Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan is the sort of movie I would have worshipped—worshipped—at the age of fourteen. For many reasons:
-It’s about a daughter’s relationship with an overprotective mother who won’t let her grow up.
-It’s about a perfectionist, which I most certainly was at fourteen.
-It’s got girl-on-girl action.
-It’s about becoming a better artist through discovering and owning one’s sexual prowess.
-She thinks she turns into a fucking swan. To a fourteen-year-old, that’s totally dark and original and badass.
-She dies in the act of achieving her full potential. To a fourteen-year-old, that’s romantic and hardcore.
-She’s a ballerina. Until the age of twelve, I was a ballerina. RELATABLE!
-It’s about embracing your dark side. BADASS! HARDCORE!
-It’s a movie where having and acting on desires makes bad things happen. To a fourteen-year-old, this is how the world works, or how we think we’re supposed to think the world works.
-Natalie Portman is talented.
-I wrote a story at age fourteen about a girl who was saving herself for her boyfriend but then her evil slutty alter-ego takes over one night and gets drunk and has sex and gets a tattoo. I think you can make the connection yourself if you've seen the film.
However, that was nearly half my lifetime ago, and now I find Black Swan obnoxious, trite, a little offensive, and an overall shame, because it’s a movie with potential. For the following reasons:
-Having desires doesn’t make bad things happen. Having and acting on desires makes the world go round. And achieving your potential usually doesn’t kill you no matter how repressed you are. There was no reason for that ending. It was tragedy for tragedy's sake. And that is annoying.
-The girl-on-girl action is actually kinda meh. It’s perfectly inoffensive, it’s mildly hot, but it was like porn without the porn: the girl climaxes in 15 seconds but we don't see anything.
-If I watched Natalie Portman’s skin ripple with the feathers-under-the-skin effect one more time, I was going to throw something at the screen. Aronofsky overused that effect the way the Matrix sequels overused slow-mo.
-You cannot dance ballet with a shard of glass in your stomach. You just can’t. If your core strength is compromised as a ballerina, you’re up shit creek without a paddle. It’s just not possible. Sorry.
-Also, ballet dancers don’t practice with their hair down, no matter how sexually liberated they are. ‘Cause then you can’t SEE. Dumbass. (And if you have a ginormous tattoo on your back, you will probably not get work at a Big Fancy Company. This may sound nitpicky but it annoyed the crap out of me.)
-If I heard that sexually predatory choreographer fire the same fucking notes at Natalie Portman one more time (give in to ze passion!), I was going to magically transport through the screen and fart on his face.
-Most of all, it had such an uncreative idea about what "Sexual People" act like. Sexual men molest anything with a vagina and are French and aggressive. Sexual women have tattoos and wear black and eyeliner and eat cheeseburgers instead of salads to show what sensual beings they are.
Lame, Aronofsky. I loved Requiem for a Dream. I heard great things about The Wrestler. But this was lame.
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I have to admit I have not yet seen this movie, though I loved Pi and Requiem for a Dream. Saw the ridiculous thing about the tree of life, or whatever it was, though can't remember what it was called. Might have loved it at fourteen as well, but not as a grown woman. Can't really get my head around men who think they are too smart for the world, and that's kind of the feeling I get from Aronosky. We're not stupid.
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