Black Swan turns 11: Revisiting Darren Aronofsky, Natalie Portman’s compelling claustrophobic drama

Black Swan’s lurid appeal was multi-layered. Darren Aronofsky’s 2010 psychological thriller offered a claustrophobic and discomfiting inroad into the mind of Nina Sayer (Natalie Portman) as she struggles to make a mark in the world of ballet. A technically proficient dancer, Nina’s career is initially staggered. When news of the lead dancer’s replacement in their upcoming performance of Black Swan is announced, Nina makes an earnest attempt to bag the roles of Odette (the White Swan) and Odile (the Black Swan).

In his retelling of the classic, Aronofsky imbues multiple facets to his story. Black Swan is primarily an underdog story that keeps audiences on tenterhooks about Nina’s future. But the film also includes elements of horror that are introduced by her paranoid schizophrenia and tendency for self-harm. The film is at once a psychosexual drama and a compelling musical. Nina’s misplaced sense of sexual abandon after being grossly infantilised by an equally problematic mother lies at the crux of the ballerina’s self-doubts. Overcontrolled and undersexualized, Nina’s bond with her mother Erica (Barbara Hershey) is insidious. 

Erica’s unfulfilled career as a ballerina becomes a propelling factor to project her frustrations on Nina and thereby live her young years vicariously through the daughter. In her need to perfect Nina’s talents, she thrusts the girl into a hyperdrive of perfection. Thus, Nina becomes an anxious overthinker, always second-guessing her prowess as a performer. This, in turn, provides the perfect canvas for an exacting Thomas Leroy (Nina’s ballet instructor, played by Vincent Cassel) to play on her weak spots.

Cassel’s bipolar treatment with Portman’s Nina is both nerve-wracking and emotional. His unabashed celebration of Nina’s talents and the consequent condescension that he makes her undergo are extremely convincing. Nina’s abject need to please Leroy is a mere extension of her unsure self, but his unforgiving stance towards her can only be summed up as a rite of passage for Nina to attain glory.

Leroy’s mercurial nature and quest for perfection make him the appropriate antagonist in a gripping story about the crests and troughs of a student-teacher narrative, a trope brilliantly used by Damien Chazelle in 2014’s Whiplash. Leroy’s almost parodically phallic presence only makes the ballet company a wretched vision of patriarchy. He routinely manipulates his students against one another, optimally inculcating the dictums of divide and rule.

Aronofsky indulges in his moments of excruciating awkwardness to develop Nina’s oppressed life. In a disturbing scene, Nina is seen masturbating in her bedroom moments before she turns around to see her mother asleep on a chair near her bedroom door. Even at her Ballet company, Nina’s co-dancers are jealous, sceptical presences that contribute to the heaviness in the atmosphere around her.

Portman’s embodiment of Nina was much more than just emotional. Her lean frame and bony structure were the perfect canvas for Nina’s almost-anorexic frame. The scene where she imagines the swan’s feathers on her shoulder blades, gives a chilling picture of a haggard, delusional artiste, burdened under the weight of her self-expectations.

Black Swan was at its core a story of the ‘grey’ in humans, it was about a crude choice between the essences of goodness, loyalty and passiveness against evil, manipulation, and duplicity.

Nina’s self-actualisation lies within herself, and Aronofsky constantly plays with this principle to confuse her as a character. Her ultimate epiphany is hence nothing less than her death, an ultimate fate. The film’s release, a decade after the millennium, oddly focused on themes like chaos and dependency, when in real life, neo-liberal thoughts of self-sufficiency were the norm. But for Aronofsky, Nina was tragically mad, hurling towards her end in a Macbeth-esque fashion.