‘He lay in his bed without moving, as though he were not yet quite certain whether he were awake or still asleep, whether all that was going on around him were real and actual, or the continuation of his confused dreams’1
The Double, Fyodor Dostoevsky
The script for Darren Aronofsky’s fifth feature has conceptual roots in Dostoevsky’s 1846 novella The Double, in which clerk Yakov Petrovich Golyadkin is driven insane by sightings of his doppelganger. Golyadkin becomes obsessed with his uncanny twin, imagining himself surrounded by replicas with sinister intentions, his own sense of identity coming irrevocably unstuck in the process.
Like The Double, Black Swan (2010) opens with its protagonist waking from a dream, and neither character nor audience is ever certain to which realm all that follows belongs. Cast as the lead in a new production of Swan Lake, the cygnine Nina (Natalie Portman) performs the innocent, vulnerable White Swan naturally but finds the seductive qualities of the Black Swan more challenging. As she struggles to embody the role’s dichotomy, Nina, like Dostoevsky’s haunted clerk, catches increasingly frequent glimpses of herself; first in window reflections, later in the faces of others. Throughout, the film teeters on the verge of hysteria, but appropriately so. Like its troubled protagonist, Black Swan has its feet only lightly grounded in a fragile en pointe, and when the bottom falls out in a frenzied final act, it does so spectacularly.
Aronofsky has long concerned himself with the twin themes of excess and obsession, from the mathematician searching for God in debut Pi (1998), through the addicts of Requiem For A Dream (2000), trying to escape desperate existences whilst plunging ever further from salvation, to the trio of Toms (conquistador, scientist and space-buddha) played by Hugh Jackman in The Fountain (2006), each seeking immortality, and colliding across space and time in a moment of mutual epiphany (for the characters at least – audiences were generally less clear as to the nature of the revelation). 2008’s The Wrestler sidestepped such elaborate staging without dropping the aforementioned keywords, with titular sportsman Randy physically and mentally enduring all that life throws at him (which in his profession includes planks wrapped in barbed-wire), fatefully extending his career beyond its natural lifespan with only steroids and desperation as fuel.
Although considerably younger than Rourke’s ‘old, broken down piece of meat’, Black Swan’s Nina is also plagued by fears of being rendered obsolete due to advancing years. Pregnancy ended the dancing days of her pushy parent (Barbara Hershey) but in the heat of an argument, Nina suggests the curtain didn’t fall as prematurely as her mother would like to think. ‘What career?’ she asks. ‘You were twenty eight!’ While Nina’s exact age is never confirmed, Natalie Portman was twenty-eight at the time of filming; a 2009 report in The Telegraph placed the average retirement age for ballerinas at twenty nine2. Such short-term disposability is represented by the character of Beth (Winona Ryder), the prima donna rejected as ‘past-it’, yet still infantilised by director Thomas (Vincent Cassell), whose pet-name for her – ‘little princess’ – is both paternal and possessively predatory.
Amidst imaginatively outlandish transformations (arms metamorphose into wings; legs crack and buckle in a grotesque reverse plié), there are images of decay that indicate a more literal preoccupation with the impermanence of youth – a hellish hangnail extending halfway up a finger; toe-nails splitting from unnatural exertions. Nina’s body is untrustworthy; not only doubling itself but crumbling to be refashioned anew. Associations with notions of youthful feminine beauty are further suggested by the nascent feather plucked from Nina’s back, the short dark bristles resembling the head of a mascara brush.
The idea that Nina is already facing her ‘last chance’ is made all the more unsettling by the perpetual infancy she, like ‘little princess’ Beth, otherwise occupies. When cast, she calls home to giddily exclaim ‘he picked me mommy!’, resembling in both tone and manner a child selected for the school nativity. Mother and daughter celebrate with an extravagantly iced cake, eaten by Nina from her mother’s finger as if it were a teat. Nina steals lipstick from her predecessor’s dressing room, guiltily applying it like a toddler playing dress-up. Her mother undresses and tucks her in at night, and attaining privacy involves rebelliously barricading bathroom and bedroom doors. When pressures mount, Nina finds solace in a ballerina music box, a prop which also serves to underscore the unchallenged central role that ballet occupies in her life.
There is also the suggestion that Nina is a virgin: she responds to frank questioning from Thomas with embarrassment, and an unusual homework assignment (‘Go home and touch yourself. Live a little’) is undertaken amidst an array of soft toys. A subsequent sex scene with mysterious rival Lily (Mila Kunis) is cast in a new light when her lover’s face changes mid-coitus; Nina’s climax is a symbolic act of self-copulation that constitutes the tipping point in her loosening grip on reality. The equation of female sexuality with evil and insanity is awkwardly retrograde but the union between Nina and her double is inarguably consistent with the film’s gothic excesses.
Early in Black Swan, Thomas criticises Nina for never ‘losing herself’ in the moment, to which she meekly replies ‘I just want to be perfect’. By the end, she has lost herself absolutely but in the process attained the perfection she so desperately craved. Whether the rapturous applause is literal or a subjective projection is, like so much else, impossible to gauge. Like Rourke’s wrestler, ambiguously frozen mid-leap, Nina is tragically victorious, triumphantly defeated. In contrast with Dostoevsky’s Golyadkin, who ends the novella with a tortured howl, Nina’s corruption instils serenity. Like the self-trepanned Max in Pi or the electro-shocked Sara in Requiem For A Dream, she finds peace in her self-destruction.
Christopher Buckle
Researcher and freelance writer
University of Glasgow
January 2011
1 Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Double (Dover Thrift Edition) (Dover Publications, Toronto, 1997), p. 1
2 Richard Johnson, ‘Ballet: The Secret Lives of Dancers’ The Telegraph, 29th June 2009
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