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Ben Cronan

Film 2010 Final Film Analysis Paper

Professor Jay Morris

28 May 2013

Demonic Alchemy in Darren

Aronofsky

The overriding theme of Darren Aronofsky’s oeuvre

is that the baser components of human nature don’t simply

hinder or destroy one’s nobler psychic yearnings, but

pervert and reshape them into horrific and deadly forces.

Aronofsky’s films concern individuals whose pursuit of an

ideal of some sort becomes more and more carnal, resulting

in self-destructive behavior that escalates until the

protagonists are completely destroyed psychologically and/or

physically. These movies are psychological thrillers in the

most literal sense, portraying the protagonists’ fear,

obsession, vanity, and lack of interior strength as actual

antagonists (sometimes flesh-and-blood ones) and “demons,”

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malignant phantoms which twist, pollute, and distort their

ineradicable need to find meaning and beauty in life into

something toxic. Aronofsky explores this idea with

sensorial, claustrophobically-focused narratives that depict

his characters’ violent psychological and emotional

disintegration as explicitly as Wes Craven shows his

characters’ physical demise. This raw technical ability

enables Aronofsky to enrich the best script and go beyond

the limitations of the worst, and while he does have

noticeable artistic flaws, and the quality of his work has

plummeted over the past decade, the New York auteur has

never directed a truly bad film. Mr. Aronofsky’s willingness

to explore the ugly forms that higher longings can take when

mismanaged by human fallibility, and his distinctive way of

conveying it in stories told through cinematography,

photography, editing, sound effects, and other technical

aspects as much as, or more than, through dialogue or

organic plot, have given all his films a haunting and

poignant aspect.

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Pi (1998), Aronofsky’s debut film, follows Max Cohen (Sean

Gullette), a Jewish mathematician in New York City, whose

violently ascetic search for a mathematical symmetry under-

mooring nature brings him to insanity’s edge. What is

evident in Pi from the opening mis-en-scene is that Max’s

search for a mathematical pattern in nature is at least

partially shaped both by his arrogance and by his fear of

anything that cannot be reduced or controlled through simple

and synthetic formulae: The film begins with a voiceover of

Max: “When I was a kid my mother told me never to stare into

the sun, so once when I was six I did.” Max’s confession of

this as a simple cause-effect statement implies he has a

severely independent and curious temperament which has the

potential to petrify into a smugness and an unthinking,

pointless lust for knowledge (which, being inherently above

animal appetites, can only be attained through sound and

tranquil thought). The audience next sees Max’s subjective

point-of-view through the keyhole of his apartment building

as he checks to see nobody is coming; this shot is

pronouncedly framed and narrow. The audience can infer from

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this that Max is both fearful of the outside world and that

his paradigm is very constricted and narrow. The next shot

is of Max, short and hunched up, walking through the

multitudinous, variegated city streets, the cinematography

moving uneasily between Max’s subjective point-of-view and

the omniscient point-of-view in carefully edited cuts

suggestive of uncomfortable disorientation, along with

complimentary sound effects: fragmentary and sped-up shots

from different directions and angles and disjointed, fast-

forwarded, jittery noises on the soundtrack. Max’s voiceover

continues over this: “Restate my assumptions: one,

mathematics is the language of nature. Two, all things can

be understood by and through numbers.” One can infer from

this, and from the general mis-en-scene at film’s start (as

well as the black-and-white photography) that Max is almost

pathologically cerebral and has trouble processing anything

without using parallel brackets, which causes him to be

severely frightened of reality itself, since, as his mentor,

Sol Robeson (Mark Margolis) tells him, our universe “can’t

be solved with math.” Another component of Max’s drive to

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find a pattern in nature can be said to be his suppressed

(and severely damaged) spiritual side fighting for

recognition by taking hold of his cognition. As Max’s

obsession intensifies, and is fueled by ambiguous signals he

sees in nature or the world about him (or thinks he sees, or

wants to see, or are all his human limits can see, or all

his personal limits can see, or all that [insert Deity here]

will let him see, or that he has read about, or been told

about), he becomes more and more frustrated and mentally

unbalanced by the maddening, teasing potentialities and

ambiguities. While Max eventually does get hold of a 216-

digit number which is supposedly of great cosmic importance,

the consequences of the intense stress Max puts on his left

brain and his denial of oxygen to his right grind both sides

further down, until finally both halves of his psychological

self disassociate from him, taking the hallucinatory forms

of a Wall Street firm that has been aggressively pursuing

him and a group of Kabbalists who are studying the Talmud to

find the numerical name of God (since, so the film tells us,

Hebrew numbers and letters are the same thing). After he has

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been psychically and physically attacked by both factions,

