Black Swan: Artistic Madness

 

Black Swan is one of those films that a psychoanalyst, reluctant or not, should have seen a long time ago.  I have been trying to convince the reluctant wife to watch it for a couple of months.  She agrees that we should see it, but she does not like violence – and this film, we both knew, would be filled with intimate violence.  And it necessarily is.

 

This post, btw, follows the plot more closely than most of my posts do.  I think it needs to because of the nature of the plot and my interpretation of it.  That said, when you watch this, it will, inevitably not follow my account – just as those who have seen the film will remember it differently than I do.

 

Black Swan is a film about the artistic process and what it takes to become someone that we both are and are not.  In that sense, it is a coming of age film – but it is a coming of age film that portrays the brutality of coming of age that occurs in public, onstage, in order to achieve something that is unique and also quite extraordinary – an accurate depiction of the contradictory aspects of the human soul.  To do this, the film and the character had to become quite mad.  But not, as some critics and mental health folks would have it, mentally ill.  The madness takes the forms of mental illness because those are the forms available to represent madness – but this is not a film about what is concretely displayed on the screen.  In fact, there are many scenes that clearly bear no relationship to reality not because the character is psychotic, but because it is impossible to represent her state of mind onscreen without her appearing to be psychotic.  And this becomes the entry point for talking about this as a film about psychosis.  But I believe it is not about that at all, but about the intrapsychic madness – the madness of the mind – that goes into becoming someone that the hero is not – and deeply and darkly also is.

 

Natalie Portman plays Nina, the perfectionistic, talented, but mousy corps ballerina in the New York ballet.  She is the daughter of a woman who also danced in the New York ballet – never advancing beyond the corps – Erica Sayers (Barbara Hershey).  Nina still lives with her mother – and her mother is a piece of work.  When Nina, who is battling - likely through anorexia and bulimia – to maintain her emaciation level weight, is offered an ornate cake by her mother to celebrate her getting a role and Nina demurs, her mother threatens to throw the cake away and it is only through what is a well-practiced routine that Nina brings her mother back from the brink.

 

I hope to demonstrate that, diagnostically, there is a lot of stuff here.  Erica – the mother – right off the bat – is precariously balanced.  We would call that a borderline level of ego functioning – meaning that she is neither neurotic nor psychotic, but somewhere in between, with characteristics of both.  She is a successful Mom who has raised, apparently on her own, a talented and competent child, but she is not mature – she needs things from her daughter that a mother shouldn’t.  The daughter could be diagnosed with an eating disorder, but she seems able to manage her mother’s muddles and is functioning quite well professionally – as we will see.  On first blush, she appears to be functioning in the high borderline to low neurotic range – probably with a more solidly developed personality structure than her mother’s.

 

This interaction between mother and daughter captures Nina’s ability to suppress her own desires – to eat – and also to alienate her smothering mother – so that she can be the highly regimented perfectionistic dancer who devotes herself to her craft and, in the process, has come to embody half of the prima ballerina role for which she has been cast – the White Swan in Swan Lake.  The White Swan is actually a human – Odette - who has been imprisoned as a swan by the evil owl-like sorcerer Rothbart.  She spends her days as a swan and becomes human, along with her similarly cursed maids in waiting, only at night at the lake that was created by her mother’s tears when the spell was cast.

 

Perhaps Swan Lake is where the term wounded bird comes from – but whether or not it does, Nina embodies the wounded bird – her emaciated and therefore androgynous body evokes a kind of careful pity from us as viewers and, in the ballet, it precipitates the romantic love of the Prince, who pledges his undying love – even though his evil mother, the Queen, has determined that he must choose a wife at a dinner tomorrow night.  So Nina dances the part of the White Swan well, but the artistic director, Thomas LeRoy (Vincent Cassel) is concerned that she can’t dance the role of the Black Swan - the seductress who uses her strength rather than her weakness to rope men in.  When Nina goes to his office to plead her case, LeRoy grabs her and kisses her, and she bites him in return. 

 

This movie is a pre-#METOO movement movie, and this scene and the others I will be talking about could be seen as reeking of casting couch sexual predation.  Certainly LeRoy is portrayed as a sexual predator by Nina’s Mom and he had a pretty openly sexual relationship with the previous prima ballerina Beth (played by Winona Ryder).  But the sexual interactions between LeRoy and Nina, starting with this one, seem less about his predation and more about his testing and then demanding the transformation from the White Swan role to being able to fully inhabit the Black Swan’s persona.  And LeRoy's interactions, then, are portrayed as being provocative of an artistic growth – and its accompanying and necessary sexual growth – rather than being intended as sexually self-satisfying.  Of course, this may be the self-deluded writing and/or directing of a predator – but as portrayed, the position is that, though madness inducing – the LeRoy's sexual aggression has artistic intent and integrity.

