One film immediately sprang to mind while I was watching Black Swan: The Piano Teacher. Both films are about performers trapped in claustrophobic relationships with their mother. Both films are about self-destruction. And both films are about the sacrifices people make for their art, often to the detriment of their well-being.

Another film that sprang to mind was Darren Aronofsky’s previous movie The Wrestler. One of the themes of that film was the way the way the main character destroyed his body for the enjoyment of others. The more he performed, the more he gave to the audience, the less he had for himself. And so it is with Black Swan. Here’s a woman who, like Mickey Rourke’s wrestler, is slowly destroying her body and her soul for other people’s entertainment and amusement.

One of the main bones of contention when I discussed Black Swan with my wife was our differing responses to the mother/daughter relationship portrayed in the film. I sensed a very subtle sexual element. My wife didn’t see it at all.

It’s by no means overt, but there are a couple of hints that there’s some sexual abuse going on in this claustrophobic, co-dependant relationship. There’s one scene where the mother, happy that her daughter Nina (Portman) got the main part in ‘Swan Lake’, gives her a cake. She then puts some of the cream on her finger and insists that her daughter lick it. The aggression is such that you know that she’s not going to take no for an answer. And then there’s another moment when the mother just invites herself into her daughter’s bedroom, and like there’s nothing wrong with this at all, like it’s the most natural thing in the world, says that she’s going to spend the night with her. It’s under the pretext of getting her daughter up early the next morning but this just seems like an excuse – the mother just wants any excuse to invade her daughter’s personal space.

Yes these aren’t overt signs of sexual abuse, but even if nothing physical has ever taken place, there’s at least psycho-sexual abuse going on here. The mother is needy, clingy and demanding, and as such she has ensured that her daughter lives in a state of arrested development. The daughter’s room looks like it belongs to a twelve-year-old. There’s pink everywhere and there are lots of childish knick-knacks. The mother has wrapped her baby up in cotton wool and as such the daughter is ill-prepared to deal with the harsh realities of real life.

But going back to the sexual undertones in the mother/daughter relationship, there’s a scene where Nina masturbates in her room. Before this, the sleazy ballet director that cast the daughter in the lead role in ‘Swan Lake’ encourages her to masturbate so that she can loosen up. He also asks her if she’s a virgin. She says that she isn’t but the true nature of her previous sexual encounters is never explained. They certainly didn’t seem like happy liaisons. Could they possibly have been with her mother? Is this why she’s so uptight? And then when the daughter finally gives in to desire, her wanking session is interrupted when she sees that her mother is sleeping in the corner of her room. The daughter’s sexual identity seems to be strongly tied to her mother – she can’t free herself from her mum’s suffocating grasp.

And it’s this search for liberation that is the main thrust of the film. Portman’s character is told time and time again that her dancing is technically perfect. However, in order to play the lead in ‘Swan Lake’, she must play both the White Swan and the Black Swan. And in order to play the Black Swan she must embrace her dark side: she must lose some of her inhibitions and give in to her emotions.

Needless to say, this is more difficult for Nina than you might imagine. All her life she’s been building a wall. She’s been resisting her emotions – keeping them at bay. And her desire to become a ballerina is a desire to achieve the perfection she can’t obtain in her real life. Therefore it’s always going to be difficult for her to perform with reckless abandon.

However, Portman’s character definitely has demons. The opening sequence superbly illustrates this as we see her dancing with the demon from Swan Lake. Nina is a troubled soul, desperately tying to keep a grip.

As Nina gets closer to the opening night, so she becomes more and more unhinged. There are some excellent visual touches that display her paranoia. One of my favourites was the shot where her reflection turns to look at her as she looks away. The direction is very casual and doesn’t draw attention to itself, but it’s rather beautiful and unsettling.

There are also some nice visual flourishes when Nina goes to a nightclub. As she dances under some strobe lights we briefly get flashes of the Black Swan. She’s finally embracing the darkness inside her.

Nina even goes so far as to take Lily, a rival dancer, home and have sex with her. But as we later find out, this is pure fantasy. Nina is beginning to unravel – her perceptions are becoming skewed.

