Black Swan

In the interest of having some pretense of a connection to popular culture, I recently decided to watch all the movies from 2010 that have been nominated for the best picture Oscar.  I figured that if nothing else, this would provide me with slightly more concrete grounds on which to say that the award means nothing when it is ultimately doled out to some hackneyed piece of tripe that can make no greater claim to artistic merit than the failure to cast any former Saturday Night Live alumni.

So it was that I decided to watch Black Swan the other night, and I must say that as excuses to watch chicks make out go, it was a pretty good one.  While the heavy-handed discussion of white swan/black swan dichotomy could get a bit repetitive, the characters and performances were enough to make some clumsy attempts at poignancy more palatable.

For me, though, the most indelible impression of the movie originated from one such discussion.  There is a scene where Natalie Portman, the newly ordained Swan Queen, is being lectured by her director on the nature of The Black Swan, which he is still unconvinced she can channel.  As a homework assignment, he instructs her to go home and touch herself, an act which she repeatedly attempts throughout the next hour.  However, despite some valiant effort, she consistently fails to see her assignment through to completion.  As I watched Portman’s masturbatory fervor interrupted time and time again, it was hard not to think that the struggle to find oneself has never been taken quite so literally.

-TC