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"Self-Mutilation and Dark Love in Darren Aronofsky's "Black Swan' (2010) and Michael Haneke's 'The...
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Chapter 8
Self-Mutilation and Dark Love in Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan (2010) and Michael Haneke’s
The Piano Teacher (2001)
Karen A. Ritzenhoff
This chapter will address the dark side of female desire by comparing Michael Haneke’s The
Piano Teacher (2001) with Darren Aronofsky’s latest release Black Swan (2010). Both female
film protagonists violently harm themselves in these narratives while exploring their sexual
fantasies. In Haneke’s film the outcome remains ambiguous: the pianist, Erika Kohut (Isabelle
Huppert), walks out of the frame with a self-inflicted bleeding wound in her chest (fig.8.1.).
Aronofsky depicts the female protagonist Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman) as dying in the final
scene, and the frame fades to white before the credits start rolling. The melodramatic finale of
the movie could also be seen as a metaphor of transformation of the female virgin into a more
mature sexual being. In French, the window of time after an orgasm is called “the little death” (le
petit mort). As the film curator in the Museum of Sex in Manhattan explains to accompany a
video installation that depicts women postcoitus, this time of relaxation is unique to desire.1 The
ending of Black Swan could also be read as an illustration of a little death after the orgasmic
dance of the prima ballerina has been completed. Nina whispers, “Perfect. It was perfect,” before
the lights take over and she fades. As seen in fig.8.2., Nina supposedly bleeds to death as a result
of a wound in her abdomen that she caused by stabbing herself with a mirror shard in her
changing room before dancing the part of the sensuous black swan.
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Figure 8.1.: In Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher (2001), the Austrian pianist Erika
Kohut (Isabelle Huppert) stabs herself with a kitchen knife while standing in the lobby of
the concert hall in the final scene of the film. She refuses to perform.
Figure 8.2: The prima ballerina Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman) bleeds from a self-
inflicted wound at the end of her performance in Darren Aronofksy’s Black Swan (2010).
This chapter looks at the topic of masochism and its depiction in film, the trope of female desire
gone awry and the representation of sexual violence directed against one’s own body. It will
also discuss the metaphor of the “wound” to describe contemporary society and the
normalization of violence and sexuality in popular culture. Carol Clover’s (2005) argument
about “the Final Girl” in horror film will be considered to illustrate that the virtuousness of the
female lead is turned against herself: rather than eliminating the dark opponent (the serial killer,
leatherface, chainsaw massacre murderer) and unmanning “an oppressor whose masculinity was
in question to begin with” (2005, 81) as the sexually prudent last girl standing, the female
protagonist Nina directs the final blow against her own body. She is her biggest enemy. In some
way her femininity is in question, because she is unable to form heterosexual, romantic
relationships. This problem is so unacceptable that she seemingly kills her “old” self in the end.
Given the fact that Aronofsky floods the film with fictitious images that the female protagonist
sees (i.e., her legs are suddenly cracking, she sees membranes grow between her toes, and
ultimately her body is covered with black feathers as she dances the rites of the black swan), it is
also possible to read the ending of the film as symbolic: it could be suggested that even though
the persona of the “White Swan” ends, the character has been transformed, as seen in figure 8.3.,
in a more sexually conscious “black swan.” This would be a more affirmative reading of the
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sexual politics of this modern fairy tale. It is indeed the reversal of the Final Girl myth. Sexual
purity and abstinence now do not grant power, but being a virgin is framed as a potential
problem.
Figure 8.3: The dancer of the Black Swan has grown wings in her own imagination
that burst out of her upper torso. The audience euphorically applauds as she concludes
her solo.
When Nina is cast as the prima ballerina in the lead role of Swan Lake, she is presented
like a trophy by the artistic director Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel) to an exclusive group of
New York ballet supporters at an elegant gala event. The prima ballerina who precedes her, Beth
MacIntyre (Winona Ryder), calls her “you fucking whore” when Nina is escorted home by
Thomas, suggesting that she got the part because she had an affair with him. Thomas does show
interest in Nina but does not sleep with her. He takes her into his elegant apartment and asks her
to take a seat next to him on his couch. Thomas assures Nina that this kind of jealousy between
dancers is “typical.” Then he questions Nina about her sexual experience and explains that he
“thought it would be good to talk about the role. Ground us a little. I don’t want there to be any
boundaries between us.” When he interrogates Nina as to whether she has had boyfriends, she
becomes coy and replies, “a few, but no one serious.” As a result Thomas exclaims, “You are not
a virgin, are you?” When Nina tells him no, he confirms, “So, there is nothing to be embarrassed
about.” After sipping on his drink, Thomas asks, “and you enjoy making love?” Nina seems
upset. “Oh, come on, Sex, do you enjoy it?” When Nina laughs at him, he counters, “Well, we
need to be able to talk about this.” At this point Nina simply nods but does not reply. Thomas
turns more patronizing and treats her like a schoolgirl, clearly losing interest in her as an erotic
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target. “I got a little homework assignment for you. Go home, and touch yourself. Live a little.”
Then he gets up from the couch, leaves her behind, and tells her to get a cab home. When she
arrives in her apartment where she still lives a secluded life with her compulsive mother Erica
(Barbara Hershey), also a former prima ballerina, the mother treats her like a precious object and
displays sensuality toward her. She not only takes the pins out of Nina’s hair but also starts to
undress her (fig. 8.4.).
