In his newest film Black Swan, Aronofsky continues his disturbing and beautiful probe into the complexities of human emotion. Nina, a role interpreted with phenomenal aptitude by Natalie Portman, is an immature, insecure but gifted ballerina. She wins the part of dancing both the Swan Queen and her dark, seductive doppelgänger, knowing only some of the difficulties she will encounter.
The idea of using a dancer and her dance to tell a story of inner struggle is hardly new to the cinema. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Red Shoes, which predates Black Swan by 62 years, tells a similar story about a different sort of duality: the impossible choice between pursuing love or the art of dance. To say that Black Swan is similar to the Archers’ masterpiece is a woeful understatement.
Aronofsky denies The Red Shoes’ influence on his work, saying, “I noticed the similarities between the stories because we both went back to ballet and pulled the different characters and ended up in similar places. But I wasn’t really influenced by it; I really could never even try to be influenced by it because it’s such a masterpiece and the dance sequences were so ahead of their time. I just kept it in the back [of my mind].”
Whether intentional or not, Arronofsky delves into the same themes to a level with which 1948 audiences may not have been comfortable. The Archers, as well as Aronofsky, were/are consumed with the exploration of the multi-dimensionality of human nature. Victoria “Vicky” Page (Moira Shearer), much like Nina, struggles for perfection in two different capacities and in the end finds herself defeated by both. In The Red Shoes, director Boris Lermontov (Anton Walbrook) tells Vicky, “you can’t have two lives,” while Black Swan’s director, Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel), encourages Nina to find the darkness in her life, telling her “the only person standing in your way is you.” Both film acknowledge the impossibility of the task and see the quests’ victims jump off precipices of both physicality and emotion, leaving their bodies and spirits maimed.
Being the perfect metaphor that they are for duplicity, both films use mirrors to profound effect. Nina’s self-reflections and descent into madness begin and end in front of mirrors. At times, they transcend the physical mirrors, climaxing in the frenzied, chromatic club scene in which we lose track of Nina and she loses herself. She welcomes in the darkness and becomes one with its physical and emotional manifestations, consummating in her sexual union with Lily (Mila Kunis) in the next scene. After her drug-induced stupor, Nina returns to her dressing room mirror for her premiere performance, where she has a haunting encounter with both her doppelgänger and Lily, between whom the borders are very unclear at this point in the film. Interestingly, Nina smashes the mirror and uses its shards as a weapon; the damage she inflicts upon an imaginary Lily and upon the black swan reflects itself upon not only the Swan Queen, but also upon Nina herself. She attempts to break her own newfound duplicity, but in the end it breaks her.
The usage of mirrors in The Red Shoes was both revolutionary and disturbing for its time. In Vicky’s performance of the eponymous ballet, her character’s dreams of dancing forever are captured through a complex projector-mirror system that shows her twirling reflection in the shoe store window. The notion of dancing forever, of course, is the cause of her eventual death, and the images reflected in the mirrors become more sinister as the ballet progresses, showing horrifying and lewd images of a circus as it descends into sinful nightlife. The scene during which Lermontov smashes a mirror, reflecting his broken dreams for Vicky, is reserved for the privacy of backstage. Here is a man who, much unlike Nina’s Leroy, discourages his vedette from leading two lives. He even denies himself the sight of his own dual nature, suppressing his romantic interest in Vicky for the love of dance, knowing that he cannot have both.
The innovative rendering of dance in Powell and Pressburger’s film amazed critics and immortalized the work in the cinematic canon. However, back in the days of Technicolor Process Four and massive three-strip cameras, shots were very tied-down and required massive lights. The amount of movement achieved in the dance scene was a huge undertaking. With the advancements in film over the last several decades, as well as Aronofsky’s decision to shoot on Super 16 and digital, he and director of photography Matthew Libatique achieved a poetic dance with the camera that transports audiences much further into the experience than was previously possible.
The smaller, more light-sensitive cameras also allowed a much more personal, gritty feel to the film. As Leroy says of his run of Swan Lake, he wants something “visceral and real,” and that manifests itself not just in the on-stage performance but also on screen. Aronofsky finds his reality and his truth in the greys of life, a theme that has manifested itself more in his films as his visual language has matured. In fact, much of the film takes place in the grey cinder blocks of the dressing and rehearsal rooms in which Nina undergoes her transformation. She even rejects her pink stuffed animals from her room, leaving only the choice between black and white and coming up with the answer of grey.
Both The Red Shoes and Black Swan are based on simple fairy tales, but both are revolutionary in their complexity. The two take place in the realm of the greys, with Aronofsky taking the visual conversation to a new level not feasible in the Technicolor era. Curiously, while the end of The Red Shoes clearly ends with Vicky’s death and inability to choose between love and art, the ending of Black Swan is maddeningly unclear. It could be Nina who dies, her white incarnation, even her black incarnation. It poses more of a question than an answer, but both still come to the same conclusion: There is no right or wrong, there is no black and white, there is only humanity.
Black Swan is currently in theaters nationwide, distributed by Fox Searchlight Pictures. The award-winning 2009 restoration of The Red Shoes is available on DVD and Blu-ray from The Criterion Collection. Trailers for the two films can be seen here: Black Swan & The Red Shoes
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