Style without substance

Rating: 7/10 (26 July 2011)

Black Swan has all the ingredients that could make it good: a good cast, an interesting premise and the budget and director that could pull it off. Yet the final product doesn't even end close to good, in fact, Black Swan ends up as simply straight out bad. The story revolves around Nina (Natalie Portman), a ballet dancer who just got the lead role of the White and Black Swan in Swan Lake, and how she slowly transforms from the White into the Black Swan. So what exactly went wrong? First of all, this film is extremely pretentious. It tries so hard in delivering its message that the message actually completely fails all together. There is a corn of gold hidden within the main plot in telling a story about performance anxiety and the need to rely on others, but this is not the route Black Swan has taken. Similar to Perfect Blue (which partly inspired Aronofsky), Black Swan revolves around a woman in the entertainment industry and how she increasingly loses her sanity as paranoia takes over. However, in Perfect Blue, the explanation for this paranoia was completely reasonable and well-thought out, whereas in Black Swan the paranoia is simply not believable because of the poor characterization.
This leads me to the second issue I had with this film, namely the characters. Whoever thinks that the characters within Black Swan are deep and three-dimensional should rethink this statement, because it simply is not true. Mind you, I do not dislike two-dimensional characters per se, especially not if the film is not character-driven since the character development would then matter less. However, Black Swan is character-driven. Being able to portray a compelling main lead is therefore vital, and more importantly being able to portray a main lead to whom the audience can relate to. Black Swan fails in both areas. Nina is a horrible character who is supposed to plunge between two extremes – two extremes that are poorly developed since you will rarely find these kind of extremes in actual people. Honestly, how many 28-year-old women do you know that still live with their mothers, still maintain a child-mother relationship (as opposed to grown up-mother relationship) and decorate their rooms like little girls would? I cannot name one. Aronofsky goes to extreme lengths in trying to symbolize the White and Black Swan, and therein lies the pretentiousness, because unless the viewer is completely daft, it is simply too obvious. Take for example Lily (Mila Kunis) and how she even got a tattoo on her back looking like two black wings. Add her liberated behavior and she automatically turns into the "bad girl", or to be exact, the whore. Instead of representing Nina's struggles to become an independent woman reaching success similar to for example Secretary (that shares plot ideas with Black Swan albeit in a dark comedy setting), the tragedy lies in that Nina fails without a man to guide her, because Black Swan is undeniably told as a modern tragedy.
This ultimately leads me to my biggest gripe with this film – namely its demonization of liberated women. Yes, you read right, this film demonizes liberated women as the only way women can properly behave are those akin to the White Swan: innocent, virginal and motherly with a man at her side, always guiding her actions (ergo the White Swan's ultimate demise is that she fails to find a man to love her like a proper woman). Basically, the whole film is a retelling of the Madonna versus the Whore dichotomy in a (post)postmodern setting and in that sense, this film is actually utterly disgusting and a slap in the face of all women who struggled and still struggle against the oppression of patriarchy.
In summary, Black Swan is a slick production that superficially looks great and is meant to attract a wide audience, but once you dig some beneath that slick surface, you find there is simply no actual substance within, beyond the idea that women ultimately can never be free. The only real way Nina could ever have succeeded would be to be born as a man, but alas, she was not. There is no interest to tell a story about ballet (it just happened to be the setting of choice), nor is there any interest to tell a great drama about women's struggles. As such, Black Swan comes off as an incredibly clichéd film that is the ultimate representation why women are still not considered equal to men.