I don’t often write movie reviews. Usually, whatever I have to say has been said first — and much better — by someone else. The last time I was provoked into a serious post by a film was nearly two years ago, when I wrote rhapsodically about The Wrestler. And it is another Darren Aronofsky film that has me writing about a movie again. I saw Black Swan on Friday and was shaken, stimulated, and moved. Featuring a staggering and deservedly-celebrated performance from Natalie Portman, Black Swan struck me as a searing and quasi-feminist commentary on the 21st century cult of perfectionism which does so much damage to so many young women.
I urge you to see this movie.
Because the film is not yet in wide release, and because there are spoilers ahead, everything else is below the fold.
The film centers on a New York ballet company’s decision to stage a new version of Swan Lake, the great Tchaikovsky classic. The charismatic and dictatorial director Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel) wants to offer an updated version of the staple show with one ballerina dancing both the virginal “White Swan” and the dark, seductive “Black Swan.” The former requires a dancer with technical perfection; a chaste ingenue. The latter part calls for a dancer who can be wild, imprecise, rawly predatory. Leroy chooses Nina (Natalie Portman) to dance the twin roles, tossing aside his aging prima ballerina Beth (a perfect Winona Ryder), and assigning the understudy’s role to Lily (Mila Kunis). Lily is a natural for the Black Swan role, but Leroy is convinced he can transform the shy, reserved, compulsive Nina into a dancer capable of shifting effortlessly between the two different parts. As the anorexic Nina desperately tries to become what Leroy wants her to be, she slips slowly into madness, struggling with hallucinations and paranoia as opening night approaches.
The fifth major character in the film is Nina’s mother (a brilliant Barbara Hershey, who stays in control of a part that a lesser actress would have taken to camp). Though Nina is obviously an adult, she lives in a state of childlike dependency with her mother, a former dancer herself and painter who helps dress and undress her daughter and tuck her into bed at night. (Nina’s room, pink and filled with stuffed animals and music boxes, looks like a twelve year-old’s fantasy world.)
The rest of the plot can be found online (or better yet, you can see it for yourself in the theater.) The five major performers (Portman, Kunis, Ryder, Hershey, Cassel) are all magnificent, and Portman and Hershey in particular deserve Oscar recognition in their respective categories. The soundtrack (which I downloaded as soon as I got home from the theater) is superb, mixing Tchaikovsky’s original score with Clint Mansell’s dark and haunting melodies. The film is sumptuously beautiful to look at, all the more remarkable because cinematographer Matthew Libatique eschews wide shots and relies on hand-held medium range and close-up takes for much of the picture. It is frightening at times, and there are moments of graphic violence. For a host of reasons, some may have trouble sleeping after seeing it. Your mileage may vary.
Before I get into a feminist take on the film, I’ll note that I grew up loving the ballet. When I was about seven, my mother took me to see the famous 1966 film of Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet starring Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn in the title roles. I was hooked, and have loved ballet ever since. Had I been a nimble little girl instead of a large and clumsy boy, I might have been sent to ballet classes (I don’t think even in my progressive family in the early Seventies that a boy would have been sent to learn dance.) As I grew up, I went to live ballet when I could, and still do.
I’ve had many friends over the years who were dancers (my younger sister, Elizabeth, danced professionally in Britain for a few years.) I had one girlfriend who had been a serious ballerina, good enough to be in a well-known company while in high school. She’d eventually sustained so many injuries that she couldn’t dance, and had gone to college instead. When I dated her, she was in her late twenties, still struggling with the eating disorder she’d developed as a young dancer. She also struggled with the memory of abusive ballet teachers, including one dance mistress who would hold a lit cigarette under the raised legs of her students, occasionally deliberately burning them if they failed to do as asked. A slight scar was still on my ex’s thigh fifteen years later. She loved the ballet, but would never go to see it live. “Too painful”, she said, “I feel so guilty that I’m not up there.” I thought that was an interesting word to use, “guilty” — as if she had let everyone down by not becoming a renowned professional ballerina.
