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Chapter 8

Self-Mutilation and Dark Love in Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan (2010) and Michael Haneke’s

The Piano Teacher (2001)

Karen A. Ritzenhoff

This chapter will address the dark side of female desire by comparing Michael Haneke’s The

Piano Teacher (2001) with Darren Aronofsky’s latest release Black Swan (2010). Both female

film protagonists violently harm themselves in these narratives while exploring their sexual

fantasies. In Haneke’s film the outcome remains ambiguous: the pianist, Erika Kohut (Isabelle

Huppert), walks out of the frame with a self-inflicted bleeding wound in her chest (fig.8.1.).

Aronofsky depicts the female protagonist Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman) as dying in the final

scene, and the frame fades to white before the credits start rolling. The melodramatic finale of

the movie could also be seen as a metaphor of transformation of the female virgin into a more

mature sexual being. In French, the window of time after an orgasm is called “the little death” (le

petit mort). As the film curator in the Museum of Sex in Manhattan explains to accompany a

video installation that depicts women postcoitus, this time of relaxation is unique to desire.1 The

ending of Black Swan could also be read as an illustration of a little death after the orgasmic

dance of the prima ballerina has been completed. Nina whispers, “Perfect. It was perfect,” before

the lights take over and she fades. As seen in fig.8.2., Nina supposedly bleeds to death as a result

of a wound in her abdomen that she caused by stabbing herself with a mirror shard in her

changing room before dancing the part of the sensuous black swan.
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Figure 8.1.: In Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher (2001), the Austrian pianist Erika

Kohut (Isabelle Huppert) stabs herself with a kitchen knife while standing in the lobby of

the concert hall in the final scene of the film. She refuses to perform.

Figure 8.2: The prima ballerina Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman) bleeds from a self-

inflicted wound at the end of her performance in Darren Aronofksy’s Black Swan (2010).

This chapter looks at the topic of masochism and its depiction in film, the trope of female desire

gone awry and the representation of sexual violence directed against one’s own body. It will

also discuss the metaphor of the “wound” to describe contemporary society and the

normalization of violence and sexuality in popular culture. Carol Clover’s (2005) argument

about “the Final Girl” in horror film will be considered to illustrate that the virtuousness of the

female lead is turned against herself: rather than eliminating the dark opponent (the serial killer,

leatherface, chainsaw massacre murderer) and unmanning “an oppressor whose masculinity was

in question to begin with” (2005, 81) as the sexually prudent last girl standing, the female

protagonist Nina directs the final blow against her own body. She is her biggest enemy. In some

way her femininity is in question, because she is unable to form heterosexual, romantic

relationships. This problem is so unacceptable that she seemingly kills her “old” self in the end.

Given the fact that Aronofsky floods the film with fictitious images that the female protagonist

sees (i.e., her legs are suddenly cracking, she sees membranes grow between her toes, and

ultimately her body is covered with black feathers as she dances the rites of the black swan), it is

also possible to read the ending of the film as symbolic: it could be suggested that even though

the persona of the “White Swan” ends, the character has been transformed, as seen in figure 8.3.,

in a more sexually conscious “black swan.” This would be a more affirmative reading of the
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sexual politics of this modern fairy tale. It is indeed the reversal of the Final Girl myth. Sexual

purity and abstinence now do not grant power, but being a virgin is framed as a potential

problem.

Figure 8.3: The dancer of the Black Swan has grown wings in her own imagination

that burst out of her upper torso. The audience euphorically applauds as she concludes

her solo.

When Nina is cast as the prima ballerina in the lead role of Swan Lake, she is presented

like a trophy by the artistic director Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel) to an exclusive group of

New York ballet supporters at an elegant gala event. The prima ballerina who precedes her, Beth

MacIntyre (Winona Ryder), calls her “you fucking whore” when Nina is escorted home by

Thomas, suggesting that she got the part because she had an affair with him. Thomas does show

interest in Nina but does not sleep with her. He takes her into his elegant apartment and asks her

to take a seat next to him on his couch. Thomas assures Nina that this kind of jealousy between

dancers is “typical.” Then he questions Nina about her sexual experience and explains that he

“thought it would be good to talk about the role. Ground us a little. I don’t want there to be any

boundaries between us.” When he interrogates Nina as to whether she has had boyfriends, she

becomes coy and replies, “a few, but no one serious.” As a result Thomas exclaims, “You are not

a virgin, are you?” When Nina tells him no, he confirms, “So, there is nothing to be embarrassed

about.” After sipping on his drink, Thomas asks, “and you enjoy making love?” Nina seems

upset. “Oh, come on, Sex, do you enjoy it?” When Nina laughs at him, he counters, “Well, we

need to be able to talk about this.” At this point Nina simply nods but does not reply. Thomas

turns more patronizing and treats her like a schoolgirl, clearly losing interest in her as an erotic
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target. “I got a little homework assignment for you. Go home, and touch yourself. Live a little.”

Then he gets up from the couch, leaves her behind, and tells her to get a cab home. When she

arrives in her apartment where she still lives a secluded life with her compulsive mother Erica

(Barbara Hershey), also a former prima ballerina, the mother treats her like a precious object and

displays sensuality toward her. She not only takes the pins out of Nina’s hair but also starts to

undress her (fig. 8.4.).

