Self-Mutilation and Dark Love in Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan (2010) and Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher (2001)

Abstract

This chapter addresses the dark side of female desire by comparing Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher (2001) with Darren Aronofsky’s latest release, Black Swan (2 010). Both female film protagonists violently harm themselves in these narratives while exploring their sexual fantasies. In Haneke’s film the outcome remains ambiguous: the pianist, Erika Kohut (Isabelle Huppert), walks out of the frame with a self-inflicted bleeding wound in her chest (figure 8.1). Aronofsky depicts the female protagonist Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman) as dying in the final scene, and the frame fades to white before the credits start rolling. The melodramatic finale of the movie could also be seen as a metaphor of transformation of the female virgin into a more mature sexual being. In French, the window of time after an orgasm is called “the little death” (le petit mort). As the film curator in the Museum of Sex in Manhattan explains to accompany a video installation that depicts women postcoitus, this time of relaxation is unique to desire.1 The ending of Black Swan could also be read as an illustration of a little death after the orgasmic dance of the prima ballerina has been completed. Nina whispers, “Perfect. It was perfect,” before the lights take over and she fades. As seen in figure 8.2, Nina supposedly bleeds to death as a result of a wound in her abdomen that she caused by stabbing herself with a mirror shard in her changing room before dancing the part of the sensuous black swan. Erika stabs herself with a kitchen knife in the final scene of the film. She refuses to perform. Nina bleeds from a self-inflicted wound at the end of her performance. KeywordsSexual DesireSexual FantasyBallet DancerFemale LeadBlack SwanThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.