Hal Kitchen
Darren Aronofsky isn’t a filmmaker we typically associate with the genre of body horror, but it’s undeniable that since his debut in 1998, his films have given us some of the most unforgettably horrifying visions of the human form. In Pi, Max (Sean Gullette) performs a self-lobotomy with a power drill to drive away the paranoid visions he is being plagued by. In Requiem for a Dream, Harry wakes from a coma to discover his infected arm has been amputated, Sara’s addiction to weight-loss medication emaciates her entire body, Tyrone’s body is reduced to a functionary of the for-profit prison-factory system and Marion’s body is pawed, violated and exhibited in exchange for heroin. In The Fountain, Izzi’s brain is consumed by a tumour and in his grief, her husband Tommy tattoos her missing ring onto his finger with a fountain pen. And in mother! the title character’s body is beaten and clawed and its fruits torn apart and consumed by a gluttonous mob. Aronofsky’s chief preoccupation in film is the human body: its violability, sanctity and defilement.
Some of the most instructive examples, however, are found in three of his most famous films, each one a character study of an individual who has taken their body to the utmost limits of human endurance and is, by their ongoing self-neglect, pushing themselves beyond it, each in meaningfully different ways, but, I would argue, each for the same reason: spectacle.
The Wrestler is the most overt example of self-destruction as spectacle. Randy (Mickey Rourke) has been a wrestler for many years and in the process has transformed his body. Steroid use has expanded his muscles to inhuman standards, and nightly brutalization in the ring has left his face and body riven with scars. Through satisfying his audience’s craving for blood, sweat and tears, he has effectively become addicted to their applause. Being adulated for satisfying such base needs has left him little reason to grow in other ways; he is a failure as a boyfriend to Cassidy (Marisa Tomei) and as a father to his daughter Stephanie (Evan Rachel Wood). He’s the proverbial guy who thinks the stripper likes him; he mistakes her onstage performance of affection as something realer than the cheers of his crowd, because that’s the deepest version of love he is emotionally prepared to give and receive. He would be a constant disappointment to his daughter if only he were around consistently enough to be one. His daughter is living with a woman and he doesn’t even know what her sexuality is—ambiguous sexuality will continue to come up in these films. When Randy tries to hold down a regular job at a deli, he ends up self-harming on the meat slicer. Pain is all that’s familiar to him and he doesn’t know who he is if he’s not in the ring, red skin on display, wounds out for all the world to see.
In Black Swan, the self-destruction is more a by-product of the spectacle. Ballet dancers are supposed to be the pinnacle of elegance, grace and femininity, but for Nina (Natalie Portman), the reality is eating disorders, peeling nails and a deep abiding sense of shame. Nina is on the cusp of success, as her natural poise and aura of innocence earn her the lead in Swan Lake and the sexual interest of predatory director Thomas (Vincent Cassell). Thomas is a hard taskmaster and master of “negging” (the abusive tactic of a man breaking down a woman’s self-esteem until she no longer believes she’s too good for him) and is unhappy with Nina’s chastity, pitting her against her vivacious and fun-loving understudy Lily (Mila Kunis). The eroticism of the dance and Nina’s latent bisexuality aside, Nina’s dance exists in contrast to Randy’s. Randy is at the end of his career and all he knows is the ring; Nina is new to the stage and it is in her drive to get there that her self-destruction lies. For both Nina and Randy, the stage is the setting for both self-effacement and self-fulfilment. Nina martyrs herself to the ideal of her craft, while Randy only hopes to go out on a high, but both commit suicide in an onstage plunge.
This brings us to The Whale. An adaptation of the play of the same name by Samuel D. Hunter, The Whale is formally very different to both the pseudo-documentary drama style of The Wrestler and the slick, magazine-glossy thriller aesthetic of Black Swan, taking place entirely within the grey, grim, cluttered apartment of its protagonist Charlie (Brendan Fraser). Like Randy, Charlie has a bitter teenage daughter he abandoned (Sadie Sink) and has transformed and mistreated his body to the edge of death. Both men suffer heart attacks early in their films as a direct result of their self-neglect. But while Randy has driven himself to the peak of masculine “hardness”, while Nina has driven herself to the pinnacle of feminine grace, Charlie has—in the film’s subtext—succumbed to a homosexual softness. Charlie is an emotional eater, he is gay, sensitive, grieving and his emotions have made him soft. There is a tragic grandiosity to Randy’s rippling muscles and weather-beaten features, as there is poise and elegance to Nina’s delicate frame, but Charlie’s huge body is made the explicit subject of Aronofsky’s camera and of Charlie’s shame. Where Nina and Randy shape and injure their bodies in pursuit of their own spectacle, Charlie’s body is itself the spectacle. There is no ring and no stage. Black Swan and The Wrestler are about the pursuit of spectacle, but in The Whale, Charlie is the spectacle.