Figure 8.4. Nina’s mother Erica Sayers (Barbara Hershey) undresses Nina in front of a

mirror when she comes home.

Figure 8.5. Nina passionately kisses the artistic director of the ballett Thomas Leroy

(Vincent Cassel) after she has transformed herself into the Black Swan.

Figure 8.6. The mother cuts Nina’s fingernails in the bathroom, hurting her daughter in

the process. Scratch marks on Nina’s left should show that she has been hurting herself.

The mother tells Nina, ”I wish I could have been there. I guess he wanted you all to

himself. I can’t blame him.” Clearly, the mother sees herself as competing with the artistic

director who is perceived as a potential romantic suitor. The mother in Black Swan is as much a

catalyst for her gifted daughter’s psychotic behavior as the mother in The Piano Teacher.2 Once

Nina has succeeded in not only dancing the role but also transforming herself into a black swan,

literally growing black feathers that burst out of her skin, she also overcomes any inhibitions and

kisses Thomas passionately after the performance behind the scenes (fig.8.5). Ultimately, “living

a little” leads to destructive behavior and violence. There is a direct correlation between sexual

discovery and pain. Even Erica hurts Nina because she insists on still cutting her daughter’s
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fingernails once she discovers scratch marks on her daughter’s back (fig.8.6). The fact that Nina

starts to scratch and cut herself is paired with fantasy images of physical decay. In a vision,

Nina’s legs break, and her skin blisters with bloody bumps and is covered by little dots that will

later explode with black feathers. Sexual desire is symbolized by these changes of the skin, and

the dots appear when Nina is aroused, especially in a scene where she imagines making love to

another dancer, her alter ego, Lily (Mila Kunis). The female protagonists of the Black Swan and

The Piano Teacher explore the carnal and destructive power of sexuality when they tease their

male playmates with attempts of seduction. Yet ultimately they remain attracted to the same sex.

There are even allusions to incestuous relationships with their own, overbearing birth mothers. In

these fictive tales, the virtuous female is no longer saved but sacrifices herself. She is not

rewarded for her virtuosity but is punished because she is technically still a virgin.

In The Piano Teacher, an adaptation of Elfriede Jelinek’s novel, the sadomasochistic

pianist will be raped by her student and later stabs herself in the chest above the heart with a

knife, causing a bleeding wound. In Black Swan, the female lead kills herself with the shard of a

broken mirror that she pulls out of an open, bleeding, pulsating wound in her abdomen. Both

women are not engaged in normative heterosexual intercourse, and it seems as if they ultimately

punish themselves for not using their genitals in conventional ways. In both cases, sexual activity

is closely associated with disgust, surprise and repulsion, accompanied by abject fluids such as

vomit and blood.

Black Swan blatantly uses the metaphor of the “good/virtuous/white swan” versus the

“sexually devious/promiscuous/black swan.” To dance the role of the black swan, the protagonist

has to go on a sexual quest that results in self-mutilation and symbolic deflowering, not with a

phallus but a sharp, pointed object that gets stuck in the opening it causes. She overcomes her
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inhibitions by separating from her own self, splitting her identity. The dark side of love is

equivalent to a repressed, nonconformist sexuality that is deemed fatal to the woman when

released. Even though both films depict “normative” society as corrupted, alienating, lonely, and

void of meaning, the virgin cannot continue living once she has chosen a different path for

herself. Erika Kohut and Nina Sayers cut themselves to symbolize deflowering of their own

bodies and use auto-violence not to cause pleasure but to chastise themselves for not succeeding

in sexual transgressions with a partner. In that way, being a virgin for these protagonists is a

curse, not a reward. Erika and Nina do not conform to social expectations surrounding femininity

such as performing domestic duties — those chores are delegated entirely to their mothers, with

whom they still live — or bearing children but they also remove themselves from being capable

of forming meaningful relationships. Rather than directing their wrath against a male opponent

or monster (as the Final Girl does) and thereby rescuing others, they direct their anger against

themselves. The sexual revolution that has allowed women to make choices about their

reproductive rights and partners has regressed for these women into sexual abstinence,

unleashing a repressed, dysfunctional, and ultimately destructive sexual fantasy. It is as if

Aronofsky and Haneke show the path of the virtuous heroine after the end credits of the film

have faded: in a highly sexualized society, they are unable to function as virgins.

Figure 8.7. The music student Walter Klemmer (Benoît Magimel) reads a letter from his

piano teacher instructing him to perform sadistic acts of punishment while she listens to

him. Erika assures him that he should to worry about her overbearing mother who is

trying to intrude into the room.

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In The Piano Teacher, the male student, Walter Klemmer (Benoît Magimel), who is the

focus of ill-guided attraction, tells his teacher, Erika, that she is sick and suggests therapy after

reading her hand-written letter instructing him to perform sadistic acts of punishment upon her

(such as slapping and hitting) and different variations of physical domination.3 He also has to

admire her hidden tools that she keeps in a box under her bed. The student initially refuses to be

drawn into her written demands for a sickening and demeaning power play and abuse.4 A

reoccurring theme in Haneke’s films is the difference between imagined, televised, and

advertised violence and the actual violence directed against the body itself (Ritzenhoff 2009). As

long as sexual acts are represented in pornographic title pages of magazines and adult movies,

the violence is made to seem socially acceptable. Once the plea for mistreatment is fulfilled by

the student, who invades her personal space, her private home, and rapes her mercilessly on the

floor of the apartment’s corridor, in front of the mother’s bedroom where the matriarch is held

captive behind the locked door, the pianist is horrified by her face being violated, her blood

gushing from her nose and lip, and ultimately her raped body. She requests that her hands be

spared.

