila and Winona and Barbara and Natalie are. NATALIE SWEET BABY JESUS. Her best role and best performance since Mathilda in Leon. She was another deal entirely and she is the best actress this year, do not try and argue with me. Vincent Cassel impressed as obviously he is wont to do, kind of toeing this line between exploitative and inspiring.
BUT MORE IMPORTANTLY: GOD THE FEMININITY OF THIS FILM I COULD CRY.
There's Nina, our perfect swan, beautiful and frail and sweet and shy. Nina dreams big in her pink bedroom with her stuffed animals and her music box, her half a grapefruit and her feathered scarf. At work she playacts as an adult-- following to obsessive perfection the steps and techniques of the ballet company. She has no close friends among the dancers and heads directly home after work. Her cellphone, with its perfect pink background, only receives calls from only one person: Mom.
Home is her Mother's domain and she is entirely a child, her sweet girl. Mom undresses her, tucks her into bed, comforts her when she cries. She scolds Nina, controls her completely. There are hints of strain from the beginning, the disturbing multitude of distorted portraits Nina's mother paints of her as she weeps, the slight glee behind her eyes as she believes Nina will never surpass her own career as a dancer. Her desire to shelter and yes, infantilize Nina overpowering everything.
At work there's Lily-- a classic adolescent figure. Lily is free and ambitious, she's overtly and easily sexy. She is lax where Nina is strung tight and Lily terrifies her. Under Lily's influence, Nina progresses from childhood to adolescence-- staying out late, drinking and trying drugs, hooking up and talking back to her mother, acknowledging her own sexual desire. Lily's got Mom running scared. Cracks begin to appear in Nina, we see she's got a history of self-harm and of purging-- a mental instability she seems to have inherited from her mother.
Then there's Beth, the former little princess, cast aside by Tomas in her "old age." She is bitter and dark and wild and self-destructive. She's Nina's future, should she achieve her dreams. She haunts Nina, who mimics her like a child playing dress up. We see in her that sacrifice an artist must make to even make a bid for perfection and how the destructive the loss of that can be.
And throughout all this, all these spectres of femininity, there's the Black Swan. Nina as powerful, as sensual, as aggressive, as frightening. Nina sees her Black Swan in every face that passes her, looking back at her in the mirror, in her dreams. In her imperfection, the Black Swan creates perfection, her emotion and confidence filling the gaps that leave Nina's Swan Princess from achieving womanhood, freedom. From becoming the Swan Queen.
Nina dances as the Swan Princess but she falters-- she's been changed by the Lilys and the Beths, real or imagined-- and she returns to her dressing room to defeat herself, to destroy whatever weak thing remains inside her. She terrorizes the stage as the Black Swan, believing she's committed murder in name of the role and when she returns to her dressing room this time, she's bleeding.
Her face changes; relief she didn't hurt Lily, horror at what's she done to herself, acknowledgement of what she must become. She emerges on her final stage as the Swan Queen-- a perfect marriage of Swan Princess and Black Swan, the ideal of womanhood-- free from outside influences and living exactly as she wishes.
She finishes, she stuns, she is perfect and then she falls. It's a victory, because now that she's become Swan Queen, what is there to achieve? Should she go from sweet girl to little princess, infantilized and instrumentalized, defined by others determinations of her feminity? She doesn't. She makes her choice and whites out, flawless and fully formed. A Swan Queen victorious.
Visually beyond anything I've seen this year-- and yes, I am including Inception-- a score of absurd perfection, the focus on feet weirdly enough, the make up, the art direction, OH GOD THE COSTUMES. This is easily my second favourite of the year and this is probably still the after glow, but I WOULD NOT KILL SOMEONE IF THIS WON BEST PICTURE.
How physically similar Mila and Winona and Barbara and Natalie are. NATALIE SWEET BABY JESUS. Her best role and best performance since Mathilda in Leon. She was another deal entirely and she is the best actress this year, do not try and argue with me. Vincent Cassel impressed as obviously he is wont to do, kind of toeing this line between exploitative and inspiring.
BUT MORE IMPORTANTLY: GOD THE FEMININITY OF THIS FILM I COULD CRY.
There's Nina, our perfect swan, beautiful and frail and sweet and shy. Nina dreams big in her pink bedroom with her stuffed animals and her music box, her half a grapefruit and her feathered scarf. At work she playacts as an adult-- following to obsessive perfection the steps and techniques of the ballet company. She has no close friends among the dancers and heads directly home after work. Her cellphone, with its perfect pink background, only receives calls from only one person: Mom.
Home is her Mother's domain and she is entirely a child, her sweet girl. Mom undresses her, tucks her into bed, comforts her when she cries. She scolds Nina, controls her completely. There are hints of strain from the beginning, the disturbing multitude of distorted portraits Nina's mother paints of her as she weeps, the slight glee behind her eyes as she believes Nina will never surpass her own career as a dancer. Her desire to shelter and yes, infantilize Nina overpowering everything.
At work there's Lily-- a classic adolescent figure. Lily is free and ambitious, she's overtly and easily sexy. She is lax where Nina is strung tight and Lily terrifies her. Under Lily's influence, Nina progresses from childhood to adolescence-- staying out late, drinking and trying drugs, hooking up and talking back to her mother, acknowledging her own sexual desire. Lily's got Mom running scared. Cracks begin to appear in Nina, we see she's got a history of self-harm and of purging-- a mental instability she seems to have inherited from her mother.
Then there's Beth, the former little princess, cast aside by Tomas in her "old age." She is bitter and dark and wild and self-destructive. She's Nina's future, should she achieve her dreams. She haunts Nina, who mimics her like a child playing dress up. We see in her that sacrifice an artist must make to even make a bid for perfection and how the destructive the loss of that can be.
And throughout all this, all these spectres of femininity, there's the Black Swan. Nina as powerful, as sensual, as aggressive, as frightening. Nina sees her Black Swan in every face that passes her, looking back at her in the mirror, in her dreams. In her imperfection, the Black Swan creates perfection, her emotion and confidence filling the gaps that leave Nina's Swan Princess from achieving womanhood, freedom. From becoming the Swan Queen.
Nina dances as the Swan Princess but she falters-- she's been changed by the Lilys and the Beths, real or imagined-- and she returns to her dressing room to defeat herself, to destroy whatever weak thing remains inside her. She terrorizes the stage as the Black Swan, believing she's committed murder in name of the role and when she returns to her dressing room this time, she's bleeding.
Her face changes; relief she didn't hurt Lily, horror at what's she done to herself, acknowledgement of what she must become. She emerges on her final stage as the Swan Queen-- a perfect marriage of Swan Princess and Black Swan, the ideal of womanhood-- free from outside influences and living exactly as she wishes.
She finishes, she stuns, she is perfect and then she falls. It's a victory, because now that she's become Swan Queen, what is there to achieve? Should she go from sweet girl to little princess, infantilized and instrumentalized, defined by others determinations of her feminity? She doesn't. She makes her choice and whites out, flawless and fully formed. A Swan Queen victorious.