he comes into contact with a gentle rabbi from the Kabbalist

group, who relates the story of the ancient Jews, and

reveals that their now-destroyed ancient priesthood were the

only ones that knew the ”true” 216-letter name of God. The

religious group (read: the bruised, damaged, violently

agitated spiritual side of Max) believe that he is “only a

vessel for our God.” Max resists violently, acknowledging

that the number is “inside of [him], changing [him”], to

which the rabbi (Max) replies, “Its killing you. It’s

killing you because you were never meant to have it.” Max

all of a sudden has an epiphany, and realizes that the

number itself is insignificant. What is important is what

the number means. After the brief revelation, however, he

is driven back off-track by his own vanity: “If you never

understood it, it’s because it’s not for you. I found it.”

We then see Max’s final psychic descent, symbolized by a

flurry of quick-cut images (random shots of sidewalks, shop-

signs, passer-by) and sounds (disembodied voices shouting

“don’t stare into the the sun, you could go blind”), tied

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together by a slow-motion shot of Max running into oncoming

traffic. As the film ends, the physically, mentally, and

spiritually broken Max, realizing the pattern he seeks

cannot be understood by him even if it exists, applies a

power-drill to his head. The film ends with Max sitting

serenely on a bench, watching the trees.

Pi is suspenseful, frightening, and enthralling, but what

makes it so is its use of audio and visual elements to

express Max’s interior apparatus. Aronofsky’s script

carefully and concisely moors its thematic concentration on

the essential futility of the search for the Absolute by

someone as flawed as Max, but its Aronofsky’s use of the

technical elements that shows Max’s psychic joints and

muscles in graphic detail. Max is hardly the most endearing

of protagonists; Aronofsky takes care to show us that he is

(non-clinically) anti-social (he is repeatedly snappy

towards a sweet-natured woman in his apartment building who

is obviously interested in him, yet barely hesitates to ask

her for a favor, and even then he is curt in his

interaction), becomes so paranoid that he believes the one

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person who genuinely understands and cares about him, Sol,

has only the worst possible motivations for lovingly

advising him that he is tilting at windmills (leading to a

rupture of their friendship), and, aside from his savant-

like gifts for math, has no superlative qualities (he is

continually quoting and discussing the theories of great

mathematicians in voice-overs, speaking of their

contributions, their ideas of beauty, their insights, cobbling

them together without really making critical judgments of

them). But Aronofsky is a master of unadulterated cinema,

and through his techniques the audience sees the positive,

even heroic, qualities in Max that his own obsession and

fear simply run down like monster trucks. One of the most

beautiful scenes in the film finds Max on a beach, the sun

glittering on the waves gently rolling about in shapes that

resemble Fi, the Greek symbol of perfection Max is basing

his hypothesis on, just conceivably enough but not so much

to be an actual semblance. Max, his face troubled and

slightly fatigued, sees someone with a metal detector

meandering about the beach, incessantly beeping, smiling

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stupidly when he finds something, extracting it, and

continuing on his pointless, noisy search. As the camera

cuts from Max’s face to the gold-seeker, it is clear that

for a moment Max sees he and this fool are not so different,

squandering their lives pursuing something that is almost

impossible to find, and, if it were found, would ultimately

mean nothing, and be of no use, in Max’s case because his

spiritual side that might respond to it or imbue it with

meaning has been intentionally undernourished and poorly

developed. When the man with the metal detector puts down

the sea-shell he has found, however, Max’s old impulsivity

returns, elbows his revelation aside, and he runs over to

look at the shell, where he sees the Fi spiral on the top of

it, and resumes his existential wheel-spinning. This scene

demonstrates Aronofsky’s overriding theme of the baser

components of human nature warping and making devouring

lusts out of the nobler ones.

