The world of actors/actresses appears glamorous: wealth, fame, sex. It’s all there, but they are also workers involved in capitalist production. This thought has been haunting me since I was leafing through Stanislavsky’s ‘An Actor Prepares’. I bought the book to gift to a friend who is very interested in films. The book’s memory faded until recently, when it re-appeared, as I ran accidentally into seeing the movie Black Swan (Darren Aronofsky). I have scanty understanding of literary criticism/aesthetics and I am unable to locate the movie in the literary discourses that I am aware of. But of all Hollywood movies that I have watched, this one is worth interpretation (at least I think so).
The movie revolves around the life of Nina(Natali Portman), who is a dancer in a company. She has the morality of a ‘adolescent girl’ that she is unable to transcend because of the circumstances in her family. Her mother is a neurotic seen from the eyes of Nina, but it is never concluded that she is one. The beauty lies in the fact that there is no conceptualization of neurosis in the movie -- only its occasional perception by Nina. Sometimes, this perception is also challenged. There is no neurosis. Nina is depicted as the best dancer in the company with her articulated movements. Nina is the best because her labor process is completely in harmony with the requirement of the company. Her product, “commodity” of dancing, that is left to consumption to the consumers who applaud seeing her performance throughout the movie, hides the Nina’s multiple ‘alienations’. The movie begins with this “commodity” and moves to an anthropocentric problematic through an engagement with Nina and her labour process.
Nina had been playing ‘the white swan’ who is “innocent” and whose morale is located in platonic love(both on and off stage). Now the company requires her to play ‘the black swan’ who seduces(on stage). The change in requirement of her company, over which she has no control, requires her to change the articulations of her labour process. This manifests into her very material being: Into her body and psyche and her articulations of both outside her work. She wants to “be perfect” and yet wants her morality to restructure itself with the requirements of her time. She finds one opponent and one veteran. She admires her veteran but is not close to her because competing, she overthrew her. She is close to her opponent in spite of a lot of differences because competition requires that of her.
The audience shall articulate many things that Nina experiences as schizophrenic only to be challenged later by the logic of her/his own judgment. In the end Nina becomes ‘the black swan’ but while trying to return to the state of ‘white swan’, that is required in the dance, she finds she had already killed ‘the white swan’. In the end Nina gazes at the audience, and then at the lights, creating a sensation of addressing anyone watching or not watching the movie. She speaks in a soft voice, “I am perfect.” But it is not ‘the white swan’ or ‘the black swan’ that dies. It is Nina who bleeds to death while the consuming world taking joy in the “commodity”.
I am no aesthetician and hence would like to keep myself limited to explicating my articulation of the harmony of the “form” of the movie with its content. There were two ‘movies’ running at the same time. One, which the audience(me) desires to see haunted by passive bourgeois consumerism. This is constantly subverted to come up with the “other text,” the “repressed” to present the real film in its absurdity. The mind dominated by bourgeois hegemony is forced to link the two to make some sense of it. In this sense the movie can be said to be a counter-capitalist intervention (may be it is not intended to be one which makes me more fascinated: ‘spontaneity’!) in that it is “progressively disturbing” especially for those engaged with (located in or aspire to be a part of) the concrete process of “dancing” in the big screen.
