The Twenty-Fourth Night of Halloween 2022

ON THE TWENTY-FOURTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched Black Swan (2010), directed by Darren Aronofsky and starring Natalie Portman. Portman’s tour-de-force lead performance here won her the 2010 Best Actress Oscar.

Nina is a ballerina at the New York Ballet company. She is in competition to play the dual role of the White Swan Queen and her wicked twin sister, the Black Swan, for a production of Swan Lake. According to the overly handsy director, Nina’s precise technique and innocent persona make her perfect for the White Swan. However, these same traits prevent her from embodying the more chaotically passionate Black Swan. So, the director initially casts another dancer. He changes his mind when Nina bites him in reply to an unwanted kiss in his office. Still, Nina struggles in rehearsals to perform adequately as the Black Swan. Then, a wild night out with a hard-partying rival dancer (played by Mila Kunis) breaks Nina’s immaculate shell. This in turn releases her doppelgänger, which appears with increasing frequency in a rising crescendo of hallucinogenic sequences.

Portman is perfectly cast, as she naturally has a ballerina’s poise, disposition, and physique. Her Oscar win was well-deserved. And I certainly enjoyed Black Swan’s propulsive emotional drama, accomplished cinematography and editing, and brief but effective bursts of phantasmal imagery. But the overtness of Aronofsky’s simple metaphors together with his sometimes absurdly high-key psychodrama tends to annoy me—which is why I have had this movie on my watch-list since it came out but put it off until our doppelgänger-horror marathon made it unavoidable. These signature Aronofsky traits are present in Black Swan, but I found them much less annoying than in, say, Pi and Requiem for a Dream. (Pi has the added annoyance of being a film about a mathematician’s descent into madness made by someone who clearly has only a rudimentary familiarity with the concerns of higher mathematics.) This is largely due to the fact that Portman and Kunis are so riveting in their respective roles, though.  

TWISTED TWINS & DUPLICITOUS DOPPELGÄNGERS:

Black Swan contains lots of mirror imagery—mirrors mirroring mirrors when the dancers are in wardrobe together; walls of mirrors when they are dancing; mirrored movements in their synchronized dances; and dancers who from a distance look nearly identical, with the same clothes, hairstyles, and general physiques. Narratively, a number of dancers are competing to take on the same role and thus are intentionally striving to best serve as doppelgänger to a character ideal in the director’s mind. Added to this, Nina’s overbearing mother was herself a ballerina whose career was cut short. Thus, she wishes for Nina to become her duplicate so as to fulfill her ambition vicariously. No wonder, then, that Nina’s madness takes the form of an imaginary evil twin who originates in mirrors and migrates into the faces of the other dancers. A high pressure situation involving doublings and re-doublings of identity causes Nina’s reflection to come to life as the lustful and violently free spirit she has never let herself be. So, once again, we encounter a type of doppelgänger that actually exists in our reality, the doppelgänger created by a broken mind.