Black Swan 2010 is Aronofsky trying to outcompete Charlie Kaufman

Blender Dumbass
September 10, 2025

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#blackswan #swanlake #natalieportman #darrenaronofsky #film #movies #review #cinemastodon

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2002 Spike Jonze film Adaptation ( written by Charlie Kaufman ) is a story about a guy named Charlie Kaufman who is tasked with adapting an article about flowers into a Hollywood picture. And the best he can do is to make a meta-adaptation, where the movie you are watching is the story of writing the movie you are watching. 2010 Darren Aronofsky film Black Swan is a similar kind of meta-adaptation, this time of a Swan Lake ( Лебединое озеро ) by Tchaikovsky. While in the same time being a movie about adopting Swan Lake.

In a way this is horror film. Like you get horror genre tropes. Blood, body mutations. Stuff like that. Like come on. In Swan Lake the main character turn into a Swan. If this is meta-adaptation, we got to have that here too.

I have brothers who were born in the same city as Natalie Portman who plays the girl that will eventually turn into a Swan. And I personally was born in Ukraine, where Mila Kunis, or the girl that is a meta-black swan in this story, is born. Also Kunis, Portman, Aronofsky himself, Winona Ryder ( who plays an older dancer ) and even Kaufman and Jonze are all Jewish. Just like me. What the fuck, movie?

I think what Aronofsky and co. were trying to do here, is to somehow make a profound oscarbait picture using the story of Swan Lake as the back-bones kind of structural thing. Obviously for Aronofsky and the writers to measure pipis with Kaufman and win, they had to make it a meta-adaptation and usually Swan Lake is performed in theater, not a movie-theater. So a story about a dancer aspiring to be the Swan was probably the only choice. Which so happened to be perfect to examine the theater industry ( or the broader entertainment industry as a whole ) looking for oscarbait serious sounding material, that would make the movie register for people as something serious. At least this reading of it sounds about right to me.

For Portman, ( as I already examined in my review of May December ) the movie, apart from being a good role, was also probably a way for her to go over her PTSD from being a lolita after working with Luc Besson. For those who don't know, Besson is not an ageist. And just so happened that he wrote and directed an anti-ageism movie called Leon: The Professional which obviously turned on a lot of people. And while for Portman to work on Leon, was fun, the experience after the film ( of a lot of men really wanting her now ), probably caused her a lot of things to think about.

Her character in Black Swan is kind of stuck in immaturity and has to fight her way to being respected. Her mother for example is such an abusive paternalistic helicopter parent, that I cannot understand how she didn't fight back when she was 10 or so. But now as she needs to get into character of the Black Swan ( a cunning, sexy bitch type of a character ), she needs to get rid of her mom, because that mother is not giving her enough privacy even to masturbate properly.

Vincent Cassel plays a maybe villain type character that I think is the proxy for the prince in Swan Lake. There is uncomfortable sexual tension between him and Portman's character. And he seems to be a literal representation of people like Harvey Weinstein. But on the other hand, it doesn't feel like he is all evil. Like there is something perverted about him, but making him all evil would be shallow and uninteresting.

Let's talk about visual effect. I was watching this film, while waiting a test VFX shot to render. So my brain through the whole thing was hyper-focused on visual effects and stuff. And man this movie blue my fucking socks off. Aronofsky is going for such complex shots and they aren't even huge or whatever. Like there is no camera in the reflection. He dares to shoot very free with all those mirrors everywhere. And somebody had to paint out the camera in every single one of those shots. And then there are the hallucinations. At one point the tattoo on Kunis's back starts to move and stuff while she is moving, deforming the shape of her back. This is complicated shit!

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