Looking back at Darren Aronofsky’s filmography you can isolate the  recurring theme of obsession, and the price paid in service of it. He loves to show people unravel as they pursue a dream with an inhuman determination. There’s a good reason for that, there’s great drama to be found in examining the alienation from others  that comes from singular pursuit  of an objective. With that alienation also comes paranoia, couple the stress of attempting to succeed a goal with paranoia and you’ve got very entertaining cinema. This is how all of Aronofskys films have worked so far.

Requiem For a Dream featured characters dealing with drug addiction and paying varying grisly prices for their obsession. The Fountain showed a man so obsessed with defeating death that he lost his wife in the process. The Wrestler illustrated the collateral damage to family (and person) as an athlete refused to relinquish the dimming limelight. Black Swan finds Aronofsky playing with the themes yet again, but in this iteration we’re set in the world of the ballet — and appropriately, this film sees Aronofsky leaving reality behind to create an expressionistic and operatic piece.

Black Swan is the story of a ballerina Nina (Natalie Portman) vying to get the lead role in a production of Swan Lake. While she excels at the controlled and virginal performance of the white swan, she can’t perform the vampier, lusty turn as the black swan. When a new, sexier and freer ballerina Lily (Mila Kunis) joins the company all hell breaks lose. At this level of plot synopsis, this movie sounds like a classed up version of Paul Verhoeven’s B-movie classic Showgirls. You might think I’m pulling that reference out of left field in attempt to be clever, but there’s a legitimate similarity between the two that has been appropriately noted by many a reviewer.

While Showgirls is ridiculously campy, it entirely needs to be. It’s a reflection of it’s subject matter. Telling the story of backstabbing and competition between Las Vegas showgirls requires a good deal of scene chewing and preposterousness because; well…Vegas showgirls’ performances are kind of preposterous. Black Swan balances between moments of quiet understated beauty and sections of wildly, over dramatic hysterics — much like the performances of ballerinas themselves. Sometimes, within the same scene the movie jumps from feeling like a highbrow, art house piece of cinema (many of the beautifully choreographed and shot ballet scenes) to feeling like an episode of Silk Stalkings (the much discussed lesbian scene between Portman and Kunis). Yet, the film does manage to come across as a cohesive whole once you accept the world that it exists in.

Although the movie is shot with a greater degree of realism — there’s lot’s of intimate, cropped, handheld cinematography à la The Wrestler, selected scenes shot in digital video and fewer overtly showy compositions (no hip hop montages here) — it clearly operates on it’s own fantastic logic. It’s a world where internal struggle manifests itself externally. There’s many a scene of questionable reality and utilizes David Cronenberg’s effective style of body horror (if you’re still haunted y the fingernail removal scene from The Fly you’ll be sufficiently disturbed by this movie).

In this world, much like in classical mythology and fable that much ballet is based on — characters only exist in archetypes. Lily is virginal and repressed — she lives in a pink room filled with stuffed animals. Tomas (Vincent Cassel) the choreographer who judges Nina and Lily — only exists in black and white environments and dresses in black & white clothes. To help sell the reality  that these characters inhabit Aronofsky relies heavily on the score by long time collaborator Clint Mansell.

Where Mansell’s other’s scores have been evocative, they have not been as nearly as bombastic as the work he composed for Black Swan. He pulls a couple of motifs and themes from the original Swan Lake orchestration but doesn’t tone them down or interpolate them into something subdued; instead, they’re on full tilt with trombones and trumpets going on full blast, cymbal crashes and racing string sections.

In the movie these full on orchestra barrages are pitted against, subtle atonal sections to play up the dichotomy of the real vs fantasy/delusion. Once again, this juggling act manages to come across more powerfully in execution than in description and serves beautifully in accenting both Swan Lake and Black Swan’s own narrative.

This movie serves as a great counterpoint/companion piece to David Fincher’s Fight Club. That movie at it’s core, spoke to the modern, western man’s internal struggle between being a refined, docile member of society and brutal savage destroyer. Here, Aronofsky is playing with the concept of the modern woman’s struggle between a role as virgin and whore, with the two main characters playing thinly sketched archetypes of both. While both movies blur the line between reality and delusion as well as speak to the looming weight of societal expectations, ultimately it feels as though Fincher’s film argues for respites of insanity as a potentially beneficial way to resolve the great question of manhood.

Aronofsky’s Black Swan though suggests that the great question of womanhood — virgin or whore — is the cause of insanity and that artificially imposed polarity ultimately ends in the damaging of women. Where Fincher’s film was comparatively a pretty straight forward narrative examining duality, Black Swan manages to take the idea of polarity and duality and apply it to all aspects of the film to create a multi-tiered and rich experience.

- Behold the Destroyer