That relationship, as well as my feminist work, made me much more critical of classical ballet. As we all know, ballet classes are a standard way (perhaps the standard way) that we acculturate little girls into femininity. Millions of little girls are be-tutued and be-leotarded, taught to twirl and plié. Eventually, they put on productions for armies of camera-toting parents. Most will lose interest by the time they hit menarche, and very few will still be dancing seriously by the time they reach high school. And those that do stay with ballet after the onset of puberty will soon learn the brutal truth that a developing body is often at odds with the aesthetic demands of classical dance. Eating disorders are a way of life for serious aspirants, and though not every single adolescent girl who dances engages in anorectic behavior, the problem is damn near universal.
Much has been made of the training that Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis endured in order to make Black Swan. Portman, naturally petite, dropped an additional twenty pounds to play Nina. (Almost all of the dancing is hers in the film, a double was very sparingly used.) In interviews, she and Kunis describe what they went through as “hell.” Ballet is the most physically painful of all the arts; if, as the noxious old saying goes, “beauty is suffering” then ballet is where that maxim reaches its natural logical conclusion. We live in a culture where we raise little girls to believe that “beauty hurts”. No wonder so many fall in love with the discipline in which pain and loveliness are both maximized!
In Black Swan, Nina’s obsession is with perfection. Her final words, as she lies dying, a gentle smile curling on her lips: “I was perfect.” And indeed, in the final scenes of the film, she is perfect. She did dance the “Black Swan” and the “White Swan” as required, and she found the darkness and sensuality that had seemed so unnatural to her. She draws a rapturous standing ovation from everyone, including her director, and slips away to the sound of their applause.
Perfectionism is the great burden of this generation of young women, as Courtney Martin and others have written so well and so often. Perfectionism is inextricably bound up with disregard for one’s own bodily needs: sleep and food stand in the way of living up to the crushing burden of external and internal expectations. Pain is a necessary, even welcome price to pay; in the strange economy of young women’s ambitions, if it doesn’t hurt, it can’t be trusted. Aronofsky captures this brilliantly in Black Swan; the staggering beauty of the dancing is always built on pain. Even before Nina’s descent into madness, we see the quotidian agonies of a dancer’s life. (There’s a great shot of Portman ripping out what little support exists in her ballet slippers so that she can be even more perfectly en pointe.) In her frailty and her reckless, joyless ambition, Nina is an all-too-familiar figure.
The real Swan Lake was written long before the arrival of these contemporary and contradictory pressures that bear down on so many young women. But in the film, the new staging of the classic clarifies the impossible double bind into which our culture now puts young women. In the traditional production, there is no “black swan” and “white swan”. Instead, there’s Odette and Odile. Odette is under the enchantment of a wicked sorceror; Odile is the sorceror’s daughter. Odette can only escape from enchantment if she can find true love, which she does with young Prince Siegfried. Odile is sent by her father to seduce Siegfried; disguised as Odette, she succeeds and receives the prince’s pledge of true love. Odette learns of her lover’s betrayal and flees, Siegfried in remorse-ridden pursuit. Odette explains she can now never be freed from the evil sorceror — save through death. She commits suicide by jumping into a lake — as does Siegfried. The spell is broken, and in many stagings, the final scene has Odette and Siegfried rising into heaven together, joined in bliss for eternity.
The changes that the film makes are key. While Odette and Odile have always been danced by the same dancer since the ballet debuted, most stagings never created a dramatic difference between the two characters. Siegfried is seduced by Odile because he thinks she’s Odette, not because Odile is so much more sensual and wild. In the Aronofsky movie, Nina is told that the White Swan (Odette, the name is never used) must be sweet and innocent, the archetypal virgin (which Nina apparently is.) But the Black Swan represents the opposite end of the feminine spectrum. Odile is no longer her father’s pawn, but now a dark and sensuous force, the embodiment of female erotic power. Nina, much too guarded, can’t pull off the Black Swan. Much of what she endures lies in her desperate attempt to draw out something she’s never felt or known.
The original Swan Lake never demanded that the principal ballerina represent these two archetypes of female sexuality. The film does, and the implication is clear. Perfectionism manifests itself in the lives of contemporary young women in many ways, not least in the demand to be pleasing while simultaneously being an assertive sexual agent. As I wrote in the Paris Paradox, the most-linked post I’ve ever had in seven years of blogging:
You combine the pressure to please with the requirement to be sexy, add in the wild overestimation of one’s own capacity to change and influence others for good, and top it off with the common and tragic overestimation of one’s capacity to suffer, and you’ve got a young woman keenly aware of how she appears to others and what others want from her – and far less capacity to articulate her own desires.
