So I saw Black Swan last week and, like Brazil or a wine so fine it’s worthy of Dylan Moran, its been growing better and better and embedding itself deeper and deeper in my mind over the past eight daze. It’s one of the closest things I’ve seen that encompasses what art is..the whole odd indefinable spectrum of it: the emotion, the psychological commitment to it, how the act of creating something can consume you – on different levels ofc.
I’ve lost all sense of surroundings and time when drawing before but I haven’t quite gone as far as Nina does while becoming the “perfect” artiste in BS. Heh, that looks like bullshit.
But anygay, honestly it was beautiful, and genuinely sickeningly disturbing at the same time, like when you eat too much Turkish delight after thinking about how nice it seemed in Narnia. As a non-believer said, “there is NO light in this film”. And I think that’s true in that every frame is clogged with claustrophobia, every camera angle is truly nausea-inducing and every character, in contrast to Nina is a decidedly black, or at the very least grey, swan.
But after a week of mulling it’s full-bodied undertones around my brain, it seems that the light of this film is the art that is created in it, the bi-product of all the therefore necessary introspective-craziness that occurs around it. And BOI, is ballet beautiful. It’s something that keeps popping up like a facebook chat notification on the monitor of my life, and I’m even more fascinated by it now than when I first saw The Red Shoes.
It seems like the ULTIMATE art form in that it is obligatory to let it uttely consume you, to give yourself over to the process, pouring as much pure emotion into it as possible and conveying all this through the greatest instrument you’ll ever own- your body. Hopefully that doesn’t sound like an American self help book.
I also love the irony of having to look as graceful, elegant, delicate and feminine by beating your body into unnatural acts and achieving an incredible level of fitness..a frankly fucking odd concept that’s explored in all it’s disturbingness in this film. Its unexpectedly and extremely appropriate that the director also did The Wrestler & Requiem For A Dream.
Its fair to say that I’m VERY double rainbow about this.
SO, what really gets me about the intensity of BS (ha), which seriously made me as tremeeendously dizzy and nauseous coming out of the cinema as Parnassus ’09 made me stunned and enlightened. Well actually, there’s the rub: no one really GOT Parnassus, a fucking..work of art in itself that had more of an effect on me..at least not on a large mainstream scale anyway. So how is it the EVERYONE loves BS, something so extreme it’s worthy of a cult status?
Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s fantastic that something like this is getting the attention (and hopefully Oscar) it deserves and I’m not saying a film loses credibility if it’s not so obscure that only indie kids know of it, but the idea that it’ll get any way watered-down is teeerrifying. And also, what about all the other films as bizarre and affecting as this that DON'T get credit? I don’t have faith in the idea that art should be elitist, and yeah, it’s great that such a film will most definitely influence pop culture..(PoTC anyone?) But who really wants to see thirteen year olds donning the hot new ballerina trend, making the monochrome tutu what the poncho of 2005 was, or HELL, whatamisaying: what nu-rave of 2009 has become.
Maybe you just can’t win, maybe it’s inevitable that BS will become a living, changing thing of it’s own and as The Ginsberg said: “Art IS a community effort”. I really hope it doesn’t get filtered to the point that it's cheapened or weakened though.
So come what may, it's worth your while to see this film.
♥
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