Bombastic, Pretentious, Misogynist, and Anti-Art

Rating: 1/10 (19 December 2010)

"Black Swan" is a bombastic, pretentious, middlebrow soap opera that struggles hard to say something profound about art and women, but manages to peddle hateful lies about both art and women. Men who've read too much Freud and have no understanding of women and teen Goth girls who wear black fingernail polish will embrace "Black Swan" passionately.
"Black Swan" has no rise in tension, no complication of plot. The entire film is a bleak, dreary, depiction of a schizophrenic who hallucinates and wears nice ballet costumes. Nina (Natalie Portman) is never depicted as having any normal life or healthy relationships the audience might care about her losing. From start to finish, the film features tight close-ups on Portman's anguished face as she careens through one hallucination, and one dance rehearsal, after another. Since Nina's world is so relentlessly bleak, horrific – and unreal – from the start, we can't invest in her. We can't care about her losing her hold on sanity, because she is shown from the get-go to have no hold on sanity. We can't care about her losing her friendships, or her hope, because she has no friendships and she has no hope. Nothing changes. Nothing is at stake. Nina is as big of a messy basket case an hour into the film as she was at the beginning. The endless close-ups on Nina's anguished face get old really fast.
The film-goer comes to understand disastrously quickly that Aronofsky's bag of tricks is limited. The sets are all in stiflingly monotonous black and white, no doubt to show how deep of a film this is. Since viewers don't know which scenes are real and which are Nina's hallucinations, it's impossible to invest in them.
The one bright spot in the film is Vincent Cassel, who relishes a bath in smarm as a ballet troupe's sadistic, manipulative, and very naughty director. He's the only one who has any fun, and God bless him for it. He could probably dance on the deck of the Titanic. With his French bonhomie and predatory amorality, Cassel is a cross between Maurice Chevalier and George Sanders.
"Black Swan" tells us that women are fragile and neurotic and if they do anything remarkable it makes them crazy. Craziness, in women, oddly parallels male sex fantasies. When women go crazy they have catfights with other women, including their moms, they torture their bodies and others in bloody, gory ways, they begin to pleasure themselves in visually artistic ways, and then they engage in same-gender erotic expression. Most of the women involved are young, fit, and minimally clad. How convenient for any kinky men watching this movie! Is this film misogynist? Ask yourself this, would Aronofksy make a parallel film about a football linebacker who goes nuts because being a football linebacker is a big stress? Yeah, I didn't think so, either. Of course this film is misogynist. "Black Swan" is a throwback to soft-core women's prison flics and misogynist film noir like 1947's "Possessed," that depicted Joan Crawford driven mad by passion.
"Black Swan" struggles really hard to say big things about art: that the drive for perfection can drive you mad, that artists sacrifice for their art, that art and madness are virtually identical. This viewer just cannot believe that someone suffering from full blown schizophrenia could become the prima ballerina of a high powered NYC ballet troupe. Ballet is not the whim of an afternoon. Ballet demands a lifetime of showing up on time, getting along with colleagues, and successful performance. Someone as ill as Nina could not have carried this off.
"Black Swan" wants us to believe the old, crude, invidious lie that art equals madness. It doesn't. There have been some high-profile artists who were also mentally ill, but that the public tends to focus on these people doesn't make art and madness the same thing. For most artists, art means years of unpaid hard work, dedication, self-discipline, and self-restraint. The creation of powerful art demands that the artist be, not crazier than the bulk of the population, but saner. Not buying into popular lies arouses envy and suspicion. Some people who hate art and artists are often simply envious of art and artists. And some people really don't understand art or artists and so they feel threatened and enraged by art and artists. It is these people who have given us the lie that art and madness are identical. Aronofsky doesn't do art or artists any favors by peddling this lie.