The Aronofsky Primer: Under the Skin and Protruding
Before I can explain what Aronofsky is saying I have to first tell you a story about my brother's bravery. When my brother and I were very young my father planted a type of sudan grass out in front of our house on about 12 acres of ground. This grass grew well above our heads and we would notice that our pack of Australian shepherd dogs would wander into the thick and itchy wall of grass. In a single file line they would wander through the wall of green blades and disappear from view. We naturally followed our dogs everywhere and promptly wandered into the humid field along the worn path that the dogs had beat down by constant travel in and out of the sudan grass. It was summer and we were instantly sweating and itching but we wanted to know where our pack was going. We could not see or hear our dogs anymore but we followed the twisting and turning path that labyrinthed through the grass, winding deep into it's heart.
Somewhere in the middle of my father's field were huge clearings of grass laid flat by our now rolling pack of dogs. They rolled everywhere in the grass, expanding the clearing into various rooms and chambers. We of course started clearing our own areas and after several days we had created our own secret world of pathways and clearings. Because it was so itchy and hot we would don thick winter coats, bandana masks and baseball helmets whilst wearing cotton gloves with which to hold and swing wiffle bats. The bats helped clear pathways and new rooms. Because of the intense heat we could only enter in half hour intervals to work. With bats in hand we created our own world-separate from adults and anyone else in the known world. It was a secret only shared by me, my brother and our dogs. A utopia.
Then one day we followed a path that wound near to our driveway. Just several rows of grass blades in from the road was a birds nest. Inside were eggs. Small and blue and speckled. We knew we mustn't touch them. The mother would abandon the eggs having smelt human hands upon her eggs. It was the secret treasure within our secret world. We visited the nest often in order to check its safety and progress. We told no one. We were the sacred guardians of the blue egged nest.
Of course we were very young in those days and we had a very loose almost nonexistent concept of the passage of time and the change that it brings. The sudan grass that my Dad had planted was for profit. He intended to harvest the field at its prime. On the day the swathers began mowing the field down we awoke in a panic. The nest! My brother insisted we save the nest. I, being the older brother and thus responsible for my brother's life said no. It was too late. The nest was gone now and if we ran through the grass after it, being much shorter than the tops of the grass we would be killed by the swathers. But Ryan was not going to let the nest be destroyed. I went to our father's ranch-hand named Brett, a high school kid who worked for my dad during the summer, and explained the crisis.
"Can you find the nest along the driveway?"
"I think I can". We tried for a long time but the field was totally different from the outside looking in and the nest was hidden from view. I could not find it. There was only one way to get to the nest. Through the passage ways we and our dogs had made.
Brett ran with me through the side passages of the field and I think he was a bit dumfounded by their extensiveness. The swathers were getting louder.
"Are we close?" I was quiet. With the taste of impending death very strong in the back of my throat everything now seemed alien and strange and I had no idea how close we were to the nest. The swathers whir of metal and insane noise was near deafening now.
"Let's go back!" I yelled and Brett complied. On returning without the nest I saw my brother was near tears with desperate fear of what would happen to the nest if we did not save it. Brett agreed to go one more time with Ryan but if they got too close to the swathers they would have to return immediately.
I waited just outside the grass field and imagined a life without my brother. If he died in the swather's mouth it would be my fault and I was weighed down by that grave burden. But Brett and my brother emerged after what seemed like hours with the nest in hand. And one of the eggs had hatched. There, with its purple eyes shut and wet and featherless was a baby bird mouthing its beak to the world around it. My brother's dedicated faith had saved the nest, the baby bird from certain annihilation.
I hadn't thought about that story for many, many years. Then one day I watched the trailer for Aronofsky's Black Swan. At the moment that Natalie Portman's character looks at her shoulder blade in the mirror and she sees something prickling out of her skin it all came back. Everything about that summer and that day came right back. It was her skin on her shoulder blade, like a plucked chicken, featherless-like the baby bird's skin-that brought it all back. When she draws a feather out of the pore and stares at it. Stares at a wet and new matted feather.
And then I thought, "Aronofsky has a thing for 'protrusions' doesn't he?" and then the floodgates opened. At that moment I had discovered the Aronofsky primer. I had only seen The Fountain from start to finish and parts of Requiem for a Dream but I had never really "gotten" Aronofsky. So I had to watch everything he's made. Pi, The Wrestler, Black Swan and then Noah. I now understand the metaphor language of Aronofsky as I see it and I appreciate more fully what he is saying.
