"It is said that analyzing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it. That is the intention..."
...of Black Swan. Think of Nina, who is obsessed with perfecting the role of Swan Queen. But according to Thomas, that is her problem, and Mulvey (quoted above) would agree. Nina looks at passionate expression, which needs a certain element of unpredictability to be truly convincing, and she tries to quantify it into a series of imitable steps. But in doing so, she destroys the very vessel to create said passionate expression: bulimia emaciates her body that must be kept tiny and countless pirouettes and plies tear her toe nails and pop her ankles until she appears no more than a relic of beauty.
But what of Nina's other side, her 'black swan' that surrenders to sensuality and impulse and lacks all control? It causes equal destruction to Nina, causes her to scratch her back and drink and do drugs and at the last, impale herself with a shard of mirror. I do not believe anyone would call 'black swan' Nina "beautiful" or "pleasurable"--venereal maybe, but then again lust could be considered a corruption of the appreciation of beauty or pleasure.
Black Swan destroys the idea of beauty by exposing the dark unknown of creativity. But that's the important thing: it exposes all of the ugly goings-on masked by beauty, and thus we no longer see beauty. The ugliness was there all along though, so I don't know if it is as much destruction of beauty as introduction of veracity. Maybe everything/one/where is ugly, really, and we're all fools to think otherwise.
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