There’s a lot of Nina in that. But as Black Swan makes clear, it’s worse than that: our culture demands that young women tap into their erotic power, whether they’re ready to or not. Girls need to be everything: serious and sexual, ambitious and aggressive, both radically feminine and radically comfortable moving into traditionally all-male spaces. It’s a double, triple, quadruple bind. It’s crushing, and as the film illustrates, quite literally crazy-making. At one point, Nina is told by Leroy to go home and masturbate to find her sensuality. What a contradiction that is! If masturbation represents the liberation of a woman’s own erotic potential, what does it mean when a male authority figure tells her to do it? It’s her sexuality — but it isn’t. Her pleasure is linked to performance, and that’s a straitjacket that too many young women know too damn well. When Leroy grabs Nina and kisses her, she responds sexually, but it’s not good enough. “I need you to seduce me“, her director snarls as he stalks off, leaving Nina bewildered. She’s not the only one confused. Lots of girls get told that they must use a power that they’re not sure they have, and they need to use it to seduce those who have power over them.
Nina’s enmeshed relationship with her mother is familar (on a less gothic level) to many girls; Nina knows that she’s fulfilling her own mother’s shattered dreams of stardom. As I’ve written many times, girls often grow up hearing the “don’t make the same mistake I did” speech from their mothers. “Do what I wasn’t able to do” is a corollary to that speech, and that’s a line only possible in a world in which women have already achieved a fair amount of opportunity. Nina represents a generation of women that enjoys more possibility than any before, but that enjoyment is crushed by the pressure to be perfect. When every expanded opportunity becomes just an enhanced obligation, there’s little room for joy. And there is no joy in Nina’s world save through the pursuit of that elusive chimera of perfection.
In the traditional Swan Lake, Odette and Siegfried die together. But in Black Swan, the White Swan (Nina) dies alone — both on and off-stage. The male dancers in the film are clueless props; not only does Nina not have a relationship with any of them in her real life, in the film, they abandon her as well. Her suicide scene shows her gesturing at the Siegfried character who stands there passive and useless. The message is clear to anyone who knows the original story: in the modern world, men won’t die for you or with you. They won’t even be there while you’re alive (Nina’s father is absent, unmentioned, unnecessary). Even a naïf like Nina knows better than to believe in fairy tales, and so she doesn’t. She believes in perfection, not romance. She dies not for love, but for control.
At the end of Aronofsky’s “The Wrestler”, the Mickey Rourke character spurns the one woman who just might still love him in order to go out and wrestle one last bout — a bout that we are led to assume will take his life. That’s an old story; a man leaving a woman for glory goes back to Hector and Andromache if not before. But in his follow-up film, Aronofsky tells us a new story, but one with which we already all too familiar. It is the story of the impossibility of living up to the crushing burden of contradictory expectations. It is the story of too many young women, women who might not be as thin or as obsessive as Nina Sayers, but women who will sense something hauntingly familiar in the doomed dancer’s desperate and triumphant pursuit of perfection. It is a lonely story. Few are so naive to believe a man will die for them, of course. But most can only hope that perhaps, if they’re lucky, they’ll find a partner to walk that hard road with them. But many suspect that even if they’re not going to throw themselves off a cliff, they’ll be climbing to the summit alone.
Note: I can’t know if this was Aronofsky being clever or just a coincidence, but the two dancers who embody these two halves of the contemporary feminine ideal are named “Nna” and “Lily.” Nina means “little girl”, of course, while “Lily” refers to a flower — or to Lilith, the first wife of Adam according to Jewish tradition, a woman whom Adam abandoned when she wouldn’t be subservient to him. Lilith is famous in Near Eastern mythology for her sexuality — and for being like the wind, often likened to a bird of prey. The gorgeous tattoo on Lily’s back is of wings which seem to pulsate and flap.
Two different archetypes aren’t new. The expectation that a woman can and should embody them both is.