Even before the climactic final sequences, the female leads experiment with hurting

themselves. Although the pianist is being physically harmed by her student towards the end of

the film, she experiments with herself earlier by cutting her own genitals with a razor blade, as I

will discuss. It is not clear whether this act of self-hatred is arousing to her or not. Haneke does

not seem to imply that she wants to cut her vagina so that no intercourse will be possible but

rather that this is an act of quiet defiance against her repressive relationship with her mother. It is

as if she is sexually confused: the imagined violence exerted by a man during S&M foreplay

preceding intercourse (as she desires in her letter) is replaced by her own mutilation. It does not
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seem to be a pleasurable exercise and bears no similarity to masturbation. There is a definite

tension between romantic love and pornography as well as transgressional sexual practices in

The Piano Teacher: Erika Kohut frequently watches pornography (fig. 8.8) that she checks out at

a video store and also tries to voyeuristically peak into cars as couples have sex in a drive-in

theater. It is as if she is gazing through a keyhole like a peeping tom.

Figure 8.8. Erika watches porn; she is surrounded by disapproving men.

Figure 8.9. Erika harms herself in the bathroom. She holds a handheld mirror and

watches her genitals while cutting her vagina in a ritualist manner. Her mother is calling

her to dinner and she responds diligently: “Coming, Mama.”

One of the key scenes of Haneke’s film takes place in the bathroom, when Erika Kohut is

alone, after having locked the door to prevent her elderly mother (Annie Girardot) from entering.

She is checking herself in the bathroom mirror and looks at her genitals with a handheld mirror

while she performs the cutting. Kohut spreads her legs while sitting fully dressed on the rim of a

bathtub in the Vienna apartment; while she cuts her vagina, the viewer’s access to this violent act

is shielded by her leg (fig. 8.9). That the actual act of cutting is not shown on screen (because her

genitals are hidden behind her legs) is typical for Haneke’s directorial style, but the effect, the

blood running down the white bathtub in one thin streak, is clearly visible. Erika exercises the

self mutilation in a seemingly well-rehearsed manner during a four-minute continuous take that

is self-contained. The scene starts with her taking a razor blade from her leather purse on the left

of the frame. She approaches the cutting like a ceremony, as if following a prerehearsed script.

Each object (the blade, handheld mirror, hygienic pad, and paper towel) is part of the painful
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ritual. Erika walks from the left side of the little bathroom to the sink and then to the right side

where the tub is located. There she takes a small mirror and places it between her legs, watching

her genitals while holding the mirror in her left hand. She cuts with her right hand. There is not a

single close-up of her face; in fact, only slight sighing can be heard, and her facial expressions

are hidden behind a lock of hair. After the cutting, she rinses out the bathtub and takes a large

hygienic pad from a bag that is placed right next to the bathtub, suggesting that she does not use

tampons for menstruation and may still be a virgin.5 Erika continues the cleanup, and the blood

runs down the drain. Even the razor blade is wrapped in paper again and returned to the handbag

she carries to work, bringing closure to the scene because she returns to the exact location in

front of the purse, ending the scene on the same framing as it had started. Then Erika brushes her

hair in front of the larger bathroom mirror as if to be a good girl before dinner, because her

mother has called her to come eat. The intrusion of the mother’s presence with a voice from off

screen is similar to Black Swan where mother and daughter also live in close proximity and the

bathroom, not the bedroom, is a site of privacy. Neither protagonist, although seemingly grown

up and even approaching middle age,6 owns a key to her room and has to barricade the door to

prevent the mother from entering.7 Erika’s mother is also used to checking her daughter’s bags

when she comes home at night. The Piano Teacher starts with an interrogation by the mother

who discovers that Erika has bought a dress. In reality, the daughter was visiting porn stores, but

she is able to hide her voyeuristic activities from her intrusive mother (fig. 8.10).

Figure 8.10. The elderly mother (Annie Girardot) controls every aspect of her

daughter’s life. She even checks Erika’s purse when she comes home. She does

not know that Erika watches porn at night and hides a razor blade in her bag.
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Another important formal cinematic element in the bathroom scene is sound. Since

Haneke rarely uses any extradiegetic music, natural sound bears much importance in his films to

construct meaning. The bathroom is filled with the muffled noise of the television set that is

constantly on and watched by the mother in her free time. Once Erika opens the door, the sound

swells up, and she will ask her mother for permission to switch the TV off. The camera’s point of

view will gaze through the open door of the dining room where the two women exchange polite

conversation until the mother notices blood running down her daughter’s leg. She claims that

looking at it is not “very appetizing.” The mother refers to the blood as a sign of Erika’s

menstrual period, whereas the source of the blood is actually the wound Erika caused by Erika’s

cutting. Blood and desire have to remain hidden in the private sphere and are associated with

shame and guilt. Jean Ma interprets this dialogue between mother and daughter and clarifies that

the audience knows that Erika’s blood on her leg is not linked to menstruation:

