[The Fallen Swan] A Discourse on Darren Aronofsky's 2010 film, [Black Swan]

The Fallen Swan [A Discourse of Darren Aronofsky's 2010 film Black Swan]

No one can make a true and strong argument that German classical composition didn't dominated the 18th and 19th centuries in such a fashion as to leave its lasting echo upon the world today. Johannes Brahms, Johann Sebastian Bach, Ludwig Van Beethoven, Clara Schumann alone levitated the composite that would be immortal the world over. Other names have also existed before (Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Joseph Haydn), during (Joseph Joachim), and after (Wladyslaw Szpilman, Henryk Gorecki, Philip Glass) but none who challenge the German classical dominance than Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. The Russian composer, known in American culture more famously for his plays "The Nutcracker" and "Sleeping Beauty," his spatial depth of sequence and genius made no greater impact than that of "Swan Lake."
Obscure in its origins and today still obscure on the American theatrical stage, wedged between its near mythical becoming and the flora of its altercations and variations, it is perhaps the most underrated and unknown to the American eye and thus, in 2010, when Darren Aronofsky released the most famous of variations in his film [Black Swan], it was a cinematic marvel and a cinematic failure.

To clarify, "failure" is chosen and founded on the peripheral of the film pundits, even the greatest of them all in the history of film critics, the posthumous, Roger Ebert, in the suddenness of shockwaves it caused in film festivals and its "limited" releases that discombobulated the minds of the majority dense American public stripped historical of aesthetics and thus remains dwarfed by the Occident. Controversy rather than a much deserved genius is stigmatized to [Black Swan] and to its auteur Aronofsky, who despite much more success in his following films, remains under castigation for his refusal to dilute the truth. It is in Aronofsky, in Portman, in Mila Kunis, that the integrity cell of film, of theatre, finds its ideal of equilibrium, faces its fear of physical detriment and unleashes it.


[Swan Lake] origins are heavily influenced by Russian folklore along with remnants of German literature, add to it the tragic life of Bavarian King Ludwig II, the body of a great poetic eulogy is set forth in an impetuous, impetus vacuum of vast space. It is Aronofsky's variation in his film, and the double within it, the theatre, in auteur theory, that births his fetiche artiste for Natalie Portman (in a trimension that portrays a devout prima ballerina, Nina, Odette in a visceral variations of [Swan Lake] and the unnamed evil double of Odette, as a split personality aware of one another.)

It is first to note that Nina [Portman] is not only a most devout second generation ballerina, she is kind, gentle, malleable in a way identical to Odette in the original version of Tchaikovsky's [Swan Lake]. It is not known if Odette displays much cowardice as Nina does but in [Black Swan], it consistently gives over to her being underrated by most in the company, verbally bullied by other dancers and characteristically labeled 'frigid." Ballet is Nina's life, the entirety of it, an obsession that even invades her dreams. This obsession is fed when Nina returns home to her mother, a failed former ballerina whose obsession is also her daughter; in the eyes of her mother, Nina is ballet, one indivisible. Despite having the longest stent with her company, Nina yet remains transparent as a transient who have just wondered into a large metropolitan. The owner of the company Thomas (portrayed by the Parisienne actor Vincent Cassel) has recognized a beautiful and talented dancer within Nina but believes that her seduction cannot be translated as her unvarying disregard for brash behavior is the key to her inability to ever become a prima ballerina. It is with the arrival of another dancer, Lily (Kunis) that Nina is finally, gradually exposed to the subterranean of misadventure.

Afronovsky again must be credited with recruiting Kunis; the Ukranian-born actress, well aware and culturally close to Russian folklore,who waltz onto the set as she did in the film with a breeze undeterred by any metaphysical force. Kunis represents a modest freedom that Nina both fears and envies, a brash deceptiveness. Nina's life resembles that of the white swan (Odette) and in her similar light, dances the part of Odette in principle with a flawless form, perfect line. The struggle comes to Nina when she attempts to dance the evil double of Odette, the black swan, a tedious role in which the greater control comes with losing control, letting go, living. Nina's entire life is about control (the white swan) so much so living the life of misadventure (the black swan) is unknowingly terrifying; she has never been allowed nor allowed herself to wander beyond the avenues set forth by her mother. It is the very fear that illcits Nina's incability to commit to the role of the black swan though once announce, she affronts any obstacle that prevents so.

But the confrontation comes not of her very own volition, it is committed by her doppelganger, the double of herself that she encounters in the most fearsome of ways. The harbinger, which is the omen of one's impending death, is encountered in its physical identical appearance but of a woman who lives opposed to the control of Nina. She wears her hair freely loose, she walks with a confidence that may even be perceived as conceited, alone, possession no fear of anyone or anything around her. Nina's double is the subconscious yearn, as the dream may impend, to be, to become, a Socratic awareness of what she must become if she is to dance both the white and the black swan.

