Wings of dark desire

With Black Swan, Darren Aronofksy returned to the inspired lunacy of his earlier work. The Wrestler (2008), for all that was good about it, was ultimately a realistic, calmly directed, even subtle film. That was fine, but 'realistic', 'calm' and 'subtle' are not words you'd pick to describe Π (1998) or Requiem for a Dream (2000), and they sure as hell aren't what you'd call Black Swan (2010), which is absurdly heavy-handed, wildly melodramatic and overblown.

That's a compliment. In the often maddeningly pedestrian world of Oscar bait, its self-conscious grandeur makes Black Swan fascinating and worthwhile. It also marks a further step in the evolution of Darren Aronofsky, staying true to his concerns as an artist but finding new and inventive ways of tackling them, and as a fan that makes me very excited.

Natalie Portman is Nina Sayers, a ballerina in her late twenties who is finally given a chance to step into the limelight with the retirement of the company's ageing star Beth (Winona Ryder), and Nina is chosen to portray the Swan Queen in a new production of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake by playboy director Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel). The fearful, self-conscious Nina is a natural fit for the virginal Odette, but cannot relax enough for a convincing portrayal of the seductive, carnal Odile.

When she is befriended by the wild, free-spirited new dancer Lily (Mila Kunis), Nina begins to come out of her shell and rebel against her loving but controlling ex-ballerina mother (Barbara Hershey). Soon, however, she comes to believe she is followed by a dark doppelganger and menaced by Lily, who she fears is trying to replace her. Her paranoia causes her to grow more afraid and tense just when she needs to finally overcome the repression that's holding her back as a dancer.

Before discussing the film itself, it's worth addressing a certain controversy that engulfed Black Swan's Oscar bid. To my mind, it's quite irrelevant who performed Natalie Portman's dance scenes in Black Swan. Film is artifice: we know, and accept, that actors do not and cannot do the things they seem to be doing in films. The willing suspension of disbelief is broken and the viewing experience damanged only when the artifice draws attention to itself by being unconvincing: poor CGI, for example, or bad acting. Black Swan passes that test with flying colours.

It shouldn't matter how much dancing the lead actress did. But Fox Searchlight brought the whirlwind on themselves by not combating the impression that Portman had become a professional ballerina in a year and a half. This not only fanned the irritating cult of authenticity - a symptom of commodification but powerless to create an alternative -, it was also grossly discourteous to Portman's dance double Sarah Lane and her colleagues. Motion pictures are collaborative efforts, and it should always be deplored when the people who make a film possible are sidelined at the expense of a few marketable stars. Hopefully the fiasco will teach studios to give all involved due credit in future productions. 

Rant over! Black Swan pretty much screams its most obvious interpretation: it's about Nina's attempt to overcome her own sexual repression, and the stresses and splits in her personality that this struggle causes. She can't win her freedom without coming apart at the seams. She's constantly infantilised by living with her mother, who calls her a 'sweet girl' (a phrase that comes to haunt Nina) and makes her live in her pink childhood bedroom, complete with cuddly toys. She's deeply uncomfortable when Thomas inquires about her sex life and asks her to masturbate to loosen up. She desires those things she will not allow herself to have and is locked in a cycle of guilt, self-hatred and perfectionism.
 

Aronofsky chose to convey that message not through conventional drama but through body horror, perhaps the most uncomfortable and terrifying subgenre. In body horror, we're attacked not from the outside (as in, say, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre) but from the inside. We can flee Leatherface, but we can't escape or fight the evil that's spreading within ourselves. Black Swan thus has strong echoes of the Calvinist doctrine as total depravity - the notion that no part of us remains uncorrupted by debilitating sin. Nina is gradually destroyed by her inability to live up to the rigid standards she has internalised: she despairs of works-righteousness, but there is no saviour to take her burden. 