The shit hits the fan when Nina finds Lily in her dressing room, dressed as the Black Swan and apparently ready to take her part. A struggle ensues and Lily turns into Nina. Nina then ends up stabbing and killing her duplicate. The passion, the energy and the emotion that she previously lacked comes out like a volcano – she’s ready to be the Black Swan.

The final performance is quite breathtaking and the sequence where she actually performs as the Black Swan is a fantastic piece of cinema. It’s wild and it’s loose, and there’s a magnificent visual flourish as Portman grows black feathers and wings burst out of her back. All of the time she’s been seeking perfection in her dancing and now she finally has it. She has everyone at her feet – the audience, her fellow performers and even the ballet director; they’re all in her thrall.

However, when Nina gets back to the dressing room she discovers that she didn’t stab her competitor at all – she stabbed herself and is bleeding to death. Somehow Nina manages to continue and gives it her all in the final act. As the White Swan lays there dying (and as she herself lays there dying), she says that she was perfect. Some performers say that they have to kill themselves for their audience. Well, Nina literally does that. And she also ends up being an echo of the character she portrays. She starts off innocent, looking for the freedom that a perfect performance will bring. But then she’s tricked by her demons and ends up destroying herself. But through this destruction she finally finds liberation – finally achieving perfection and finally receiving recognition from her peers and her audience, she can give up the ghost, knowing that nothing will ever supplant this moment.

Randy ‘The Ram’ Robinson is a man hopelessly stuck in time. He’s a man living on past glories, unable to forge a future of any kind. As a result he’s doomed to live a life of poverty and doomed to debase himself in an effort to try and recapture some of the old magic. He’s a dinosaur who knows he’s a dinosaur, but he’s quite happy with that fact – it’s the world that changed and fucked itself up.

In one scene we see Randy playing a video game with a neighbourhood kid. But they don’t play a Wii or a Playstation 3. Instead they play on an NES. The reason for this is because this system has a wrestling game that has Randy on it. Because of his ego and his quiet narcissism, Randy couldn’t contemplate playing a more recent game. When he stopped being part of the mainstream, everything became irrelevant.

This attitude is echoed in a scene where Randy has a drink with Cassidy, a stripper who he’s hoping to start a relationship with. They talk about music and about how great Motley Crue and Guns ‘n’ Roses were. And then they discuss how awful the 90s were and how Kurt Cobain was a giant pussy. Now whether that’s the truth or not doesn’t matter. What matters is Randy’s inability to evolve as a person. Most people’s tastes change as they age. They discover new things and re-evaluate the things they used to like. But because the 90s coincided with a slump in Randy’s career, the decade, and everything in it, automatically sucks. Nostalgia constantly clouds Randy’s head.

Illustrating how dangerous this sort of nostalgia is, is a scene where Randy goes to a mini wrestling convention. It’s a terribly depressing affair. There are a bunch of old grapplers begging for scraps from their loyal fans – this is their pension fund. And everywhere Randy is reminded of the degeneration and decay that follows them around. One guy has an ankle bag connected to a catheter and another is in a wheelchair. Randy knows what could lie in wait for him, but seeing as he lives hand to mouth, and seeing as he’s not really qualified to do anything else, he knows that he must continue punishing his body.

However, Randy does try and make a living elsewhere. He has a job in a supermarket. And here we have some of the funniest and some of the most depressing moments. It’s fun to see Randy getting into his job (he works on the deli counter and begins to joke about with his customers) but it’s excruciating to see him get bullied by his dweeb of a boss – the guy mocks his wrestling career, saying that all he does is sit on other men’s faces. Wrestling is hardly a noble profession, and yes it’s ridiculous, but it’s also an incredibly tough way to make a living. And knowing this, and knowing how easily he could cripple his arsehole boss, you constantly want Randy to beat the guy up. You want him to do an Iron Sheik and break his back and make him humble. So it’s a crowd pleasing moment when Randy finally has enough and quits his crappy job.

But the scenes at the deli counter are also interesting for the way that we see Randy interact with people. What Randy lives for is approval. He wants to hear the crowd roar and he wants them to chant his name. So his job on the deli counter begins as a sort of performance. He’s trying to replace the thrill of a wrestling audience with something on a smaller scale. It works for a little while. Well, until the customers begin being a pain in the arse.

