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Black Swan
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Black Swan takes wild psychoanalysis back to the chamber
realms of art-making. This is a commercial movie that many people despise.
Posturing, incoherent, strained, hysterical: yes, it is all of these things.
Nothing like The Red Shoes (Michael Powell & Emeric
Pressburger, 1948), Center Stage (Nicholas
Hytner, 2000) or All About My Mother (Pedro Almodóvar, 1999);
maybe a little too much like Repulsion (Roman
Polanski, 1965). But so what? The film possesses a compelling intensity; it is
closer to John Cassavetes’ Opening Night (1977) than any previous high-art, ballet movie. Its merry, all-in,
every-which-way-including-loose level of hallucinatory madness works for it:
confusion of identity and muddled psychic projections are its principal
subjects.
Mother/monster, the internal dark double, teacher/seducer,
whore/rival: the figures spin around, changing places, bouncing from one level
of reality (or fantasy) to the next. The film keeps
flipping the deck, courting ever less logical convolutions of ambiguity – all
for the sake of shock, of incessant vertigo. It is way beyond the cerebral
machinations of an Inception (Christopher Nolan, 2010) style of mind-game movie, and closer, in its weird
way, to the unconscious as levered to the surface of Raúl Ruiz’s Mysteries of Lisbon (2010) or Jacques
Rivette’s 36 Vues du pic Saint-Loup (Around a Small Mountain, 2009).
Black Swan ties itself up,
eventually, in a much-previewed, pre-visualised, hyper-choreographed finale
that, in exhaustion after so much psychic flux, drains itself out to pure white
in a death-impulse for its central character, Nina (Natalie Portman): that is
the only way to end in this overheated, post-indie, Hollywood context – and
assuredly not the way of Opening Night,
which had the nerve to suspend itself ten minutes before the end, casting out
its initial premise in the course of an ultimate performative play which is
among the most daringly open, weightless conclusions in all cinema.
In Black Swan,
as in Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void (2009), we travel with a new, doubtless fashionable kind of cinema that is
situated just at the back of a lead character’s head (diving down stark,
plunging passageways like in a sped-up video game) or glued, in deliberately
ugly wide-angle, right to the skin pores, face-front (Inland Empire,
2006). This is one pole of wild psychoanalysis in the contemporary cinematic
field: inner or eyeball subjectivity put under pressure and trembling until it
shatters into a thousand tiny fragments, contradictions, loops, short-circuits.
Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy (2010) is
the other, minimalist pole: serene, events viewed from a distance, a two-shot
world with plenty of space and locale all around – the only possible
reverse-field being the mirror/camera into which the imaginary lovers stare,
individually, during the twin bathroom interludes that provisionally conclude
their ambiguous game.
For we spectator-critics, one pole of wild
psychoanalysis is not necessarily better, more sensible or ethical than the
other. We exist, day to day, strung out between both options. Film criticism
has to give up its abundant fantasies of judgement, discernment, purity; it has
to plunge into the space between Certified
Copy and Black Swan, between Lars
von Trier and the TV series Blindspot (2015-2020), between 10 Cloverfield Lane (2016) and the avant-garde – and seriously visit all stations along the way. To
do that, it will need to discard some of its hard-won habits and rituals, and
open itself to first-time surprises. It will need to risk itself in an eternal
becoming.
Excerpted from the chapter “Wild
Psychoanalysis of a Vicarious, Unstable Reality” in my book Mysteries of
Cinema (Amsterdam University Press, 2018 & University of Western
Australia Publishing, 2020).
MORE Aronofsky: © Adrian Martin 2011 / 2016 |