Figure 8.4. Nina’s mother Erica Sayers (Barbara Hershey) undresses Nina in front of a
mirror when she comes home.
Figure 8.5. Nina passionately kisses the artistic director of the ballett Thomas Leroy
(Vincent Cassel) after she has transformed herself into the Black Swan.
Figure 8.6. The mother cuts Nina’s fingernails in the bathroom, hurting her daughter in
the process. Scratch marks on Nina’s left should show that she has been hurting herself.
The mother tells Nina, ”I wish I could have been there. I guess he wanted you all to
himself. I can’t blame him.” Clearly, the mother sees herself as competing with the artistic
director who is perceived as a potential romantic suitor. The mother in Black Swan is as much a
catalyst for her gifted daughter’s psychotic behavior as the mother in The Piano Teacher.2 Once
Nina has succeeded in not only dancing the role but also transforming herself into a black swan,
literally growing black feathers that burst out of her skin, she also overcomes any inhibitions and
kisses Thomas passionately after the performance behind the scenes (fig.8.5). Ultimately, “living
a little” leads to destructive behavior and violence. There is a direct correlation between sexual
discovery and pain. Even Erica hurts Nina because she insists on still cutting her daughter’s
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fingernails once she discovers scratch marks on her daughter’s back (fig.8.6). The fact that Nina
starts to scratch and cut herself is paired with fantasy images of physical decay. In a vision,
Nina’s legs break, and her skin blisters with bloody bumps and is covered by little dots that will
later explode with black feathers. Sexual desire is symbolized by these changes of the skin, and
the dots appear when Nina is aroused, especially in a scene where she imagines making love to
another dancer, her alter ego, Lily (Mila Kunis). The female protagonists of the Black Swan and
The Piano Teacher explore the carnal and destructive power of sexuality when they tease their
male playmates with attempts of seduction. Yet ultimately they remain attracted to the same sex.
There are even allusions to incestuous relationships with their own, overbearing birth mothers. In
these fictive tales, the virtuous female is no longer saved but sacrifices herself. She is not
rewarded for her virtuosity but is punished because she is technically still a virgin.
In The Piano Teacher, an adaptation of Elfriede Jelinek’s novel, the sadomasochistic
pianist will be raped by her student and later stabs herself in the chest above the heart with a
knife, causing a bleeding wound. In Black Swan, the female lead kills herself with the shard of a
broken mirror that she pulls out of an open, bleeding, pulsating wound in her abdomen. Both
women are not engaged in normative heterosexual intercourse, and it seems as if they ultimately
punish themselves for not using their genitals in conventional ways. In both cases, sexual activity
is closely associated with disgust, surprise and repulsion, accompanied by abject fluids such as
vomit and blood.
Black Swan blatantly uses the metaphor of the “good/virtuous/white swan” versus the
“sexually devious/promiscuous/black swan.” To dance the role of the black swan, the protagonist
has to go on a sexual quest that results in self-mutilation and symbolic deflowering, not with a
phallus but a sharp, pointed object that gets stuck in the opening it causes. She overcomes her
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inhibitions by separating from her own self, splitting her identity. The dark side of love is
equivalent to a repressed, nonconformist sexuality that is deemed fatal to the woman when
released. Even though both films depict “normative” society as corrupted, alienating, lonely, and
void of meaning, the virgin cannot continue living once she has chosen a different path for
herself. Erika Kohut and Nina Sayers cut themselves to symbolize deflowering of their own
bodies and use auto-violence not to cause pleasure but to chastise themselves for not succeeding
in sexual transgressions with a partner. In that way, being a virgin for these protagonists is a
curse, not a reward. Erika and Nina do not conform to social expectations surrounding femininity
such as performing domestic duties — those chores are delegated entirely to their mothers, with
whom they still live — or bearing children but they also remove themselves from being capable
of forming meaningful relationships. Rather than directing their wrath against a male opponent
or monster (as the Final Girl does) and thereby rescuing others, they direct their anger against
themselves. The sexual revolution that has allowed women to make choices about their
reproductive rights and partners has regressed for these women into sexual abstinence,
unleashing a repressed, dysfunctional, and ultimately destructive sexual fantasy. It is as if
Aronofsky and Haneke show the path of the virtuous heroine after the end credits of the film
have faded: in a highly sexualized society, they are unable to function as virgins.
Figure 8.7. The music student Walter Klemmer (Benoît Magimel) reads a letter from his
piano teacher instructing him to perform sadistic acts of punishment while she listens to
him. Erika assures him that he should to worry about her overbearing mother who is
trying to intrude into the room.
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In The Piano Teacher, the male student, Walter Klemmer (Benoît Magimel), who is the
focus of ill-guided attraction, tells his teacher, Erika, that she is sick and suggests therapy after
reading her hand-written letter instructing him to perform sadistic acts of punishment upon her
(such as slapping and hitting) and different variations of physical domination.3 He also has to
admire her hidden tools that she keeps in a box under her bed. The student initially refuses to be
drawn into her written demands for a sickening and demeaning power play and abuse.4 A
reoccurring theme in Haneke’s films is the difference between imagined, televised, and
advertised violence and the actual violence directed against the body itself (Ritzenhoff 2009). As
long as sexual acts are represented in pornographic title pages of magazines and adult movies,
the violence is made to seem socially acceptable. Once the plea for mistreatment is fulfilled by
the student, who invades her personal space, her private home, and rapes her mercilessly on the
floor of the apartment’s corridor, in front of the mother’s bedroom where the matriarch is held
captive behind the locked door, the pianist is horrified by her face being violated, her blood
gushing from her nose and lip, and ultimately her raped body. She requests that her hands be
spared.