The protagonists of Aronofsky ‘s second film, Requiem

For a Dream (2000), share the same obsessive fear, arrogance,

and easily mis-channelled idealism, and the results are even

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more brutal. Aronofsky has called Requiem for a Dream “a

manifesto on addiction’s triumph over the Human Spirit…a

monster movie. The only difference is that the monster

doesn’t have physical form. It only lives deep inside the

characters’ heads.” (i) Based on Hubert Selby, Jr.’s

eponymous novel following the deterioration of four people

through drug addiction, the film pulls out all the stops,

taking full advantage of the whole medium of film to sear

that monster (or at least an idea of its nature) into the

viewer’s mind. This it does devastatingly. However, other

than being the most effective after-school special of all

time, the film is mostly an exercise in Aronofsky’s skillful

technical storytelling, plagued by a weak script, and a weak

sense of character. Noteworthy performances by Marlon Wayans

and Jennifer Connelly (the latter of whom, with her almost

mystically fine and delicate beauty, Aronofsky seems more

interested in as a set-piece to communicate the idea of a

spoiled magic with maximum eloquence) enrich the story a

good deal, but can’t really lift it beyond a vague

dilettantish outline, making it less gut-wrenchingly tragic

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than it could have been. The problem of the film is that

the material seems out of Aronofsky’s artistic range;

dazzling sensory assaults may work in portraying the

dynamics and contours of a character’s neurosis, are hardly

suited to such an emotionally complex and nuanced story as

this; still, Aronofsky’s gets as much as he can with what

he’s got.

Aronofsky is indeed a master of atmosphere, and that is

clearly evident in Requiem for a Dream. An eerie, off-kilter

tone pervades from the start; the film opens with an idiotic

clip of a game show before it abruptly shuts off for a

moment and a violent, ominous sound is heard; then, in the

film’s first real scene, we see Harry (Jared Leto), a young

drug addict, through a slightly askew camera lens, yelling

in a thick Brooklyn accent, not entirely clearly, at his

mother, Sara (Ellen Burstyn), about chaining the TV set to

the radiator; after unsuccessfully trying to open the closet

(where, it soon becomes evident, Harry has locked Sara in

order to take away the set), the camera cuts to a shot of

Sara in a claustrophobically cramped and ill-lit space.

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Through here Harry’s quasi-incoherent speech is muffled even

more, as we hear him threatening to “break the radiator or

maybe blow up the whole house.” It is evident during this

scene from the uneven camera angles, lighting, and sound

editing that the scene is from the point of view of neither

character, but some external sentience, observing the events

for certain. This malevolent presence is suggested by the

ever-so-faint dark shadows near Harry in what is obviously

daytime and by the dim closet. The monster movie theme can

also be found in the hostile alteration of Harry’s voice

through the closet into something different and transformed.

The film’s best uses of the horror method are in the imagery

of drug-taking, the nuclear intensity of the climax, and the

visceral, discordant soundtrack. Aronofsky utilizes a

variety of effects and camera tricks in the sequences of

pill-popping and opiate-snorting, creating the sense of a

lurid carnival, and sometimes evoking an astonishing

palpability through flashy digital effects (sped-up, slowed

down, extremely slow-motion, mellow and jittery

cinematography and sound effects). The background music

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throughout the film is a sinister, clipped electronic lurch

accompanied by a few soft, slightly off-key piano notes.

This has the perfect quality of slowly creeping evil,

enhancing yet imposing the menace of the story. The film’s

climax is one of the most heart-stopping, sobering, and

brilliantly executed in cinematic history: an uncompromising

montage of tightly edited, utterly disturbing imagery

tracking the characters’ separate, apparently synchronized

fates (Tyrone getting beaten and mocked by prison guards

while in withdrawal, an ungroomed, emaciated, delusional

Sara suffering electro-shock and other violent therapies,

Marion trying to get drug money by performing hardcore sex

acts with other women in front of nasty, black-suited men in

a dark building lit only by the men’s flashlights, Harry

undergoing amputation of a gangrenous arm). The images cycle

increasingly faster as things get worse moment by moment,

the music (by now violently dissonant) grows to the point

where it is an onslaught of pure tension until the awful

apex is reached in a final crushing blow (Marion forcing

herself to orgasm anally, blood spattering as a medical

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drill-saw cuts into Harry’s arm with a horrible sound, Sara

shocked into a vegetable, and Tyrone collapsed in near-

seizure). This final sequence is a watershed moment in

cinema, for it is absolutely shattering physically,

psychologically, spiritually, and emotionally.

