by Jason Adams
We're in between seasons of our "Great Moments in Horror Actressing" series, taking the post-Halloween holidays off, but I decided to spring out from under my self-appointed mothballs to celebrate this week's 10th anniversary of Darren Aronofsky's le grande trash Black Swan -- to spring out, to do a lustily precise pirouette, and to plunk down some love here for Natalie Portman's spectacular and much-deserved Oscar-winning turn as the prima ballerina Nina Sayers, our favorite sweet girl slash toe-crunching psycho.
Over this past weekend I randomly ended up re-watching two seemingly disparate horror films that you might not immediately sense a sister-bond between...
Thosee titlese were Black Swan and Ari Aster's Midsommar. I found myself thinking the exact same thought during each film -- how the hell did they do those dance scenes? When Dani, tripped out on mushroom tea, swirls around that May-pole, and when Nina, tripped out on starvation and desperation, swirls her many swirls across the length of her film, the choreography of the camera-work is truly mind-boggling. Both directors insist on getting right in there in the middle of the dance, spinning and whirling as if we're our leading lady's invisible partners -- the audience becomes the Ginger to their Freds.
They say with dance movies it's important to keep your camera far away, so we can actually watch the dance itself, but these scenes, because of their psychological bent, are exceptional exceptions -- we're better off staying mainly trained on the actors' faces. And I say that not because Portman's modest ballet skills got some side-eyes from professional dancers, but because Nina is experiencing a full-on mental movie breakdown here and that particular dance-floor is, as always, across the face. I need to see her pas de deux with delusion!
Aronofsky's trademark shot of staring at the back of a character's head is in full display across Black Swan but notably not so much during these dances -- he'll have us staring at Portman's hair-bun through the winding, cramped corridors of the theater leading up to the stage, but the second Nina spins out in front of an audience wham, we're eye to eye with Portman, and it's the world that now spins about her. These moments brim my favorite steps, leaps, and bounds towards Nina's psychotic dissembling, nowhere more shocking than in the moment when Nina finally, terrifyingly, becomes the Black Swan. The way she pulses and whirrs, practically purring -- this, I tell myself, is when Portman won her Oscar. This sequence explodes, CG gooseflesh -- excuse me swan-flesh -- rippling off of the screen.
This is what we been waiting for! That's not to discredit her many fine smaller touches -- everybody loves the way she cries on the telephone after winning that role of a lifetime, her voice breaking as she says "He picked me, Mommy" -- but despite my lovelier instincts this movie always finds me assuming the role of Vincent Cassel's predatory task-master: I just want my sweet girl to live a little, damn it! Nina's early-on dedication to downcast mousiness is as gumption-getting as Jennifer Lawrence's character in Mother! -- we come to thirst for fury, for red eyes and big bold bird-armed savagery. For snatching our rightful places!
These movies make culpable maniacs of us -- we'll burn the theater down and bleed out for art -- for Capital A Art, Exclamation Point! -- in these people's capable, if only they'll let them be, hands. Perfection, a May-flower crown and the simple sparkling diamond of Creation itself torn from inside our carved-out bellies, is prize a'plenty. The hangover comes the next day -- for now, we live a little.