At the same time, this juxtaposition of the shocking and banal refracts back onto the

female body in order to render it strange, uneasy, menaced. Their exchange frames

Erika’s auto-mutilation not as symptom of self-alienation but rather as self-reference to

the body, achieved by a violent mimicking of the biological processes that mark sexual

difference. Erika’s actions ultimately construe femininity as a wound, a wound that

appears as a natural condition but whose origins in fact lie elsewhere. (Ma 2010, 523)

In the shot immediately following this scene, Haneke cuts to the public display of porn

magazines in a store, depicting nude women in different sexual poses. These magazines are
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accessible to the public but only legitimately to an adult, mostly male, paying audience. Erika

runs into one of her male, teenage students in the porn store where she looks at recorded tapes. In

the subsequent piano lesson, she chastises him cruelly for being a “pig” and threatens to tell his

mother about the voyeuristic transgression. He apologizes to her as if she was a pars pro toto for

all women who are depicted in pornography in demeaning poses. Erika has no sexual interest in

him and coldly dismisses his feeble attempts to claim that he is sorry.8

In the first explicitly sexual encounter between the student Walter and the piano teacher,

she chooses a public space, the women’s bathroom, as the site. Walter had followed her there,

asking her to come out of the cubicle where she went to the bathroom (Haneke lingers on the

natural sound of peeing) and then attempts to shower her with kisses. Instead of responding to

his impulsive passion, Erika asks not to be touched and starts instead to masturbate him while

demanding authoritatively that he neither move nor talk. Each time he does, she either hurts him

or stops her actions altogether. She bites his genitals and this clearly evokes the association of

castration anxiety. Walter is uncomfortable, sexually frustrated, and confused. It is suggested

cynically by Walter after the bizarre encounter that she needs more practice so as not to hurt him,

falsely assuming that she is interested in a normative, romantic relationship, despite the power

differential between teacher and student. He does not have an orgasm when she handles him but

she forbids him to touch himself. This is only the prelude to even more disturbing encounters

where the viewer is coerced into watching intimate moments as a voyeur, although body parts

are never shown. Walter is clearly upset by his inability to respond to her touch. “You should

know what you can and can’t do to a man,” he claims. But she clearly does not know. He frames

her “treatment” as humiliating. Erika Kohut does not know how to perform sexual favors for a

man without hurting him; neither does she know how to please herself. She instead hurts herself
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with the cutting. The idea of pleasure and physical sexuality are undermined and replaced by

Erika’s voyeuristic gazing at porn videos and trying to watch sexual behaviors of lovers. She

imagines intimacy but can only revert to violent mechanics of lovemaking, not to the emotions.

In this way, her virtuosity and sexual inexperience come to haunt her as a virgin in middle age.

What used to be desirable in the context of horror films, namely purity, leads in Haneke’s film to

the reversal of the Final Girl myth. The self-directed violence creates an open wound, once in the

intimate area of the body and once above the heart. This depicts repressed sexuality as a defect

that cannot be released in transgressional sexual practices (Walter refuses to play into her sexual

fantasies) but leads to self-abjection.

Mother-Daughter Relationships

There is a clear correlation between forbidden sexuality and the mother. Erika will once try to

kiss and cuddle up next to and then on top of her mother whose bed she shares at night (on her

absent father’s side of the marital bed), instead of sleeping in her bedroom. Erika states at the

end of this dysfunctional encounter that she has seen her mother’s pubic hair, thereby sexualizing

the speech as well as her actions toward her mother. Contrary to her repeatedly dismissive and

rejectful interactions with Walter, she initiates the approach to her mother in bed, impulsively

and clumsily. Erika infantilizes herself. The mother reacts to her daughter’s transgressions much

as Walter who claims that she repulses him; this is particularly the case after she throws up in the

aftermath of another failed sexual encounter: “Sorry, you stink so much, no one will ever come

close to you,” he tells her crudely. It is as if he has started to consent to her sick games of abuse

and subordination. When Walter eventually comes to sleep with her and enters her on the floor,

she begs him to stop, horrified at the actual invasion of her body. The violence has moved from
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description and imagination to action; it has left the domain of the handwritten letter with

sadistic sexual demands and starts to take a life of its own. Erika’s vagina has no longer just a

symbolic function but is now crudely violated. This violation occurs without any of the sex toys

or bondage paraphernalia Erika originally desired for this act of deflowering. Walter warns her

that “you have to give a little,” but she lies beneath him like a log, unable to move, unable to

respond to his attempts to caress her, unable to object more heavily. He appeals to her, “Love

me, please,” but she is not touching him at all. After he leaves, she slowly crouches up, clearly in

pain, and opens the door to her mother’s bedroom by turning the key. Part of her fantasy had

been to leave her mother outside the room during her sexual escapades. By turning the key, Erika

allows her mother back into her private sphere where she has now been victimized. This was

exactly what her mother had worried about when Erika had brought Walter home for the first

time. Yet it is not Erika’s mother who commits physically violent transgressions as Nina’s

mother does when she hurts her daughter while cutting her nails (see figure 8.5.); rather, the

violation is perpetrated by the male invader into the shared female space of the apartment.

