The Black Swan
SPOILER: IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN THE FILM AND DON’T WANT TO
KNOW WHAT HAPPENED, STOP READING
The Black Swan...........
“I was perfect”.
She couldn’t be the Black Swan.
She only knew how to be the White One.
Black and White. Dark and Light. Bad and Good. Wrong and
Right. Damaged and Calm. Aggressive and Passive. Damned and Forgiven.
I went to see Swan Lake when I was about eight years old;
at a provincial theatre in a principal town whilst visiting friends of the
family. Red chairs, high up, looking down at the passion of this performance,
Tchaikovsky blasting out; pain, hurt, tears, anguish, dramatics.
Could a girl of eight years old really understand what
was going on?
All I can remember was feeling such a terrible pain for the suffering of
Odette.
I’m not too sure of the story. There was an evil spell
which cast Odette to live as a swan in a lake of tears. As with most contrived
little love stories, she has to find a prince who will love her for eternity in
order to break the dark spell. Once she has found her prince, the spell will be
broken and she can live as a woman once more.
But evil prevails. The dark side find a character called
Odile who is the mirror image of Odette. The prince believes that he has his
woman and declares his love for the wrong person. Realising what he has done,
he dashes into the forest to find Odette and to kill the evil one for casting
these spells. He raises his arrow to kill the baddy, Rothbert, I think, and
accidentally sends the weapon straight into the heart of his loved one. The
swan Odette disappears for a second to reveal the beautiful woman that she is.
But she is dead within an instance. Devastated at what he has done, he walks
into the lake with the dead love, drowning himself and allegedly living for an
eternity in the arms of his love.
Aarrrhh.
It traumatised me, for sure, in more ways than one. I’m
sure there are variations to this story but this is the one that I can
remember.
It was this performance that made me choose to learn the
oboe, purely so that I could play that haunting tune, the one where Odette
dances to her death.
......................................................................
When I went to the cinema some time ago, I saw the
trailer to “Black Swan” and I wasn’t particularly interested in seeing it. It
all looked rather contrived to me; anorexic, self-harming ballerina killing herself
over the role of Odette, imagining all sorts of revolting things happening to
her, culminating in some tragedy of sorts that the teaser would not quite tell
you. You had to pay your money for that. So I finally saw it recently on DVD.
It wasn’t the best film I have seen but there was some
resonance, and the depiction of the light and dark was slightly better than I
had expected.
How was this perfect, little innocent delight going to
turn into the darkness of the Black Swan?
She could perform brilliantly as the virginal beauty Odette.
But she needed to be Odile as well; the Temptress, enticing the Prince with all
his stupid naivety into reneging on his virginity. Without his cock in glorious
ignorance of a woman’s cunt, he could not save Odette. She, the Virgin Swan
could only be fucked by a Virgin Prince in order to break the spell.
How was the master of the ballet going to get this woman
to feel what it was like to be a seducer or an adulteress? How was she going to
turn into an experienced whore who fucked for pleasure, who revelled in knowing
what it was like to be fucked out of her brain, swimming in a delirious passion
that nothing else in this world could match?
He took her to one side at the end of practice. He
swooped her around the room. He took her in his arms and he kissed her. He told
her to open her mouth to accept his tongue, pouring it into her mouth so that
she couldn’t refuse. She wanted him now and he knew it. He slid his arms around
her, feeling through the nakedness of her ribcage, towards her breasts and held
them hard within his cupped hands, willing her to feel the force of her sexuality,
not his. He reached down towards her pussy, and he urgently pushed his thumb
deep into the folds of her labia, moving it around, imitating the motion that
he longed to provide without the chastity of clothing.
She was falling, falling, falling......
He let her feel. He held her up towards him, and looked
deep into her eyes, staring hard, making sure he had his woman just where he
wanted her.
“I seduced you.
You have to seduce me. Learn how to seduce me.”
And he walked away.
The bastard. He fucking walked away.
He’d fed her. He’d done it. There was no hope for the
poor woman. She was well and truly fucked.
Only she still didn’t know how to seduce, and this little
episode had not made her into a temptress. All it had done was fill her silly
little head with thoughts of making love to her teacher.
He still had work to do in order to make her into the woman
that he thought she was capable of being.
“Do you like sex? Does it feel good when you have sex? Have
you had sex? Are you a fucking virgin?”
Turning to the lead male he asked the heartless question,
“Would you want to fuck this?”
And then he turned back to Nina.
“Go home and find yourself”, he said, nodding down at her
cunt.
She lay down on her bed, exhausted from her work. She lay
there and slowly moved her hands under the sheets, under the duvet towards her
cunt. Her eyes admitted to the audience that she had found some delight. She
pushed hard and started to stimulate her clitoris. After a few minutes, she
shifted her excited body onto its side, capturing the duvet between her thighs.
She shuffled once more onto her stomach, keeping the bulk of cloth between her
legs and rode herself to orgasm, only prevented from revelling in the
brilliance by realising her mother was in the room with her.
She had tried masturbation and she had nearly got there.
But she still couldn’t use this to be the whore that was
needed, and she wanted to be perfect.
And then there was Lily.
Lily was the sexiest woman in the group. She could piss
on being the Black Swan. She was a horny woman who looked as though she knew
how to ram her fingers up anyone’s cunt to get them going. She looked as though
she would happily suck off all the men in the company in one go, swallowing
every offering that they would be only too willing to gush out of their cocks,
hetero and homosexual alike. This woman could turn the most dedicated male cock
lover.
