No doubt about it. “Black Swan” is a “cotton candy” movie experience. It
distracts you with a roller-coaster ride of sex, violence, and unabashed,
in-your-face melodrama. Perhaps it is so satisfying because, while it’s filling
you up with this intense sex and violence, it still makes you feel like you’ve
had a high-brow, “literary” experience. Who wouldn’t be thought-provoked by its
weighty themes of doubleness, the frailty and dangers of art, and the mind’s
capacity to build its own reality?
Despite these attractive features, in my opinion “Black Swan” is a cinematic
disaster. It is so rife with cliché I found myself saying “Come on!” over and
over again while watching it. The character of Lily is one big fat movie
stereotype. To symbolize wildness and rebellion, she sports tattoos, smokes
cigarettes, and offers the “promise” of drug trips and illicit sex. The possibility of sex with one’s teacher is not new or interesting territory here – it’s already been covered in even ballet movies like Center Stage. Even the movie’s themes are dealt with through clichéd shortcuts: mirrors are used heavy-handedly to evoke the concept of the double, for example.
The other problem I had with “Black Swan” is its treatment of female sexuality.
“Black Swan” wants to explore a young person’s coming-of-age, and the idea of
giving up discipline in favor of losing oneself in art. But both of these
themes eventually collapse into a reductive exploration of Nina’s sexual
awakening. To me, this is a cop-out, both thematically and on the level of plot.
One could imagine much more creative ways to explore coming-of-age, and the loss of self in life and art, than to have it come down to when and how the female protagonist has sex. Why is it that Hollywood movies keep falling back into the old pattern of placing disproportionate focus on the sexualized female body?
I would definitely recommend seeing “Black Swan” just for the entertaining
melodrama it offers. But that doesn’t mean I would take it seriously as a work
of art!