It is also of note that Nina's haunts also come with the figurative and physical fall of the former prima ballerina Beth Macintyre (portrayed by Winona Ryder), whose relationship with Thomas ends as she is forced to retire and thus become the fallen swan. In a last great endeavor, a tragic effort, Beth throws herself in front of a car and is wounded into a critical condition state.

Nina, as all artists, undergoes a gradual growth as child in the womb of the world, a decadent movement to the seduction, autoeroticism. The Swan represents most things of Russian history, even the Swan itself is known to spend its entire life with one partner once their necks are crossed. The erotic, too, in the formula of the swan queen role. Masturbation is only a means to release the black swan, a dark impulse that is beyond the mere physical cathartic release humanity is privy to; it is cajoled from an internal force, a poltergeist, a demonic possession. The act of Nina and Lily in frottage and cunnilingus itself is the manifestation of the black swan seduction of the white, itself, autoeroticism.

And in spectating the intellectual egg breaking open for the first time, as a spectacle of the third fate cutting the thread to bring this life to its end, motion in perfect line, the greatest firmament in which we'll ever see the human body at its most perfect line, its most eloquent movement, grandiloquent as it was before the fall of Eve, the perpetual interplay between character, doppelganger, the straight from reality that is only accompanied when Nina begins to live the swans, becomes the swans; the white as she began, the black as she becomes, the fallen as she is bound to become.

With the white swan there is a malleable, linear, transparent innocence, with the black, there is seductive, brashness, erotic malevolence that forms the mirage of murdering the lover, with the fallen, comes the failure of a lifted curse, self-murder in the most tragic of ultimatums; love or death. Veronica (portrayed by Ksenia Solo, another actress born in a former Russian dominated nation, Latvia) as Lily (Kunis) neither could be the swan queen, for to be the white swan, there is love, sacrifice, unconditional devotion to eternal bliss; neither have this, only the genome of the black swan and thus they could never be the swan queen, for with the white, there is a devolving, or evolving to the black swan (which all humans have within them) and only with the characteristic of love, can one become the fallen swan. Nina's gene expression throughout the film, throughout the theatrics, throughout her physical motion, obtains and exposes the markers of all the swans.

The physical moreso the psychic impression of Nina is the myth that survives Odette, her love for ballet is then synonymous with the love for Prince Siegfried and the sensation is reminiscent of something else, a sort of magic conjured from the stage and the frequented praise accompanied by roses at the foot of the black swan, whose seduction is as pretentious as the theatrical performance in itself. What leads to what becomes of the "controversial," underrated film and underrated play, a sound and harmonious notion only survived in the Balinese theatre and remorsefully nostalgic in the occident. By reacquainting the American eye with this lost treasure, reconciliation itself becomes amalgamated fragments made by the decades of dismantling at the hands of cultural artifice, a cultural decay. If artifice is found in Aronofsky's film, it is only in the form the of the black swan and the competitive nature of ballerinas, namely Lily, who resorts to numerous wiles to expose the few but drastic flaws of Nina and thus capitalize on Thomas's preference perhaps gathered from his love and relationship with Beth.

In the most derelict way as one who takes no interest in their own self-destruction, Nina is catapulted into a controlled chaos, where chaos in the predominant language, martyrdom the patois, an umbilical direction beyond the line as a mere remark to extravagance, to the extraordinary. The acts and segments are broken in a way to disconnect and once again connect as a defunct geometry made possible by abstract variation, a formula incomplete and still somehow brings about an exact scientific sum. The direction is a division of the same mirror image twins separated at birth, reunited through an inherent resurrection. The adopted miscarriage, tatters made into whole cloth, prolong flights in an unforeseen gesture in the incapability to descend to the earth.

I dare say that the ballerina encompasses more of the faults, pains, pledges and physical defaults as no other visual or motion artist. Because she is born as a woman at the foot of man, she has been taught to believe that she has limitations. When she is first deflowered by ballet, she revolts to overthrow limit through a most painful and precise art; if limitation is found, it only survives in her fragile mind, for her body, if her mind allows, has becomes superhuman and her revolt decimates limits in order for her to dance freely, precisely, flawlessly in spatial space and time. [Black Swan] has brought to film the toils of the ballerina in beautiful revolt as never before, perhaps for the last time in our human history. And in theatre within the film, their revolt is one in which demands years of unconditional, devout diligence, an interior walk within that is per contra to the human.

