By intricately creating a film that presents a woman’s tragedy, Black Swan questions the history of the supposed ‘universal truths’ of the tragedy that was always centered around a male protagonist. Darren Aronofsky’s reinvention of tragedy takes what is already piercing and twists it until it not only impacts our perception of what could be but of what is. In Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, tragedy was introduced. Shakespeare’s tragedy is timeless but we are removed from it. Black Swan, however, through the manipulation of it’s heroine’s characteristics, is intimate. It strikes its audience with the realistic and poignant tragedy of perfection. Aristotle believed that “…the essence of a riddle is to express true facts under impossible combinations.” Through warping the characteristics of the tragic heroine, her impossible combinations not only reflect a universal truth, but a personal truth. Black Swan reveals the impossibility of perfection, through this revelation the audience is communicated to the nihilistic nature of human life. It is a paradox. In the fear that our lives and existence mean nothing, we become obsessed with the idea of everything.

The foremost aspect of the tragic hero is their hamartia- the flaws that drive them to their demise. The flaws of our tragic heroine, Nina, contrast to those of the traditional tragic hero and those of literatures women. They have been either representations of beauty or representations of evil. They are spectators. Nina is complex, flawed and central. Her worth is measured by other people’s affection or lack thereof. It is the catalyst for her destruction. Her obsession with perfection and craving for attention are products of working in a profession in which there is an expiry date on a woman’s value, she is made to fear imperfection because she knows that for the company, the audience and the world, she is utterly replaceable. Aronofsky elicits his audience’s pity through the nature of Nina’s flaws; she is a puppet whose strings are pulled by the expectations of her society. The pressure to be perfect is force fed into Nina’s understanding of life and purpose. She reveals that “I just want to be perfect”, when tasked with playing both the White Swan and the Black Swan in Swan Lake. The duality of these expectations acknowledges the “new version” of perfection; the unspoken expectation that perfection is no longer white. To be perfect is to be everything. To charm and to seduce. To entertain “not just the prince, the court, the audience, the whole world.” The Black Swan is the contradiction. Her obsession is born from the bombardment all around her ensuring that unless she gives all of herself to every person who sees her as their own, she is not worth anything. It is an obsession born from being “thrown to the wolves” and giving yourself up to feed their insatiable hunger. Aronofsky proposes the possibility of a tragedy that is dictated by the condition of an entire society.

In the Aristotelian tragedy, peripeteia consisted simply of a man’s journey from good to bad. Aronofsky flips the traditional structure of peripeteia to articulate the intrinsic nature of a woman’s downfall, the difference between the illusions we present and the realities we live. Outwardly, Nina grows from mediocre to extraordinary, while inwardly reverses into nothing but a cracked shell. The entirety of the film is a deliberate portrayal of Nina’s deteriorating perspective, through the explicit use of over the shoulder, close up and hand held shots. Her audience sees her fulfill the impossible task of embodying both swans in a way that looks “effortless. She’s not faking it”. They are transfixed by her performance but do not see what Aronofsky allows his audience to see. Nina spins around and while we hear the roar of an audience in awe, we see the close up shot of a face breaking into tears. Her psychosis intensifies yet all those around her see is the image of a ballerina, twirling perfectly on her stand. Nina does not go from good to bad, she becomes both exceptional and broken. This reversal of the traditional peripeteia and it’s dual nature reminds the audience of the sometimes stark contrast between what we see and what is hidden while simultaneously commenting on the way she, as a woman, is taught to suppress. Nina experiences a fatal psychosis after performing the White Swan and stabs herself. We hear the crisp, overt sound of her panicking breath and see a close up shot of her face transitioning from agony to neutrality; a mask of indifference in order to hide her suffering. Her gender reinforces this, she implodes in contrast to the externalized tragic heroes. The soundtrack of Swan Lake reaches an ironic crescendo while Nina’s life effectively comes to an end. She has reached her perfection after performing both swans but realizes that in doing so, she has killed herself. Aronofsky’s audience is positioned to experience the juxtaposition between how she simultaneously rises and falls. The price of succeeding outwardly is often to shatter inwardly; what is everything externally becomes nothing internally. Because it is what we see that we put value in, we crave applause and kill ourselves to get it. Nina sacrifices her own potential to live, to be more in the true sense of the word. Aronofsky comments on the way our societal expectations are “perfect even, but destructive”. This destructive perfection means it is easy to lose our balance between what we want and what we have, it means we fall even when we are succeeding.

The conventional tragic hero experiences an anagnorisis in which they reflect on their own destruction but cannot do anything to reverse it, thus evoking a cathartic pity in the audience as our protagonist’s ending feels unjust. Aronofsky manipulates this characteristic by arranging Nina’s anagnorisis with an inconsistency, she flickers in and out of reflection and ignorance. Nina visits retired ballerina and used up golden girl, Beth, in hospital to return items she had stolen. She comes close to recognition but in seeing her own face appear on Beth’s, screaming “I’m not perfect. I’m nothing” Nina runs away from the opportunity to save herself. The audience is allowed to see both the transferability of their tragedy and how easy it is, to knowingly sacrifice everything you have to gain everything you don’t have. Realistically, we do not have one moment of ultimate recognition. The original tragedy is structured in this way in order to symbolically elicit sympathy. Aronofsky’s reinvention of anagnorisis is used to reflect rather than represent and in its realism, demands empathy. Ultimately, Nina’s denial of reflection results in her reaching a perfection that kills her. Like Gatsby, like Lear, like Oedipus and Kane, death is how she is rewarded for her obsession with perfection. She performs both swans, innocent yet tantalizing. Vulnerable and powerful. Finally, she “felt it. It was perfect. I was perfect.” In attaining her ultimate glory, she cannot survive because to be, have and get everything that is expected of her can only be an illusion. Nina’s tragedy reflects that of the Swan Queen’s, the audience questions whether “in death she found freedom”. Like King Lear, it would be cruel to “upon the rack of this tough world Stretch [her] out longer”, she is stretched out over the desires and expectations of others. Nina pushes the boundaries of possibility so far that she loses her ability to live in the world any longer. The forced impossibility of her perfect existence highlights society’s weakness for the illusion of ‘more’, the disappointment we feel when we see less than perfection. In doing so we are deluded, we fail to accept the imperfection in reality, to truly gain more because we value image over life.

The greatest plague yet most innate instinct of humanity is the preoccupation with more. The constant desire for, obsession with and belief in a greater purpose. It is the root of all tragedies, whether they depict a man or a woman, no matter the discrepancies in the way in which respectively, we are programmed to want, express and fall. Within a society that misplaces value, tragedy is imminent. Grotesquely, we thrive in a culture of measurable things, lacking in the immeasurable. Black Swan’s depiction of the female heroine draws attention to the devastation of striving for perfection. The expectations that fuel this obsession are those that encourage us to “stretch [our] arms out farther”, “borne back ceaselessly” into attaining something impossible. Through highlighting the nature of being a woman in this society, Aronofsky communicates the dangers of losing control over ourselves in a fear of not doing, being or having enough. Oblivion is our greatest fear. We search for something to grasp on to that feels like it has meaning, we strive to achieve something greater than what we have. The tragic irony is that when we are tempted to believe that if we stretch ourselves far enough, we will be rewarded with ‘perfection’, we will always crumble to reality’s cruel imperfection.