Even before the climactic final sequences, the female leads experiment with hurting
themselves. Although the pianist is being physically harmed by her student towards the end of
the film, she experiments with herself earlier by cutting her own genitals with a razor blade, as I
will discuss. It is not clear whether this act of self-hatred is arousing to her or not. Haneke does
not seem to imply that she wants to cut her vagina so that no intercourse will be possible but
rather that this is an act of quiet defiance against her repressive relationship with her mother. It is
as if she is sexually confused: the imagined violence exerted by a man during S&M foreplay
preceding intercourse (as she desires in her letter) is replaced by her own mutilation. It does not
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seem to be a pleasurable exercise and bears no similarity to masturbation. There is a definite
tension between romantic love and pornography as well as transgressional sexual practices in
The Piano Teacher: Erika Kohut frequently watches pornography (fig. 8.8) that she checks out at
a video store and also tries to voyeuristically peak into cars as couples have sex in a drive-in
theater. It is as if she is gazing through a keyhole like a peeping tom.
Figure 8.8. Erika watches porn; she is surrounded by disapproving men.
Figure 8.9. Erika harms herself in the bathroom. She holds a handheld mirror and
watches her genitals while cutting her vagina in a ritualist manner. Her mother is calling
her to dinner and she responds diligently: “Coming, Mama.”
One of the key scenes of Haneke’s film takes place in the bathroom, when Erika Kohut is
alone, after having locked the door to prevent her elderly mother (Annie Girardot) from entering.
She is checking herself in the bathroom mirror and looks at her genitals with a handheld mirror
while she performs the cutting. Kohut spreads her legs while sitting fully dressed on the rim of a
bathtub in the Vienna apartment; while she cuts her vagina, the viewer’s access to this violent act
is shielded by her leg (fig. 8.9). That the actual act of cutting is not shown on screen (because her
genitals are hidden behind her legs) is typical for Haneke’s directorial style, but the effect, the
blood running down the white bathtub in one thin streak, is clearly visible. Erika exercises the
self mutilation in a seemingly well-rehearsed manner during a four-minute continuous take that
is self-contained. The scene starts with her taking a razor blade from her leather purse on the left
of the frame. She approaches the cutting like a ceremony, as if following a prerehearsed script.
Each object (the blade, handheld mirror, hygienic pad, and paper towel) is part of the painful
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ritual. Erika walks from the left side of the little bathroom to the sink and then to the right side
where the tub is located. There she takes a small mirror and places it between her legs, watching
her genitals while holding the mirror in her left hand. She cuts with her right hand. There is not a
single close-up of her face; in fact, only slight sighing can be heard, and her facial expressions
are hidden behind a lock of hair. After the cutting, she rinses out the bathtub and takes a large
hygienic pad from a bag that is placed right next to the bathtub, suggesting that she does not use
tampons for menstruation and may still be a virgin.5 Erika continues the cleanup, and the blood
runs down the drain. Even the razor blade is wrapped in paper again and returned to the handbag
she carries to work, bringing closure to the scene because she returns to the exact location in
front of the purse, ending the scene on the same framing as it had started. Then Erika brushes her
hair in front of the larger bathroom mirror as if to be a good girl before dinner, because her
mother has called her to come eat. The intrusion of the mother’s presence with a voice from off
screen is similar to Black Swan where mother and daughter also live in close proximity and the
bathroom, not the bedroom, is a site of privacy. Neither protagonist, although seemingly grown
up and even approaching middle age,6 owns a key to her room and has to barricade the door to
prevent the mother from entering.7 Erika’s mother is also used to checking her daughter’s bags
when she comes home at night. The Piano Teacher starts with an interrogation by the mother
who discovers that Erika has bought a dress. In reality, the daughter was visiting porn stores, but
she is able to hide her voyeuristic activities from her intrusive mother (fig. 8.10).
Figure 8.10. The elderly mother (Annie Girardot) controls every aspect of her
daughter’s life. She even checks Erika’s purse when she comes home. She does
not know that Erika watches porn at night and hides a razor blade in her bag.
