Unnerved by the fear of being turned into a monstrous creature, the distressful yet captivating psychological thriller, Black Swan, directed by Darron Aronofsky, explored uncharted waters in cinema. The three acts of the film are a seamless, uninterrupted metamorphosis of the feminine from innocence and purity to deviance and overt sensuality. The metamorphosis of the feminine applauds, yet is repulsive of, a ballet dancer’s craving for perfection—a transformation an industry must exploit solely because it can. The establishment of fine arts, an industry every female creative dreams of breaking into, capitalizes on the very psychological terror that Aronofsky's Black Swan skillfully exposes. Black Swan unapologetically shines a mirror back onto movie producers and directors who are in positions of power.

The plot of the movie follows Nina, played by Academy Award-winning Actress Natalie Portman, an up-and-coming ballet dancer who desires to be the Swan Queen. That season, the ballet company’s director, Mr. Thomas Leroy, had made the creative decision to conjoin both roles of the White Swan and the Black Swan together—both will be performed by one dancer. Nina proceeds, throughout the movie, to drive herself to the brink of insanity in perfecting herself to embody both opposites. What makes Aronofsky's film foundational is that it places psychoanalysis in the mainstream consciousness, opening up dialogue for women who experience the mundane horrors of being hypersexualized or locked out of their sexual blossoming.

The film drew creative inspiration and structure from the actual ballet, Swan Lake. The film’s story parodies the relationship between the White Swan, Odette and the Black Swan, Odile. Odette and Odile juxtapose each other yet share similar names. Odette is the innocent girl who’s in love with Prince Siegfred, but is cursed by Rothbart to be a swan by day. Odile, Rothbart’s daughter, is turned into the spitting image of Odette. Odile successfully seduces Prince Siegfred with her beauty, leading to the tragedy of Odette who can no longer break the curse with the Prince’s vow of love. Odette is devastated not only by the fact that Odile took her place, but by the fact that the prince could not even discern the difference. He was under no spell, but deceived—failing to attest to his love. In the classical version of Swan Lake, Odette is only liberated when she drowns herself in the lake. Nina in Black Swan, is trapped in her innocence like Odette. Nina is fated to die in desperate hopes she was perfect in her final moments.

Aronofsky’s retelling of Swan Lake examines the anatomy of a woman’s strange, yet provocative and death-driven relationship with herself—one which we diagnose as the “Madonna-whore complex.” Originating from Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis, this paradigm encapsulates the White Swan and Black Swan dynamic in the film. The Madonna-whore complex represents the male gaze as an omnipresent force. This gaze categorizes women as either a virgin—one who must be protected from the men’s perversions—or a harlot —one who revels in her promiscuity to the delight or discomfort of men. The complex splits women down into a duality, labeling them as either a sexual or asexual being—leaving no room for anything in-between. In both states of the duality, women and their sexual being are radically defined by men, for men.

Fearing one’s ostracization from being a woman, we accept the challenge of proving our completeness in flaw and in fortune. This challenge is agonizing. Black Swan masterfully encapsulates the challenging, psychological torment of the Madonna-whore complex.

Nina, at the beginning of the film, is representative of the “Madonna” archetype. For example, Nina, despite being an adult, possesses an adolescent’s demeanor and stature. At the beginning of the film, she has no apparent affinity with sexual desire since her maturation has been severely stunted by her authoritative mother, Erica. Erica—a retired ballet dancer—is the maternal figure in Nina’s life who is disgruntled by an industry that pushed her out after becoming pregnant. The uphill battle to preserve youth is a motif present in every woman’s life, one that is complicit in the Madonna-whore complex. Erica could no longer be either desirable as either the Madonna or the whore. She was shut out and vicariously lived through her daughter who she both loved and resented.

After Nina wakes up from a dream where she is the Swan Queen, she is surrounded by stuffed animals and trinkets from girlhood. Her room is painted pink, signifying her delayed maturity as Erica waits to serve her a singular boiled egg and half a grapefruit for breakfast. Nina lives with her overbearing mother, who reinforces Nina's meekness and submission in the name of “mother knows best.” Nina is perpetually kept as the White Swan—one who is unable to tap into the dark seductiveness of the Black Swan. In this, Nina is unable to meet the expectations of her demanding director,who after giving her the role of the Swan Queen, torments Nina sexually and invasively in the pursuit of “drawing out” the Black Swan that is supposedly immanent within her.

