"In fiction, folklore and popular culture, a doppelgänger is a tangible double of a living person that typically represents evil...The word is also used to describe the sensation of having glimpsed oneself in peripheral vision, in a position where there is no chance that it could have been a reflection. Doppelgängers are often perceived as a sinister form of bilocation and generally regarded as harbingers of bad luck. In some traditions, a doppelgänger seen by a person's friends or relatives portends illness or danger, while seeing one's own doppelgänger is an omen of death."
Literature and film is littered with the idea of the double: they can be your evil twin, a colleague who's better at being you than you, or a dead ringer for your equally dead girlfriend. But in the end, they're nearly always you. The part of yourself you can't admit exists. The part of you that does what you can't. They may cause you pain, but they get what you want. But to become one again, whole, almost always necessitates violence. You can merge with them, or you can kill them, but whenever there is two of you, by the end there must only be one.
Swan Lake is probably one of the best known ballets in the world. The story is this: Odette, a chaste young princess, is put under an evil spell by a wicked sorcerer. By day she is a swan and only human at night. The spell can only be broken by true love. A young prince sees her and falls madly in love with her, and it seems she will at long last be freed of the spell. But the wicked sorcerer has other plans. He sends in his daughter Odile, who looks like Odette, to seduce the prince at the ball where he is to declare his love for the princess. She succeeds and the princess is imprisoned in her spell forever. Unable to live without her prince, she throws herself off a cliff and is freed only in death.
In the ballet, Odette is identified as the white swan, Odile the black. They are played by the same dancer, meaning the dancer must be able to capture the fragile, pure qualities of the white swan and the cunning, dark qualities of the black swan.
In this tale, the black swan, the evil twin, is victorious, and the white swan dead. But the dancer herself must be both; must divide herself in two and merge by the end. Or perish.
Black Swan, directed by Darren Aronofsky, is the story of Nina, a ballerina in the prestigious New York Ballet Company. She lives and breathes ballet, at the cost of perhaps a normal life. She lives at home with her controlling mother, in a room that doesn't seem to have changed since she was five. It's a suffocating pink, with stuffed toys lining the room. She is determined to play the Swan Queen in the company's performance of Swan Lake.
She is a perfectionist, which makes her an amazing dancer, but it has failed to impress the company director Tomas enough to feature her. He questions her ability to embody both roles - the virginal white swan and the sensual black swan. She accidentally convinces him and wins the role. The role of understudy is given to Lili, a dancer new to the company.
In the ballet that is Nina's life she is the white swan, and Tomas the prince. To her, Lili is the black swan, and is a threat to everything Nina has worked for. But not all is as it seems. Is Tomas really the prince? Or is he the wicked sorcerer? And is Lili really the black swan, or is she merely an incarnation of that side of Nina that she and her mother try to bury deep within her mind every day?
This is a very dark and twisted version of Swan Lake in which the doubles are not restricted to Odette and Odile (or Nina and Lili), but to all the major players. Accompanying Nina's descent into madness is an uncomfortable, unnerving experience. We are in Nina's point of view throughout the whole film and whether we ever escape is impossible to tell.
It would seem that the theme of the double becomes an integral part to the plot's classical trajectory; in the classical Hollywood film, we are presented with a protagonist with one desire that motivates all their actions and the narrative. The story unfolds in the service of this all-encompassing idea. To keep the viewer engaged with the protagonist and their struggle, the filmmaker must create obstacles for the protagonist. In the end, the protagonist achieves their desire (or not), and the story has no need to continue. In this case Nina, as the protagonist, desires to play the Swan Queen. The obstacle in her path is essentially her own mind. But she cannot accept that fact and so her mind must create versions of herself and defeat them in order to achieve her goal.
Lili, Tomas and her mother all represent Nina in some way and her reenactment of the Swan Lake story in her own life. But Lili, as Nina's black swan, is the doppelganger. The double that threatens Nina's career, relationships and her life. Nina's evil twin that threatens to consume her. To fully embody the role of the Swan Queen, Nina must kill Lili and become whole; Nina and Lili.
Aronofsky uses conventional Hollywood storytelling to engage us the viewer. The theme of the double is revealed through several visual devices; mirrors and reflective surfaces are everywhere - bathrooms, studios, nina's bedroom, the New York subway windows. Characters resemble Nina and become her; Veronica, the girl Tomas threatens to give the role to; Beth, the dancer who is pushed aside because of her age who attempts suicide and damages her legs; Lili, even people Nina passes on the street. Lili often becomes Nina, pushing her further into madness.
The camera too becomes one way in which the viewer is pulled into Nina's mental instability. The primary way the viewer always engages with the screen is the camera. Sounds simple, but few filmmakers seem to realise the possibilities this opens up - Aronofsky uses careful handheld camerawork to stalk Nina through the maze of New York and the ballet company, the repetition of shots symbolising the routine that she has imposed on herself. We follow her and become involved with her.
This is not the first film to trick the viewer into adopting the point of view of a mentally unstable protagonist; but not many films do it so well. Films that allow us to question the reality presented have a dangerous tightrope running across them, which the filmmaker must navigate to emerge with a successful film. While the viewer craves the revelation of the reality of the world presented in the film, for many the confirmation that we have been inside a troubled mind all along represents the film falling off the tightrope and dying. Films like Secret Window, Inception and Shutter Island fail because the reveal is too obvious - we see it too early on that tightrope. Films like Memento, The Prestige and now Black Swan walk the tightrope to the end. In the latter, it seems it is the viewer and Nina who fall off. Nina literally falls just as the Swan Queen does. But maybe some of us are left, panting, on the edge.
It is a credit to Aronofsky that we never truly know when Nina is lucid or having a psychotic episode, but it is Natalie Portman as Nina that is the stunning glue that binds us to the screen, to the story. For as we long to know what is really happening, there's a part of ourselves that doesn't care. She is our protagonist - we want her to achieve her goal, whether that comes at the price of her mind and even her life.
Mila Kunis as Lili is extraordinary in a supporting role, the perfect complement to Portman. Vincent Cassell is more than convincing as the prince/sorcerer Tomas. Barbara Hershey is the feather in the cap of pitch-perfect performances from the main cast. Portman is a revelation, on track for a grandslam in this year's awards season, but she would be nothing without her colleagues.
The costumes by Rodarte are incredible, particularly the Black Swan costume, and the cinematography is beautiful; a haunting visual metaphor for Nina's internal struggle.
It's difficult to sum up this film, so I'll let my friend do it for me:
"Black swan did not disappoint. It's a phenomenal film - intense, passionate, sad, melodramatic, disturbing, visceral, exhilarating..."
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