Darren Aronofsky’s 2010 film, Black Swan, fit into a lot of boxes. It was a psychological thriller, a body-horror flick, a character study, a coming-of-age saga. It was a cautionary tale about ballet culture, helicopter parenting, and perfectionism. Rewatching it roughly 15 years after its release, though, I’ve come to see it as something else: a workplace drama, about an ambitious woman navigating a hypercompetitive environment, contorting herself to please the mercurial boss who holds her fate in his hands.
The ballet world is, of course, unique—a field that requires uncommon athletic and artistic mastery, as well as more commitment and sacrifice than most 9-to-5 jobs. The path to success for a dancer doesn’t necessarily look the same as that of a corporate employee. Yet Black Swan’s central character, Nina Sayers, played by Natalie Portman, struggles in ways that feel broadly relatable.
Like many young strivers, Nina has wound up with her identity entirely entangled in her job. When she lands her dream role in Swan Lake, playing both the innocent White Swan loved by a prince and the seductive Black Swan who attempts to steal him away, she throws herself into her work. But recognition always seems out of reach. The company’s director, Thomas (Vincent Cassel), keeps telling Nina she’s too “frigid” and sexless to play the Black Swan. The other dancers covet her part and make her feel unworthy of it. (In any industry, sparse opportunities can lead to hungry, cutthroat workers.) Nina has no mentor to look up to; Beth, the former prima ballerina played by Winona Ryder, has been ruthlessly excised from the company for being too old. The film implies that Beth is still as capable as ever of performing beautifully; the company simply wants a “fresh face,” as Thomas puts it, to draw audiences. Here as in so many workplaces, employees are expendable, valued not for their personhood but for their present contribution to the bottom line.
On top of all that, Thomas keeps coming on to Nina, arguing that she needs to loosen up to get in touch with her inner Black Swan. He asks if she’s a virgin, tells her to masturbate (homework), and kisses her (more than once). This of course puts her in an impossible position: If she protests, she’ll be proving his point that she’s too uptight; if she relents, she’ll be proving right the other dancers’ suspicion that she exploited his attraction to get the part. Thomas’s fiefdom seems similar to that of many real-life dance companies in that power is concentrated in a man with few checks on his behavior. His harassment evokes some of the abuse accusations that have rocked the ballet world—but also the kind of #MeToo stories that have emerged in numerous fields. And as Nina struggles to focus, Thomas keeps telling her, cruelly: “The only person standing in your way is you.”
That idea—and the disturbing question of whether it’s true—is one that I imagine haunts many working women. Around the time Black Swan came out, high-powered female executives were making headlines, and Hillary Clinton was secretary of state. Women could see that incredible professional success was possible—but this didn’t mean they were in a position to achieve it. In 2013, Sheryl Sandberg, then the chief operating officer of Meta, delivered a diagnosis in her best-selling book Lean In: Women tend to deny themselves career success, she argued, because they internalize the idea that they should be meek and deferential, and thus take “their foot off the gas,” as she put it in one TED Talk. Instead, she asserted, they need to be bold: speak up in meetings; ask for that raise. Sandberg’s philosophy, I realized, is rather Thomas-esque. In one scene, seemingly testing Nina, he tells her that she won’t be getting the main role in Swan Lake—then berates her for accepting his decision rather than fighting him on it. “You could be brilliant,” he tells her later. “But you’re a coward.”
Though Lean In was a hit—people like to feel that they have agency—it also stirred immediate controversy for its insistence that women could change their circumstances through sheer force of will. Sandberg eventually gave more credence to the structural causes of professional inequity and acknowledged that she hadn’t truly understood the plight of, say, working single moms. But three years before her book was published, Black Swan had already captured one of the problems with holding yourself entirely responsible for your own success: It can turn you against yourself. In a sense, Thomas’s warning that Nina is getting in her own way is a self-fulfilling prophecy. She becomes her own worst enemy.
Aronofsky has said that he based Black Swan on Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s short 1846 novel The Double, about a struggling low-level civil servant who finds that a man has joined his office who looks exactly like him—but who is far more charming and well liked by their colleagues. They become nemeses, naturally. (The Double was also made into its own movie, starring Jesse Eisenberg, in 2013.) In Black Swan, Nina is surrounded by creepy mirror images. Sometimes, her reflection, in the studio’s great glass wall, stops mimicking her actions. Sometimes she hallucinates that people walking down the street or dancing across from her have her face. Primarily, though, Nina’s double—the far more charming, better-liked version of her—is a dancer named Lily (Mila Kunis), a clear Black Swan to Nina’s White one. When Nina despises Lily, she is despising herself. Eventually Nina grows paranoid, losing her grip on what’s real and what’s not. Her breakdown is far more dramatic than what most people will ever experience, but it illustrates the way in which endless, lonely toil can alienate a person from herself. It’s the extreme but logical conclusion of adopting a bootstrap mentality under conditions that don’t actually allow you to pull yourself up.
The path for ambitious women today may be even more obscure than it was upon Black Swan’s release. Politicians, academics, pundits, and influencers are challenging not only the idea that women should be CEOs but also that they should be in the workforce at all (or able to vote). McKinsey’s annual Women in the Workplace study of corporate America—co-conducted by Sandberg’s LeanIn.org and published last month—found that “women are as dedicated to their careers as men” but that they tend to receive less mentorship at work and, in senior positions, remain outnumbered by men. Some companies, according to McKinsey’s report, had recently cut programs designed to support women; many had curtailed remote- or flexible-work options, which are generally a boon to moms trying to keep their jobs. For the first time since McKinsey began conducting its study, female participants reported less desire for promotion than male participants did.
Yet when men and women receive similar amounts of support from senior colleagues, the report found, any ambition gap between the sexes disappears. Women, this suggests, care plenty about what they do and whether they’re seen. Only when they feel undervalued or have little hope of advancement are they more likely to pull back.
Something that struck me when I rewatched Black Swan was all the little reminders that Nina once really loved ballet, before the job wore her down. And I wondered: What if she’d had a less predatory director in a less punishing environment? What if she’d had someone to help her tap into that love without losing her mind? One of the saddest parts of Black Swan is seeing Nina’s passion for dance draining out of her. Thomas keeps telling her to feel the music, to not just to go through the motions. By the time he’s got his grip on her, it’s too late.
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