As for the cast, while Ellen Burstyn received the

lion’s share of the acclaim, it is Wayans and Connelly who

prove strongest. Wayans recalls Marlon Brando in On the

Waterfront, every expression, move, gesture, and stance rich

with character. Connelly, as has been said, seems mainly

here as a concrete symbol to emphasize the enormity of the

carnage. While no better actress could have been picked for

this, and Aronofsky does a fine job as a director with it,

Connelly is every bit as responsible for making her

character a haunting portrait of wasted vitality as

Aronofsky; at the end of the film, it is not only the

Connelly’s natural physiognomic purity as she vilely

degrades herself that haunts one; it is the soul, the

animating force behind that enchanting face, informing it

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with a look of despair and helplessness that almost

physically rends one; whatever else it is, that is talent.

Aronofsky’s main problem here seems to be that the

ability to create essentially classical characters that

worked beautifully for Pi isn’t suited to the labyrinthine

psychic nadirs that Selby plumbs. Indeed, while Aronofsky is

very much responsible for the effectiveness of Requiem for a

Dream, the reason the film is by far his most harrowing

outing probably has more to with the hand of Selby in the

script and the source material. Aronofsky, in his artistry

and sympathies, is from the more or less symmetrical and

generally humane tradition of the Renaissance; aesthetics,

not Truth, is his primary concern as an artist, and thus,

while he is capable of creatively and innovatively

expressing human psychic and cognitive processes, he cannot

penetrate to the deepest, darkest corners of the psyche.

This is perhaps why his work has gotten weaker since his

first two films, and why it has relied more on gimmicky

visuals and cheap thrills.

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Black Swan (2010), Aronofsky’s first big critical and

commercial victory, is also one of his weakest films, but

this does not mean it is a clunker by any means. Jonathan

Romney has described the critical consensus on Black Swan: “a

downright barmy mix of sex and…melodrama underneath its

ostensible high–culture trappings.” Black Swan undoubtedly

very much had the potential to be a “downright barmy” B-

picture or much worse, and there are indeed a few disastrous

moments that threaten to completely derail the film. But

Aronofsky knows the themes of Black Swan-devotion to an idea

manipulated into mindless, violent lust, the process of

psychological and physical self-destruction-like the back of

his hand, and pulls off another moving, if lesser,

achievement.

Black Swan centers on Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman), an

extremely neurotic and seemingly “goody-goody” young

ballerina whose determination to be at the top of her art

and her profession, and inability to acknowledge and deal

with her baser nature which is in fact what drives her,

cause a visceral inner combat between her psyche’s different

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sides, which alchemizes her into a hollow sociopath, and

eventually causes her to destroy herself by accident. The

hairline fissure in Nina’s inner apparatus that sets off her

grand implosion is that she is deathly afraid of not being

generally flawless. “I just want to be perfect.” But

although she does in fact love her art and wants to be

excellent, Nina’s severe equation of professional success

with self-hood results in her being willing to do anything

and sacrifice anyone (including herself) to achieve

something. Her morally ambiguous ballet director, Thoman

(Vincent Cassell), after casting her as the Swan Queen in

Swan Lake (portrayed as being the female performing-art

analogue to Hamlet) gives her the impression that he has

selected her out of the ballerina pack for his own reasons,

so to speak, and gives her a “homework assignment:” “go home

and touch yourself.” Although obviously uneasy with (though

not repelled by) this unorthodox directing style, she does

so, enthusiastically and vigourously enough to draw blood.

This indicates that her pursuit of achievement is becoming

warped by her unacknowledged (therefore unchecked) dark side

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into a meaningless craving to progress to an external Point

B. Eventually Nina becomes more and more unable to control

her nasty inner child, who, over the course of the film,

progresses from stealing the belongings of a dancer Nina

admires (Winona Ryder) for use as talismans, to killing the

former, to assaulting and verbally abusing her mother. Nina,

typical of an Aronofsky character, pathologically refuses to

see that her blind pursuit of perfection has rendered her

horribly flawed, and she is escalating into total paranoid

psychotic delusion the harder she tries to crush her more

unsavory inner substance.

In Black Swan, Aronofsky is more uneven and less

technically adventurous then he has been previously; his

earlier films, with their quasi-diegetic music and sound,

intricate, dazzling sensorial tableaux used to tell internal

psychological narratives as commercial “yarns,” and use of

ferociously intricate editing, cutting, hyperactive

electronic and appropriated ambient music, seemed more in

the tradition of New Hollywood filmmakers like pre-Star Wars

George Lucas and Michael Mann. In Black Swan, Aronofsky seems

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to draw on more subtle directors like Hitchcock and on

standard horror film devices. While the change does

generally work, the powerful menace much of the first half

of the film evokes gets exploded by utterly preposterous,

moronic imitation Hammer gimmicks later on. Aronofsky does

manage to salvage the film, but the sheer bizarreness and

incongruity of those few shots are strong enough to mar it

significantly.

