thinkgreenthursday

Robert here, with my series Distant Relatives, where we look at two films, (one classic, one modern) related through a common theme and ask what their similarities and differences can tell us about the evolution of cinema.  Since one of these films is still in theaters, I thought I'd mention that while certain plot elements are revealed I've done my best not to spoil any of the film's dramatic resolution.

They're all the same these bloody virgins, they're all teasers that's all.

Sex is dirty.  Sex is bad.  Both of these women have stilted sexuality in a world that demands they be sex objects.  Each film does a superb job of getting us into their heads, making us understand how they see sex.  As Carol lies in bed at night, hearing the animalistic moans and grunts being made by her sister and her sister's beau in the next room, we agree that they don't sound sexy at all.  They don't sound like something Carol would want to partake in.  They don't sound like something we would want to do.  For Nina, a subway encounter with a perverted old man tells us all we need to know about how sex appears before her: dirty, aggressive, a violation.  There's nothing present that suggests the comfort of love or even the enjoyment of pleasure.

For both of these women, being virginal is part of attaining or maintaining perfection.  Carol's pursuit of this ideal is subconscious.  She doesn't hope to achieve anything by accomplishing it, but being spoiled by a man would be akin to falling from grace.  For Nina, avoiding sex is part of her active pursuit of artistic perfection.  Her mother has pushed her in the direction of the pure innocent ballerina.  When company director Thomas Leroy insists that sexuality is her only path to perfection, it both contradicts and reinforces her attitudes toward sexuality and innocence.  After all, he demands she become sexual to embody the black swan, the dark character.  So sex may now be the goal, but it's still something sinister.

No way out

The activeness of Nina versus the passiveness of Carol is one of the major differences between these two films.  Yet in both cases it seemingly makes their downfall more inevitable.  Carol has no direction in life, no goals, no hobbies even.  Her descent into madness seems a natural progression of that emptiness.  For Nina, her pursuit of artistic triumph is so great, it can only lead where it eventually does - downward.  What both of these women do share is obsession, and that, however manifest, is the key to their fates.  The two women justify their darkness differently as well.  Black Swan plays with the doppleganger (echoing Swan Lake).  Nina, perhaps unable to accept any darkness within herself, creates mirror images of herself, onto whom she can project her inner evil.  Carol recedes within herself, becoming further and further the eternal victim.  She rationalizes her actions as necessary self-defense.  She has to.  By the end of her film, even the walls are attacking her.


In the over forty-five years between these two films, we notice that audiences have changed little.  Stories of beauty and obsession are still captivating.  Both films present us with a heroine who the picture empathizes with and sexualizes, almost becoming another one of the many gazing and lecherous men that surround them.  Like Nina, Black Swan the film is more active in its pursuit of our emotional distress.  The film is bombastic, swirling around, throwing a large amount of stimuli at is from all sides.  Repulsion is more passive like Carol, building slowly to a point where fantastic images truly shock.  Both methods work for their respective films, though the more modern one is maybe indicative of a time when the weight of film history and media saturation requires images be louder.  But however the times have changed, we still respond to beauty in peril.  We still are shocked at beauty embodying evil.  And like that camerman we feel terrible about it, but keep it in our gaze.

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