News Desk: Black Swan in Red Shoes : The New Yorker

Black Swan in Red Shoes

Posted by Joan Acocella

We’ve heard from the film people about whether or not “Black Swan” is a good movie, but what’s it like as a ballet movie? The usual, just updated for our dirtier days. Ballet films are a genre, like baseball movies. They always say one thing: that classical dance destroys the people who do it. In “Specter of the Rose,” a Ben Hecht movie from 1946, the young ballet star murders his first wife and then pitches himself out a window so as to prevent himself from killing his second wife as well. In Herbert Ross’s “Nijinksky” (1960), that unfortunate artist’s psychosis is brought on by the strains of ballet as well as by Diaghilev’s efforts to turn him into a homosexual. But those sufferers are men. For the last half-century or so, ballet movies have been primarily about women, and the women are doomed not just because they try to be perfect but because they work so hard to that end that they have no time to go out and have sex with men. “The Turning Point” and “Center Stage” were recent variations on this scenario.

The mother of them all is Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s 1948 “The Red Shoes,” one of the most beautiful movies ever made—its star, the budding ballerina Vicky Page, is played by the flame-haired Moira Shearer—and therefore an especially potent contributor to the tradition. In the film’s most famous passage, the tyrannical impresario asks Vicky, “Why do you want to dance?” She answers, “Why do you want to live?” Because of her servitude to her art, she has to leave her nice husband. Ballet versus a man: you can’t have both, and if you choose the wrong one (ballet), you’re in trouble. At the end of the movie, when Vicky falls off the balcony onto the train tracks, we don’t know if this is an accident or a suicide. (Or did the shoes dance her to her death? That’s what happens in the Hans Christian Andersen story on which the movie is based.) But Vicky clearly regards her death as a product of her obsession. “Take off the red shoes,” she says—her last words.

“Black Swan” has roughly the same story. Like Vicky, Nina (Natalie Portman) lives for ballet alone. Like Vicky, she has a despotic ballet master; she’s a bundle of nerves; what she needs is a good ****. Her situation is worse, though. Ballet has made her psychotic. She hallucinates. In her mind, her skin sprouts black feathers. People are having sex in the stage wings. Then she’s having sex! Cunnilingus! With a woman! In the course of all this we see a bloody hole gaping from among the feathers of a white tutu: a disappointed vagina.

Why is this the story of almost every ballet movie? Well, the obvious answer is that artists are usually portrayed that way - driven, tormented. You get movies about Tchaikovsky and Mozart, who died early and horribly, but not about Haydn, who lived a pretty contented life, or Bach, with his bustling household.

But the portrayal of ballet dancers as anguished souls is more consistent, and I have a hard time not seeing it, in part, as sour grapes. Ballet is not natural, people say. (Why would someone damage her feet by wearing those shoes?) It’s not democratic. (Why aren’t professional ballet schools open to every child?) It’s not fair. Ballet dancers are chosen from among the thin, the tall, and - what is seldom said - the pretty. Who wouldn’t want to look like Natalie Portman, and put on that fabulous tutu, and dance to Tchaikovsky, and have everyone clap? The thrill of seeing this, combined with the p

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