15 Years Later, Black Swan Remains A Modern Masterpiece
It was perfect.
Some films feel as though they’ve always been classics, embedded in the fabric of pop culture so fully that it’s hard to tell when its relevance even began. It’s like that for Black Swan, at once a timeless psychological horror and a defining entry in 2010s horror. The film by Darren Aronofsky owes plenty to films that came before, from its most obvious influence, Perfect Blue, to all-time classics like The Red Shoes. It’s also not unlike The Piano Teacher or Possession, two essential records on female mania. But don’t assume that reverence makes it derivative: Black Swan has more than taken on a life of its own since. Fifteen years removed from its initial release, it’s now a classic in its own right.
A brilliant post-modern meditation on paranoia, Black Swan has become a foundational text for female-centered horror... and a crushingly relatable one, despite the lengths it goes to depict it. Few know what a psychotic break truly feels like, but nevertheless find a kind of kinship with Natalie Portman’s doomed ballerina, Nina Sayers. Black Swan is about more than the ambition that unravels her psyche like a spool of pink ribbon, and it’s more than a tale of obsessive artistry. Those themes are just the springboard for a truly gonzo psychological break; the fact that Black Swan refuses to stop there is what separates it so fully from its contemporaries.
Portman’s Nina was a brilliant play on the actress’ early on-screen persona. After playing plenty of precocious young girls and infantilized, manic-pixie love interests, Portman was eager for a different kind of role. Black Swan finds her somewhere in the middle. A chaste, emotionally stunted dancer trapped in the limbo of girlhood, Nina is a walking, talking commentary on Portman’s history in Hollywood — really, a metaphor for the double standard so many female artists struggle through. Nina lives under her mother’s (a chilling Barbara Hershey) thumb, her childhood bedroom still adorned with pale pink and porcelain toys. At the New York Ballet Company, her youth is her greatest asset, placing her in the running for the lead of a new production of Swan Lake while the company’s aging prima, Beth (Winona Ryder), is forced to step down. Her naïveté, meanwhile, makes her easy prey for the company’s director, Thomas (Vincent Cassel).
In Nina, Thomas sees the innocent, frightened White Swan — but to lead Swan Lake, she’ll need to play a double role, embodying the brazen, chaotic confidence of the Black Swan, too. Her quest to prove that she can do both sends Nina tumbling down a rabbit hole of suppressed desires and anxieties, allowing Aronofsky to craft one ballsy sequence after the next. Black Swan is a film about duality and perceived personas: Beth, for better or worse, is what Nina could be in the future. The same goes for Nina’s prime competition for the lead role, Lily (Mila Kunis), who’s also the Black Swan incarnate.
As disgust and desire expand inside her, the veil between reality and fantasy fades entirely. Trippy visions challenge Nina’s shattering persona along with our own presumptions. No, Nina’s not really pulling black feathers out of her skin — but the truth behind sexual encounters with Lily or violent altercations with Beth is purposely vague. Is Nina pleasuring the subject of her repressed affections, or pleasuring herself? Is she watching Beth self-harm, or is the blood on her hands her own?
Nina’s psychic break is as outlandish as they come, but still feels painfully cathartic.
The details of Nina’s mad descent might be up for debate, but it’s all in service of our heroine’s eventual inner reality. She becomes the Black Swan literally and figuratively, manifesting the ink-black wings and the corrosive confidence needed to play the part — but it all comes at great cost. For all the fans eager to say “she’s so me” in response to Nina’s mental breakdown, Black Swan is very much a cautionary tale. It’s also impossibly cathartic for anyone tempted to destroy themselves to be understood, to find their version of perfection. For one brief, brilliant moment, Nina feels perfect. Though the quest to get there is paved with all kinds of horrors, Aronofsky, Portman, and their collaborators make that feel like a triumph — and that’s just one of the reasons Black Swan became such an instant classic.
