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The Third Hand |
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DARREN ARONOFSKY'S FILM "BLACK SWAN" OR THE BLACK SWAN IN THE BLACK SWAN
By Helmut Ploebst
Actually there never should have been a black swan. Until the end of the 17th century, swans were supposed to be white only. In 1697, black swans were discovered in Australia, and the former certainty became history. Unexpectedly. Since then, the black swan has been a symbol for the occurrence of an event hitherto regarded as impossible.
In 2007, the New York-based Lebanese philosopher Nassim Nicholas Taleb published his “Black Swan Theory” in his book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable – just in time at the outbreak of the financial crisis. In the ballet Swan Lake (1877) the black swan stands for the incarnation of desaster masked as temptation and staged as deception – in a political sense, too.
The psychological thriller Black Swan of US film director Aronofsky thematises the social system of ballet, confronting its totalitarianism with severe criticism. It partly contains the political concept of Swan Lake, and partly an important element of Taleb's “Black Swan Theory”.
Like all art forms which are created by collectives, ballet belongs to the inherently social arts – as opposed to the solipsistic ones which are realised mainly by single authors. Political processes are active in all social arts; surprisingly, though, they mostly are treated anecdotically only, although these processes have an important influence on the respective art form.
All social arts are structured extremely hierarchically. For more than half a century there have been many attempts to develop alternatives to these hierarchies. Even more astonishingly, in the wake of the 1968 movement an extremely authoritarian art system developed (e.g., director's theatre), where acclaimed geniuses like Peter Stein, Peter Zadek or Frank Castorf could – and still can – run riot as dictators.
The reign of cockerels
So, a strange parallel on this level to ancient aristocratic-authoritarian ballet, which until today in many of its formations has adapted seamlessly to the maxims of neoliberalism. Therefore, several theatre, dance and artist formations recently have again taken recourse to collective work. The matter-of-factness of the authoritarian principle and the equally difficult and rare development of collective practices in the social arts show that they have not at all been able yet to free themselves from the deception of genius. Especially so because for the more or less entirely conservative marketing environment of art, the genius or star is best marketable. There is no difference here between bourgeois and pop culture, and both for some time now have been absorbed successively in the service-oriented creative apparatus of neoliberalism.
Here, Aronofsky's story takes up. But it doesn't do so with the sad biography of Nina Sayers (played by Natalie Portman) which is in the foreground. The drama of her fate is important mainly as an act of persuasion by the director in order to attract a larger audience. The character of the ballet director Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel) appears more pointed there, for the vain, pompous and authoritarian cockerel represents a male type one often meets in the world of ballet – as one does in theatre, in politics, in the military, among managers and so on. A stereotype, but a relevant one, because it downright archetypically denominates the performance of a power dispositive.
After all, it is just this type of sociopathic and cowardly male operating with blackmail and subterfuge who in the character of the ballet impresario Boris Lermontov drives the female protagonist Victoria Page to commit suicide in the English film The Red Shoes (1948) by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. Sixty-two years later, Aronofsky still tells the same story, only omitting the love story. However, the character of Nina Sayers is worked out much better than that of Victoria Page. The suicide in both films stands for the “black swan” in Taleb's sense: for the unforeseen event which seems impossible.
In Black Swan, another kind of body language than that of ballet comes to the fore. Strained tendons, agonised mimics, and recurring stressed preparation for dance choreograph Sayers' heavy duty body via montage, camera and cutting. Close-up shots of a broken toenail or of tearing off a bit of skin transfer this stress directly into the cinema audience's empathic apparatus. And the change of perception of the ballerina who gradually succumbs to schizophrenia is drawn impressively at least in that scene where she looks at herself in a mirror and suddenly sees a third hand scratching her shoulder where she bleeds again and again but later denies having injured herself.
Pillow fight with swan feathers
The third hand marks the transition of the Sayers character to a Jekyll-and-Hyde creature. The dark Odile breaks out of her, and her eyes become red like a demon's (one of the instances where the director borrows from the B-movie treasury). Sayers becomes a Frankenstein monster which only superficially continues to function under control of the system that formed it. And so it remains unclear whether it is this third hand which mutilates Beth, her predecessor as star of the ballet company, with a nail file. However, it becomes clear that she doesn't – as we are first made to believe – stab Lily, her rival for the role, but rams a mirror shard into her own belly.
She dances the piece with this handicap up to the death of Odile which also means her own end. Now at last the blood flows out of her belly, and when Leroy bends over her she manages to whisper: “It was perfect.” Full stop. End of the pillow fight of special effects, and credits with a few lonely dancing white and black feathers.
With regard to method, Aronovsky does not come near his wonderful film Pi (1998) which is about a paranoid mathematician. A small consolation: Black Swan stands out in American dance film history from Saturday Night Fever (1977) up to Shall We Dance? (2004), from the naive you'll-make-it-if-you-want-to which presents an ideological strand of the “American Dream” and subsequently of neoliberalism. Black Swan mirrors the crisis of this neoliberalism where everything is “Performance”, meaning maximisation of the presentation of performance regardless of its ethics or quality.
In spite of the film's spectacular make-up, Aronofsky's critique of the dark history of the art form ballet which up to now has hardly been dealt with, is correct and necessary. For like every authoritarian system, the ballet world, too, resists such a coming to terms and rather indulges in the comforts of beautiful appearances. Black Swan at least scratches at the surface of an image which is founded on collective schizophrenia.
(2011-02-14)
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