Charlie is introduced to the viewer masturbating to porn, images of two muscular men engaging in acts he is physically incapable of. His story is immediately contextualized as one of shame, impotence and onanistic pleasure, and it is in his orgasm that he suffers his initial heart attack. Sex is important to all three films. Randy is a regular at the local strip club, and the closest thing to a relationship he has is with his favourite stripper, someone he pays to tease him, to show off her body to him, but who he cannot sleep with. His one hook-up with a fan, in the bathroom of a bar, leads directly to him missing out on a rendezvous with his daughter, who is more or less the same age as the young fan he has sex with, publicly, in front of a mirror. Randy chooses the instant gratification of watching himself, of being seen having sex with a young woman, over rebuilding a meaningful relationship with his actual daughter.
Even more sexually charged, Black Swan is functionally an erotic thriller, as Nina’s competition with Lily for the approval of Thomas earns her the ire of discarded grand dame Beth (Winona Ryder), producing a kind of sexual rivalry. Thomas himself accuses Nina of trying to seduce him into giving her the lead role. When she denies it, he forcefully tries to kiss her anyway. Nina is extremely sexually repressed and sex causes her a tremendous amount of anxiety. She masturbates but is almost caught by her mother and later tears out the cuticle of the same fingers that she touched herself with. She is aware Thomas covets her sexually and perhaps reciprocates his attention, but fears his favour will shame her in the eyes of other women. When he picks her for the lead role, she thinks of herself as a “whore”. When Beth outright accuses Nina of exchanging sex for the role, Nina defensively bats the accusation back at her. Nina’s sexual repression becomes focused on Lily, someone who appears to experience no anxiety around sex whatsoever, her obsession culminating in a fantasy sequence where Nina imagines an intense sexual encounter with a woman who switches back and forth between Lily and Nina herself. Her chastity is so integral to her identity that Nina fears that by giving in to her desires and becoming the “perfect dancer,” she is becoming someone else.
So through The Whale, Black Swan and The Wrestler, we see three different kinds of people: a gay man, a bisexual woman and a straight man, whose neuroses all sabotage their sex lives, their bodies, and their relationships with others, each in very different ways that express how the filmmakers see these people. Randy is the epitome of toxic masculinity: he is strong, tough, he can take a punch, but he is also alone, uncommunicative and unable to change or grow. Nina is the epitome of toxic femininity: she’s demure, chaste, endlessly self-critical and beholden to the impossible standards of others. So what is Charlie then—the epitome of toxic homosexuality? He’s emotionally vulnerable to the degree that he’s incapable of taking care of himself; like Randy, he’s unable to change; and like Nina, he blames himself for failing to meet the impossible standards of people who do not care for him. He is not alone, but the people around him have either resigned themselves to enabling his self-destruction, have an agenda to push on him, or are outright exploiting and berating him. Therefore, there isn’t really any hope for Charlie and not really anything to learn from his story. All that’s left for him to do is leave on good terms with people who don’t actually deserve closure. All The Whale does is make skinny straight people feel better about themselves by watching an unhappy, overweight gay man literally die for their approval.
Genre is essential for the way we interpret movies. The reductiveness of Black Swan’s psychological elements is admissible because it exists primarily as an erotic horror; the self-importance of its message undercut by the visceral pulpiness of its appeal. The Wrestler has an intimacy and realism in both its camerawork and dialogue that sells its characters, its world feels everyday and credible. The Whale is so theatrical, so portentous and laden with such crass, meaningless metaphors, that it invites the viewer to engage with its subtext in a way that is fatal to such a corny melodrama. What exactly is the purpose of the repeated allusions to Moby Dick anyway? Just to remind us that Charlie is fat? How is Melville’s seafaring epic in any way relevant to the tale of a dying gay English professor’s misguided attempts to patch things up with his homophobic daughter? It’s not, it just serves to tack on a veneer of literary respectability that the film is unable to earn any other way and which falls off immediately given its staggering irrelevance, and that no part of The Whale suggests that the writer has even read the book he’s alluding to.
As The Whale begins, Charlie has an orgasm that almost kills him. This is a kind of foreshadowing because there is one structural commonality between all three of these films, and it echoes throughout Aronofsky’s other films like The Fountain too: all three of these films end at the precise moment of their protagonists’ deaths. Aronofsky likes to end his films with moments like these, climactic explosions that articulate an impression of both transcendence and sudden expiration. Against the advice of his doctors, Randy performs his signature move in front of a cheering crowd and dies of a heart attack. Nina, her side pierced (just like Jesus), blood seeping through her leotard, performs her final swan dive before her adoring fans and, having achieved perfection, expires on the mat. Charlie, who is unable to walk unassisted, crosses the room to his daughter, his feet lift off the floor like he’s being lifted to heaven, and he dies.
Each of these characters achieves the orgasmic catharses they’ve been pursuing, at the cost of their lives. Randy relives his greatest moment of fame, Nina dances the perfect swan song and Charlie proves himself to his horrible daughter. Each character dies in a climax of self-actualizing, overcoming the infirmity of their bodies, leaving behind the battleground of shame and suffering that their corporeal vessels have become, and achieving transcendence. They transcend the physical realm, and thereby, the narrative space. The film cannot continue; we cannot follow them into their transcendence. Like the human body, film has limits, and as our heroes surpass the limits of their human bodies, we too are left behind.