Something foreign and alien enters the protagonist. It infects, festers and incubates within the host, the protagonist. Struggle and then change ensues. Often their behavior will be extreme and dangerous to both themselves and those closest to them. But ultimately a protrusion following a penetration, a stabbing or a cutting signifying the realization of this change occurs and we the audience become bathed in light- never truly aware of the ultimate fate of our hero/heroine at their moment of self-realization-(do they die? Survive?). From Pi to Black Swan and on into Noah Aronofsky explores this metaphor of permanent change following a penetrative trauma in various mediums.
He is an artist intrigued with the animus of creative struggle within the artist/performer/genius. He explores the cost an individual pays for the searching of the ecstatic moment of full self realization. Epiphany. Nirvana. A-ha!
For me that moment was the early morning of the next day when we went to check on the baby bird we had fed with a dropper the afternoon and evening previous. In the nest lay the baby bird, dead, with a trail of red ants snaking up the patio tables leg and engulfing the featherless body. I think we sprayed water all over that table in earnest dismay at what we had witnessed. As much as we had cared about the saving of the nest the laws of nature would ultimately take its course. One must strive to save life in the face of death, despite death's inevitability, even if you might fail, because really, what else is there?
So it was the bravery of my younger brother Ryan, so long ago in the grass field of my father's ranch, swathers rattling through and devouring our brief and sacred halls of grass that led me to understand Darren Aronofsky's particular cinematic language.
Penetration: The Infection Spreads
An individual is infected by something. Literally something physically enters the protagonist and uses him/her as a host. In the case of Pi Max has stared too long into the sun. After damaging his eyes he slowly regains his sight but now suffers headaches, nosebleeds and hallucinations. From that moment on Max becomes obsessed with numbers.
For Noah his infection begins with hearing the voice of God. As the host to God's promise, that He will flood the Earth, Noah becomes obsessed with the building of the ark. His behavior becomes extreme and dangerous to both himself and those closest to him. But his obsession cannot stay contained within him. God's will spreads out.
Requiem For A Dream on the surface is about addiction but peel back the layers and you see that it's about a point of infection followed by an obsession that leads to the loss of control of one's self. A loss of control that obliterates the identity of the host to the point that they are no longer isolate in their infection but contagious. Contagious in the sense that they lose their physical boundaries to a larger world that will penetrate them and change them permanently.
Protrusions and Expulsions
There will come a time that the protagonist or the host can no longer contain this infection. The Fountain sees three time lines merge with the same story of a man obsessed with fighting the infection that threatens his woman. He must leave his cloistered world and penetrate the wilderness, his own mind and the cosmos to try and save her. But the infection penetrates him metaphorically. He is not "separate" or isolate from this ordeal. He is connected to this inevitable death and must experience his own expulsion from the "egg' of their existence.
Jerod Leto's innocent turned junkie digs into his skin. Mickey Rourke's wrestler tears himself apart physically, to the point that they must open his chest to mend his heart. Sean Gullette's Max takes a drill to his head in order to alleviate the pressure from the strange protrusion on his temple. Portman's ballerina is being torn open from the inside. All of Aronofsky's subjects burst open from the spread of some inner foreign force that cannot be contained or isolated. They bulge, stretch and tear from this pressure as the psychic stress manifests itself in the flesh. They are transforming into something else and it will be permanent.
Transformation
The hero/heroine will eventually lose the struggle to contain the transformative pressure within them. Once "it" has burst forth they complete their metamorphosis. This symbiot has now taken control of the host and we see this physical change. They are now something and someone else. After this alchemic switch the subject re experiences isolation as they are now different and thus alone. All that remains is a single purpose for which they have been transformed to serve.
The Wrestler must wrestle. The Black Swan must dance. Hugh Jackman's personas must unite and heal. Max must know. Noah must bring his family and God's animals to safety. But in the end they are bathed in light.
Saturated in Light
In the end all are bathed in light. Is this enlightenment? Is it God's grace? Or just change, perhaps? The ending is always ambiguous. As Noah was a story that was quite personal to Aronofsky I have always imagined that when the rainbow appears it is it's beauty that rewards those who have survived. Survival is the key here. Beaten, cut, brought from safety and isolation we have been penetrated and exposed to others. That exposure is not always clean and we can transform from it but that shedding of the skin can be painful and unsettling. Even violent and bloody. But in the end we become singular and yet all of us connected in that pain. Maybe that's just life. At least that's the itching feeling I get. Just underneath the skin I hide in.
Years ago I remember reading that Aronofsky was once picked to direct a Wolverine film. I got why. The metaphor is there. But maybe a little too literally. I prefer his own visions and writings. As I prepare to watch Mother! (and from everything I hear and read I better prepare) his metaphor is always in my mind. So I've avoided the trailers and reviews as best I can. But even knowing the journey I am excited to experience the process all over again. Who knows? Maybe now we will see what's inside the light.