Tybout crafts movie mash-ups

“Black Swan” director Darren Aronofsky may be a director in profession, but he has the heart… “Black Swan” director Darren Aronofsky may be a director in profession, but he has the heart of a mashup artist.

After all, how else could you explain the fact that Aronofsky originally conceived “Black Swan” and “The Wrestler” as one movie? To many, this concept seems horribly incongruous: “The Wrestler” is a humble, humane drama firmly ensconced in real life; “Black Swan,” if the reviews are to be believed, is a morbid, Kafka-esque horror film.

For the record, Aronofsky had a surprisingly reasonable justification for the hybrid: “They [the two movies] are really connected and people will see the connections. It’s funny, because wrestling some consider the lowest art — if they would even call it art — and ballet some people consider the highest art. But what was amazing to me was how similar the performers in both of these worlds are. They both make incredible use of their bodies to express themselves.”

To me, this explanation begs the question: What really unites films? What makes them cohesive? Is it theme, as Aronofsky seems to be suggesting, or something more concrete (setting, characters, plot)?

To test the limits of this theory, I’ve compiled a list of film “remixes” — cinematic pairings that might cohere based on Aronofsky’s logic. If not stitched somehow together by a postmodern mad scientist, the below movies should at least be experienced in succession.

“Fight Club” and “Persona”: This pairing might offend fans of revered Swedish auteur Ingmar Bergman, who usually shudder at macho cult flicks like David Fincher’s “Fight Club.” It’s hard to extract a cogent synopsis from the former, but if pressed to summarize, “Persona” is the story of a renowned actress, Elisabeth, who has abruptly stopped speaking, and the attempts of her young nurse, Alma, to treat her ailment in an isolated vacation house Nevertheless, Fincher’s pulpy, visceral classic and Bergman’s moody art house drama occupy the same sentence because they both probe issues of identity, albeit in very different manners.

Not to tarnish these films with spoilers, but at the termination of both, it turns out that individual identities are less distinct than either set of protagonists would care to believe — as are the identities of “Fight Club” and “Persona” themselves.

“Apocalypse Now” and “Barton Fink”: The classic Vietnam epic and the Coen brothers’ black comedy about a writer in Hollywood are, as is also the case with many musical remixes, superficially incompatible. However, both chart a journey into a modern hell — in “Apocalypse Now” the hell is physical (Kurtz’s camp); in “Barton Fink,” partly mental and partly physical (Fink is in disarray at the end, and in a somewhat heavy-handed turn of events, his hotel floor catches fire). And like all good corruption sagas, both “Apocalypse” and “Barton” feature some memorably depraved sequences: In fact, the former can almost be reduced to a series of gruesome episodes. To avoid spoiling the latter, I’ll simply say that a very different side of John Goodman is on display.

“Being John Malkovich” and “The Truman Show”: Voyeurism is a theme that “Being John Malkovich” — a film in which a downtrodden man and his co-worker discover a tunnel that leads directly to John Malkovich’s mind, enabling them to control him — doesn’t so much explore as it does tackle head-on. Conversely, “The Truman Show” can credibly be deemed a movie about several themes — fate, independence, truth. The title characters in both films, however, are the subjects of a people’s unremitting meddling — at the expense of their own health and sanity, the desires, dreams and aspirations of a plurality are channeled into an unfortunate individual.

“8 1/2” and “Synecdoche, New York”: Federico Fellini’s 1963 masterpiece and Charlie Kaufman’s contemporary epic abound in similarities: both films feature protagonists struggling quixotically to realize their magnum opus — in the former, the protagonist is a movie director; in the latter, a theatre director. Loved ones are alienated, money is wasted and unwieldy, otherworldly sets take shape.

Naturally, a distinct metafictional strain permeates both films — “Synecdoche,” in particular, is a dense hall of theoretical mirrors — and to wrap your mind around their narrative architecture requires a discipline not usually demanded of audiences. For mind-bending ruminations on the relationship between art and life, “8 1/2” and “Synecdoche” make for an impressive — if imposing — doubleheader.