And so we finally saw The Black Swan. I didn't know much about it before watching it, and so I was surprised to see all the ancient tropes: the fragile virginal acolyte, the powerful impresario, the stage mother (only in the chorus, then pregnant), the role too hard to play, the self-slaughter at the moment of triumph...
It was The Turning Point and The Red Shoes, only worse. (There was no supportive company or converted composer, no jealous director / dramaturge. No one at all cheered for the woman in The Black Swan.) There was an amazingly cruel scene where the new principal dancer is introduced to the donors and supporters, pained and complex expressions and champagne on the staircase, while the former principal dancer is in the crowd on the floor below, a nobody, left to scurry off as best she can. (She's later run over by a car, sustains massive damage to her right leg, and cuts herself in the cheeks because she is & has nothing now.)
It was not White Nights. (Oh, that timid, wicked, commissar-loving Helen Mirren, that coward and inferior artist, that failure who failed to grasp the freedom embodied in the West!)*
The Black Swan definitely was not Tap. It wasn't anything with Ginger Rogers; it wasn't Singin' in the Rain or even bloody Yankee Doodle Dandy.
Art is dangerous for women, mostly, it seems, because men control it. Were any of the men in The Black Swan too virginal, too timid, too frigid? (Too unmanly, as you might have thought, but possibly not said, about Robert Helpmann?) Were the men's toenails splitting? Did the director sexually assault them to improve their performances? Were they declared unfuckable? No? And why not?
Arnofsky also directed The Wrestler. It could be argued he's just a misanthropist... But… The Wrestler kept reminding me of Lipstick and Dynamite, a documentary about women wrestlers in the U.S. in the '40s, '50s and early '60s – the punishing schedules, the drugs to keep you going, the cheating managers, the cheating spouses & partners, the virtual impossibility of working your way out of your contract –
Some of management's deceptions in L&D took me straight back to my time in boiler-rooms. So I thought The Wrestler was about class, not gender.
It might be that it's impossible to make a film about ballet that isn't about gender (the limitations of the f, the transcendence of the m.).
Just remind me never to watch another one. Ever.
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* The character Galina was not an inferior artist: she was a peak performer of classical ballet. Classical ballet was becoming a thing of the past; the Soviet Union was about to collapse. Modern ballet, especially America modern ballet, was, in the movie, the dance of relevance, new horizons, the future - all packaged as "artistic growth." What of modern dance 25 years later, when America is on the verge of collapse? Is the Baryshnikov character now quaint and inferior, now that modern dance is becoming a thing of a particular era, emblematic of a future that leaked away into storms and sand? The plot prevented modern dance being presented as another choice, or something a classically-trained ballet dancer could continue to do with an aging body.
You can't separate the economic power of a milieu from the estimation of its arts...
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* The character Galina was not an inferior artist: she was a peak performer of classical ballet. Classical ballet was becoming a thing of the past; the Soviet Union was about to collapse. Modern ballet, especially America modern ballet, was, in the movie, the dance of relevance, new horizons, the future - all packaged as "artistic growth." What of modern dance 25 years later, when America is on the verge of collapse? Is the Baryshnikov character now quaint and inferior, now that modern dance is becoming a thing of a particular era, emblematic of a future that leaked away into storms and sand? The plot prevented modern dance being presented as another choice, or something a classically-trained ballet dancer could continue to do with an aging body.
You can't separate the economic power of a milieu from the estimation of its arts...