 

The willingness to portray her own body becoming her enemy makes Natalie Portman's extraordinary performance more courageous than, for example, Charlize Theron's unrecognisable turn in Monster. In Black Swan Portman shows the vulnerability of the same body we know from perfume ads - although having lost twenty pounds for the film the already petite actress looks disconcertingly frail. Mila Kunis, showing off her natural easy charm, is the perfect opposite to Portman, while Vincent Cassel - an actor who's always interesting, even when he's not good - turns in a rather terrific performance as a man driven by impulse and desire. 

 

Subtle it all ain't, and that goes doubly for Clint Mansell's score. Disqualified from Oscar consideration for liberally quoting Tchaikovsky, the music would be greatly lessened without the use of 'Swan's Theme', a grand, devastating piece of music that says 'tragic foreboding' like nothing else (witness, for example, its use in the Last Supper scene in Des hommes et des dieux); but as it is, the sweeping orchestration fits the melodrama like hand in glove. 

 

Aronofsky, I said, is developing as a director. He's still up to his favourite techniques: the over-the-shoulder camera following actors around makes a number of appearances and is used to great effect in dance sequences. Aronofsky is less fixated on his bag of tricks these days, but he's learnt new ones too. The horizontal expanse provided by the film's 2.35:1 aspect ratio gives him the space he needs for thrilling dance sequences: the climax has the best of the lot, but there's stiff competition.

 

Praise is due, too, to the bold decision to almost totally abandon narrative coherence for a psychological stream of consciousness in the last half-hour, creating a sustained nightmarish rush of horrifying images up to the climax - which, as in all Aronofsky films, is inexorable, the only logical conclusion to his characters' lives. Aronofsky films are about people who are obsessed by something - numerology, heroin, wrestling, ballet - whose ultimate fates are dictated by these fixations.

So slay we all

It's an iron law of film franchises that they never end on a high note. Business logic dictates that studios must keep cranking out sequels until, inevitably, they produce an installment so critically reviled and commercially unsucessful that public disgust forces them to lay the series to rest. One can imagine a world in which artistic vision alone determines the lifespan of film series: but to get there we'd need to overthrow the social conditions that give rise to films like Resurrection.

Halloween: Resurrection (2002) killed the Halloween franchise for good: it was simply so bad that Dimension Films had to stop flogging the dead horse and let Michael Myers die at last. A few years later, series producer Moustapha Akkad - a great man, after a fashion - was blown to kingdom come by a suicide bomber in Jordan, and thus ended one of the great slasher franchises, in fire and blood - until the 2007 remake, anyway.

We open with credits, presented in a grossly terrible font before a dark background, and then we hear Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) recite a fauxlosophic speech about the door to hell etc. Laurie has been confined to a psychiatric institution after accidentally killing an innocent man on Halloween night, 1998, according to exposition spouted by a senior nurse (the late Lorena Gale) for the benefit of her colleague (Marisa Rudiak). Both Gale and Rudiak are deeply terrible in this scene, incidentally; and since Gale at least was excellent as Elosha on Battlestar Galactica, I'll hold the script responsible.

It appears that at the end of H20 Michael Myers crushed a paramedic's larynx and switched clothes and mask with the unconscious man, and it was this poor devil that Laurie killed. I don't need to tell you this makes no sense, and I honestly wish the writers had just brought Michael back by fiat. Why not claim a wizard did it? It's not like they hadn't gone there before. Anyway, it quickly emerges that Laurie is only pretending to be catatonic: in fact, she's waiting for Michael to turn up and finish the job. Curtis, incidentally, is much worse than she was in H20: I believe she was contractually obliged to appear, but it's clear that just like everyone else in the whole world, she was sick to death of this series.

Michael comes for Laurie, murdering security guards along the way. There follows a pretty good fight-chase scene between Laurie and Michael, at the end of which she lures him onto the roof and catches him in a snare (as he attempts to hack his way out, his knife makes comically overdone slashing noises). Just as she's about to finish him, though, she hesitates, fearing she may kill the wrong man again; Michael exploits this to throw her over the edge. She kisses the mask, hisses 'I'll see you in hell!' and falls to her death. This is every bit as underwhelming to watch as it is to read about, incidentally. As Michael walks out, he hands his knife to an inmate obsessed with serial killers - handle first, of course: wouldn't want anyone to get hurt.