Hey Hugo– the ballerina in the 1966 R&J was Margot Fonteyn.
Joan Fontaine is the actress.
Ah, good catch. Thanks! I loved Fonteyn so much and am ashamed I made the mistake in haste. (Like when I typed Keith Urban when I meant Urban Meyer in a recent Facebook post!)
Wow, great review. It sounds like a disturbing movie.
I was struck by one sentence, especially in the context of contemporary pressures on boys/men:
“Girls need to be everything: serious and sexual, ambitious and aggressive, both radically feminine and radically comfortable moving into traditionally all-male spaces.”
Both polarities here are very depressing to me. The idea that women are still getting intense pressure to be thin, pretty, delicate, precise and subservient is awful itself. But when you add pressure to be ambitious, aggressive, & sexual predators, this is fatal.
With regard to boys/men, I feel as though the same is true in a way. They are being expected to be aggressive & ambitious sexual predators (which may have always been hard for many boys/men) and articulate, communicative, egalitarian and nurturing to the point of “helicopter partnering and parenting.”
I would think if in the case of both boys and girls, we could shave the expectation of aggression & predation out and teach assertiveness, and the “helicopter partnering and parenting” out and teach adult partnership where each person stands on his/her own and empathy and compassion in relationship as well as in parenting, things would be a lot easier.
People would have to give up their preoccupation with sex differences though.
There is also a class aspect. Today’s young professionals – female and male – understand well we are in a “winner-take-all society” (see Robert H. Frank) and have a deep “fear of falling” (see Barbara Ehrenreich). They know their “10 minutes” may be up very soon.
Frank emphasized that today’s corporate and professional worlds were turning into celebrity contests similar to the worlds of dance and music.
Moving post, Hugo. Almost crying reading it. Enlightening. Move me to cherish my ‘imperfect’ self and live my ‘imperfect’ life as best as I could. Thank you…
There is also a class aspect.
People would have to give up their preoccupation with sex differences though.
And as you point out, if we ever can really do that, everyone will be able to be a bit more whole.
On the film, it was shot at my college, and from people who worked on or by the shoot, it sounds like what Natalie Portman went through was truly horrific. I’m always troubled by films like this and The Machinist where actors are encouraged/compelled to engage in eating disorder-like behavior, and are then idolized for their incredible dedication and performance.
For me, it sounds almost as if the filming was a meta-performance of the story of the film itself. I know there’s no way to tell a story about eating disorders and the pursuit of perfection without compelling the actors to engage with the material to that extent. But it is a troubling narrative … Portman does this incredible performance and achieves artistic perfection because she managed to put herself in such a terrible place, physically and mentally.
So in other words, she becomes a heroine/role model for over-achieving girls everywhere. If we just tried harder to lose weight and work ourselves to death, we might be as perfect as the actor/character.
What concerns me thinking about the story is the people who won’t realize it’s a tragedy. Oh, intellectually they may know, but the beauty/perfection of it has a certain attraction, and people are good at finding role models in troubling places. As Comrade Svilova says, she may well become a heroine to a certain type of over-achieving girl – one who sees that Nina achieved her goal, but doesn’t understand what it cost her.
I was planning on seeing Black Swan this week, and now I can’t wait to go. Thanks for the insightful review.
having seen the moving and found it really engaging, i do share comrade svilova’s concerns re the meta-performance aspect of all this. i haven’t seem aronofsky’s other films, but you point out (as others have) the pain/punishment echos from The Wrestler, and from what i understand, his other movies all tend to incorporate this theme in one way or another. so we come to the question of authorial intent (a question i hate, but an inevitable one!). are we so sure that aronofsky’s perspective on this self-immolating quest for perfection is one of criticism and not admiration? why is it we think he’s critiquing and not endorsing? (i mean, she’s CRAZY, so there’s that – but she seemed to be starting to come undone before even landing the part, and the film never seems to take a clear position that she *shouldn’t* have pushed herself to the brink for the final “achievement,” you know?)
i don’t have good answers, obviously. i just find myself wondering about this.
