Black Swan

For the most part, my and Simone's artistic tastes blend magnificently. An underappreciated commonality that all would-be couples should investigate more thoroughly before agreeing to anything as absurd as devoting your entire life to another human.

Our music interests are highly compatible, the rare exceptions being my savage adoration toward Captain Beefheart, Zappa, Morrissey and some early country artists and her awkward, unfounded passions for the mediocre likes of Richie Havens and Alejandro Escovedo.

As for the written word, we have taken comfortably mutual corners. Me, in the realms of non-fiction and journalism and she in the flowery prose of fiction. We will occasionally venture into each other's territory on a suggestion from the other, but the lines are clearly and amicably drawn. We simply prefer different conduits for our literary feedings.

Our appreciation for painting, sculpture, and drawing is near identical, which makes jaunts to museums always the best of times.

With the cinema, we are again in absolute agreement on nearly everything. We laud the risk takers and scorn the predictable. We prefer the small to the grandiose, the understated to the obvious, the open end to the conveniently sewn up, and the knife to the bomb. I tend to lean more toward pretense and unreasonableness, but that is only because I am a far greater asshole and possess a more ludicrous sense of humor than she.

Which is why a film like Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan tears our house asunder and puts Simone and I at cinematic odds.

We both adhere to the "absolutely no talking until it's over" policy for anything we see together at the theater. But when those lights come up, watch out. Someone's gonna get an earful, depending on the divide and who actually chose what movie to see. It seldom happens, as our likes and dislikes- as I pointed out- are pretty well known at this point in our relationship.

Then along comes a film like Black Swan.

The schism could readily be seen as we left our seats. I muttered something underneath my breath to the effect of "masterpiece" and "misunderstood in its own time" and Simone responded with a continual Bronx cheer from the moment we left our seats, through the lobby, until we hit the cold Milwaukee street, leaving a trail of spittle and contempt so wide and toxic that the theater staff itself would have to separate it from the popcorn remnants and sticky residue and discard it using tongs, a bucket and some HAZMAT suits.

In the light of day, under the marquee, she shook her fists at the heavens and vengefully cried, "Aronofsky!!!" at the top of her lungs.

I kind of liked the picture show.

Of course, I had girded my cinematic loins for such nonsense through years of admiration for the absurdly pretentious films of Ken Russell throughout the 1970s and '80s and had formed an obliged emotional bulwark against such astonishingly doomed, bleak and arcane downers as Tree of the Wooden Clogs, The Bicycle Thief, Pelle the Conqueror and, frankly, most anything by Ingmar Bergman.

Black Swan is nowhere near any of those masterpieces, nor should it be considered as anything but a current attempt, by an ambitious hack, to capture the spirit of them. But its motivations are in the right place and it sporadically achieves some of the brilliance of its betters out of sheer audacity and having a pair of balls on it larger than Paul Bunyan's, spurred on by being a story primarily about the machinations of the female psyche as reflected through a lecherous male prism. The film is decidedly chauvinistic. There is no argument to that. But do women have to be such selfish, petty, crazy, condescending bitches in decrying that?

Oops.

Aronofsky is an acquired taste. He had a promising debut with Pi in 1998, a tight little black-and-white thriller having fun with Hassidism and numbers. Then came the overwrought mess that was Requiem for a Dream, salvaged, if at all, by a great performance from Ellen Burstyn. The bloated, overly ambitious The Fountain followed six years later and the one time wunderkind seemed to be flailing. His kinetic, gimmicky style (one imagines, adopted for the micro-attention-span youth) was corralled and 2008's The Wrestler put him back on the map with some inspired casting (Mickey Rourke) and a suitably grainy style. The script blew for the most part and one wonders whether Aronofsky, despite his unique flair, had a blind eye for drama and a tin ear for dialogue.

The same problems which plagued The Wrestler are apparent in Black Swan albeit not as prevalent- the desire for images over storytelling, incongruous genre shifts, heavy handed, often trite dramatic intrusions, and thematic tropes so fucking obvious that an elementary school music teacher helming a 5th grade production of Camelot would rise from their piano and shout, "Shut it down, we need to go another way."

The film belongs to Natalie Portman. Her Best Actress Oscar was well deserved. I would have loved to see Jennifer Lawrence's performance in Winter's Bone take it, but fuck me, I'm a purist. Portman is commanding in her weakness. A confused practitioner of an art (ballet) that has kept her from living any sort of normal existence. She's a cutter (through scratching), a nail biter, a sexual repressive, an anorexic and mired in a disturbing state of arrested development (in her mid-20s she has a bed filled with stuffed animals). A girl never allowed maturity due to her constant drive for perfection and acceptance from others, especially her domineering stage mother, Barbara Hershey. Hershey's turn in this film and real-life cosmetic surgery can only be described as "severe". Once a naturally beautiful star and actress, her want of eternal youth both in and outside the film has created an interesting monster indeed. Her male doppelganger from the same era, Mickey Rourke, has achieved notoriety for similar on and off-screen eccentricities, curiously under the wing of Mr. Aronofsky. If you add Ellen Burstyn to the mix you'll notice the need of the director to use and abuse former elites of the prior film acting generation. Perhaps in forging the new with the destruction of the old? Patterns. Patterns. Hollywood patterns. Interesting.

Meryl Streep and Jon Voight as aged S&M swinging fetishists for his next project, I'm imagining.

Enough with the tangents.

As for the applauded Mila Kunis performance? I don't see it. Maybe if the lesbian scene was nude (what happened to actors giving their all?), but I always hear the voice of Meg from Family Guy whenever that mediocrity opens her mouth.

Aronofsky's visual style works here and is the primary storytelling device. The dialogue is thankfully meager, coming when it does in embarrassing attempts at already established exposition, including silly synopsis of Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake for the Ignoranti and metaphorically challenged. His camera is dominant. Twirling, fluttering, angular, reflective, shaky, spinning and often capturing sleekness and physical beauty (the dancer's musculature and movement) in an otherwise ugly world of shallow competitiveness and damaged characters. He also loves to linger on discomfort and visceral, physical unpleasantness- the peeling of skin, the tearing of fingernails and toenails, the cracking of joints, and the stress on the human body, both emotionally and physically, not highlighted by most filmmakers today.

Sure, Aronofsky's a thematic retard. As subtle as a drunk Max Ernst in a bar full of Michelangelo enthusiasts. The whole film falls completely apart after the club scene (about 1:20 in) where the chicks trip ("roll") and engage in clothed (?) cunnilingus. But we're all a little tired by that point, having fed on the prior sustenance. No matter how galling and self-important it was. He's one of the few directors at least trying to reignite the flame of artistic cinema.

What it is, essentially, and what I could not get across to Simone, is that Black Swan is a rare film in the morass of current movie product that strives for beauty, ugliness and something more.

Art, maybe.

I'm sure of one thing. Tchaikovsky would either have approved or never stopped throwing up.

I know I had to hold Simone's hair from over the bowl when we got home.



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