I went into this movie (oops) fully expecting to hate it. I mean, it's a movie about ballet (cooties!), and the reviews I've read seemed to suggest it was homophobic.
I did not, in fact, hate "Black Swan". Sometimes it was gross, and sometimes it made me angry, but mostly I thought it was funny. This is a movie that hates the fact that human beings have bodies. I can not imagine anything more ridiculous...
I also didn't expect to find so many similarities to "A Streetcar Named Desire", but, even leaving aside the fact that "Streetcar" is still fresh in my mind, the parallels are plentiful.
1. Both movies hate, hate, HATE sex. "Streetcar" offers sex appeal and then cruelly yanks it away, leaving you with incest, pedophilia, spousal abuse, and rape, while "Black Swan" barely gets as far as holding hands before making you feel like a terrible person. The movie from 1951 is actually more progressive in that regard.
2. Both movies offer us horny females who go absolutely, positively, woo-hoo insane because of their horniness. Granted, Nina (Natalie Portman) is on opposite sides of the fucking planet from Blanche, in regards to acting on her desire. However, it's still desire that gets the two of them into trouble. Woops, I meant "terrifying madness and/or death".
3. Finally, both movies really don't like the fact that men and women exist. And not in a queer, "down with gender" kind of way. It's more like a "you are sinful for existing" thing (see link above). In both movies, men are portrayed as insensitive, sex-crazed brutes and women are portrayed as jealous, sex-crazed lunatics. Hey, maybe it isn't just these two movies...maybe it's Hollywood. However, a "Streetcar"/"Black Swan" double feature would really make a great field trip for an abstinence only sex ed class!
On to our feature presentation...
The movie starts with Natalie Portman (Nina) dancing with a big ugly man in an awful sweater, who eventually turns into Satan, or maybe a Mexican wrestler, or a chicken. And so the tone has been set. Off we go on a sinister subway ride, where a cute chick is spotted in the opposite car -- or is it only Nina's reflection?
Nina is a ballerina, who has a creepy relationship with her mom, and is so femme she makes Barbie look like Vin Deisel. She trains in an underground torture chamber. Oh wait, that's Lincoln Center. You know, I was just by Lincoln Center to visit the Performing Arts Library, and it didn't look particularly grim then. Maybe because it was daylight...
Enter the asshole director, who gives us some exposition on "Swan Lake". The good, pure White Swan is bested by the evil, slutty Black Swan, "and in death finds freedom". That's almost as subtle as Blanche telling a sailor, "They told me to take a streetcar named Desire and transfer to one named Cemetery." Actually, it's even less subtle, since at least that was a metaphor.
And how the hell does a bird kill itself by jumping off a cliff, anyway? Very deliberately?
Ok, so, we already know how the movie ends. Nina dies. Time to go!
Wait. There's that sexy girl from the subway ride!
Sexy girl's name is Lily, and she's "straight off the plane from San Francisco". Straight indeed. Nina's already got a queer eye for her.
There's some bitchiness from the other ballerinas, and there's some bulimia, there's some toe cracklin', and Nina is menaced by graffiti...then we have the wrinkly old asshole director sticking his tongue in her mouth. She bites him. Good for her!
In accordance with Hollywood logic, this is exactly what she needed to do to prove herself. She gets the lead role in "Swan Lake", over Veronica, who is mean and wears too much makeup.
Nina celebrates by calling her mom, and by getting completely freaked out by a slur written on her mirror. Even worse, mom has to get all weird about her cake. If you go by this movie, bulimia is just part of the job, but getting upset when your daughter won't eat cake is crazy and abusive.
The next scene is all ribs and nipples, in case you were feeling ok about Nina not eating cake. Asshole director (his name is Tomas) watches her dance the pure, virginal White Swan. He tells her, "The real work will be your metamorphosis into her evil twin." I agree, I hear that kind of thing is exhausting.
Bloody cuticles scene. You know, I bite my cuticles all the time (I know, it's gross), and it never sounds like that...
More assholery from the asshole director. Nina is called a cocksucker by Winona Ryder. There's an ugly damn bird-man sculpture. Is this at the Museum of the American Indian? You know, I once did a drawing project just like that, it was all about a man sacrificing himself for art and science, and transforming himself into a bird...
Tomas continues to be an asshole by taking a less-than-eager Nina back to his room for sex. When she resists, he suggests she go fuck herself, quite literally. What a charming guy.
