Black and White Swans

In my quest to see all of the Academy Award nominated films, (I have seen six of ten), a friend and I saw Black Swan a few weeks ago. When we both left the theater, we looked at each other and said "What was that?" We talked about the film during our post movie lunch and couldn't really decide what we thought about it.

The movie was about a ballet dancer who became mad during the film. We were able to see her trek to madness and at times, it was difficult to discern what was real and what was her imagination. It was quite labor intensive.

When I returned home, I posted on Facebook "Just saw the movie Black Swan, hmmm. I always say "hmmm" on FB when I want to elicit a response without first giving my thoughts and impressions. There were almost 40 responses to that post. They were all very interesting.

Some offered comparisons to "A Beautiful Mind," a movie about madness (if I remember correctly). Others attributed her madness to a mother who drove her to it.

This dancer had no trouble dancing the "white swan," but when she had to become the "black swan," she had difficulty. Although I personally reject the idea of white representing good and black representing bad, I press on. In her imagination (I guess), she became a black swan. I think we all have a little black swan in us. Some of us don't know the difference between a black swan and a white swan. Some of us have white swans when we probably need a black swan!

The movie showed the power of the mind. It is an understatement to say that "it plays tricks." It was interesting to see the madness of someone's mind played out on the screen. It was depressing and not pretty. But then, sometimes we probably need to see that to know that we are relatively sane. We all need to get in touch with our Black Swans--there are some we need to keep and some we need to get rid of.