Lily wanted the role, or so Nina thought. Nina had done
everything in her life to reach this point. She had endured an overbearing
mother, she had forfeited ‘love’, she wanted and needed this role and couldn’t
differentiate between the two.
And she looked over the studio at Lily, the natural Black
Swan, and saw her as an absolute threat.
Envy didn’t trickle through her veins. It poured through
her just like a torrent, like a gushing ejaculation from her cunt.
She was everything that Nina wasn’t; the opposite in
every way. The lead man wanted to fuck her. The teacher wanted to fuck her.
Nina was nothing.
She started imagining things. Her dark emotions had completely
overwhelmed her. They were working without thought. When thought joined them,
there was total chaos. Nina felt as though she was losing everything.
She was.
Lily tried to help her. It was complicated. Nina realised
that she was probably as infatuated with this stunning woman as everyone else.
Lily decided to try and befriend the frigid one, taking
her out of herself, which was obviously misinterpreted by the insane Nina, who
thought she was trying to poison her so that Lily could jump into her black
tutu.
Getting into the taxi after a night of booze and
seduction from two hopelessly tedious lads, Nina slumped into a drug-induced
semi-coma. As she lay in this daze, she felt Lily’s hands wander towards her
pussy, gently caressing her, inviting her to feel.
She removed Odile’s hand. Odette was a virgin and needed
to remain so.
(Funny, nobody ever mentions whether a lesbian is
officially a virgin or not.)
On returning to the flat, Nina took Lily forcefully by
the hand and led her to the bedroom.
Securing the door from the overpowering Mother, she walked
towards Lily and took her face in her hands and seduced her with a passionate
kiss.
Lily responded immediately, ripping Nina’s clothes from
her body, pushing her down onto the bed, feeling through the limited breasts to
tweak her nipples, ripping off her panties and lying between her legs to suck
the living juices out of the virgin performer who could only lie down and take
the experience and the lustiness of this practiced seducer.
At the point of orgasm, you knew that Nina had it in her.
She had experienced and loved sex. She had opened herself to her sexuality. She
had exploded into a new realm of understanding. She had been gloriously fucked
by a woman. She had learned in experience and now she was ready to seduce
anyone who took her fancy. She wanted to be the Black Swan, and she knew she
had already mastered the other role.
Of course, it was in her imagination. The role had
changed her. Ambition had firstly taunted her, then had won her over. Nothing
was going to stand in her way.
There had been no lesbian passion but she needed
something to get horny enough to do her work, and she used her mind to do so.
Only minds work in darkness and in light, just as
everything in life.
And screaming ambition lost her in the end.
What was the point of it all?
“I was perfect”, she said.
And so she was.
But what was the point of being perfect, when there was no
one there to share the experience? What was the purpose of knowing what was
right when the journey was undoubtedly ending in trauma?
The Black Swan was performed. She had found the
seductress. She had learned something from her infatuation with both her
teacher and her nemesis to capture the darkness of lust. She too could have
whipped cocks out and creamed them off.
But with a fucked mind, she was already dead.
Aren’t we all.
..................................................................
The film showed light and dark. It demonstrated the
damage that destructive emotions can do.
She paid her price.
It was quite painful viewing, in that respect. There is
clearly a light and dark to everyone. People live with their shadows or cast
them aside. At times in life, the shadow overwhelms. And it is understandable,
even if it isn’t right.
But the thing that fascinated me about this film with
regard to sexuality is twofold.
Firstly, there was, in this film, the admittance that we
cannot really be our true selves without discovering both our Odette but as
importantly, our Odile. We cannot be fully actualised human beings without the
sex, and it is not just the simple joy of sex. If you are going to fully
embrace life, you have to feel sex, want sex, desire it more than anything else
in life, knowing that it is a pinnacle of living, and then you have to do all
of that without making a song and dance about the desire. Desiring something so
passionately is a dangerous place to be, believe me.
The film did well on this front. It showed that without
embracing our sexuality, we cannot ‘perform’ at our best. We cannot really be
the people who we are. Without sexuality, we are but a shadow of our real
selves, and it was only in discovering her sexuality that this woman could be
the performer that she was allegedly born to be.
The second issue is this. Black Swan, White Swan. Dark
and Light.
In all manner of literature, there is the light and dark,
there is the black and white, and in an uncontrollable force, with a subliminal
racism, the black is always bad.
In Swan Lake, Odette is dressed in a white dress and
white tutu, Odile is veiled in black.
But white is the virgin, the good, the pure and black is
the seductress, the evil, the tainted.
Why does this have to happen and what is it saying about
sex?
Surely, if you follow the analogy, it is saying that sex
is dark. Sexuality is the dark side.
In my enlightened world, sex would still be seen as
raunchy and fun and exciting but it would not be seen as dark.
These are precisely the sorts of stereotypes that need to
be knocked down once and for all if the sexual are to be liberated to enjoy
their sexuality once and for all.
Sex is not dark. Sex is the most liberating thing that
has ever happened in my life, which is why I am at such pains to keep it.
Human touch is vital, which is why people fall into all
manner of stupidity to protect it. Instinct at work.
Sex is not black, not dark, not evil, not wrong.
Embracing sexuality is the lightest thing a person can do
for themselves.
Perhaps if Nina had realised that, and realised the
brilliance of what she had only just begun to discover, then she may have saved
herself from the mutilation that she inflicted upon herself.
Perhaps we all can, if we just open our eyes to the
wonderment of sex, sexuality and the intimacy of one another.