Haneke had suggested in the previous interactions between mother and daughter that their

relationship was deeply fraught and indeed reflected some of the sickening power play that Erika

was asking for in a relationship with her male student. In the logic of the film, the physical

violence that is exerted by the intruder is a latent result of the psychological dysfunction and

emotional stagnation (“glaciation” —Vereisung — as Haneke describes as interpersonal conflict

in several of his films) between mother and daughter. Rather than rescuing Erika from her

mother’s domineering presence, Walter pushes her deeper into dependence. There is no reason

for him to rescue the damsel-in-distress because she cannot satisfy him sexually.
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Normalcy after the traumatic event is seemingly restored when Erika is seen in the next

shot, dressed in formal black and white clothes, getting ready to perform at a piano concert. Her

mother gets her ready as if she is a child who needs supervision and accompanies her to the

concert hall. But Erika packs a large kitchen knife in her purse and stabs herself after Walter

passes her casually in the lobby. Instead of performing on stage, she walks out of the hall, the

blood slowly seeping through her white blouse before she steps outside without a coat and

disappears off frame into the cold evening. This escape from conflict, caused by repressed sexual

desire and the exaggerated expectations of an overbearing mother, bears similarity to the

narrative in Black Swan. In Aronofsky’s film, the protagonist is seemingly surprised by self-

inflicted violence. When Nina Sayers (Portman) discovers that she has stabbed herself and is

bleeding to death, she is astonished and begins to sob and cry.

In one of the more explicitly sexual scenes, the protagonist comes back to her small New

York apartment after a night of partying. The mother, Erica Sayers (Barbara Hershey), has been

waiting and confronts her, asking about her whereabouts. Nina rebuffs her by announcing that

she has “fucked them all” and gives the first names of two men. Again, the daughter does not

have a key to her bedroom and barricades the door with a dresser to be alone with her female

companion, Lily. “Don’t come in here,” she warns her mother. She experiences an erotic fantasy

with Lily whose naked back reveals the tattooed two wings of a black swan, suggesting that she

is the antithesis of the white swan. Initially it seems ambiguous whether Lily is really in the

bedroom or Nina is experiencing another of her surrealist sexual fantasies. Aronofsky suggests

that Lily is indeed Nina’s alter ego, representing the more mature sexual woman who is

experienced, sensual, and seductive, all the qualities Nina is supposed to acquire to dance the

role of the black swan convincingly on opening night. At one point Nina no longer looks into
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Lily’s face but into her own while she experiences an orgasm, followed by the “petit mort” (the

little death). In that brief afterglow, Nina suddenly sees her own face in lieu of Lily’s. The

director might suggest that the discovery of sexual pleasure is fraught. Another interpretation is

that Nina turns into her fantasy of a sexually active woman, Lily, when she allows herself to let

go of her sexual inhibitions. Sexual pleasure is not induced by intercourse but by same-sex

intimacy. However, Nina’s attitude toward the other side of herself, her sexual side, is fraught

with anger. “It is my turn,” she will exclaim in another fantasy scene when faced with Lily, who

seems to get ready for the big scene of the black swan, in her changing room. Lily tries to replace

Nina and take over the dancer’s role (fig. 8.11). This is the turning point of the entire film

because Nina supposedly stabs her opponent to pave the way for the second act of the big

ballet’s opening night, where she now has to perform as the black swan (fig. 8.12). Once she

stabs Lily, her eyes turn blood red and her face is grimaced by her anger. In several of the shots,

Lily turns into Nina, suggesting the confusion of identity: the white swan and the black swan

merge.

Figure 8.11. Nina tries to strangle her alter ego. This time she is wearing the dress of the

Black Swan. Her persona has merged with the Black Swan and she is killing the sexually

less experienced White Swan.

Figure 8.12. Nina (this time in the costume of the White Swan) kills her Black Swan

alter ego Lily (Mila Kunis) with the pointed shard from a broken mirror, shattering her

identity. Lily is dead on the ground, lying in a field of broken glass. Nina discovers later

that she has stabbed herself in the abdomen and that the dead body only existed in her

fantasy.
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Through the metaphor of the black swan the melodramatic story is coined of the young,

highly competitive ballet dancer in New York who has missed puberty and its sexual revelations

while diligently practicing in the studio for her career. In this regard she is similar to the pianist

in Michael Haneke’s film, because both have to put their personal lives on hold to succeed as

artists in solo careers. Both are directed by their overbearing mothers who tightly control every

move of their daughters to guarantee success. Both characters lack a father figure and have a

conflicted attitude towards heterosexual sex and sensuality. While the piano teacher checks out

porn tapes in the video store and voyeuristically gazes at sexual activity through car windows in

drive-in movie theaters as if peeking through a keyhole, the prima ballerina orchestrates her own

fantastic encounters in her mind. The sexual fantasy of both women is deemed nonconformist

because it displays elements of masochism. Once Nina reaches the top of her ambitions and is

cast as the prima ballerina in Swan Lake, this exact virtue of professional discipline as a dancer

and sexual abstinence, being still virtuous, comes to haunt her. The lascivious choreographer

Thomas gives her the task of finding sexual pleasure to be able to more realistically depict the

passionate black swan, the dark side of love. Rather than going to a bar and picking up a

stranger, or even more conveniently starting an affair with the ballet master himself, the prima

ballerina engages in sexual fantasies that are ultimately fatal.