This is a built-in problem in representing perfectionism. As anyone who has ever worked with anorexics knows, what is intended as a warning is too often interpreted as instruction. This is the paradox of art that seeks to promote justice, and I did see this film as a moral work (like the Wrestler), making a point about pain and perfectionism. I read it as a critique rather than an endorsement, though I agree that not everyone will respond that way.
Interesting review – you make a lot of great points. (Spoiler alert if you read further here!) I did not take Nina’s death at the end as literal. After much discussion with my husband, we realized that it was unlikely she could dance the second act with a shard in her and then the third act with a gaping wound with a) no one noticing, and b) the wound suddenly deciding to expand at the very end and not earlier. Since much of the film is hallucination, and it’s hard to tell what is not, I concluded that the death at the end is metaphoric – that she had to kill off the “sweet girl” inside her in order to embody the darker side of the role.
One dancer usually dances both roles.
Amanda, I made that point:
The changes that the film makes are key. While Odette and Odile have always been danced by the same dancer since the ballet debuted, most stagings never created a dramatic difference between the two characters. Siegfried is seduced by Odile because he thinks she’s Odette, not because Odile is so much more sensual and wild. In the Aronofsky movie, Nina is told that the White Swan (Odette, the name is never used) must be sweet and innocent, the archetypal virgin (which Nina apparently is.) But the Black Swan represents the opposite end of the feminine spectrum. Odile is no longer her father’s pawn, but now a dark and sensuous force, the embodiment of female erotic power.
I just saw it last night.
I agree with this post, but would love to hear more of your thoughts about Nina’s relationship with Lily. The sex scene was hot-as-advertised, but I couldn’t help but wonder what it’s purpose was. Was it Nina letting herself be sexual? Letting herself orgasm with Lily (when her other orgasm was stopped by the site of her mother) means that she’s letting someone else touch her, or maybe taking Lily into herself and becoming like her? Just wondering what your thoughts were.
Well, we now have the most infamous aborted masturbation scene in cinematic history!
Assuming that the sex with Lily was a fantasy, then yes, it’s about Nina’s longing to find that sexual side of herself. There’s an old psychological trope (in which I put very little stock) that straight girls have sex with other girls at least in part to take in part of another woman’s sexuality.
Wow, I really appreciate this take on it. Like others said above I’m pretty excited about the movie (though, thanks for mentioning the body horror aspects – that stuff DOES bug me and I appreciate the warning)
Also like others, I’ve put myself through hell trying to be perfect. Eating disorder hell, insomniac hell, and depressive hell when it all came crashing down. I just got my passport renewed and compared the picture in the old one, when I was at the height of my perfectionist mania, to my new one post-depression, at one of the happiest times I’ve yet had in my life. It almost made me cry to see the gaunt girl with the overplucked eyebrows in the first picture, compared to the cheerful eyes, cropped hair and dimples I have now. Even my mouth looks more like I’m really smiling in the new picture. Holy shit, what was I doing to myself? And how can I make sure I’ll never do that again!?
I’d just like to point out, with respect, that you used to say very positive things about masturbation in 25B. You never told us to go home and do it, but you once memorably described masturbation as “an inherently feminist act.” I agree. But while you never pried into our lives, you did take on the role of a male authority figure encouraging sexual exploration, even if you derived no benefit therefrom.
The movie was great and so is your review. Just tweaking you a bit on one small similarity between Hugo Schwyzer and Thomas Leroy.
@Cammie, I think you make clear the distinction between us. And I stand by my paeans to self-pleasure, recognizing that private acts sometimes need and deserve public celebration, if not public display.
@LassLisa
“What concerns me thinking about the story is the people who won’t realize it’s a tragedy. Oh, intellectually they may know, but the beauty/perfection of it has a certain attraction, and people are good at finding role models in troubling places.”
There’s probably a lot of class-ism and racism intersecting with my comment, but that’s a part of why people who think Scarface is TEH GR8TEST THING EVARRR I WANNA BE LIEK TONY MONTANA THE WORLD IS YOURS LOL pisses me off so much.
Black Swan sounds pretty ballin’, I didn’t know the director also made The Wrestler; I think I’ll watch these back-to-back. How strange/coincidental that these movies focus on two of my greatest childhood loves. O_O
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I finally saw it. I’d been waiting to read your review. I had such mixed feelings about the film as I felt strangely inspired by what I knew Natalie POrtman had done in order to play this part. I was torn as to whether or not it was a feminist movie, but now I’m more convinced that it is.