With Laurie dead, the mantle of final Myers scion should theoretically pass to her son John; but Josh Hartnett being out of Resurrection's budget in the wake of Pearl Harbor, we instead get a cast of random unknowns. Our obvious Final Girl this time around is Sara (Bianca Kajlich, of Dawson's Creek). The film introduces us to her in a lecture on the Jungian concept of the shadow, which is apparently 'a figment of ourselves that even the collective unconscious denies... Inside all of us there lurks a dark, malevolent figure, a kind of bogeyman, if you will'. That may sound ominous, but it's so much nonsense: in analytic psychology, the shadow is a complex uniting the 'socially undesirable aspects of the maturing personality' (Anthony Stevens, Jung: A Very Short Introduction, p. 64). Am I wasting my breath here?

Sara and her friends Rudy (Sean Patrick Thomas), an enthusiastic cook, and Jen (Katee Sackhoff - no, really) have just been chosen for a new internet reality format thought up by Freddie Harris (Busta Rhymes). 'Dangertainment' will see a group of contestants spend Halloween night in the old Myers house in Haddonfield, supposedly to find out what drove Michael to kill; the teens have cameras strapped to their heads and viewers can choose their own angle. Of course, Freddie and his assistant Nora (Tyra Banks) have secretly loaded the house with knives, fake corpses, spooky toys and the like, hoping for more entertainment value.

Beside Sara, Rudy and Jen, the contestants include Donna (Daisy McCrackin), who spouts what the screenwriters believe is high-falutin' college talk; Jim (Luke Kirby), a music student who wants to get into Donna's knickers; and Bill (Thomas Ian Nicholas), who dies very quickly. Of all these people, Katee Sackhoff is probably the most dispiriting: evincing none of the brilliance she displayed as Battlestar Galactica's Starbuck, she is very bad here, and it makes me feel a little embarrassed. It is, in general, a loathsome bunch of meat - although on the plus side, we have three named black characters, a series record and quite possibly an all-time high in the slasher genre.

Obviously, Michael turns up and begins murdering everyone. The kills are pretty rank, gory but unoriginal; and if you were to ask me when the old 'killer kills with people in the next room none the wiser' trope got really stale, I'd have to say it was around the time of Halloween II, back in 1981. We're treated to the worst head prop I've seen in a very long time during Jen's death scene, and there's one fake-out of a seemingly dead character returning to life, because in the Halloween series multiple stab wounds lead to either (1) instant death, (2) brief loss of consciousness, after which you carry on as if nothing ever happened. Michael is played without distinction by Brad Loree, and let me issue my familiar complaint that the mask looks different again: the eyeholes are smaller now and have black rims.

In Resurrection, we see everything that makes a slasher bad coalesce. Its screenplay, penned by Larry Brand and Sean Hood, is truly lousy, leading to a film so braindead it makes The Curse of Michael Myers seem downright ambitious. The performances are terrible and, worst of all, it's unimaginably ugly. The 'choose your own perspective' gimmick means that a lot of what we see is low-quality, grainy webcam footage, and the innumerable POV shots make for a miserable viewing experience (there's a reason why POV is used sparingly in film). Director Rick Rosenthal's return to the franchise sees it at its nadir, and Rosenthal has no luck making any of what happens less confusing. It's a miserable little film that escaped direct-to-video hell only because of the franchise's prestige and Akkad's clout, and thus it's a good showcase of the slasher as a whole c. 2002.

In this series: Halloween (1978) | Halloween II (1981) | Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1988) | Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988) | Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (1989) | Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995) | Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later (1998) | Halloween: Resurrection (2002) | Halloween (2007) | Halloween II (2009)