Dialogue with Amber Jacobs about Black Swan
(Originally published in Film Quarterly)
Mark Fisher: Black Swan presents, claustrophobically and without any comforting “objective” distance, the madness of the lead character Nina Sayer (Natalie Portman). Much of the film’s power derives from its lack of proper perspective: we are always inside Nina’s paranoid schizophrenia, just as we are inside the madness of Carole (Catherine Deneuve) in Polanski’s Repulsion. The camera is tightly angled throughout the film, while the diegetic sound (under-the-breath remarks, snickers, door knocks) is often widely spread, giving the sense that there are threats which we cannot yet—or perhaps will not ever—see.
Nina is a technically accomplished ballerina, but someone who has not yet reached the heights of her art. At the beginning of the film, it seems as if Nina is stuck at this level; she is fundamentally blocked. She is referred to as “frigid”: overcontrolled and undersexualized. When Nina is asked if she is a virgin, her denial is unconvincing. She certainly seems to be anorgasmic. Nina lives with her overbearing mother (Barbara Hershey, playing possibly the most horrific cinematic mother figure since Brian De Palma’s Carrie). The mother blames her own underachievement as a ballet dancer on having Nina, and her attitude toward her daughter is shot through with deadly ambivalence: on the one hand, she can live through her daughter, who can achieve what she herself could not; on the other hand, Nina is a rival who cannot be allowed to do better than she did. Here then is the structure of the double bind which Gregory Bateson claimed was at the basis of schizophrenia: two contradictory demands (”do better than I did,” “don’t outdo me”) are made simultaneously. Yet Nina does have a breakthrough and is given the lead role in Swan Lake. Unfortunately, however, the breakthrough is also a breakdown—by the night of her debut performance, Nina’s madness is no longer controllable. It cannot be contained either by Nina or by the film itself. The final scene appears to show Nina stabbing herself, and then dancing brilliantly before dying, but by this point it is no longer possible for us to distinguish Nina’s delirium from any “independent” reality, and we cannot be sure what has happened.
The ballet company is an infernal vision of patriarchy, controlled by an almost parodically phallic artistic director, Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel), who routinely manipulates the dancers into competing with each other—“he’s a prick,” as Sayer’s rival, Lily (Mila Kunis), succinctly summarizes. It’s significant that the preeningly cruel Leroy, like all of the (actually very few) male characters in the film, is a repellent figure. Thomas represents a hypersexualized version of the kind of therapeutic “wisdom” widely disseminated by the likes of Oprah Winfrey: the blocks to Nina’s self-realization lie within herself, he says; she can only achieve success if she makes contact with her repressed sexuality. Yet Leroy’s predatory positivity is stymied by the tragic drive of Black Swan’s narrative: once the repressive shackles are released, the result is not erotic fulfillment, but death. For me, the tragic dimension of Black Swan is what is shocking, even subversive, about the film at a time when neoliberal ideology peddles the idea that we are all in control of our own fates. Nina is tragically mad, and her madness is a black mirror held up to patriarchy.
If Leroy embodies patriarchy, then Nina’s relationship with other women shows the damage that patriarchy has done. The ballet has the febrile, duplicitous atmosphere of a single-sex school. Other women are either hostile or so annihilatingly close that Nina can’t distinguish herself from them. Nina experiences her subjectivity (and sexuality) as threatened by the obscene over-proximity of her mother. In an excruciatingly awkward and disturbing scene, Nina is in her bedroom masturbating and on the brink of coming, when she rolls over and sees her mother, asleep but looking as if she is dead, on a chair by the door. Nina experiences Lily as an erotically confident enemy conspiring to destroy her, as her double (”he made me your alternate,” Lily tells Nina at one point), and as a sexual partner, and only fleetingly as a friend or ally.
Without doubt Black Swan is a film of female horror, but I don’t think that makes it a work of misogyny. Far from it: Black Swan struck me as a work of what one might even call “Irigarayan horror”—referring to the theorist Luce Irigaray—to the degree that it could almost be seen as dramatizing some of Irigaray’s ideas.
Amber Jacobs: Certainly Black Swan reproduces the terms of the Western male imaginary that Irigaray describes and critiques. Woman as passive sexualized object. Woman as a mere muse lacking a subject position or desire and entirely constructed via male fantasy. Relations between women reduced to pathological variants of a mother–daughter bond characterized by merging or hate and competition. Nina is a creature of this psychosexual structure and the film’s ballet milieu presents it in an obscenely exaggerated form. Under the patriarchal conditions Black Swan replicates, women’s attempts to achieve subjectivity invariably result in madness, breakdown, self destructivity, and premature death.
Does Black Swan critique the terms of this patriarchal imaginary, as Irigaray clearly does? Does it present them as contingent or ideological? No. The film reproduces, romanticizes, and condones these terms. There is no subversion or rethinking. Black Swan is, in my view, itself just a symptom. The film does not even offer any kind of ambiguity that could suggest an alternative to the patriarchal construction of femininity. One looks in vain for any hint in Black Swan of what would make it truly Irigarayan—an alternative construction, or even a resistance to the version of femininity in which Nina is trapped. Instead she first becomes psychotic and then becomes dead. All she achieves, if this is anything, is the perfection of an object produced by the necrophiliac desire at the heart of the male imaginary—the desire expressed so lucidly by Edgar Allan Poe when he said that the death of a beautiful woman is the most poetic topic in the world.