So powerful and beautiful. Already ordered the Nureyev and Fontaine version of Romeo and Juliet on Netflix!
“When every expanded opportunity becomes just an enhanced obligation, there’s little room for joy… in the strange economy of young women’s ambitions, if it doesn’t hurt, it can’t be trusted.”
So true. I’ve seen it two times but only just now did I see your link on FB.
I wish you could warn every girl not to see this movie with her mother. Can you say, awkward? My mom HATED the movie. She wanted me to be a dancer, but it bored me and I was never very good at it.
And for the record, second time I saw it, the masturbation scene seemed way hotter than the Lily-Nina sex scene, which didn’t seem realistic to me at all. I say the second time, because the first time I was way too mortified to think sexually, sitting next to my mother!
Amanda is right. The death was metaphorical. Also Lily isn’t even real, her character represents the passionate side of Nina which Nina has repressed. Nina basically is hallucinating Lily. And Nina’s line about being “perfect” is actually not about the damaging kind of perfectionism but about the perfection of finally being *in the moment* and embodying the passion of the dance.
Everyone misses that part. I mean, yes, this film is largely about the dangers of societal pressure for women to be perfect. But it’s MORE about the danger of repressing our innate passion & sexuality in the name of that perfection. In the final performance, when Nina dances as the black swan, she isn’t thinking technically, she is totally in the moment, totally open to her inner passion. And that is what the masturbation scene is about, as well as the lesbian sex scene (and yes, Hugo, straight women DO sometimes have sex with other women to unconsciously get in touch with their own femininity).
Remember, Lily isn’t *real* – she’s not even acknowledged as present by Nina’s mom (in the apartment) or by the other dancers in the dressing room. She represents the repressed sexuality within Nina and the sex scene IS about Nina getting in touch with herself that way, opening herself up to her own sexuality – something that scares her and threatens her sense of control. This is primarily about Nina learning to let go of her need for control. To also FEEL as opposed to solely THINK her way through life. And how THAT is the true meaning of perfection (the good kind).
What dies in the end is not “Nina” but only the innocent, rigid, perfectionist, *control freak* side of Nina. Being “truly” perfect means being “in touch” with herself. It’s a GOOD thing, unlike the dangerous kind of “perfect” she tries to embody earlier in the film. Earlier in the film Thomas has a line about the real meaning of dancing “perfectly” (which is to dance with passion, not just technique) which totally sets up the ending.
Every review or critique I’ve read misses this entirely, but before this film was made, everyone who passed around the script got it.
Casey, that kind of “good perfection” is just as damn elusive, if not more so, than the “bad kind.” Everyone who is a perfectionist sets up that false binary to justify what they do — hell, that’s what the Amy Chuas of the world do when they preach their cruel parenting style.
I agree that Nina sees this higher level of control to which Thomas pushes her and she pushes herself — but the idea that it is somehow good or attainable or not harmful is simply absurd. The girls I work with who are perfectionists (musicians, models, gymnasts, dancers) almost invariably see their pursuit of perfection as noble, beautiful and necessary, fusing passion and technical artistry. But they still fall short time and time again. Being “in touch” becomes, as I see over and over and over again, one more burden — there is no liberation in it.
Your mileage may vary.
By the way, saw the film a second time, and confirmed a lot of what I thought I’d seen. And it’s still my #1 film of the year by a mile, with King’s Speech a solid second.
You’re misunderstanding me. Thomas makes a comment early on about what he wants from her and I can’t remember the line but it’s something about passion being more important than perfect technique. That perfection isn’t a lack of flaws, it’s about being in the moment.
Nina has this erroneous idea of perfection as technique and she lives like a puppet, controlled by her mother as well as the rigors of her ballet. It’s only in the end, when she gets in touch with her true self, embraces her wild, sensual side, that the strings are severed. She literally kills her childish, perfectionist, puppet self. Lily, her sensual, passionate, autonomous self, LIVES.