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Another important formal cinematic element in the bathroom scene is sound. Since
Haneke rarely uses any extradiegetic music, natural sound bears much importance in his films to
construct meaning. The bathroom is filled with the muffled noise of the television set that is
constantly on and watched by the mother in her free time. Once Erika opens the door, the sound
swells up, and she will ask her mother for permission to switch the TV off. The camera’s point of
view will gaze through the open door of the dining room where the two women exchange polite
conversation until the mother notices blood running down her daughter’s leg. She claims that
looking at it is not “very appetizing.” The mother refers to the blood as a sign of Erika’s
menstrual period, whereas the source of the blood is actually the wound Erika caused by Erika’s
cutting. Blood and desire have to remain hidden in the private sphere and are associated with
shame and guilt. Jean Ma interprets this dialogue between mother and daughter and clarifies that
the audience knows that Erika’s blood on her leg is not linked to menstruation:
At the same time, this juxtaposition of the shocking and banal refracts back onto the
female body in order to render it strange, uneasy, menaced. Their exchange frames
Erika’s auto-mutilation not as symptom of self-alienation but rather as self-reference to
the body, achieved by a violent mimicking of the biological processes that mark sexual
difference. Erika’s actions ultimately construe femininity as a wound, a wound that
appears as a natural condition but whose origins in fact lie elsewhere. (Ma 2010, 523)
In the shot immediately following this scene, Haneke cuts to the public display of porn
magazines in a store, depicting nude women in different sexual poses. These magazines are
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accessible to the public but only legitimately to an adult, mostly male, paying audience. Erika
runs into one of her male, teenage students in the porn store where she looks at recorded tapes. In
the subsequent piano lesson, she chastises him cruelly for being a “pig” and threatens to tell his
mother about the voyeuristic transgression. He apologizes to her as if she was a pars pro toto for
all women who are depicted in pornography in demeaning poses. Erika has no sexual interest in
him and coldly dismisses his feeble attempts to claim that he is sorry.8
In the first explicitly sexual encounter between the student Walter and the piano teacher,
she chooses a public space, the women’s bathroom, as the site. Walter had followed her there,
asking her to come out of the cubicle where she went to the bathroom (Haneke lingers on the
natural sound of peeing) and then attempts to shower her with kisses. Instead of responding to
his impulsive passion, Erika asks not to be touched and starts instead to masturbate him while
demanding authoritatively that he neither move nor talk. Each time he does, she either hurts him
or stops her actions altogether. She bites his genitals and this clearly evokes the association of
castration anxiety. Walter is uncomfortable, sexually frustrated, and confused. It is suggested
cynically by Walter after the bizarre encounter that she needs more practice so as not to hurt him,
falsely assuming that she is interested in a normative, romantic relationship, despite the power
differential between teacher and student. He does not have an orgasm when she handles him but
she forbids him to touch himself. This is only the prelude to even more disturbing encounters
where the viewer is coerced into watching intimate moments as a voyeur, although body parts
are never shown. Walter is clearly upset by his inability to respond to her touch. “You should
know what you can and can’t do to a man,” he claims. But she clearly does not know. He frames
her “treatment” as humiliating. Erika Kohut does not know how to perform sexual favors for a
man without hurting him; neither does she know how to please herself. She instead hurts herself
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with the cutting. The idea of pleasure and physical sexuality are undermined and replaced by
Erika’s voyeuristic gazing at porn videos and trying to watch sexual behaviors of lovers. She
imagines intimacy but can only revert to violent mechanics of lovemaking, not to the emotions.
In this way, her virtuosity and sexual inexperience come to haunt her as a virgin in middle age.
What used to be desirable in the context of horror films, namely purity, leads in Haneke’s film to
the reversal of the Final Girl myth. The self-directed violence creates an open wound, once in the
intimate area of the body and once above the heart. This depicts repressed sexuality as a defect
that cannot be released in transgressional sexual practices (Walter refuses to play into her sexual
fantasies) but leads to self-abjection.
Mother-Daughter Relationships
There is a clear correlation between forbidden sexuality and the mother. Erika will once try to
kiss and cuddle up next to and then on top of her mother whose bed she shares at night (on her
absent father’s side of the marital bed), instead of sleeping in her bedroom. Erika states at the
end of this dysfunctional encounter that she has seen her mother’s pubic hair, thereby sexualizing
the speech as well as her actions toward her mother. Contrary to her repeatedly dismissive and
rejectful interactions with Walter, she initiates the approach to her mother in bed, impulsively
and clumsily. Erika infantilizes herself. The mother reacts to her daughter’s transgressions much
as Walter who claims that she repulses him; this is particularly the case after she throws up in the
aftermath of another failed sexual encounter: “Sorry, you stink so much, no one will ever come
close to you,” he tells her crudely. It is as if he has started to consent to her sick games of abuse
and subordination. When Walter eventually comes to sleep with her and enters her on the floor,
she begs him to stop, horrified at the actual invasion of her body. The violence has moved from
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description and imagination to action; it has left the domain of the handwritten letter with
sadistic sexual demands and starts to take a life of its own. Erika’s vagina has no longer just a
symbolic function but is now crudely violated. This violation occurs without any of the sex toys
or bondage paraphernalia Erika originally desired for this act of deflowering. Walter warns her
that “you have to give a little,” but she lies beneath him like a log, unable to move, unable to
respond to his attempts to caress her, unable to object more heavily. He appeals to her, “Love
me, please,” but she is not touching him at all. After he leaves, she slowly crouches up, clearly in
pain, and opens the door to her mother’s bedroom by turning the key. Part of her fantasy had
been to leave her mother outside the room during her sexual escapades. By turning the key, Erika
allows her mother back into her private sphere where she has now been victimized. This was
exactly what her mother had worried about when Erika had brought Walter home for the first
time. Yet it is not Erika’s mother who commits physically violent transgressions as Nina’s
mother does when she hurts her daughter while cutting her nails (see figure 8.5.); rather, the
violation is perpetrated by the male invader into the shared female space of the apartment.