 

We don’t quite know why – though the bite seems to have sealed the deal – Nina, to her surprise, is cast in the role instead of Lily (Mila Kunis).  Lily, whose carefree style allows her to play, to flirt, as Odile – the Black Swan – and to convincingly win the Prince (LeRoy) away from Odette (Nina) when she is dancing the role.  So Nina continues to worry, after having been given the part by LeRoy, that Lilly will steal it from her.  That said, and though LeRoy encourages Nina to model herself on Lily – frankly neither Lily nor Nina have the gravitas that is needed from a Prima Ballerina and neither of them appears ready to be the Black Swan.  Still Nina fears that Lilly is trying to take the part from her.  But she also – and I think rightly – sees Lilly as her double – as her doppelgänger.  They are twins, standing on the edge of being principal ballerinas but neither of them able to quite manage the role yet.  They are too flimsy.  

 

Nina hallucinates Lilly as having her own face at various points and is confused by this – including in a scene that takes place in her bedroom when Lilly is making love to her – while her mother is locked out of the room and objecting that Nina should be asleep and preparing for her work on the stage in the morning.  This is one of those places that critics and psychologists see evidence that Nina is psychotic.  But I don’t think that is what is happening here at all. 

 

This scene begins with Lilly coming to Nina’s apartment to apologize for having made a snarky comment and intending to ask Nina out to do something fun – not knowing that Nina never does anything fun.  Nina’s days are spent in rehearsals and then with her mother, period.  Nina’s mother answers the door, but does not let Lilly in.  Nina, in an uncharacteristic fit, defies her mother, opens the door, invites Lilly in, and then decides to go out on the town with Lilly despite her mother’s objections.  They go to a bar, pick up a couple of guys – Lilly offers Nina ecstasy, which she refuses, but then Nina sees Lilly spiking her drink with it and acquiesces to trying it after being reassured the effects will last for only a couple of hours.  All kinds of chaos ensues and apparently Nina and Lilly end up in bed in Nina’s apartment with Nina’s mother listening at the door to their goings on. 

 

The hitch is that when Nina wakes up late the next morning, Lilly is no longer there, but the door is still barred from the inside.  She shows up late at the stage, where Lilly is dancing the part of the Black Swan in Nina’s absence.  When she confronts Lilly about the night before, Lilly accuses her of having had a Lezzie wet dream about her, and that seems to be the case.  Nina is obsessed with Lilly and her freedom and has fantasized about having her be in her room – though she was also fantasizing about a version of herself making love to her.  Nina was, in this fantasy, her own double – both the innocent being seduced by the Black Swan – she is beginning to become the Black Swan herself – but at this point only the pale version of the Black Swan that Lilly can fulfill – the version of the swan that LeRoy passed on in favor of Nina.

 

But there is still a problem – as talented as Nina is, she is still the White Swan.  She just doesn’t have what it takes to be the Black Swan.  Her mother senses this and calls in sick for her on the day of the performance.  Nina defies her again – this time with finality – and heads, late, to the stage – where LeRoy is preparing Lilly to dance the part based on Nina’s expected no – show.  Nina has a lackluster dance as the White Swan – she falls out of the arms of the person carrying her – and blames her partner for the drop, though we know that she has been reeling and is barely hanging onto herself.  We are worried about her ability to perform the second act, and we don’t doubt that LeRoy is, too.  So it is no surprise to us when Lilly is in the other stall in Nina’s dressing room, preparing to dance the part of the Black Swan.  What is a surprise is that Nina throws Lilly against the mirror, causing the mirror to shatter – and then uses the shards of the mirror to murder Lilly.  She then stuffs Lilly into a closet and prepares to dance the Black Swan…  Ouch.

 

Nina, having murdered someone that she admires – and someone who is also her nemesis – is prepared to be the Black Swan.  Her transformation, from webbed feet, to her skin sprouting feathers, is the powerful climax.  The audience appreciates the dance that she does – we – who are with her and seeing the world from her perspective – experience the transformation in a visually transfixing manner – one that relies heavily on make-up, special effects, and the ability of Nina/Natalie Portman to become the Black Swan.  Having seduced the Prince and the audience, she waltzes off stage to seduce LeRoy – something he has dared her to do – edging her closer and closer to exploring her sexual power, but he is overwhelmed when she achieves it, and we are too.  Nina has become, not Lilly, but the woman who can bite – not just to end an encounter – but to bite off what she may or may not choose to chew on and suddenly it is LeRoy who is in awe of her and not the other way around.  We didn’t know she had it in her.