Thomas wasn’t pushing Nina to be perfect in the way SHE understood perfection. He was pushing her to get in touch with her passion and sexuality. That’s what makes life “perfect,” being true to yourself – flawed or not. Just being in the moment as opposed to in the performance. That is what she finally understands at the end which WAS totally liberating (as symbolized by the death of her old self).
By the way, I actually discussed the script last year with one of the producers and this was his perspective as well.
Also, there’s nothing “absurd” about a ballet director trying to get a dancer to dance passionately. And just what in the world does this have to do with Chinese parenting or fashion models?
Parenting is not a sensual art like dancing or music. And the perfection models pursue is not about getting in touch with their individual passion or sexual identity, it’s about projecting society’s (f*ed up) idea of sexuality. There’s no correlation between parenting or modeling and this film’s theme, whatsoever.
Also, that you believe this astounds me: “pursuit of perfection as noble, beautiful and necessary, fusing passion and technical artistry. But they still fall short time and time again. Being “in touch†becomes, as I see over and over and over again, one more burden — there is no liberation in it.”
You see the attempt to find passion in one’s art, and the sense of being ‘in the moment’ while creating that art, to be burdensome? Maybe what is burdensome is that “the girls you work with” don’t know how to accept that they can’t achieve it ALL the time but that it’s still worth pursuing. If they find it burdensome that they can’t ALWAYS be in touch, well that’s THEIR problem of perfectionism, not a problem of the noble artists’ goal of always striving to be “in touch” or in the flow.
I’m a writer and a dancer. And I know the difference between when I’m going through the motions and when I’m totally in the moment. I don’t beat myself up those times I can’t seem to get in the flow. But I always strive for it. And when I find it, I am “perfect.” Whether my technique is “perfect” or not. I am out of my “self,” I am in touch with my passion as it expresses itself perfectly through me. How is that burdensome? Unless I get back into my “self” with all the ego issues of performance and perfectionism – only THEN is it burdensome. Ego is burdensome. Not the pursuit of passion in one’s art.
Black Swan is nowhere close to the number one film of the year. It was great but I’d put it at #4 or #5 on the outside. There’s pretty much a universal consensus that The Social Network is by a wide margin 2010′s best. Sorry if that gets your pants in a politically correct knot.
Casey, I’m not a dancer. But I work with young people who lack the capacity to discern what you discern, who feel confused by the requirement to be passionate about something about which they are so frequently uncertain.
You don’t beat yourself up when you can’t get in the flow, and I am so glad. How I wish most of the young talented people I work with could say the same.
But isn’t it curious that we both loved the same film, albeit for utterly different reasons?
And Um, gosh, I’m heartsick that my views fall outside of the universal consensus. Just heartsick.
Yes, Hugo, because you are just so accustomed to having your views be exactly in line with majority opinion! (/snark)
I thought Black Swan was the best movie of the year. So did a lot of people I know. The Social Network was boring and sexist. I thought The Fighter was the second best of the year.
Hugo didn’t like The Social Network because Zuckerberg wasn’t replaced by a fingerquotes “witty” female programmer who was just so smart, but not taken seriously by the manpigs in the Harvard establishment. The plot should have been about her struggle against the dim-witted manpigs, and Jesse Eisenberg should have been recast as a rich white manpig who steals credit for the Facebook idea. That would have won it a best picture endorsement on this blog.
Hah. Social Network is #6 on my films of the year:
1. Black Swan
2. The King’s Speech
3. Blue Valentine
4. The Fighter
5. The Kids are Alright
6. The Social Network
I didn’t hate it. It was very well-done, gripping at times, but not on a par with some of the others, especially my top two.
Well, color me surprised.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lance-p-hickey-phd/flow-experiences-happiness_b_811682.html
^^A great article on being in the flow.
Hugo, you claim to wish your students wouldn’t be so hard on themselves for not being able to get into the flow and that’s very valid but advising them to not try or not bother themselves is doing them a serious disservice. In Black Swan, Thomas was trying to get Nina to grasp what the flow even IS, and then help her find it (his telling her to masturbate was one way he did this, not the controlling manipulation you saw his suggestion as). She’s convinced ballet is all about technique and he was desperately trying to get her to see the light because he believed in her. You label him as the ‘bad guy’ yet he was consciously being the catalyst for her growth as an artist and her newfound ability to get into the flow. He’s clearly the “Mentor” in this Hero’s Journey (that’s a good thing).
