Black Swan : Forget who you are. Remember who you want to be.


Let me get the thoughts straight in my head. I’ve been awake for 39 of the past 41 hours doing my adult duty of work, parenting, housework. And here I am. Here we all are. In the moment, living now, and so often, we forget the moment we live in, we’re all living in a past or looking forward to a day that may never comes, so rarely are we in the Here and The Now. And the past few years of my life, I’ve been living Black Swan. Black Swan is a film about the Greatest Thing You Will Ever Do. About how it consumes you, devours you, leaves you battling all your fears on the world stage, and how there is always someone breathing down your neck whilst you do, with a target on your back, wanting to sit in your seat, live your life, and live it differently.

There’s moments where I come out of work, or a moment at work, and I get the same adrenalin rush I did when the band used to play live. No covers band were Volume : but a stripped down, literate cross between Joy Division and Rage Against The Machine. There were moments on stage where I was both deeply focused on the precise second and also, completely in the moment. You only get one shot, do not miss your chance This opportunity comes once in a lifetime. Nothing feels as good as that moment when you know you have achieved it – and pulled off the plan you had. That kiss. That gig. The unveiling ceremony for the new project at work. The first car off the production line. The applause at the grand finale.

This is the world of Black Swan. The world of the perfect moment : achieving it, and never letting it go. The last time I felt so utterly in a moment was when my son was born. Everything else, when I held him for the first time, this beautiful, screaming little blood-stained package of hopes and fears, faded into insignificance. Money? Meaningless. Power? Irrelevant. Here, in our arms, was a boy. A boy we thought would never be born, a boy we hope might one day come to us, a boy who we spoke about a decade before. I remember, clear as day, standing in a field in Hyde Park, talking to the woman who gave birth to our son, eight years before he was born, and talking clearly. The exact words were that “I want to hold my child in my arms for the first time, and look over, and see you gazing at our child.”



And she was right.

Before me, now, and for every day, The Greatest Things I Will Ever Do, is raise our children. There are two boys in this world who I have fathered, and for whom, no one else in the world will ever be their Daddy. I have to do the best I can for these pure, loving, innocent souls, to mould them, shape them, protect them, and give them the tools to make it through this bitch of a life unscathed. My Father was very hands off : he was there for the conception, but mentally absent for pretty much every moment after that. I made enormous mistakes in my life. No one was there to tell me the pitfalls and errors in my decisions. I wouldn’t’ve listened. But at least I would’ve known someone cared and there was someone I could go to. I never had that. My children will always have that. I will give them everything I can and nothing less. And at the end of this, when they are men, and they will be the light of someone’s life, or change the world in some way, or they themselves give children life and form them, when someone holds their hand and feels that sense of elusive peace, or when the boys that are now children and babies themselves hold their own babies, then I will have fulfilled my ambition : the Greatest Thing I Will Ever Do. To make men out of these people, and to impart them with the message that the world does not need any more men that the rest of the world are forced to endure. My children are my masterpiece.

Black Swan is Darren Aronofsky’s masterpiece : it covers the eternal battle all of us have, every second, every day. The gulf between who we are, and who we want to be. The war between having to walk the thinnest line between professionalism, competence, and technical excellence, and the fire and flame of our personalities, the spark that makes us more than merely competent, but makes us exceptional. And the spark that can destroy everything it touches.

I’ve seen it at work, and in love. That line being crossed, blurred, rubbed out. You’ve got to burn, to shine, after all. The slow evolution of our lives from the ambitious but blunt twenty something, to the careful, considered, indentured people who, day by day, and piece by piece, traded dreams for comfort. This informs every second of the film. Natalie Portman plays Nina, but really, like Sean Connery, Portman IS Nina. The actress ceases to exist, and Nina becomes a live, three-dimensional person who happens to wear Portman’s face. Driven by an oppressive mother, by the pressure of the spotlight, the addiction of opportunity, the one chance that you have building up to your entire life, Nina is slowly – but surely – fighting a losing battle between expectation placed upon her by everyone else and her desire to please them, and the person she is : a scared, timid girl who feels out of her depth. And don’t we all feel, if we listen to the voice inside, a child trapped in a body of a man from time to time? Don’t we all feel alone, the only person in the room who isn’t half as good as everyone else makes out they are? It could be though that everyone else is better at masking it. That everyone else feels the same way.

Black Swan is less of a film than a meditation. So little happens and yet so much. For long stretches, whilst I was watching the film, I was thinking instead of experiencing – and that’s the greatest gift a film can give. I was lost in a train of thought inspired by the art. And the last time that happened to me was when I was watching Pink Floyd at the Albert Hall in 2006. And what is obvious – and deeply reminiscent to me of my own experience of intense pressure and fragmentation, is that Black Swan is about the pressure upon the self. At the time of my breakdown, in January 2009, we were wrestling a multitude of pressures : a financial crisis as the result of fraud, an insane work schedule of years of 14 hour days, and the death of our child. Life suddenly stopped being bearable, and the cracks in my mind connected. I’m wiser and stronger now, I know my limits and my boundaries. Sometimes you have to go too far to know you’ve gone too far. You only know you’re out of your depth when you’re drowning.

I have never seen a film so accurately demonstrate the experience of unbearable stress and an individual reality that is at odds with the consensus. The line between the real, and the unreal, become indistinguishable : the real world becomes a place where random elements seem to connect in a way that no longer makes sense yet somehow still occurs. The human ability to make sense of random events has been unplugged.

Be the best you can be. You Let Yourself Down. And, with Portman in every scene, “Black Swan” is a journey deep into the mind of one person haunting themselves. As a film, it is a technically flawless and fluent way to present a complex, intelligent tale. As an experience, for anyone who has ever suffered, or felt expectation, it is a reminder of the wolf of ambition forever scratching at your door. The paying of the price that your ambitions and abilities carry with them. The scars we carry as we shoulder the weight of expectations and achievement. The limits of human endurance, and what lies beyond the map. About breaking points, for the individual, and for the price we pay for freedom from ourselves. But most of all, it about the definition of what it is to be who we are, and how we see ourselves is both a prison and a liberation. Forget who you are. Remember who you want to be.


- posted by Mark @ 12:58 am