The Black Swan

The Black Swan

SPOILER: IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN THE FILM AND DON’T WANT TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENED, STOP READING

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0947798/

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.

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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.

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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.