Nina’s default position is that of the white swan: prim, uptight, prissy, mummy’s girl (her bedroom all pink and white and frilly with a ballerina music box and copious soft toys). In her dancing she has perfect technique but no feeling, no passion. Thomas constantly tells her she is repressed, inhibited, fragile, and ultimately passive. He attempts to seduce her into exploring her “dark” side, her inner “black swan” (an age-old male rescue fantasy of unlocking the woman’s desire dating back to Sleeping Beauty). Here again another tired binary mapping the limited terrain of femininity under patriarchy: the white/black, virgin/whore split which the film makes no attempt to disrupt. Predictably, it is only through Thomas, the male phallic director (the Prospero–Pygmalion figure) that Nina attempts to access her inner black swan. Thomas gives her some homework one day after humiliating her in the studio about her “frigid” dancing. “Go home and touch yourself,” he tells her, and like a good girl she complies. Even her masturbation has to be initiated by him.
There are two scenes in the film in which Nina is supposed to be exploring her own sexuality at the command of Thomas and achieving some kind of agency. The first is her doing her “homework” in her bedroom and the second is the lesbian sex scene with her contemporary/double/competitor Lily (which we learn retrospectively is just her fantasy). In both of these scenes she is trying to obey Thomas’s imperative to “let go and unleash her passion.” But rather representing the specificity of Nina’s desire, these scenes function completely within the terms of male fantasy. Even in her own fantasies, Nina reproduces the standard iconography of soft porn; the lesbian scene in particular is replete with porn clichés. It functions entirely for the pleasure of the heterosexual male spectator. It absolutely precludes any other kind of desire. Black Swan is certainly not able to think or even suggest the “beyond” of the male imaginary that Irigaray calls for—where woman-to-woman relations do not relentlessly reproduce the terms of, and pleasures of, male fantasy.
Another worn-out visual cliché that the film relies on is the use of mirrors and reflections. There are repeated shots of Nina looking at her reflection in mirrors: in her bedroom, in the hall of the apartment she shares with her mother, in metro windows. At the dance studio and in her dressing room, multiple mirrors often create a mise-en-abyme: the multitude of reflections immerses us in a maze of feminine bodies and faces, giving us no way of locating the “real” body as distinct from the refections. In this way the constant refrain, “I am nothing,” which is uttered by the older ballerina Beth (Winona Ryder) who has been replaced by Nina and then echoed by Nina herself, expresses the film’s fixed take on femininity. In short: woman does not exist. The mirrors crudely hammer this point home; the infinite image of the reflected, homogenous bodies and faces of the ballerinas represents a construction of femininity that has no life outside the terms of the mirror/gaze of the male symbolic.
Over thirty years ago feminist film theory observed this tyranny of the male gaze. Laura Mulvey called for filmmakers and critics to refuse both the impulse to reproduce this construction and to resist the pleasure it generates. Black Swan proceeds as if feminist film theory never happened. Instead it allows itself to absurdly, hyperbolically romanticize the patriarchal construction of femininity as mere reflection in a somewhat sickening way in the last scene. Nina, having stuck a piece of broken mirror into her abdomen, finally dances the black swan before collapsing and achieving a climactic, “perfect” death. This is executed with a banal, off-the-peg aesthetic. The blatant color scheme of red blood on white dress creates a laughably crude symbolism. At one London screening of the film I attended, people were laughing loudly at this point even though the film is clearly taking itself utterly seriously. Perhaps this pure earnestness was prompting an audience sense of over-the-top, high-camp comedy. There certainly is the option of treating Black Swan as comedy and I think that this approach at least has the merit of dissenting from, or just defending against, the film’s reactionary gender politics.
There is one scene in Black Swan that I think unwittingly reveals what one might call the film’s salient desire. It is the scene in the subway train when an old man makes lewd gestures and sounds in front of Nina before beginning to masturbate. Perhaps the menacing urban landscape is supposed to represent the leaking out of Nina’s fantasy into reality, the persecutory city and the persecutory mind overlapping (an idea far more effectively realized in Jacob’s Ladder). However, this squalid scene stands out to me for another reason, one that the film doesn’t have under control.. I read the scene as disclosing (unwittingly) the film’s meta narrative about its own production — the male, masturbating—position from which the film was made.
Mark Fisher: Black Swan is an intensely divisive film. For instance, to counter your anecdote about the audience when you saw the film: when my wife and Black Swan, we found it utterly harrowing. Far from laughing, we could barely breathe. The film does take itself utterly seriously; this is its scandal and its challenge. Its hyperbolic handling of emotions is melodramatic, but it is the way it moves between naturalism, melodrama, and body horror that makes Black Swan so singular a film. I think Steven Shaviro was right when he argued “that the emotional tonality of Black Swan combines horror with melodrama: more specifically, horror’s body panic and hysteria with melodrama’s embarrassment and overstatement and weepiness.”