Nina begins to harm herself, cutting, slicing, tearing off fingernails and skin, violently

altering her body, a process that also changes her mind. This is a strong reference to the abject

quality of femininity, linked to one of the key ingredients of the horror film (Creed, 2005). At

one point, her toes are sutured together similar to a swan’s foot. In addition, there are the two

main, above-mentioned scenes to mark sexual desire gone awry. Both entail that Nina sees her
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sensual rival, Lily, as being her opponent as well as playmate. Initially, she has a sexual fantasy

in her bedroom where she is making love to her while Lily kisses her genitals. The fact that Nina

suddenly sees her own face, making love to herself, suggests that she is actually not with a

partner, unable to experience pleasure with another person. It had been suggested by the ballet

master that she should start exploring her own sexuality and initially Nina tries to masturbate,

caught “in the act” by her mother who violates her personal space repeatedly. In the second

scene at the theater, Nina supposedly kills her rival just before going back on stage to dance the

part of the Black Swan: she will actually transform into the swan and grow first black feathers,

then wings. When returning to the changing room, Nina discovers that there is no blood,

emanating from the bathroom where she had shoved Lily’s dead body. Instead, she looks down

on herself and watches a gushing red hole in her stomach. Similar to David Cronenberg’s

Videodrome (1972) protagonist who discovers a large gushing wound in his abdomen that looks

like an open vagina, Nina’s “wound” could also be seen as the orifis. By administering the fatal

blow with the shard of a broken mirror that she will pull out of the hole herself, she has

metaphorically deflowered herself to be able to dance the sexual death rite.

Precursors in Film History

When discussing these two films, two different filmic parallels come to mind. One is

Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), where the female lead is killed off in the shower by a psychotic

serial killer and the blood runs down the drain, mingling with a close-up of the dead eye in a

dissolve. This is a stylistic parallel to The Piano Teacher because both scenes take place in the

bathroom and both show blood draining off into a hole. On a different level, the image of the

overbearing mother figure, of course, plays a large part in the Psycho narrative. The more vivid
 18

filmic precedent can be found in Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers (1972). There, one of

three sisters, Karin (Ingrid Thulin), cuts her vagina with a broken wine glass. Both acts of

violence in these two anteceding films relate to female desire. In Hitchcock, the protagonist is

punished for desiring an extramarital affair and running away with her boss’s money, which is

ironically not the motive for the murder. In Bergman, the protagonist is cutting herself, harming

her genitals, which can then no longer be penetrated by a male partner, her coldhearted husband,

during intercourse. In Hitchcock and Bergman, the female victim is clearly not a virgin. In

Haneke, the act of self-mutilation could very well be a self-induced deflowering. The scene

remains ambiguous as to what the driving force behind Erika’s cutting is. The main difference

between Bergman and Haneke/Aronofsky is that in the latter the act of cutting is supposed to

evoke lust. In Cries and Whispers, the oldest sister Karin is the one who is most unhappily

married to a much older, rich, distant and bigoted man. She clearly hates him. When she has cut

herself on a chair in front of her marital bed chamber, she licks her lips. There is no visible blood

and her white nightgown seems impeccable. There are drops of perspiration on her forehead after

the cuts have been administered to her vagina with a glass shard. She enters the bedroom, sees

her husband, walks past him without talking, and lies down on her side of the bed. Bergman cuts

to a reaction shot by the husband who looks irritated and seems to disapprove of her. When the

camera cuts back to Karin in bed, her hands are covered in blood and she has spread her legs as

if she was in the act of giving birth. Then she covers her mouth with her blood and tastes it. She

grins triumphantly at her husband. Karin has altered her body and created a wound that will

prohibit her husband from sexual intercourse, disabling her body. Contrary to the cutting scenes

in The Piano Teacher and Black Swan, her self-mutilation seems to provide her with jouissance,

satisfaction, and triumph over her abhorrent husband. The act of cutting is not a self-imposed
 19

punishment for being sexually frigid but a means to ensure sexual, marital abstinence. The next

scene in Cries and Whispers switches to Karin’s younger sister, Maria (Liv Ullmann), calling her

name. “Don’t come near me, I can’t stand anybody touching me,” Karin exclaims. The middle

sister, Agnes (Harriet Andersson) has just died of cancer, comforted by the maid, Anna (Kari

Sylwan), who has an affectionate, sensual and protective relationship with the suffering patient.

She often allows Agnes to lie like a nursing child on her bare chest in bed evoking a lesbian

relationship. This ritual also has allusions to the affections between a mother and daughter.

Agnes has lost her own daughter to an illness, as the film suggests repeatedly; the maid prays in

memory of the dead child each day in her bedroom, where the empty crib still remains next to

her bed.