Nina returns home. Now, I scribbled down a series of notes at this point. They're just sentence fragments, but I think they get the point across all by themselves:
Exposed spine
Scratching herself
Oozing
Mom strips [Nina] topless & sucks bleeding finger
In other words: ewwww.
Well, after all that, Nina decides to go to her room and take the asshole's advice. Surrounded by pink, fluffy stuffed animals, she lies in bed and rummages under the covers to her crotch. It's not very sexy, since she has the body of a prepubescent, and is even wearing little girl Underoos. It gets even less sexy when we, and Nina, realize that Mom is in the room.
Winona Ryder's character, Beth, meanwhile, decides to throw herself into traffic. We don't actually see this, but the asshole director suggests to Nina that she intentionally got hit by a car. You see, Beth was the former head ballerina at the company, and the asshole fired her for being old. Then she got hit by a car. Does he seem guilty or remorseful about it? Not particularly. He is truly a prince among men.
More scabs. More sexual harassment: "I'll be the prince" indeed. He paws at her little girl body as a sort of tutorial. She needs to be more passionate, and nothing gets a woman's blood flowing like RAPE.
Enter sexy Lily, with bad-girl cigarettes. She is much prettier than Tomas, or hell, even Nina, who has this weird skin rash...she is also genuinely charming and would be the most sympathetic character in the film if the film didn't consider female sexuality completely evil.
"Someone's hot for teacher..," Lily surmises, when Nina defends Asshole Tomas. I think I threw up in my popcorn.
Bloody fingernail clipping. You know, I could have sworn that this sort of thing was a specifically MALE metaphor for fear of sex and the castration complex...but then again, I wouldn't want to see what the movie would come up with for a specifically female version.
Another evil subway ride, on the Hogwarts Express to Hell. Grandpa sits across from Nina and mimes fingering her. Boy howdy, does this movie hate sex.
Nina and mom argue. Nina takes off with Lily to the evilest night club in New York City. Lily gets her drunk, introduces her to frat boys, and gives her E. This can not end well. And it doesn't.
While Nina is half passed out from all the booze and drugs, Lily fingers her. Has nobody in this film ever heard of consent? Next up: Nina arguing with her mom. That's kind of a good thing, since her mom is too attached to her. Then Lily has ambiguously real oral sex with Nina, accompanied by disgusting sound effects, because how dare the audience enjoy it?
It ends with Nina waking up alone and throwing out all her creepy toys. Wow, that wasn't so bad afterall. Maybe sex isn't such a bad --
GAY PANIC!
Nina starts going...well, less sane. She is all sweaty and gristly the day before her starring role. She is hallucinating, complete with ominous music and huge shadows. "Black Swan" temporarily transforms into a slasher flick. And Nina temporarily transforms into...oh come on! That's actually the ankle joint, not the knee! There's absolutely no need for that popping noise either!
Well, I guess female independence means going insane. That's what puberty is for. On to the dance!
Everything is going great until Lily's man-whore "accidentally" drops Nina. For that, Lily (certainly not her man-whore) must die. So she dies. Or maybe she doesn't. Who can tell at this point? Nina kisses Pickle-Puss asshole Tomas, which is this movie's way of saying "Nina has become an independent adult", and my way of saying "That's disgusting!"
It's bad enough that Nina has just killed her lesbian crush in favor of an oily old leather bag of a man...but he's been a little rape-y throughout the movie. The only reason he doesn't, in fact rape her is...um...I'm at a loss for reasons. Because it would give "Black Swan" an X-rating?
Oh G-d, I can already hear the sound effects...
But Lily isn't dead...or evil...and something about pushing shards of glass into a pussy...I mean, a tutu, and then...oh fuck, this is worse than menarche.
If I had to give this film a star rating, it would be 2 and a half out of 5:
1 for "keeping my attention" (how could it not, with all those bleeding sores?)
1 for "making me afraid of ballerinas" (see above)
And 1 half star for "lesbian sex scene which was actually kind of hot if you ignore the amplified slurping sounds"
Despite my first impression, I did not wind up hating this movie. It has such a vile message I almost ENJOY hating it, which makes me like it...but then I remember why I hate it again. So in the end, I like hating it, which is different from simply hating it.
Natalie Portman put in an excellent performance, and I'm going to do an image search for the actress who played Lily right now.
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