Haneke had suggested in the previous interactions between mother and daughter that their
relationship was deeply fraught and indeed reflected some of the sickening power play that Erika
was asking for in a relationship with her male student. In the logic of the film, the physical
violence that is exerted by the intruder is a latent result of the psychological dysfunction and
emotional stagnation (“glaciation” —Vereisung — as Haneke describes as interpersonal conflict
in several of his films) between mother and daughter. Rather than rescuing Erika from her
mother’s domineering presence, Walter pushes her deeper into dependence. There is no reason
for him to rescue the damsel-in-distress because she cannot satisfy him sexually.
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Normalcy after the traumatic event is seemingly restored when Erika is seen in the next
shot, dressed in formal black and white clothes, getting ready to perform at a piano concert. Her
mother gets her ready as if she is a child who needs supervision and accompanies her to the
concert hall. But Erika packs a large kitchen knife in her purse and stabs herself after Walter
passes her casually in the lobby. Instead of performing on stage, she walks out of the hall, the
blood slowly seeping through her white blouse before she steps outside without a coat and
disappears off frame into the cold evening. This escape from conflict, caused by repressed sexual
desire and the exaggerated expectations of an overbearing mother, bears similarity to the
narrative in Black Swan. In Aronofsky’s film, the protagonist is seemingly surprised by self-
inflicted violence. When Nina Sayers (Portman) discovers that she has stabbed herself and is
bleeding to death, she is astonished and begins to sob and cry.
In one of the more explicitly sexual scenes, the protagonist comes back to her small New
York apartment after a night of partying. The mother, Erica Sayers (Barbara Hershey), has been
waiting and confronts her, asking about her whereabouts. Nina rebuffs her by announcing that
she has “fucked them all” and gives the first names of two men. Again, the daughter does not
have a key to her bedroom and barricades the door with a dresser to be alone with her female
companion, Lily. “Don’t come in here,” she warns her mother. She experiences an erotic fantasy
with Lily whose naked back reveals the tattooed two wings of a black swan, suggesting that she
is the antithesis of the white swan. Initially it seems ambiguous whether Lily is really in the
bedroom or Nina is experiencing another of her surrealist sexual fantasies. Aronofsky suggests
that Lily is indeed Nina’s alter ego, representing the more mature sexual woman who is
experienced, sensual, and seductive, all the qualities Nina is supposed to acquire to dance the
role of the black swan convincingly on opening night. At one point Nina no longer looks into
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Lily’s face but into her own while she experiences an orgasm, followed by the “petit mort” (the
little death). In that brief afterglow, Nina suddenly sees her own face in lieu of Lily’s. The
director might suggest that the discovery of sexual pleasure is fraught. Another interpretation is
that Nina turns into her fantasy of a sexually active woman, Lily, when she allows herself to let
go of her sexual inhibitions. Sexual pleasure is not induced by intercourse but by same-sex
intimacy. However, Nina’s attitude toward the other side of herself, her sexual side, is fraught
with anger. “It is my turn,” she will exclaim in another fantasy scene when faced with Lily, who
seems to get ready for the big scene of the black swan, in her changing room. Lily tries to replace
Nina and take over the dancer’s role (fig. 8.11). This is the turning point of the entire film
because Nina supposedly stabs her opponent to pave the way for the second act of the big
ballet’s opening night, where she now has to perform as the black swan (fig. 8.12). Once she
stabs Lily, her eyes turn blood red and her face is grimaced by her anger. In several of the shots,
Lily turns into Nina, suggesting the confusion of identity: the white swan and the black swan
merge.
Figure 8.11. Nina tries to strangle her alter ego. This time she is wearing the dress of the
Black Swan. Her persona has merged with the Black Swan and she is killing the sexually
less experienced White Swan.
Figure 8.12. Nina (this time in the costume of the White Swan) kills her Black Swan
alter ego Lily (Mila Kunis) with the pointed shard from a broken mirror, shattering her
identity. Lily is dead on the ground, lying in a field of broken glass. Nina discovers later
that she has stabbed herself in the abdomen and that the dead body only existed in her
fantasy.
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Through the metaphor of the black swan the melodramatic story is coined of the young,
highly competitive ballet dancer in New York who has missed puberty and its sexual revelations
while diligently practicing in the studio for her career. In this regard she is similar to the pianist
in Michael Haneke’s film, because both have to put their personal lives on hold to succeed as
artists in solo careers. Both are directed by their overbearing mothers who tightly control every
move of their daughters to guarantee success. Both characters lack a father figure and have a
conflicted attitude towards heterosexual sex and sensuality. While the piano teacher checks out
porn tapes in the video store and voyeuristically gazes at sexual activity through car windows in
drive-in movie theaters as if peeking through a keyhole, the prima ballerina orchestrates her own
fantastic encounters in her mind. The sexual fantasy of both women is deemed nonconformist
because it displays elements of masochism. Once Nina reaches the top of her ambitions and is
cast as the prima ballerina in Swan Lake, this exact virtue of professional discipline as a dancer
and sexual abstinence, being still virtuous, comes to haunt her. The lascivious choreographer
Thomas gives her the task of finding sexual pleasure to be able to more realistically depict the
passionate black swan, the dark side of love. Rather than going to a bar and picking up a
stranger, or even more conveniently starting an affair with the ballet master himself, the prima
ballerina engages in sexual fantasies that are ultimately fatal.
