Director Darren Aronofsky resurrected Mickey Rourke’s career with “The Wrestler,” and worked a similar boon of blessings for Natalie Portman in “Black Swan.” She won the Oscar for her performance, and she seemed in 2010 to have blossomed into the Meryl Streep of her generation.
The role of elite ballerina Nina Sayers checked off many of the things on the list that attract Mr. Oscar—dramatic weight loss, all-consuming immersion in a demanding skill set (ballet), and shape-shifting disappearance into a character. Indeed, her brief transformation at the end, into the actual Black Swan of the title, is as bona fide a shape-shift as one will ever see in cinema—that moment alone was almost worth the price of admission.
The Attainment of Perfection
The film is a dark tale of obsession with artistic technique: the ruthless ambition, the sacrifice, the obsessive compulsiveness. It tells of how a dancer manages to capture two out of the three main ingredients that, according to Socrates, constitute great art: truth and beauty. What’s missing to a certain extent is goodness.
Can an artist embody an extreme range? If not, can the issue be forced; and if so, what’s the cost? These are the questions “Black Swan” poses.
Erica Sayers (Barbara Hershey) is the ballet version of the overprotective horror-mom in “Carrie,” vicariously living dreams of success through her daughter. Thomas Leroy is one of Vincent Cassel’s stock-in-trade charismatic creeps, this time in the form of a tyrant choreographer.
And Lily (Mila Kunis) is seductive as the dancer with the chaotic, dark fire that Portman’s Nina lacks. Kunis’s Lily draws Portman’s character into her world of hookups in bars, pill-enhanced mood control, and laissez-faire attitude toward practice, ostensibly to become her friend, but we quickly sense a darker, ruthless competitiveness behind her motives.
Nina allows herself to be drawn in since, as one theory goes, to be true in art one should really live it. As Charlie Parker famously said, “If you don’t live it, it won’t come out your horn.” However, a lot of what he lived was heroin addiction, so maybe ... that doesn’t apply to ballet as much? Director Aronofsky says otherwise.
Nina’s apparent above-and-beyond ambition for gaining recognition for having achieved perfection is underscored throughout the film by self-mutilations that demonstrate the lengths she’s willing to go to in order to access her inner Black Swan. Since our shortened attention spans need to be held more and more these days by the shock techniques of the horror genre, there are many in this film.
What’s the Payoff?
The issue of artists sacrificing and enduring pain in order to achieve perfection is a well-known fact—witness the massive, 60 pound, life-threatening weight gain that Robert De Niro ate himself up to for “Raging Bull.”Any act of creativity leads to a certain amount of obsession, and any creative person knows that the euphoric state of getting something exactly right, and honoring their God-given talent, is their raison d'être.
This ranges from violinists and sitarists practicing until their fingers bleed, Delta Force operators shooting pistols until their hands bleed, new Harley-Davidson owners staying up till 3 a.m. with the aftermarket parts catalog and obsessing about which exhaust pipes will express their personalities better, or ballerinas dancing until their toes and ankles bleed. They don’t call it blood, sweat, and tears for nothing. The pain of obsession is a “hurts so good” kind of pain.
Are there any further payoffs for the performer than perfection for perfection’s sake? The greatest stage actor of all time, Laurence Olivier, although he was undoubtedly being glib, said that he was never conscious of any motivation to be perfect other than the desire to show off.
The inherent nature of the performing arts is such that they can fuel the human attachment to showing off easier than in painting, sculpting, and poetry. Actors, dancers, and musicians are demonstrating something they’ve worked hard on in front of a crowd, and there’s applause.
But people just simply want to show each other what they accomplished, starting with “Mommy, mommy, lookit-me lookit-me jump off the diving board!” Nina achieves her goal; the audience clearly loves Nina’s final performance.
Classical Versus ‘Method’ Acting
We go to see art to experience a degree of perfection, and as a reminder of what high levels of attainment humanity is capable of. However, in the performing arts, and specifically acting, there was a shift that occurred when acting transitioned from classical methods to Konstantin Stanislavsky’s vision of emotional authenticity, which one of his students, Lee Strasberg, then turned into the now famous “method acting.”We want to see real emotion, not fake. But in the distant past, when art was meant to depict the divine, it was with the intention of uplifting the observer spiritually, and not to impart a sense of satisfaction in baser human emotions such as revenge (that exist throughout Shakespeare’s work). In terms of the original use of art, even Shakespeare’s secular poetry, beautiful as it is, was a fallen art form. The original theater was church services—wholly in the realm of the sacred.
Back to the Sacred
What of healing? If art didn’t have a healing capacity, the field of art therapy wouldn’t exist. We know that art can heal, and that healers are not motivated by a need for attention. The dark conclusion of “Black Swan” (which I won’t give away) is the logical outcome of art that’s trending further and further away from art’s origins.
Can we in modern times reintroduce the sacred into art? This is definitely achievable. Here’s a quote taken from the classical Chinese dance website of Shen Yun: “Almost every culture looked toward the divine for inspiration. Art was meant to uplift, bringing joy to both the people who created and experienced it. It is this principle that drives Shen Yun performers and their art.”
Professional dancers from around the globe have agreed that Shen Yun attains a level of perfection in dance that is rarely seen. So this positive intention, to display divine images, with the intent to heal through joy and beauty is the key to attaining perfection without the deleterious side effects.
I initially gave “Black Swan” a rating of 4 out of 5 stars. Now I feel like downgrading it to a 3.5 just because it’s dark, depressing, scary, and has drugs and gratuitous sex. Wait! I’ll let the rating stand for technical aspects, but as I find nowadays that I don’t really want to see ballet, one of our last remaining pure art forms, demeaned in that setting anymore, I’ll give it two ratings (see below).
Nevertheless, director Darren Aronofsky has actually done an excellent service by showing how art has reached the extreme of a downward, demonic trend. Now that we’ve reached that extreme, perhaps things will turn around.