There’s also an excellent bit of filming before Randy makes his first appearance on the deli counter. We see him getting dressed and then we follow him through the building. For anyone who’s grown up on wrestling shows, this will immediately remind them of Raw or Smackdown or Nitro. And then to further highlight the similarities, just before Randy goes through the ‘curtain’, we hear the cheer of a crowd. Randy is trying to replace the irreplaceable – nothing will ever equal the thrill of going before a massive crowd. After entertaining thousands of people, everything else is destined to be an anti-climax.

The wrestling scenes themselves are disappointingly few, but they’re expertly filmed. They begin with a rather ordinary match but then we have a crazy hardcore bout. Here we have Randy, who doesn’t seem to be the hardcore type, debasing himself for a few extra dollars. We see him and his opponent get thrown through glass, get tied up in barbed wire and even have staples shot into their chests. It’s barbaric stuff.

But the way that all of this is deconstructed is excellent. We see Randy’s injuries and then we see the sections of the match that caused them. You quickly begin to wonder how a human being can sustain this. And then when you realise that men do this night after night for nothing more than gas money, you begin to question your complicity in it. Yes I love wrestling – I love the silliness of it, the theatricality and, yes, the bloody violence – but the toll that it has on the human body is amazing. We’re basically paying to see men get slowly crippled. Because even though wrestling matches are pre-determined, they’re still incredibly violent. I mean, a chair shot on the head is a chair shot on the head. And when you consider the fact that these men wrestle full schedules, you wonder how they manage to get through it.

The answer to that is they use drugs. And in one scene we see Randy buy a whole cocktail of what the Iron Sheik would call medicine. It’s nice to see that the film doesn’t pussyfoot around the ugly side of the business.

Unfortunately, though, the film has some hokey melodrama at the centre of the plot. You see, Randy, after the hardcore match, has a heart attack and is ordered not to wrestle. If he wrestles again, he could have another heart attack and die. So that’s why he tries to make an honest living in the supermarket. But although something like this is actually a good possibility for a wrestler – far too many have died of heart disease because of all the drugs they take – it still feels like a contrived plot device. It feels like it’s trying too hard to add pathos.

For instance, at the end, we have Randy returning to the ring to fight a match. You’re asked to question whether he’s going to survive it. Is he going to drop down and die? But the film doesn’t need this. Because of his desire to get back in the ring and feed some more on the adulation of an adoring wrestling crowd, Randy squanders two real relationships. He squanders the chance to make up with his daughter and he loses the chance to have a meaningful relationship with Cassidy, the stripper he befriends. Randy prefers to live a life of make believe. He doesn’t really want a real relationship with all the confusion and heartache that comes with it. He wants the simple, illusory relationship he has with his audience. He hits a move and they cheer. It’s joyously uncomplicated – for him, it makes sense.

So therefore, knowing that he’s fucked up his life by being such a knuckle-head, we don’t really need the added melodrama of ‘will he live or will he die?’ But regardless, the film gives it to us anyway. And it’s to the film’s credit that it doesn’t resolve the issue. The film ends with Randy struggling to the top rope so that he can hit his finishing move. It’s most definitely curtains for him (if he doesn’t die, he’s probably never going to be able to wrestle again), but because the set-up is a little hackneyed, it’s not as moving as it should have been. The ending would have had more weight if this was simply a man unable to relinquish a past life with the hopes of a meaningful future shattered. But instead the film has a kind of soap opera ending. And although, yes, wrestling is soap opera, the real lives behind them are far more strange and bewildering.

I also wasn’t particularly taken with the scenes with Randy’s daughter. Evan Rachel Wood was a little bland and everything felt a little overly familiar. But thankfully you have Mickey Rourke to pull you through these scenes. He’s marvellous in the film. His Randy ‘The Ram’ is a pathetic, loveable, frustrating waster. As he says, he’s an old piece of meat. All he can do, much like the stripper he befriends, is sell his body to an eager public. He doesn’t know anything else. And rather miserably, he loves the people that are destroying him. The relationship with the crowd becomes almost sado-masochistic – as he prepares to perhaps dive to his death, he tearfully relishes the cheers. It’s a wonderfully bleak portrait of a man crashing and burning, and Rourke gives it the humanity it needs.