Nina begins to harm herself, cutting, slicing, tearing off fingernails and skin, violently
altering her body, a process that also changes her mind. This is a strong reference to the abject
quality of femininity, linked to one of the key ingredients of the horror film (Creed, 2005). At
one point, her toes are sutured together similar to a swan’s foot. In addition, there are the two
main, above-mentioned scenes to mark sexual desire gone awry. Both entail that Nina sees her
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sensual rival, Lily, as being her opponent as well as playmate. Initially, she has a sexual fantasy
in her bedroom where she is making love to her while Lily kisses her genitals. The fact that Nina
suddenly sees her own face, making love to herself, suggests that she is actually not with a
partner, unable to experience pleasure with another person. It had been suggested by the ballet
master that she should start exploring her own sexuality and initially Nina tries to masturbate,
caught “in the act” by her mother who violates her personal space repeatedly. In the second
scene at the theater, Nina supposedly kills her rival just before going back on stage to dance the
part of the Black Swan: she will actually transform into the swan and grow first black feathers,
then wings. When returning to the changing room, Nina discovers that there is no blood,
emanating from the bathroom where she had shoved Lily’s dead body. Instead, she looks down
on herself and watches a gushing red hole in her stomach. Similar to David Cronenberg’s
Videodrome (1972) protagonist who discovers a large gushing wound in his abdomen that looks
like an open vagina, Nina’s “wound” could also be seen as the orifis. By administering the fatal
blow with the shard of a broken mirror that she will pull out of the hole herself, she has
metaphorically deflowered herself to be able to dance the sexual death rite.
Precursors in Film History
When discussing these two films, two different filmic parallels come to mind. One is
Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), where the female lead is killed off in the shower by a psychotic
serial killer and the blood runs down the drain, mingling with a close-up of the dead eye in a
dissolve. This is a stylistic parallel to The Piano Teacher because both scenes take place in the
bathroom and both show blood draining off into a hole. On a different level, the image of the
overbearing mother figure, of course, plays a large part in the Psycho narrative. The more vivid
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filmic precedent can be found in Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers (1972). There, one of
three sisters, Karin (Ingrid Thulin), cuts her vagina with a broken wine glass. Both acts of
violence in these two anteceding films relate to female desire. In Hitchcock, the protagonist is
punished for desiring an extramarital affair and running away with her boss’s money, which is
ironically not the motive for the murder. In Bergman, the protagonist is cutting herself, harming
her genitals, which can then no longer be penetrated by a male partner, her coldhearted husband,
during intercourse. In Hitchcock and Bergman, the female victim is clearly not a virgin. In
Haneke, the act of self-mutilation could very well be a self-induced deflowering. The scene
remains ambiguous as to what the driving force behind Erika’s cutting is. The main difference
between Bergman and Haneke/Aronofsky is that in the latter the act of cutting is supposed to
evoke lust. In Cries and Whispers, the oldest sister Karin is the one who is most unhappily
married to a much older, rich, distant and bigoted man. She clearly hates him. When she has cut
herself on a chair in front of her marital bed chamber, she licks her lips. There is no visible blood
and her white nightgown seems impeccable. There are drops of perspiration on her forehead after
the cuts have been administered to her vagina with a glass shard. She enters the bedroom, sees
her husband, walks past him without talking, and lies down on her side of the bed. Bergman cuts
to a reaction shot by the husband who looks irritated and seems to disapprove of her. When the
camera cuts back to Karin in bed, her hands are covered in blood and she has spread her legs as
if she was in the act of giving birth. Then she covers her mouth with her blood and tastes it. She
grins triumphantly at her husband. Karin has altered her body and created a wound that will
prohibit her husband from sexual intercourse, disabling her body. Contrary to the cutting scenes
in The Piano Teacher and Black Swan, her self-mutilation seems to provide her with jouissance,
satisfaction, and triumph over her abhorrent husband. The act of cutting is not a self-imposed
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punishment for being sexually frigid but a means to ensure sexual, marital abstinence. The next
scene in Cries and Whispers switches to Karin’s younger sister, Maria (Liv Ullmann), calling her
name. “Don’t come near me, I can’t stand anybody touching me,” Karin exclaims. The middle
sister, Agnes (Harriet Andersson) has just died of cancer, comforted by the maid, Anna (Kari
Sylwan), who has an affectionate, sensual and protective relationship with the suffering patient.
She often allows Agnes to lie like a nursing child on her bare chest in bed evoking a lesbian
relationship. This ritual also has allusions to the affections between a mother and daughter.
Agnes has lost her own daughter to an illness, as the film suggests repeatedly; the maid prays in
memory of the dead child each day in her bedroom, where the empty crib still remains next to
her bed.
