Video

Black Swan: ballet + body horror

@sumitsays: Black Swan. If ballet + body horror = inspired, I’m looking forward to flamenco + splatter

I’ve mostly seen Black Swan described as a psychological thriller – a term that I’ve always understood to mean that the protagonist has to use their ingenuity and wits, rather than physical strength, to escape a situation, the threat of violence being more present than violence itself. (Wait Until Dark would be my canonical example.) Black Swan, however, is about a young woman’s descent into dysmorphic insanity. Almost every scene in this film is disturbing in a visceral sense (including those that reveal the phenomenal physical stresses associated with ballet): bodies are flexed, broken, torn up, destroyed and finally reshaped into unsettling new forms. So I’d say it owes more to “body horror” than “psychological thriller”.

Pigeon-holing aside, is it any good? Well, I enjoyed it, though it did lay it on pretty thick. Films that give the audience very few clues about what to believe run the risk of losing their emotional investment, and it would seem that’s the case for some of Black Swan‘s viewers. I found it easy enough to pin myself to the fate of Natalie Portman’s tormented prima ballerina; whether what’s she’s experiencing is “real” or not in some objective sense didn’t matter much to me. I enjoyed the structure, too, with the character’s arc mirroring that of the ballet she’s performing in; Aronofsky mashes it up enough that the ending is satisfyingly resonant rather than hokily obvious. (A personal irritation: Black Swan bears some striking similarities with a novel I plotted but never got round to writing about five years ago. Oh well.)

Incidentally, I’m not kidding about the flamenco-splatter movie. Someone do it. All those scarlet frills…



tron will eat itself

As I’ve opined elsewhere, the appeal of TRON lay in its attempt to portray the future of personal computing. Conversely, the lack of appeal of TRON: Legacy lies in its refusal to portray the future, or even the present, of personal computing. Beneath its splashy effects, the 2010 movie is resolutely palaeofuturistic: a vajazzled version of the way we once thought computers would be be, rather than how they’ve actually turned out – or what they might turn into tomorrow. (Both films are flawed when it comes to plot, acting and so on; there’s little to distinguish between them there.)

Perhaps it’s unsurprising, then, that there are a host of retro-flavoured variations on TRON: Legacy on YouTube – stripping away the unnecessary and contradictory state-of-the-art audiovisual glut in favour of a sparser, more direct chipstyle appeal to our nostalgic impulses. Perhaps Disney should have saved its $170 million and quit while it was still ahead: perhaps Space Paranoids was all the fans wanted all along.

But then there are those who aren’t content to stop at retrofitting Legacy. What are we to make of a reconstructed  rendition of the original lightcycle sequence? A prosaic modern desktop being used to emulate a vintage 8-bit machine’s take on the supercomputer-propelled 1982 movie? And as with the visuals, so with the music. Beyond midimachine’s 8-bit remakes of Daft Punk’s score, we get 8-bit Weapon doing Wendy Carlos’ original Tron score. What’s new is now old, and what’s old is new again. Where do we go from here? Do we keep iterating backwards until we have Tron rendered as Pong, block paddles bouncing black-and-white Sark and Flynn dots back and forth, finally caught in an infinitely initialising loop?

BURN-E

So I finally saw Wall-E today (and enjoyed it). Here’s a related short, BURN-E, that presents the events of the film from the perspective of the eponymous humble maintenance bot, who makes a brief appearance in the movie. (Best quality version I could find – but for some reason it’s flipped. Doesn’t make much difference except that the writing is the wrong way round.)