Double bill: a reluctant King, a paranoid Queen

[Since I’ve been having so many conversations lately about the perils of subtextual analysis, I thought it might be fun to do a “mix and match” post about two recent films. Scarily, the connections seem to grow the more I think about them.]

On the face of it, there isn’t much to link Tom Hooper’s The King’s Speech and Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan. The former is a solidly written and acted historical piece, made in the efficient but workmanlike style that characterises many British period films. The latter is a visually showy, full-blooded melodrama that is almost too imaginative for its own good, careening from psychological thriller to B-movie horror to profound study of artistic turmoil. But the two movies do have something in common: both feature lead characters suffering from serious performance anxiety as they prepare to don a role. Colin Firth and Natalie Portman may have been Oscar royalty for a night, doing and saying all the right things up on that podium, but they won their statuettes for playing a nervous (real-life) king and a mentally fragile (Swan) queen respectively.

Firth’s Prince Albert – informally called “Bertie” but soon to be King George VI – is terrified by the demands of public speaking, while Portman’s ballerina Nina is beset by self-doubt, repressed sexuality, the inability to loosen up, and who knows what else as she rehearses the lead part in a performance of Swan Lake. At risk of overreaching, both Nina and Bertie also have domineering same-sex parents (thought the films wisely steer clear of pop psychology) and both were born into worlds that they can’t escape from. Albert’s "papaa" (George V to you and me) is a hectoring father who could turn any child into a bundle of nerves, let alone an introverted boy saddled with the demands of being a public figure; Nina’s mommie is a gargoyle who has raised her daughter in a cocoon, surrounded her with stuffed toys and made her a channel for the reversal of her own disappointments. (Like everything else in this mysterious film, aspects of the mother's personality could be Nina’s mind engaging in embellishment. But even so, we can see that ballet is as much a part of her DNA as the monarchy is a part of Albert’s.)

In a way, therefore, both stories are about performers putting on a face, and one thing both films do well – Black Swan in particular – is to place us in the middle of the action. Needless to say, this is a position we aren’t accustomed to being in when it comes to such things as royal speeches or ballet. Whether in person or watching on a TV screen, we see such “shows” from a comfortable distance, from a position of detachment. But Black Swan contains many handheld camera shots that take us right onto the stage with the tormented Nina and the other dancers – so that we get a sense of them as real, vulnerable, hardworking people with creaking joints and bruised feet, rather than as automatons striking poses on a faraway platform. And one of the very few times The King’s Speech does something relatively unconventional with its camera is in a tracking shot that follows Albert into the hall where his coronation ceremony will soon take place. From our vantage point right behind his head, we can feel the full magnitude of what awaits him, and this makes the subsequent point-of-view shots more effective; that intimidating portrait of Queen Victoria is frowning at us as much as at him.

“I was perfect,” Nina whispers in the final seconds of Black Swan, though we’ve already seen at what cost this “perfection” has been achieved. The climactic sequence of The King’s Speech – with Albert delivering his radio address to the country on the eve of the Second World War – is more subdued; it’s about stiff-upper-lip pragmatism rather than the heady intensity of a ballet reaching its crescendo, and the speech itself is not perfect – merely good (which is more than satisfying, given the lead up to it). The two “theatres” couldn’t be more different, but both end with a sense of personal affirmation for the “performers”. In that sense, there’s something poetically apt about the acting Oscars going to Firth and Portman this year, whether or not you agree with the decision.

P.S. Black Swan is, of course, open to dozens of other interpretations. I’m sure someone will eventually write a thesis about the whole film being an elaborate metaphor for sexual awakening/the loss of virginity – what with Nina being “pierced” by a phallic shard in the climactic scene, and the liberating effect this has on her. More seriously, it has visual and thematic similarities to Brian De Palma’s Carrie, in which a disturbed, virginal girl (with a psycho mother) unleashes forces she didn't know she possessed. Both films also feature climactic scenes involving white dresses being stained with blood – you decide what that might mean!