Maria tries to kiss her older sister on the mouth and face as if she were her lover,
covering her with affection and after initial resistance, Karin responds reluctantly. She announces
earlier, “I can’t. I can’t stand it. … I can’t breathe any longer. All that guilt. Nein…leave me
alone. Don’t touch me.” In Bergman, women’s pleasure is unlived. Neither one of the three
sisters has a fulfilling sexual life, repressing their hidden emotions and concealing their desires
behind iron masks of disgust and despair. These Victorian women are different from the pianist
Erika and the ballett dancer, Nina. Bergman’s characters belong into the nineteenth century
where women were locked into roles and unhappy marriages, surrounded by lies, hatred, and
boredom. They are repulsed by the touch. The similarity between all the women in the films is
their desire to be caressed, but only Agnes, the dying sister, can openly express her need, most
explicitly in death. When she awakens after being declared dead by the family doctor, she has
tears in her eyes. She begs her two sisters to come into her bedroom and comfort her so she can
leave in peace. Neither Maria nor Karin are willing to be close to their dead sister. They shy
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away, disgusted, disturbed and run away. The next day, they are back in the elegant estate after
the funeral, in their fine costumes and masquerades, surrounded by their two malign, inept
husbands. Anna, the maid, is the only one who is willing to bid Agnes farewell, although in an
unusually intimate manner that suggests an erotic bond. The connection that the sisters have is
different from the mother-daughter relationship displayed in Haneke and Aronofsky’s films, but
it also transgresses social boundaries. In contrast to Erika and Nina, Bergman’s three sisters are
filled with shame and regret. They are locked into heterosexual relationships that are unfulfilling,
and they derive pleasure from hurting themselves and others. In The Piano Teacher and Black
Swan, the female protagonists are their own worst enemies and remove themselves because they
do not seem to fit in a society that is filled with lies (similar to Bergman’s cosmos) and where
sexuality is regulated by their mothers. The black swan will have to dance her role to please a
paying audience and guarantee the fiscal success of the ballet company and its elitist clientele —
but her mother sits in the front row and glances at her throughout the performance. The pianist
refuses to play for the public in the end. Her seclusion as an artist leads her to be incompetent in
her everyday life.
The Open Wound and Violence
To engage with the subject of the open wound addressed in the films by Aronofsky and Haneke,
the work of Mark Seltzer in True Crime (2007) is helpful. Seltzer connects the desire of
audiences to watch violence in the mass media as indicative of modern society where voyeurism
is part of everyday communication patterns: “If the unobserved life, on this view, is not worth
living, then living one’s life cannot be separated from its media doubling” (Seltzer 2007, 10).
The author describes the role of the audience in media representations of violence.
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Hence, the spectacle of violent crime provides a point of attraction and identification, an
intense individualization of these social conditions, albeit a socialization via the media
spectacle of wounding and victimization. To the extent that action, like motive, must be
attributed to individuals, these small and intense melodramas of the wound acclimatize
readers and viewers to take these social conditions personally. These social conditions
then, in turn, take on the form of a pathological public sphere. (Seltzer 2007, 10)
As pointed out in Jean Ma’s text on The Piano Teacher, Haneke constructs Erika’s
actions as construing “femininity as a wound” (Ma 2010, 523). There is indeed a “spectacle” of
violence in both The Piano Teacher and Black Swan. The difference from conventional horror
movies, though, is the fact that the respective female protagonist is not turned into a heroine at
the end of the films for remaining virtuous and eliminating the monstrous opponents, but rather
she becomes the victim of her own self-destruction and self-hatred. No longer is the male
opponent seen as the cause of evil, but the mother, and by extension the virtuousness of the
female lead is not rewarded but punished. Both Erika and Nina perform in the public sphere as
artists, pushed into leading roles as pianist and dancer by their critical, imposing and controlling
mothers. Both young women go insane, caught between their unfulfilled sexual desire and the
expectations toward their talents, measured by an unforgiving audience. Both manage to stay in
the public sphere of the filmic audience despite the fact of harming their bodies in their private
sphere. Violence on their terms is a spectacle, directed at their own body. The spectacle of
watching suffering is transferred from the stage (of the recital hall or the theater) to the audience
in front of the movie screen: the viewers of these two movies engage in a voyeuristic journey in
which they witness self mutilation as an aberration of the conventional horror movie narrative as
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described by Clover. There is ultimately no male intervention to avenge violence committed
against the female body. The “wound” and “victimization” are part of an intensely voyeuristic
spectacle but are more reflections of the sexual confusion of the female heroines than their
virtuous control over their own bodies. The other players in the film (mothers, lovers, colleagues,
students, teachers) have lost control over the women’s bodies, and the genital area is stripped of
its desirability. The two female protagonists in Black Swan and The Piano Teacher are in charge
of their own sexuality and sex but they fail instead of triumphing over this capacity to control. In
this way, both film directors show a regressive, dark side of love and sexuality, an outgrowth of
women’s liberation that has ultimately gotten out of control when women determine their own
fate. However, if one embraces the idea that Nina has found her sexual Other in the final scene of
the film by killing off her old self through the insertion of the shard, the film’s conclusion would
be less fatalistic. Nina could still be considered dead at the end, but her new identity as the
seductive black swan would have come to life. It could be argued that her surrealistic visions of
herself in the mirror and the struggle with herself in her bedroom and the changing room would
prepare her for this transformation. This interpretation would actually suggest that female desire
could emerge once abstinence and virginity were recognized by a woman as flawed and
repressive.
Works Cited
Addison, Heather, Mary Kate Goodwin-Kelly and Elaine Roth. 2009. Motherhood
Misconceived: Representing the Maternal in U.S. Films. New York: State University of New
York Press.
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Clover, Carol J. 2005. “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film.” Horror: The Film
Reader. ed. Mark Jancovich: 77-89.
Creed, Barbara. 2005. “Horror and the Monstruous-Feminine. An Imaginary Abjection.” Horror:
The Film Reader. ed. Mark Jancovich: 67-76.