FWIW: As a perfectionist who has struggled with disordered eating, self mutilation, substance abuse, and depression, every time someone tells me to “just relax” and “find yourself” and “go with the flow” and “have some fun” I do see it as yet another project I have to be perfect at, and since I’m obviously not at all good at those life skills, it does seem like yet another failure. Black Swan doesn’t read to me as an inspiring journey of a young woman who manages to free herself from her quest from perfection; it seems like the story of a young woman who literally dies because she is unable to escape from her perfectionism, so even the command to get in touch with herself and go with the flow becomes a project that she cannot complete perfectly without killing herself. In other words, it’s so impossible for her to really conceive of being different from her desperate, perfectionist self that she dies rather than try to let go of her demands and standards for herself.
Just a subjective opinion, of course, and I’m glad that you saw it as a positive story, Casey. But to me it was both a note of warning to not go that far in my own perfectionism — and a twisted kind of inspiration to try to be more like the desperate, perfectionist Nina. Because I’m obviously not as good a perfectionist as she is … I’m still alive, and thus, flawed.
Interesting article, thanks.
Casey, it’s a false dichotomy you set up: either you demand the pursuit of perfection, or you encourage sloth and the denial of one’s gift. But there’s a third option, one I live by as a mentor, a teacher, and a father: encouraging a balanced, gentle, perseverance in the pursuit of those things that are likely to enrich one’s life.
I know my Jung pretty good (hell, I used to teach Robert Bly to my students), but I just can’t see Black Swan as Jungian at all, not seriously so — Thomas is a cruel Svengali figure, an archetype perhaps, but in no remote way a positive one. The classic excuse abusers in positions of power give for the abuse they inflict is “I was trying to help my child/student/patient/mentee reach his/her potential.” (Amy Chua, call your office.)
After seeing this film (thanks to Hugo’s recommendation) I am so glad that I was the worst 6-year-old ballerina in the history of the Joffrey school
I thought it was very telling that Thomas orders Nina to “Lose yourself” rather than “Find yourself” when he’s instructing her to discover her passion. This, for me, makes his mentoring creepy and boundary-busting. He plays head games with her, alternately filling her with dreams of greatness and deriding her sexual innocence, so that she believes that the only way to break into adulthood is to submit to his seduction. That isn’t empowerment.
I don’t really see how Hugo can advocate balance when he runs like 300 miles a week and gets like 4 hours of sleep a night. He’s clearly hyper-driven. People who look up to him (for some indiscernible reason) are going to get the message that this kind of thing is normal.
“Lose yourself†rather than “Find yourselfâ€
Grr, that’s the message I get from too many people, and it pisses me off. All I have is myself — screwed up and flawed as I am — and I want to stay myself. Maybe a bit less neurotic, but overall, I get the message that I’m unlikable as I am and I should be completely different. Kind of like Hiccup in “How to Train Your Dragon.”
But you just pointed at all of me!
Thanks for pointing that phrasing out, Jendi.
@Um, a lot of us look up to Hugo but don’t share his hyperness. He never demands his students or mentees run with him or live as he does. He isn’t preaching perfectionism to anyone.
@Comrade Svilova and Jendi: yes! “Lose yourself” is not a healthy message. “Find yourself” is. And they are not the same, at least not in Western culture.
I interpret “lose yourself” as advice to drop or escape the bounds of ego. Guess I interpret it quite differently from everyone else here but maybe I’m not as defensive about my imperfections.
And CS, Nina absolutely does NOT “literally” die which is part of the point I keep trying to make. This film shouldn’t be taken literally in the first place (do you think she “literally” danced with a shard of glass in her abdomen?) What dies is her perfectionism. Lily represents the imperfect – yet balanced & happy – artist and SHE lives. Nina and Lily are 2 sides of the same person and in the end, the perfectionist dies while the imperfect side lives happily ever after.
But I give up here. If you’re going to take this film literally you’re never going to see the forest for the trees.
Okay, Natalie Portman just gave a post-Oscar interview where she totally agreed with my take on this movie too. Just sayin, dude.
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