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Eve Tushnet

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Last updated on: February 1, 2011 at 2:01 am by Eve Tushnet

2011-02-01T02:01:00-04:00 Eve Tushnet

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OH, ROMANCE IS NOT A CHILDREN’S GAME: A review of Black Swan, finally. [lightly edited bc I initially posted an unedited version–fixed some typos and rhetorical fumbles, but substantively this is the original post–sorry! A bit more on this movie later tonight.]

I saw this movie I think more than a month ago, but had a hard time figuring out how to talk about it. So this is my flailing attempt to describe why it completely worked for me despite often being crude.

I think The Vault of Horror is really on to something in labeling the movie “expressionist.” Black Swan is almost a Cabinet of Dr. Caligari for women. I know some viewers were disappointed that the movie pulled its punches on “body horror”; for me, Natalie Portman looking at herself in the mirror was vastly more terrifying than any H.R. Giger-influenced scuttling creation. I explained it to a friend by saying I thought Black Swan had achieved balletic body-horror: camp, because camp is always the razor’s edge where tragedy meets parody. Loveless, cruel, and longing: that’s how Black Swan woos its audience, all femme-fatale.

Black Swan gives us both repression-is-horror and self-expression-is-horror. I’m not sure I can think of a horror movie which managed to stay en pointe so completely. (For example, and I get that other people have other experiences of this movie, I thought that the hippies [eta: pagans, but you know what I mean!] in the original Wicker Man were so gross and silly that the movie’s central conflict never felt real to me. I almost think that a horror movie, to succeed, needs you to love two conflicting sides [cf Juno and Beth in The Descent, for a case in which the obvious enemy is, for the audience, really just a way of raising the stakes and illuminating the conflicts between the women?].) Anyway, I loved Nina, I loved her naive idiot director, I loved her rivals, and I think if I were a better person I would have even loved her mother. I thought TVOH’s line, “Nina’s startling transformation into the black swan is the transformation of an individual who can only find release in the acceptance of that within her which also has the power to destroy her,” was exactly not the point of the movie. Free to Be You and Me was not what this movie is about. More like, “The mind is its own place, and in itself/Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.”

One reason I didn’t post about this movie before is that I wasn’t sure how to talk about the fact that there are at least two, maybe three, scenes in which Natalie Portman simulates masturbation. And I’m kind of intensely ambivalent about that, even beyond the part where I did actually look away from the screen for certain moments of the movie. First, I was reminded of how censorship breeds creativity. If the makers of this movie knew they couldn’t get an actress, a human person, to deploy her sexuality in this creepy diffused poly- and abstracted-erotic way, I think they would have found some metaphorical ways to make their point.

But that point would always have been masturbation, I think. Black Swan is actually aligned with Catholic sexual morality insofar as masturbation is one manifestation of Nina’s spiral down into herself. Even her fantasies about connection with another woman are presented, by the movie, as masturbatory hallucination. Nina is never granted eros. All she has is self–the hated self, the perfect and exalted self, but never anything or anyone but Nina.

Soldiers, this solitude
through which we go
is I.

When you tell somebody, “Express yourself”–you’d better be pretty sure you know who she really is inside. Black Swan, with its rage against both repression and self-actualization, is a movie against our times.

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