Grundman, Roy. 2010. A Companion to Michael Haneke. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Ma, Jean. 2010. “Discordent Desires, Violent Refrains. La Pianiste (The Piano Teacher). A
Companion to Michael Haneke. Ed. Roy Grundman. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. 511-531.
Kaplan, E. Ann. (1992). Motherhood and Representation: The Mother in Popular Culture and
Melodrama. London/New York: Routledge.
Naqvi, Fatima. 2010. Trügerische Vertrautheit: Filme von Michael Haneke. Wien: Synema.
Ritzenhoff, Karen A. 2010. Screen Nightmares: Video, Fernsehen und Gewalt im Film.
Marburg: Schüren Verlag.
---. 2009. “The Frozen Family: Emotional Dysfunction and Consumer Society in Michael
Haneke’s Films.” Sex and Sexuality in a Feminist World. Eds. Karen A. Ritzenhoff and
Katherine A. Hermes. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 71-88.
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Seltzer, Mark. 2007. True Crime. Observations on Violence and Modernity. New York:
Routledge.
Warren, Charles. 2010. “The Unknown Piano Teacher.” A Companion to Michael Haneke. Ed.
Roy Grundman. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. 495-510.
Filmed
Black Swan. Directed by Darren Aronofsky. USA. 2010.
Cries and Whispers. Directed by Ingmar Bergman. Sweden. 1972.
Piano Teacher, The. Directed by Michael Haneke. France. 2001.
Psycho. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. USA, 1960.
Videodrome. Directed by David Cronenberg. Canada. 1972.
Notes
1 The Museum of Sex in Manhattan features an exhibit on Sex and the Moving Image. As part of
the film display, a section is devoted to Beautiful Agony, amateur videos about women who
experience orgasm and the “little death” that follows it. The accompanying program text spells
out that “those short films paired with audio are tremendously intimate, separating the essence of
an orgasm from a specific sex act” .
2 In both films, the mother figures have displaced their own desires to further the artistic careers
of their talented daughters. Nina’s mother used to be a dancer herself and has constructed a life
narrative that makes her daughter be indebted to her for sacrificing her life. This is a common
trope in mother-daughter relationships and maternal melodramas as E. Ann Kaplan has studied
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(1992) as a topic of film history in her seminal book on Motherhood and Representation: The
Mother in Popular Culture and Melodrama. Heather Addison et al. (2009) also addresses the
complexity of changing mothering roles in modern society in her coedited volume on
Motherhood Misconceived: Representing the Maternal in U.S. Films.
3 The student reads excerpts of the letter on camera and spells out the sexual fantasies. “Then,
gag me with some stockings I will have ready. Stuff them in so hard that I’m incapable of
making any sounds. Next, take off the blindfold please, and sit on my face and punch me in the
stomach to force me to thrust my tongue in your behind.” (…) “For that is my dearest wish.
Hands and feet tied behind my back and locked up next door to my mother out of her reach
behind my bedroom door, till the next morning…If you catch me disobeying any of your orders,
hit me, please, even with the back of your hand on my face. Ask me why I don’t cry out for my
mother or why I don’t fight back. Above all, say things like that so that I realize just how
powerless I am.” Jean Ma (2010, 516) transcribes this monologue in her article “Discordant
Desires, Violent Refrains” in A Companion to Michael Haneke.
4 Walter asks his teacher what the acts of violence would “open” for him? Similar to the
metaphor of the keyhole that Erika cannot cover to avoid her mother’s intrusive gaze, the letter is
regarded as an opening to her sexual fantasy life. This could be seen as a metaphor for the
“opening” of her sexual desires that she wants to share with her student. Even though Walter is
appauled, he is also intrigued by her subordination to his gaze. She crouches in front of him on
the floor and shows him the toys she keeps in a box under her bed as if to share her favorite
stuffed animals with a playmate. She displays ropes, chains and even a black rubber hood,
linking her fantasy to S&M fetishized objects.
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5 The fact that Erika uses large cotton liners and no tampons is possibly an indication that she is
still infantilized by her mother who controls her every move. It does also suggest a certain
youthfulness about her sexuality and a possible insecurity towards her body. When cutting
herself, she can indeed control the flow of blood. However, when Walter comes to rape her, he
first hits her face and blood is gushing from her lip and her nose. The mother’s control smothers
Erika most of the time and she can live her own sexual desires only when watching porn outside
the shared home. Despite the matriarchal presence during the rape, Erika’s mother is unable
protect her in this physically violent scene. Whenever Erika leaves the house and returns, her
mother checks her bags. Erika is not horrified by blood or other fluids. In fact, in the unrated
director’s cut of the film, she is seen in a cabin at the porn store she frequents, picking up a paper
tissue that is soaked with semen. She sniffs it and then presses it against her nose while she
watches the sex tapes on concurrent screens, inhaling the scent.
6 Isabelle Huppert was 36 years old when she played the role of Erika Kohut.
7 Fatima Naqvi (2010) has written about the significance of keys and keyholes in The Piano
Teacher in conjunction to voyeurism and sexuality.
8 Erika rebukes her student harshly: “What for? Sorry isn’t enough if I don’t know why. Are you
sorry because you’re a pig, or because your friends are pigs? Or because all women are bitches
for making you a pig?”