Black Swan

Black Swan feels like a one-up on the Fight Club formula. The antagonist is in the head of the protagonist, but not exclusively so. Lily (Mila Kunis) interacts with other characters, and even comments on Nina's (Natalie Portman) delusions. While it's not always clear what literally happened, the movie makes no attempt to hide that it's about a mental breakdown, so this isn't a major spoiler. The real Lily is even amused to find that Nina fantasized a sexual encounter between them well before the end of the film.

Nina is a ballerina pushed into the profession by her stage-parent mother (Barbara Hershey), who gave up her own dancing career to raise Nina. Her ballet troupe's headliner, Beth MacIntyre (Winona Ryder), is aging and ready to retire, so a new lead is needed for the Swan Queen in Swan Lake, who will have to dance as both the innocent White Swan, and the seductive Black Swan. Nina is cast primarily on the strength of her White Swan performance, despite her inability to properly perform the Black Swan.

At the same time Lily enters the troupe, a far more sexual and experienced woman who ends up promoted to Nina's understudy based on the strength of her Black Swan. The two have great chemistry together, but it's not clear how much of the relationship is real. They vary between friendship and bitter rivalry, going out on the town for a night in what seems to be Nina's first ever act of rebellion against her overbearing mother.

Throughout the film Nina finds herself under attack by a doppelganger representing her repressed emotions. However, early in the film the doppelganger exclusively appears with Nina's appearance, in later scenes she begins to hallucinate it as Lily, creating the ambiguity about their relationship. Lily is the free and independent person who Nina wants to be, and Nina hallucinates the aforementioned sexual encounter after their night out together.

The two other major influences on Nina are her mother, and the director Thomas (Vincent Cassel). Both of these figures follow the same basic arc: they push Nina only to realize that they've gone too far. However, her mother is a repressive force trying to keep Nina under her thumb, while Thomas wants her to lose her innocence and her control so that she can become the Black Swan.

Of these two figures, I find her mother to be the most fascinating. While she's initially played as purely malevolent, by the end I'm honestly not sure how to feel about her. She begs her daughter to drop out of the performance as her mental state deteriorates, but her motives are questionable. Does she want to save her daughter, or hold her back from greatness? And how much of her cruelty and control was in Nina's head all along?

Thomas walks the line between a demanding employer, and a sexual predator. The sexuality is so fundamental to the role of the Black Swan that it's hard to argue that a director kissing his actress passionately, or telling her to masturbate, wouldn't have a positive impact on the performance. On the flip side, he is pursuing a woman with an obvious power imbalance.

Before the final performance, Nina stabs her doppelganger, believing it to be the real Lily, when the doppelganger tries to overtake her as the Black Swan. With this act, Nina's hallucinations seem to accelerate, and she imagines herself growing wings on stage as she nails the Black Swan. Seeing Lily, she realizes before the final act that she had stabbed herself, but danced on anyway, declaring her performance to be “perfect” to Thomas in the final line of the film.

The movie manages to avoid one of the biggest missteps of most modern horror: the movie doesn't drive-home it's status as horror. The horror comes from the things that happen. There's never a scene in which the audience is asked to despair. The movie is filled with tension and uncertainty, right up to the final shot. It takes a talented director to make you legitimately uncertain if you should should be happy or sad. Did Nina kill herself in her performance? Or did she finally grow to maturity, while suffering a flesh-wound?

I find this movie fascinating because it's a horror movie that clearly has women as it's main audience. Don't get me wrong, female stories have always been a big part of the horror genre, but anyone can be scared of Ginger in Ginger Snaps becoming a big, slobbering monster. This is a movie that makes the idea of maturing into a world that demands nothing short of physical perfection absolutely frightening. It's a movie about the terror of the female experience, that I honestly don't feel fully qualified to address.

That said, however, this film is great. It kept me enthralled beginning to end. What I've seen of Aronofsky's other work has been, for the most part, either too depressing or too boring for my tastes, but this film hit it out of the park. It's a masterpiece, beginning to end.