I agree that Jacob’s Ladder is a partial parallel here. Both are New York films; both include disturbing subway scenes; both flit rapidly between the mundane and the infernal-metaphysical; both in the end resolve into an ultimately unintelligible psychotic puzzle. What makes Black Swan different—and uncomfortably so—are the melodramatic elements. As Shaviro argues, melodrama remains a mode that is held in low repute, in part because melodramatic movies were thought to be “women’s films.” But Black Swan does more than simply update melodrama. In addition to all the uncanny doubles within the film, Black Swan as a whole is itself the double of Swan Lake, and it shows is that the “high art” of ballet and tragedy cannot be securely separated from the degraded hyperbole of melodrama.
You’re right of course that the film lacks much of a sense of a beyond. That, I suppose, is why I would consider it a work of Irigarayan horror: Black Swan gives us many of Irigaray’s negative images of female subjectivity under patriarchy but without laying open any possibility of an alternative. (Perhaps some hint of a beyond is opened up in the nightclub scenes, in which another kind of dancing opens up the possibility of Nina “losing herself,” but not in the way that Thomas wants her to.) I agree, also, about the centrality of masturbation to the film. Black Swan is a film that is large part about auto-eroticism and fantasy. But I do not read the fantasies or the auto-eroticism guiding the film to be essentially male. While you’re right that the film draws upon soft-porn tropes at one point (the lesbian scene), this is far from being its predominant mode. It’s worth noting at this point that the lesbian scene is itself fantasmatic—or more properly delirious, since Nina does not realize she is fantasizing, leading to an awkward scene with Lily the next day. As the film moves towards catastrophe, fantasy gives way to delirium, and auto-eroticism collapses into self-harm. This is a film about the refusal of sexuality. Throughout most of the film, Nina will not allow herself to be constituted as a sexual object, even for herself. A heterosexual male viewer coming to Black Swan looking for titillation wo uld surely be deeply disappointed. The film shows a female body too destabilized by anxiety and delirium to be the object of a masturbatory male gaze. As Nina’s body-image disintegrates, Black Swan provides us with some of the most stunning images of body horror since prime-period Cronenberg. At points, Black Swan is like a schizophrenic version of a superhero movie, Nina’s back raw and prickly like a freshly plucked chicken, waiting for the delirial swan wings to appear, as if she is a traumatised mutant struggling to come to terms with her body’s capacities to transform itself.
But Nina’s revulsion from sexuality, the repeated shots of her being sick into a toilet bowl, and her fear of food—one of the most creepy and awkward scenes in the film sees Nina forced by her mother to eat a slice of revoltingly sickly looking pink cake—point to bulimia and anorexia. Is the ballet dance a code for the anorexic “art” of famishing, and is Nina’s dream of achieving perfection (= death) nothing more than an anorexic’s delirium?
The film begins and—quite possibly—ends with Nina’s fantasy of dancing Swan Lake. A great deal turns, naturally, on how we read these climactic moments. From a naturalistic perspective, the final scene seems preposterous, incredible: how could Nina possibly stab herself with a shard of glass and then continue to dance? By now, we are not dealing with fantasy any more but with full-on pyschosis. I don’t see this as “uncritical romanticization” so much as tragic madness. Nina’s madness is a howl against the power structures that gave rise to it; it doesn’t simply confirm those structures.
Amber Jacobs: Yes, Nina’s madness can be heard “as a howl against the power structures that gave rise to it.” The same thing can be said about most of the mad women in Western literature and cinema. This is fine, but isn’t it time we stopped howling already? Can we have speaking parts now, please? But unfortunately there is no shortage of Natalie Portmans to howl their way to an Oscar.
In this sense there must be many thousands of films that could qualify as an “Irigarayan horror.” Is there something about the horror genre which structurally prevents it from having a sense of a beyond? Wouldn’t it be so much more interesting to imagine an Irigarayan horror, where the source of horror would not lie in the body of the hollow female subject or her “distanceless proximity” to her abject mother -but in what truly threatens the achievement of her subjectivity?
I don’t agree that this manmade “woman’s film” is the fantasy of an anorexic. I’d say instead that it’s psychic junk on which the spectator is invited to gorge—but not by a sadistic mother. The cake scene is creepy because behind the surgically enhanced mask of the monstrous mother I could only see the smug face of Aronofsky feeding me his sickly confection. Not only does Black Swan simply reinforce what we already know about female subjectivity under patriarchy, but also the film is as aesthetically ludicrous as the cake (which is why it’s often funny) and is entirely complicit in the production of its own symptomatology. Behind the spoonfed clichés is the specter of male narcissism, which is willing to take any form or do anything to seek satisfaction and prevent injury to itself (including dressing in drag and stuffing a bulimic with cake. Nothing is achieved by this film other than its own climax and it is in this sense that it’s “autoerotic.” I don’t mean at all that it’s intended to titillate—the film satisfies itself in this regard and, in the process, leaves us as cold as the dirty old man on the subway or Duchamp’s perpetually grinding Machine Célibataire. Nina is nothing but the stain to be cleared up at the end.