The opening scene, in which an ominous black figure

subjects Portman, delicately dancing the White Swan in full

costume, to a kind of forced mimicry, before vanishing and

leaving Nina dancing the movements of the black figure by

herself (quite unwillingly, to judge from Portman’s aptly

expressive face). This is a well-executed and atmospheric

foreshadowing of how the supposedly angelic Nina will later

be consumed by her dark side. Another excellent use of

camera occurs shortly after, when a series of smoothed jump-

cuts of Nina from behind as she walks to the dance studio

give the impression of some unseen, vaguely sinister entity

following her, implying the stalking of her by her inner

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evil side. Another haunting shot finds Nina as she sits

outside the studio, eyes closed and hands fluttering,

practices the dance moves intensely. One can see, in this

scene, the possible danger that she faces in her devotion to

her ideal, in the scene’s suggestiveness of a mentally ill

homeless person sitting on a city corner. The theme that her

dedication to her ideal is so extreme as to prove a

malevolent force is evoked in several scenes at the

beginning of the film showing graphically the toll taken on

Nina’s body by her dancing, with minutely fine-tuned, “IN

STEREO”-bone-cracking and one harrowing scene so well-done

as to palpably evoke the sense that she breaks her toe off

(thank God she only slices some blood-vessels down to the

bone, which the audience is privileged to see in the next

scene). These parts of the film show Aronofsky purging the

flashiness and unmasked intensity of his style in earlier

films and refining it into a more understated, but no less

unsettling, form.

Some crucial scenes dealing with Nina’s psychological

disintegration, however, threaten to capsize the film

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several times. These scenes are not only out of sync in

terms of tone and quality; they are surreal in the worst

possible sense, so mindlessly cheap and banal that one

wonders if Aronofsky has become senile. The climax of the

film, in which Nina fights violently against her dark half

(which has projected onto a “trampy” rival she thinks is

trying to steal her role), could’ve been yanked straight

from a Troma Film: attempting to stab the “other” girl, the

two forms hiss hokily at one another “my turn,” “my turn,”

until Nina\ stabs/is stabbed and, neck mutated into a swan

shape and eyes a demonic red, growls “IT’S MY TURN!” Hearing

someone stirring, Nina then drags the open-eyed, pliable,

betutued corpse into the rest room, which, being in a

ballerina’s dressing-room, we can suppose is used primarily

by women. This small but important detail apparently never

occurred to Aronofsky, who shortly after, thinking it a nice

touch of suspense, has a fair quantity of blood flow from

beneath the women’s rest-room door. Then there are the black

feathers-yes, feathers-bursting out of Nina’s skin, and the

webbed toes (she doesn’t sprout a beak, thank heavens).

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These scenes are so inept, so unintentionally campy, that

they deal a serious blow to the film’s credibility.

Darren Aronofsky is a superb director in his use of

sensory storytelling. Rimbaud’s famous quote about “a

poetic language accessible…to all the senses” permits of

easy application to Aronofsky if one substitutes “cinematic”

for “poetic,” for Aronofsky, like George Lucas and Michael

Mann, draws on all sensorial technological media that

appeals the eyes and ears to convey psychic nuances in his

characters, and knows how to make one’s antagonizing of

oneself as thrilling and frightening as external enemies and

goblins. Being a congenital artist, his characters are

essentially clay molded and manipulated by him, and thus

Aronofsky has a threshold in how far he can go in exploring

the myriad psychological facets of human beings. This has

resulted in his later films lacking the strength of his

earlier ones. But in spite of the (sometimes blundering)

flaws of some of his films, his excelsior use of the sensory

has given all his films something of lasting aesthetic

value.

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Works Cited

Aronofsky, Darren. Forward to the New Edition. Requiem for a

Dream. By Hubert Selby,

Jr. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press. 2000. Print.

Rimbaud, Arthur. A Season in Hell: The Illuminations. Trans. Enid

Rhodes Peschel. New

York: Oxford University Press, 1973. Print.

Romney, Jonathan. “Blood, Sweat, and Murder at the Ballet:

The Endless Torture of

Darren Aronofsky.” The Independent, 9 January 2011. Web.

24 May 2013.

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