In early 2011, sometime after the film was released on home video, I sat down with mum to watch what she had heard was a “new ballet movie” by Darren Aronofsky. I was 12 years old, spending school nights training to be a professional dancer. Without any warmup, knowing very little of the ballet and pointe work that earned Natalie Portman her best actress Oscar, we pressed play on Black Swan.
Well before Brendan Fraser’s time on the couch and the many houseguests of Mother!, Aronofsky increased the wattage with a companion piece to follow his heavy-hitter, The Wrestler. Watching Nina Sayers’ (Portman) intense physical trials and her stilted sexual awakening, with my mum beside me, I was understandably disturbed. At this point in my adolescence, I thought Jumanji was a scary movie. Like the film’s injured bird, I was being introduced to a darkness I didn’t understand. And somehow I couldn’t get enough. Why did it feel so good?
In the years since, I have returned to Black Swan in search of that same dread and delight. With each viewing, my affection for it deepens. The pale pinks and gentle powdery blues, Nina’s cosy wrap sweaters and leotards, even Barbara Hershey’s smothering presence, all of it has become an unexpected comfort.
Almost hermetically sealed within a world of its own, Black Swan is strangely soothing. It’s a retreat into the insular private life of an artist committed to just one thing. For Nina, there is only space for ballet, and for the duration of the film, I too am consumed. It’s an obsessive story told in tight closeups and staged in cramped spaces. From the subway to her apartment, where she lives with her mother, Erica (Hershey), Nina spends her time fenced-in. Even in the outside world – a sunshine-less New York City – she walks the street under scaffolding; her only sky, the ceiling of the Lincoln Center.
Having served plenty of time in the company’s corps de ballet, Nina’s dedication has gone mostly unnoticed – as her mother reminds her each night, brushing her hair and tucking her into bed (Nina’s infantine bedroom is perhaps the scariest part of Black Swan). When artistic director Thomas (Vincent Cassel) announces that prima ballerina Beth – a scene-stealing Winona Ryder cast brilliantly as a mean drunk over the hill – will be stepping down, Nina is hellbent on taking her place. Like All About Eve and Showgirls, it’s out with the old and in with the new. The company will begin its season with Thomas’s version of Swan Lake. His plans are simple: “Strip it down, make it visceral and real.”
This is easier said than done for Nina, who finds herself cast as Swan Queen after a stolen kiss with Thomas in his office. Much to his surprise, she bites him on the lip – an uncharacteristically brazen move from the virgin ballerina seemingly unfit to play the titular role. In rehearsals, Nina demonstrates her rigor with every arabesque, virtuosic as the White Swan. Her Black Swan, however, lacks edge, something friendly rival Lily – played by a bacchanal Mila Kunis – makes up for in spades.
With Lily as her liberated double, the sexually repressed Nina invites darkness into her life, hoping that it will bring her closer to the vamp Thomas has asked her to become. At times she is seduced by menacing flashes of herself in others; on the street, in the studio, looming over her in the bathtub. In the subway window, I see a wicked smile momentarily cross her reflected face and wonder if I am also seeing things. Loosening my grip on the barre, it feels good to give in to an ambiguous and unstable nightmare. I revel in every rewatch because Black Swan still feels dangerous.
Portman’s commitment to the role, and the pleasure of watching her, is a reminder of ballet’s enigma: a delicateness that is contingent on the endurance of extreme physical pain. It’s not simply that ballet is formally brutal, but that watching it is also a kind of brutality. Black Swan knows this to be true. With its exquisite horrors, the film is a rare indulgence, much like a trip to the ballet but at a fraction of the cost.
When at last Nina is transformed into the Black Swan, she falls to her death on stage. Diving on to a hidden mattress behind the set. Still catching her breath, she can barely speak, “I felt it, perfect.” Nina is finally pleased with herself. “It was perfect,” she concludes of her swan song. With every rewatch, still somehow keeping me on my toes, I find myself agreeing with her.
Black Swan is available to rent digitally in the US and on Disney+ in the UK and Australia