 

She returns to her dressing room and we are concerned again for her – what is she to do with the body? – but then Lilly shows up at her door to congratulate her on her performance.  What has happened?   Oh, she didn’t destroy Lilly – her Doppelganger – she destroyed herself – thrusting the shards of the shattered mirror not into Lilly but into herself.  She dances the final piece wounded – a piece that culminates in her regarding the Prince, who has been seduced by her nemesis on stage – the Black Swan who is evil Rothbart’s daughter, Odile.  The White Swan – Nina – will never be able to live as a human again – the prince cannot undo his attraction to Odile (which, in this rendering is  Odette’s dark side) – so she is trapped in her Swan body.  She takes in the Prince – LeRoy - and the Queen – her mother – and, rather than live a loveless life, she takes her own life – and the audience erupts with cries of Nina, Nina, Nina, while LeRoy rushes to her and discovers that she is near death – and, curtain!

 

Nina has killed herself.  She has destroyed the mousy persona that allowed her to have the technical chops to become the prima ballerina – but that self must be destroyed for her to make the transition to being the star.  She needs to feel, as the previous prima ballerina, Beth, did – that others are out to get her.  She needs to know that others are working just as hard as she is – that they are just as talented – and she needs to know that she is better than they are – that she can become not just the technically proficient dancer – but the star.  And to do this, Nina must die.  Not the flesh and blood Nina that is portrayed in the film, but the persona that has brought her here.  She must shed that persona like a snake skin so that she can grow into who it is that she can truly be – and this is a terrifying step.  She needs to leave her mother – her protected space where she never had to grow up – her sexless and therefore inviolate self – the one who would not – like her mother had – become pregnant and leave the troop – but more than that – the one who would not be penetrated.  But the penetration had to come – not from LeRoy – but from herself.  She had to marshal the self-destructive forces that she had been relying on to get her – the anorexia, the bulimia, the ability to ignore the pain of the damage to her fingers, the self-harm that she inflicted with her fingernails, all of this had to be directed outward.  She had to gain the claws that she had so carefully trimmed and use them to slay the world, and to slay the part of herself that had contained and repressed her so that she could shine.  And this was a violent transformation.

 

There is a critical scene that helps in this transformation.  Early in the movie, after she has displaced Beth as the prima  ballerina and when Beth is headed to a year of dancing out her string – about which Beth is furious – Beth is struck by an auto and hospitalized.  Nina visits Beth in the hospital twice.  Once as the mousy and worried corps ballerina who won’t wake the sleeping Beth but can see the extent of her injuries – Beth will surely never dance again.  And the second time to return the things she has stolen from Beth – the little trinkets that connected her to Beth.  These include the nail file that Nina has been using to file down her claws – to stop herself from scratching herself.  Beth takes this implement of non-destruction and, in a weird set of images, stabs herself with them.  Nina, horrified, retreats, only to discover that she is carrying the bloody nail file.  Did Nina inflict the wounds?  Is she psychotic enough to imagine that Beth did it when she was murdering her?  From the perspective of having seen Nina’s murder of Lilly as an imagined event – we can now appreciate that Nina has imagined this horrific and surreal scene.  It represents an important transition towards becoming the Black Swan: Nina is acknowledging that her advancement – her achievement of her own goals – is coming at the cost of Beth (and her Mother’s) realization of their mortality – of the loss of their own powers.  Nina’s birth robbed her mother just as her appointment robbed Beth – but it is also the case that her mother and Beth were at the end of their string anyway (Beth is, I think, the age that Nina’s mother was when Nina was born – 28).

 

So how are we to understand Nina?  Her character starts out at a Neurotic to high Borderline level, but becomes – necessarily – less well organized – more fluid – she enters into a temporary state of madness - in order to re-own the aspects of her character that have been disowned as she has worked to inhabit the role of the Black Swan and the persona of the prima ballerina.  This trajectory is similar to the trajectory that is taken in the successful transition from adolescence to adulthood – and in a successful long term treatment of an overly constricted individual.  This is a violent process.  Well-earned skills and habits are loosened up – which is terrifying.  If I can’t do what protects me, what will happen to me?  And all kinds of paranoid fears emerge – my peers want what I have – my mother is jealous of me – and, though the thoughts may be paranoid – meaning that they are borne out of a projection of inner fears into the world – they may also reflect what is actually going on out there – both Lilly and Nina’s mother are, I think, jealous of her.  And it takes courage to be the apparent instrument of their demise.  And it takes a strong soul to see that though both they and you believe this to be the case, it is not.  But without that courage and strength, great art, growth, and healing cannot take place.

Birdman is a middle aged male variation on this theme that you may enjoy reading about.

For another way to think about the horror aspects of this film - some of which are described above - see a post on Bride of Frankenstein.

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