Maria tries to kiss her older sister on the mouth and face as if she were her lover,

covering her with affection and after initial resistance, Karin responds reluctantly. She announces

earlier, “I can’t. I can’t stand it. … I can’t breathe any longer. All that guilt. Nein…leave me

alone. Don’t touch me.” In Bergman, women’s pleasure is unlived. Neither one of the three

sisters has a fulfilling sexual life, repressing their hidden emotions and concealing their desires

behind iron masks of disgust and despair. These Victorian women are different from the pianist

Erika and the ballett dancer, Nina. Bergman’s characters belong into the nineteenth century

where women were locked into roles and unhappy marriages, surrounded by lies, hatred, and

boredom. They are repulsed by the touch. The similarity between all the women in the films is

their desire to be caressed, but only Agnes, the dying sister, can openly express her need, most

explicitly in death. When she awakens after being declared dead by the family doctor, she has

tears in her eyes. She begs her two sisters to come into her bedroom and comfort her so she can

leave in peace. Neither Maria nor Karin are willing to be close to their dead sister. They shy
 20

away, disgusted, disturbed and run away. The next day, they are back in the elegant estate after

the funeral, in their fine costumes and masquerades, surrounded by their two malign, inept

husbands. Anna, the maid, is the only one who is willing to bid Agnes farewell, although in an

unusually intimate manner that suggests an erotic bond. The connection that the sisters have is

different from the mother-daughter relationship displayed in Haneke and Aronofsky’s films, but

it also transgresses social boundaries. In contrast to Erika and Nina, Bergman’s three sisters are

filled with shame and regret. They are locked into heterosexual relationships that are unfulfilling,

and they derive pleasure from hurting themselves and others. In The Piano Teacher and Black

Swan, the female protagonists are their own worst enemies and remove themselves because they

do not seem to fit in a society that is filled with lies (similar to Bergman’s cosmos) and where

sexuality is regulated by their mothers. The black swan will have to dance her role to please a

paying audience and guarantee the fiscal success of the ballet company and its elitist clientele —

but her mother sits in the front row and glances at her throughout the performance. The pianist

refuses to play for the public in the end. Her seclusion as an artist leads her to be incompetent in

her everyday life.

The Open Wound and Violence

To engage with the subject of the open wound addressed in the films by Aronofsky and Haneke,

the work of Mark Seltzer in True Crime (2007) is helpful. Seltzer connects the desire of

audiences to watch violence in the mass media as indicative of modern society where voyeurism

is part of everyday communication patterns: “If the unobserved life, on this view, is not worth

living, then living one’s life cannot be separated from its media doubling” (Seltzer 2007, 10).

The author describes the role of the audience in media representations of violence.
 21

Hence, the spectacle of violent crime provides a point of attraction and identification, an

intense individualization of these social conditions, albeit a socialization via the media

spectacle of wounding and victimization. To the extent that action, like motive, must be

attributed to individuals, these small and intense melodramas of the wound acclimatize

readers and viewers to take these social conditions personally. These social conditions

then, in turn, take on the form of a pathological public sphere. (Seltzer 2007, 10)

As pointed out in Jean Ma’s text on The Piano Teacher, Haneke constructs Erika’s

actions as construing “femininity as a wound” (Ma 2010, 523). There is indeed a “spectacle” of

violence in both The Piano Teacher and Black Swan. The difference from conventional horror

movies, though, is the fact that the respective female protagonist is not turned into a heroine at

the end of the films for remaining virtuous and eliminating the monstrous opponents, but rather

she becomes the victim of her own self-destruction and self-hatred. No longer is the male

opponent seen as the cause of evil, but the mother, and by extension the virtuousness of the

female lead is not rewarded but punished. Both Erika and Nina perform in the public sphere as

artists, pushed into leading roles as pianist and dancer by their critical, imposing and controlling

mothers. Both young women go insane, caught between their unfulfilled sexual desire and the

expectations toward their talents, measured by an unforgiving audience. Both manage to stay in

the public sphere of the filmic audience despite the fact of harming their bodies in their private

sphere. Violence on their terms is a spectacle, directed at their own body. The spectacle of

watching suffering is transferred from the stage (of the recital hall or the theater) to the audience

in front of the movie screen: the viewers of these two movies engage in a voyeuristic journey in

which they witness self mutilation as an aberration of the conventional horror movie narrative as
 22

described by Clover. There is ultimately no male intervention to avenge violence committed

against the female body. The “wound” and “victimization” are part of an intensely voyeuristic

spectacle but are more reflections of the sexual confusion of the female heroines than their

virtuous control over their own bodies. The other players in the film (mothers, lovers, colleagues,

students, teachers) have lost control over the women’s bodies, and the genital area is stripped of

its desirability. The two female protagonists in Black Swan and The Piano Teacher are in charge

of their own sexuality and sex but they fail instead of triumphing over this capacity to control. In

this way, both film directors show a regressive, dark side of love and sexuality, an outgrowth of

women’s liberation that has ultimately gotten out of control when women determine their own

fate. However, if one embraces the idea that Nina has found her sexual Other in the final scene of

the film by killing off her old self through the insertion of the shard, the film’s conclusion would

be less fatalistic. Nina could still be considered dead at the end, but her new identity as the

seductive black swan would have come to life. It could be argued that her surrealistic visions of

herself in the mirror and the struggle with herself in her bedroom and the changing room would

prepare her for this transformation. This interpretation would actually suggest that female desire

could emerge once abstinence and virginity were recognized by a woman as flawed and

repressive.

Works Cited

Addison, Heather, Mary Kate Goodwin-Kelly and Elaine Roth. 2009. Motherhood

Misconceived: Representing the Maternal in U.S. Films. New York: State University of New

York Press.
 23

Clover, Carol J. 2005. “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film.” Horror: The Film

Reader. ed. Mark Jancovich: 77-89.

Creed, Barbara. 2005. “Horror and the Monstruous-Feminine. An Imaginary Abjection.” Horror:

The Film Reader. ed. Mark Jancovich: 67-76.

