Why I Hate Black Swan

Fucking metaphors. Easy tools for filmmakers who wish to be complex and dark and arty. So easy they’re dangerous.

White Swan = pure, virginal.

Black Swan = dark, oozing sex.

Mother = Pink Floyd’s Mother.

Ballet = the drama of life.

So, White Swan must exorcise her inner demons to transform into the Black Swan, in her quest for perfection in Ballet. (While Mommy penetrates ballerina and audience with her ever-watchful gaze in the background). And since exorcisms are irreversible, she must give herself up in the process. All to the tempo and tenor of Tchaikovsky. Of course.

The problem isn’t that it’s all been thought before though (it has), or that it’s all so predictable (it is); the problem is that the film is like a throbbing illustration of a basic fact - that pretension can so effortlessly pass off as great art. Watching Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan is like reading a research paper on ‘how to make an intense film’. (Except it’s got girl-on-girl action, which never hurt anybody, right?). From the moment you meet the fragile, on-the-brink-of-collapse-any-moment-now Nina Sayers (the pains Natalie Portman must have taken for this role of a lifetime are only too transparent, she is painful), and encounter the workings of her seriously-warped-in-need-of-major-therapy mind (uff, if that alter ego had made another random appearance in the subway or the mirror, I would’ve stood up and screamed at my laptop, ‘Yes, yes, I get it. She has it in her. She has it all in her.’), you can start ticking the check-boxes on say, the Oscar list. And the research paper must-haves.

Then again, it’s not simply the clinical manual approach that got my goat. (That would be Lars Von Trier and Dogville, and another evening of a rant). It’s the sheer nothing-ness of Black Swan vying for the title (what’s more, winning it) of delicious darkness and intense, heart-breaking cinema that does it.

At least Von Trier gives me a headache. And something of an argument. (What is up with that misanthropic bastard? Why does he unleash his films on us? What does he get out of it? Definitely not an Oscar). I mean, at least he gives me something. Black Swan doesn’t leave you anything. Not even cold.