The ballerina is the central theme of the human endeavor, of the great human plight to live out accidental existence, naked ambition in transgression of its own said rights, misery's illegitimate child disfigured in embryonic misshapen, menacing the day they'll have their death to this world. This artist is the ideal of this marauding species, the human miasma to become something existential, concerned not with destruction and self-destruction but with electricity, an alternating current between being and falling, for with great height and depth comes an inevitable fall; this fall is reminiscence, a representation of one having taken flight, wings at some point bloomed, unfolded and fluttered into a maddening lift from the earth. If one is to see what has become of art, which is the wavelength between this life and the next, they only have to look upon Javier Perez's film [En Puntas] to witness this immediate, this sudden plummet from self-righteousness to self-flagellation.

In the abandoned aura of a theatre of bygone ornament, a single man is seated in view of an empty stage, lined with velvet curtains. With the winding of an antique music box, which creates in its simplistic mechanics a floating tune, the curtain is lifted to a small grand piano being approached by a ballerina. Amelie Segarra is the woman who approaches, mounting to be met with a pair of pointe shoes modified with stainless steel knives attached. Hanging from above is a rope, used to aid her to a most extreme position of uprightness once she has secured her perilous motifs.

Once she is upright, in a most learned and superhuman balance, she must rely solely on her years of discipline and equilibrium, a tedious bravery that comes with a second thought inherently to the human mind, to keep her balance; one fall and she will meet a most sudden blunt trauma to render her unconscious. Pivots en pointe, she simultaneously dances on the very tip of the blades whilst in a frenzy of frustration. Her discipline has become her as it was innate yet she  reveals that she still reserves that bits and pieces of human frailty. Even on the very edge, millimeters from a fall forward to a frontal injury, this discipline is set. Segarra en pointe, on an empty stage, in an abandoned theatre, wrought with the paradox of discipline and weakness is Perez's critique on the whole of the human race.

Aronofsky and Perez has made of the theatre and the film, its modern double, a setting of both transcendence and tragedy, of massive misadventure to not suppress reality with abstract but to bring into abstract a reality itself. Segarra, as Nina, both are burdened with doubles, doppelgangers which exposes their vulnerabilities one moment and make possible what is out of their grasp the next. Nina possess genius while Segarra is possessed by genius but even in genius, a markable, remarkable, rare, naked-eye meteor, a domain abject on the contrast obscured by its own sense of threat, reliance upon its sphere is one of fragile, dissimulated constrain. What may be enticed metaphysically may not follow over into the thoughts, but expressed nonetheless. However this is not the trademark of multiple personalities; each is both aware of the other, yes, but each is one in the same, in pursuit of the same transcendence, one through naive modesty, the other through relentless decadence.

What more can be more dear than the nakedness of the visceral mind embracing the light of a beautiful ideal, the haunted incandescence capture without mercy, construct a character from the very expression of light and life itself.  We speak of the arrival of a moon full inasmuch its wholeness removes us momentarily from the difficulties of man against man, its lunar lapse falls upon the earth as torn into the atmosphere with magnetic response. It is beautiful to us because its death, its nothingness, its lapse of nevermore, removes us from ourselves. To be moved, to forget the world in which we inhabit, its monotonous coarseness and enter into an unknown dimension, one borrowed from the mysticism of this world and the unknown of the next, is why the metaphysics of the ballerina, of the ballet, is beloved, its fall upon us is invited as a warm blanket on a frigid night imprisoned by a polar vortex.

Humanity needs these reminders of dimensions, restricted districts beyond that demand great depth and great substance, sustainable lore that makes of the mind a cathedral non-transparent through the stained glass. When first I rose to my feet at the conclusion of [Black Swan], something anew had become in me, of me. I had become disengaged, dis-enraged with the past, with the sterility that left distorted dreams within my mind unfertilized. It might be said that for the mind to illuminate, it must first show its own shadow, its own double, the opposing hemisphere that the sun never sees. The mind must rotate if light is to ever traverse the meridian, bring forth an efficacy against its own animated suspension, attain another kind of being. No other film has given more to the mind, brought forth the power to cause thinking as opposed to a passing thought during a viewing moment, than [Black Swan]. Its efficacy that has aggregated from an underrated ballet and an underrated film to an underrated immortality. In this asphyxiating age in which we survive, an ancient language that is misunderstood and difficult to learn, it dies due to our inability to understand its complexities. To survive on our ignorance is not survival at all but merely equivalent to saying what has already been said, not what needs to be said, what most fear to say, fear to tread.

And after all the audible mannerism of composed murmurs has been lifted as a foster into the air to fly in space and the noises from within the earth become deafening in the backdrop of a mutinous night, I know it was I who was speaking. The artist from clay had become a stratified, an ossified immortal from this theatric vaccination. In the midst of all meteors and spells, I had understood nothing in that nothingness of a desolate town, only wiles to offer a shifting perspective of those bygone and failed to transpire.