Metamorphosis and Modulation: Darren Aronofsky's BLACK SWAN
Black Swan (Darren Aronofsky 2010) tells the story of Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman) a ballerina who dreams of dancing the Swan Queen in Swan Lake. When she wins the lead role, Nina slowly begins losing her mind, in a curious and intense mix of melodrama and horror. Pressured by the ballet director Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel) and her overbearing mother (Barbara Hershey) Nina first finds escape in her friendship with understudy Lily (Mila Kunis) but begins to suspect that Lily wants to kill her to get her role. Slowly Nina's body also begins to change, culminating in the opening performance, where Nina's body transforms into a terrifying hybrid figure of swan woman, before Nina falls to her death. In this chapter, I wish to investigate how digital morphing works as a way of figuring biopower, registering the cultural forces of gender, sexuality, and desire. Black Swan is exemplary in this regard as Nina becomes the locus of stratifications of power, turning biopower into felt sensations rather than pure abstractions of power. In this analysis, I am tracing the co construction of an aesthetic logic (the digital morph) and a cultural logic (biopower and corporeal forces) I will read Black Swan and its morphing both as a distinctive formal device of post cinema, and as an articulation of a certain "structure of feeling."