Grundman, Roy. 2010. A Companion to Michael Haneke. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

Ma, Jean. 2010. “Discordent Desires, Violent Refrains. La Pianiste (The Piano Teacher). A

Companion to Michael Haneke. Ed. Roy Grundman. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. 511-531.

Kaplan, E. Ann. (1992). Motherhood and Representation: The Mother in Popular Culture and

Melodrama. London/New York: Routledge.

Naqvi, Fatima. 2010. Trügerische Vertrautheit: Filme von Michael Haneke. Wien: Synema.

Ritzenhoff, Karen A. 2010. Screen Nightmares: Video, Fernsehen und Gewalt im Film.

Marburg: Schüren Verlag.

---. 2009. “The Frozen Family: Emotional Dysfunction and Consumer Society in Michael

Haneke’s Films.” Sex and Sexuality in a Feminist World. Eds. Karen A. Ritzenhoff and

Katherine A. Hermes. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 71-88.

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Seltzer, Mark. 2007. True Crime. Observations on Violence and Modernity. New York:

Routledge.

Warren, Charles. 2010. “The Unknown Piano Teacher.” A Companion to Michael Haneke. Ed.

Roy Grundman. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. 495-510.

Filmed

Black Swan. Directed by Darren Aronofsky. USA. 2010.

Cries and Whispers. Directed by Ingmar Bergman. Sweden. 1972.

Piano Teacher, The. Directed by Michael Haneke. France. 2001.

Psycho. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. USA, 1960.

Videodrome. Directed by David Cronenberg. Canada. 1972.

Notes

1 The Museum of Sex in Manhattan features an exhibit on Sex and the Moving Image. As part of

the film display, a section is devoted to Beautiful Agony, amateur videos about women who

experience orgasm and the “little death” that follows it. The accompanying program text spells

out that “those short films paired with audio are tremendously intimate, separating the essence of

an orgasm from a specific sex act” .

2 In both films, the mother figures have displaced their own desires to further the artistic careers

of their talented daughters. Nina’s mother used to be a dancer herself and has constructed a life

narrative that makes her daughter be indebted to her for sacrificing her life. This is a common

trope in mother-daughter relationships and maternal melodramas as E. Ann Kaplan has studied
 25

(1992) as a topic of film history in her seminal book on Motherhood and Representation: The

Mother in Popular Culture and Melodrama. Heather Addison et al. (2009) also addresses the

complexity of changing mothering roles in modern society in her coedited volume on

Motherhood Misconceived: Representing the Maternal in U.S. Films.

3 The student reads excerpts of the letter on camera and spells out the sexual fantasies. “Then,

gag me with some stockings I will have ready. Stuff them in so hard that I’m incapable of

making any sounds. Next, take off the blindfold please, and sit on my face and punch me in the

stomach to force me to thrust my tongue in your behind.” (…) “For that is my dearest wish.

Hands and feet tied behind my back and locked up next door to my mother out of her reach

behind my bedroom door, till the next morning…If you catch me disobeying any of your orders,

hit me, please, even with the back of your hand on my face. Ask me why I don’t cry out for my

mother or why I don’t fight back. Above all, say things like that so that I realize just how

powerless I am.” Jean Ma (2010, 516) transcribes this monologue in her article “Discordant

Desires, Violent Refrains” in A Companion to Michael Haneke.

4 Walter asks his teacher what the acts of violence would “open” for him? Similar to the

metaphor of the keyhole that Erika cannot cover to avoid her mother’s intrusive gaze, the letter is

regarded as an opening to her sexual fantasy life. This could be seen as a metaphor for the

“opening” of her sexual desires that she wants to share with her student. Even though Walter is

appauled, he is also intrigued by her subordination to his gaze. She crouches in front of him on

the floor and shows him the toys she keeps in a box under her bed as if to share her favorite

stuffed animals with a playmate. She displays ropes, chains and even a black rubber hood,

linking her fantasy to S&M fetishized objects.

 26

5 The fact that Erika uses large cotton liners and no tampons is possibly an indication that she is

still infantilized by her mother who controls her every move. It does also suggest a certain

youthfulness about her sexuality and a possible insecurity towards her body. When cutting

herself, she can indeed control the flow of blood. However, when Walter comes to rape her, he

first hits her face and blood is gushing from her lip and her nose. The mother’s control smothers

Erika most of the time and she can live her own sexual desires only when watching porn outside

the shared home. Despite the matriarchal presence during the rape, Erika’s mother is unable

protect her in this physically violent scene. Whenever Erika leaves the house and returns, her

mother checks her bags. Erika is not horrified by blood or other fluids. In fact, in the unrated

director’s cut of the film, she is seen in a cabin at the porn store she frequents, picking up a paper

tissue that is soaked with semen. She sniffs it and then presses it against her nose while she

watches the sex tapes on concurrent screens, inhaling the scent.

6
Isabelle Huppert was 36 years old when she played the role of Erika Kohut.

7 Fatima Naqvi (2010) has written about the significance of keys and keyholes in The Piano

Teacher in conjunction to voyeurism and sexuality.

8
Erika rebukes her student harshly: “What for? Sorry isn’t enough if I don’t know why. Are you

sorry because you’re a pig, or because your friends are pigs? Or because all women are bitches

for making you a pig?”