| Related Products: | |
| If you want to write, direct or produce a | |
| film like the one featured: | |
| Software | |
 |
Blockbuster 6 |
| Classes |  |
Great Screenwriting Audio Course
|
| TRUBY BREAKDOWNS |
 |
Spoiler alert: this breakdown contains crucial information about the plot of the film. Black Swan is a movie that makes you pay a lot more than the admission price. But the payoff is huge. To be honest with you, I found most of the film annoying. Yes, the dancing is lovely. But the scenes of self-flagellation and abuse made my skin crawl. And I don’t like stories about madness or addiction. Besides shoving an unlikable character down our throats, these films have no plot. They keep hitting the same story beat. Sure enough, Black Swan keeps showing us and telling us that Natalie Portman’s character, Nina, is terribly insecure about performing the role of the Black Swan and is too repressed to express the role’s dangerous sexuality. All of this overshadows two excellent decisions the writers make early on that pay off big at the end. Their first choice happens in the opening scene. In my Great Screenwriting Class I spend a lot of time talking about how to open your story, because it’s the foundation upon which every other story beat depends. |
|
Ironically, the opening in Black Swan is not a story beat at all. It’s just Natalie
Portman, as Nina, dancing. In effect the writers are saying, let’s get the big
question out of the way right up front: can Natalie Portman dance?. This isn’t
Gary Cooper, playing Lou Gehrig, barely able to throw a baseball (Useless Tip:
if you ever have to pick sides in softball, just watch how everybody throws). This
movie star is a first class ballet dancer. Establishing that fact is crucial to the
film’s success because the story is about the sacrifice needed to be the best in
the world at your craft, whether it’s a sport, an art form or a combination of the
two.
The second crucial choice the writers make concerns the key structural technique necessary to make a madness or addiction story work. Don’t make the prime opponent the affliction. If you do, the hero is just punching herself, and the drama dies. Instead, create outside character opposition that challenges and exacerbates the hero’s personal flaw. That way you create plot and build the drama. In Black Swan the outside opposition comes from the womanizing director, Thomas, and the competing dancer, Lily, played by Mila Kunis. Lily is especially valuable because she pulls the story out of Nina’s head and introduces the possibility that a very real conspiracy is underway that will destroy the hero. Sometimes paranoid people are justified in their paranoia. Finally we get to the “battle” scene, the performance. Everything in the film has been one long foreplay for the battle, and it’s a killer. Like all great battle scenes, it’s based on the principle of convergence. The climactic moment of Swan Lake is also the climax of the film story and the climax of Natalie Portman’s performance. Nina overcomes initial failure and not only defeats her demons, she dazzles as the Black Swan. She is sexy and dangerous in the dance, and she passionately kisses the director offstage, after having had to fend him off up until then. For this to be the same moment when Natalie Portman’s performance crosses into greatness is an incredible thrill that only film can give us. It’s not that she can get into the pain of the White Swan; this we’ve seen for the whole film. It’s not that she can suddenly act the passion and dominance the Black Swan requires and translate that into first class dance. The white heat of Portman’s brilliance comes in how she can shift back and forth between vulnerability and dominance at lightning speed, and be each emotion at the moment she hits it. The end of the dance and the film shows screenwriting as the height of dramatic art. Nina, as the White Swan, runs up the platform to commit suicide and we think she will do it for real since the real has by now melded so completely with art. She jumps. But wait, there’s the mattress. We feel release, victory; she has defeated her demons. And then we’re flipped again. She’s already done the deed, given herself the fatal wound. It’s the act she had to take to get the performance of her life. We plummet. But she knows; “it was perfect.” She’s the perfectionist taken to her logical extreme, given a self-revelation that is at once brimming with truth and utterly without understanding. Comments
Alexander Fell 18 Dec 2011, 12:58
What about "The Red Shoes"?
KW 04 Sep 2011, 21:16
Natalie Portman thinks she didn't die but Darren Aronofsky does. I'm going
with Darren Aronofsky's interpretation that she did die. (Though there is a
hospital very close to Lincoln Center in real life so she would of gotten
there quickly to get treated)
Erick 05 Jul 2011, 21:55
Yayyy for Black Swan!
Yayy for Truby.
José Yapur 04 Feb 2011, 23:33
I'm also surprised you didn't mention Nina's mother. Particularly since the
film's actual story is about Nina "growing her own wings", killing of her
repressed "sweet girl" and then becoming a woman. If anything, her main
opposing force is her mother.
The opening which you consider no story beat at all sets not only the fact that natalie can dance but also the tone of the film and most importantly, Nina's curse. From the very beginning Nina has been cursed to be the "white swan" and she was cursed by her mother, who I think is Black Swan's Rothbart. The whole "achieving perfection" thing is merely the textual story Black Swan is telling. The subtextual is much more interesting and is where the film finds it's subtlety, cleverness, rawness and ultimate power. Without this subtext the film would've been nothing but obvious symbolism after obvious symbolism and ultimately shallow. Also, SPOILER ALERT! I don't think she actually kills herself. I thought I was alone on this interpretation for a long time until I saw an interview with Natalie Portman and, well, she thinks the same.
Eric Vincent 28 Jan 2011, 11:09
Hi John-
Curious as to why you didn't list the mother as an opposing force, a negative animus (the consuming mother) for Nina. She supports her daughter's career as long as she isn't TOO successful, but is determined to thwart her daughter's efforts when she eclipses her own accomplishments with the company. Second, I saw the director as more of a mythic "helper" or "gatekeeper." Yes, he comes on to her, but she passes the "test" when she bites him, revealing the dark power he only suspected previously. Inviting her to his loft, the director quickly passes on an attempt to seduce her, and I feel it's for a more complex reason than the turn-off of her utter sexual naivete. I think the character of the Director was savvy enough to see the benefit to his company as a direct benefit to him and worth far more than a conquest- small redemption indeed, but something.
Powered by Scriptsmill Comments Script
|
|