Discomfort Zone
When he’s not doling out cinematic punishment in the form of gonzo biblical tales like Noah and Mother! — two films I liked, but which inspired much derision for their trippy, horror-movie takes on Old Testament-style tyranny — Darren Aronofksy occupies what I like to think of as a cinematic discomfort zone full of characters who manifest their pain and sadness in the body blows they deal themselves.
It began with Pi, his superb black-and-white debut about a numerologist searching for clues to the stock market in the Torah. That was a movie that started with its protagonist confessing to purposely scorching his retinas as a child by looking directly at the sun, and ended with him trepanning his skull with a power tool to quiet the frenzy in his head.
Then came Requiem for a Dream, his hard-hitting, hip-hop influenced addiction drama, based on the novel by Hubert Selby Jr, and forever burned into this viewer’s brain thanks to that brutal crossfading finale featuring junkie Jared Leto’s necrotic arm being sawn off and diet-pill-addicted Ellen Burstyn undergoing electro-shock therapy. I remember Aronofsky likening the effect of reading Selby’s prose to being “punched in the solar plexus” and wanting to share that experience with audiences. I also remember thinking, ‘This is my kind of filmmaker.’
We’ll skip over the metaphysical New Age nonsense of The Fountain for now and bodyslam straight into The Wrestler, a cinematic mea culpa for its star, Mickey Rourke, the bridge-burning 1980s’ Hollywood could-a-been who left the industry to pursue an ill-advised boxing career, destroyed his face and memory in the process, and re-emerged in the early 2000s as a bit-part heavy, until Aronofsky returned him briefly to the A-list with this tale of a broken-down wrestler seeking redemption. Upping the corporeal punishment by making Rourke’s Randy ‘the Ram’ Robinson a juicer with a heart condition, the character’s self-loathing reached its wince-inducing apotheosis not in the ring, but in a supermarket, with Randy spontaneously tendering his resignation for his low-paid deli counter job by jamming his hand into a meat slicer.
Then there’s Black Swan, that barmy Giallo-esque ballet freak-out, which, like The Wrestler, was also about the pain of performance, albeit this time finessed into a cautionary tale about pursuing perfection at all costs. Aronofsky even gave all those close-ups of contorted limbs and ankles and bloody toenail-ectomies an additional meta quality by making the psychic meltdown of Natalie Portman’s prima ballerina a consequence of her relationship with a ruthless director preying on her insecurities — a plot point that would likely inspire a more heated discourse today than it did back in 2010 (you can read my interview with Aronofsky from the time here).
And now there’s The Whale, a film that left me pretty cold (you can read why in my Scotsman review), but which takes Aronofsky’s appetite for self-castigating characters to a new extreme by casting Brendan Fraser as a morbidly obese shut-in intent on eating himself to death — an ouroborus moment, perhaps, for a filmmaker who may have gorged himself on this theme one too many times.