2010’s Black Swan was a career highlight for American writer-director Darren Aronofsky. The psychological horror movie about a mentally unstable ballet dancer was nominated for a plethora of awards, with lead actress Natalie Portman earning a SAG, a BAFTA, a Critics Choice, and (among many others) an Oscar for her performance. Aronofsky’s previous film, The Wrestler, was a change from his previous maximalist work. The stripped down, slice of life drama got the attention of mainstream Hollywood, and with Black Swan he reaped the rewards of his 10+ year filmmaking career. Horror films are rarely nominated by the Academy, making Portman’s win (alongside Jodie Foster’s in 1992 for Silence of the Lambs) an anomaly in Oscar history. Seven years would pass before another horror film was recognized at these awards; the next being 2017’s Get Out, which won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.
Portman’s character, Nina Sayers, is demure to a fault. The film focuses on her struggle to please both her domineering mother and the ballet company’s artistic director, Thomas Leroy (played by Vincent Cassel). Tchaikovsky’s ballet Swan Lake serves as a backdrop to Nina’s unraveling mental state while the demands of playing both Odette and Odile (the titular Black Swan) test her limits. As the people in her life take advantage of her, Nina imagines a series of grotesque body transformations and other frightening hallucinations.
Does Darren Aronofsky Understand Horror?
Aronofsky twists the plot of the ballet, through his character Thomas, to serve the metaphor of his own film. In Tchaikovsky’s original Swan Lake, both Odette and Odile are under the control of the evil sorcerer Rothbart. After begging for her forgiveness, the prince and Odette throw themselves into the lake, choosing to die together instead of living apart. In Black Swan, Thomas’ artistic vision has Odette as a pristine virgin, Odile as an evil seductress, and the prince leaves Odette to die alone, heartbroken. Thomas then sexually manipulates the innocent Nina to make her a “better” Odile. He threatens to replace her with another dancer, Lily (Mila Kunis), and Nina begins to confuse Lily’s actions with her own. She hallucinates a sexual relationship between her and Lily, and then between Lily and Thomas. The final moments suggest that Nina also dies, a victim of her own insanity, though what actually happens remains open to interpretation.
Aside from a few characters that link back to their Swan Lake inspirations, any other parallels are scant. Though Nina is an accomplished ballerina in New York City, something that takes an incredible amount of skill and strength, Aronofsky seems uninterested in her agency. He never counters Thomas’ corrupted interpretation of the ballet, and instead presents Nina as the perfect, broken girl, a caricature of innocence. The script heavily leans into the ‘hysterical’, ‘delusional’ woman horror tropes, tying her descent into madness with her own sexual awakening (and then tying this awakening to sexual assault). “I want to be perfect” she insists, one of the few things we learn about her dreams and desires. Any potential plot or character development is unraveled by continuous reveals that the events in the previous scene were imagined. Her attraction to Lily is left unexamined, making their hallucinatory sex scene just another “shocking” moment.
Where Black Swan flounders, a film like Micheal Haneke’s The Piano Teacher (2001) soars. Isabelle Huppert plays Erika, an emotionally stunted woman stuck between a domineering mother and a demanding art form. Though Erika and Nina have little say over their day-to-day lives, Haneke purposely explores the ways that Erika asserts her agency, though they’re often upsetting and violent. Both films also deal with sexual assault, but Haneke makes a specific choice not to invoke any kind of male gaze; the camera barely moves as the actors play out the sequence. In Black Swan’s most sickening scene, Aronofsky directs the camera to follow Thomas’ hands as he assaults Nina, forcing the audience to assume the abuser’s perspective. Unlike Aronofsky, Haneke and Huppert managed to create complex, flawed characters that are frustrating and engaging, without ever infantilizing its protagonist.
Black Swan Represents the Worst of “Prestige” Horror
Black Swan also flails when compared to a more recent horror film about doppelgangers that has been recognized by the Academy Awards – The Substance. Back in 2010-11, the marketing around Black Swan leaned into its ‘prestige’ status as a way to legitimize the film’s grosser moments. Natalie Portman’s Oscar race campaign focused on her year-long training as a dancer and the authentic athleticism of her performance. This misguided quest for respectability gets in the way of the film’s campier moments, making the jumpscares and sudden gore feel out of place. In contrast, The Substance is interested in no such mainstream legitimacy. Director Coralie Fargeat embraced gore and camp to tell her story about female duality under the oppressive male gaze. Despite the absurdity of the plot, Fargeat’s characters and their struggles ground the story with depth and meaning.
Despite Black Swan’s initial success, Aronofsky’s career struggled as Black Swan faded out of the limelight. His biblical epic Noah went largely unnoticed, and his maximalist ode to inspiration Mother! (starring his soon-to-be ex-girlfriend Jennifer Lawrence) deeply divided audiences. It would be over a decade before he’d return to the award circuit with 2023’s The Whale, for which lead actor Brendan Fraser won an Oscar. However, the issues that plague Black Swan also plague The Whale. The novel Moby Dick is supposed to be the backbone of his metaphor, but the connection between the titular whale and the protagonist is just that he’s fat – like a whale. He carries a lot of guilt – physically, on his body, as fat. That’s it. The Whale relies on lazy stereotypes under the guise of ‘high art’ to once again create a protagonist whose virtuousness lies in their ability to absorb everyone else’s abuse.
Black Swan’s legacy represents the most frustrating aspects of “Academy Award” cinema, and its faults become clear when held against better films. It will always be a drama masquerading as horror, one that twists Nina’s abuse into art to serve a patriarchal gaze. Her psychosis and death are presented as a beautiful tragedy, a fetishized martyrdom to Thomas’s (and Aronofsky’s) artistic vision of a perfectly broken girl.