Aronofsky purposefully focuses on this dynamic as Thomas’s character represents an unscrupulous industry; Nina and Thomas engage in a sexual tension where Nina is being toyed with sexually by Thomas. Thomas breaks Nina’s boundaries in order to retrieve the Black Swan he believes is inside of her. Aronofsky takes a risky move by criticizing the film and arts industry as a whole, where male authority figures do often harass actresses or blacklist them when they do not submit to their sexual requests. For example, Aronofsky’s creative direction depicts the cruelty of the industry in a grimy, dark lighting—one that shares visual intimacy with his previous thriller, Requiem For a Dream. He engages with Portman’s raw emotions in her struggle towards earning the approval of Thomas. For female performers, this jarring reality is validated by Black Swan’s study of power imbalances. The power imbalance between the artist and the female muse is one that creates a system of social punishment like rape culture. Whether in the workforce, in school, or in Hollywood—power imbalances are sustained when we legitimize the Madonna-whore complex as essential to women’s natural existence.

Furthermore, the emotionally-laden scenes between Nina and Erica only intensify as the plot progresses. It is not until Nina arrives home from a grueling rehearsal with her tyrannical director that she erupts in defiance towards a bitter Erica. The plot thickens as Lily, played by Mila Kunis, the new dancer who Nina is paranoid will overshadow her in the ballet company, interrupts the fight by visiting Nina in her home. Nina, in the spur of the moment, decides to leave with Lily, who invites her for drinks before the performance, signifying her rebellious transformation into the Black Swan. Lily represents the whore, a temptress not to Thomas, but to Nina, who begins to explore an alluring yet serpentine womanhood through Lily. Nina hallucinates Lily in two separate episodes: during their lesbian sex scene and when Nina seemingly finds Lily sitting at her vanity and kills her with a shard of broken mirror glass. In both scenes, she's behaving overtly sexual or violent—making the transition into the Black Swan.

Nina makes the leap from girlhood—the careful comfort of her parental figure—to womanhood—becoming in control of her sexual reality. This transition is both liberating and traumatic for Nina as her hallucinations grow to threaten her well-being up until the very end of the movie. It is only when Nina starts defying her mother, taking control back from Thomas, and being seduced by an untamed Lily (or rather Nina’s hallucination of her), that Nina can finally transform into the Black Swan and perform at her highest. As both the White Swan and Black Swan, she accomplishes the nearly impossible project of being both Madonna and whore in the eyes of a patriarchal audience—society’s woman as chimera, the tragic muse.

In the end, however, Nina realizes her desire for perfection is resolved by her literal death on stage. At the end of the third act of Black Swan, Nina realizes in her pursuit of perfection, she’s accidentally struck herself in the abdomen with a mirror shard, not Lily. Her tragic fate is sealed by the very industry that forced Nina to strive towards perfection in the first place. Aronofsky plays with body-horror throughout this film to symbolize how women may either reinvent themselves or be forced to transition and perform. Aronofsky portrays Nina’s death and ascension into the white lights of the theater stage to symbolize the end of women's tumultuous existence. Nina’s existence could only be resolved by female suffering, rebirth as the Black Swan and death as the White Swan — the film’s ending shot is of the white ballet stagelights, often interpreted as Nina’s ascension into peaceful heaven.

This is a perpetual machine that is sustained by an aesthetic of female suffering. Working with the assumption that suffering will necessarily and eventually be rewarding — a genre critique of the plot — this is not only facilitated by Thomas but also by the other women who surround Nina as she treks towards perfection. From Odette drowning herself in the lake to young Nina stabbing herself, suffering to the brink of death is depicted as the only way a woman may perfect herself. Whether she is the victim of sexual abuse, the tragic muse, the Christian martyr, or the ritual sacrifice—she is perfected at the moment her life is ended by herself in addendum to those around her. This message is situated as “the only good [perfect] victim is one who is dead.” To be a woman is to be a Jenga tower of tragedies that must suit everyone else's narratives but your own.

Black Swan is unparalleled in its stunning cinematography and its use of body horror to tell a unique story—a style that radically defined Aronofsky as a unique gem to independent film. The movie peels back the layers of how the Madonna-whore complex reworks itself into the lives of everyday women workers, artists, and creatives. Black Swan is not only a film, but a cautionary tale that serves as a reminder of what female “perfection” looks like and how it is so often achieved—through sacrificing oneself, piece by piece, until nothing is there, leaving absolutely nothing left to the imagination.

Written by Sidney Tesy, Photography: Shivank Rana, Design: Ava Follis, Social Media: Lauren St. John, Styling: Wilhem Reichmeider & Avery Elkins, Event: Ava Klein

The Muse