(This probably could go without saying, but it won’t : This article is all about my thoughts about the movie Black Swan. If you haven’t seen it, this it not going to be of much interest to you. Sorry about that. Watch it if you get the chance, even if you don’t give a damn about ballet. I don’t. )

Finally got around to seeing last year’s critical darling Black Swan yesterday, and so I thought I would capture some of my thoughts about it on my handy little blog here and save them for all posterity.

It’s the least I can do. You know, for the future.

First off, I should note that I did not go into this viewing aflutter with anticipation or giddy with joy. Sure, I had sampled the amazing rush of great press for the movie, so I know it was both a box office success and a critic’s best friend, but that is no guarantee of a movie’s suitability for my own particular (and sometimes downright peculiar) tastes. I have disliked critical darlings before, and of course, being a science fiction fan, a lot of my favorites have been pooh-pooh by the literary and cinemiste elitists who have the strange idea in their heads that science fiction is all zippy pow ray guns and heavily mammalian aliens babes.

Personally, I think it’s because the word “science” is in there, and people who like science like science fiction. Hence, the arts majors who make up film and literary instinctively fear and hate it, figuring that if they go anywhere near science fiction, someone might ask them to do long division.

And of course, despite being no more alpha specimens than we are, the literary and film snobs are still as determined as everyone else to look down on us nerds. And if nerds like science fiction, then liking science fiction makes you a nerd. And there’s nothing worse than that. Right? Right.

But meanwhile, back at my point… I was not highly anticipating this movie. I have no interest in ballet, and the whole thing seemed, from afar, like a rather self-congratulatory and pretentious exercise in artistic excess. The premise certainly does not appeal to me.

But the psychology of it does, and that is what drew me into the movie and why I now consider myself quite a fan of the flick. If you have been avoiding this movie because, like myself, you don’t care about ballet, rest assured that this is a great movie regardless of the subject matter or milieu.

It was poor Nina’s descent into madness which sucked me deep into the depths of this film, and Natalie Portman deserves a lot of the credit, because this was an incredibly complex role for any actress and she played it with exquisite detail. You could really see her transition from the prim, quiet, submissive Nina who was completely her mother’s appendage, there to fulfill the dreams her mother had to give up to take care of baby Nina, to the out of control, out of her depth, and clearly out of her mind Nina at the end of the film.

I feel for girls like Nina, the quiet overachievers who are docile and placid on the surface, but just below the surface are a roiling, seething mass of anxiety, depression, suppression, and lack of self-expression.

It really touched my heart when she said “I just want to be perfect.” That is exactly the trap that such overachievers face, ever striving to be The Perfect Child when that is simply not possible. No matter how hard to try, you are still human. You will never be perfect. You have to make peace with that, or it will eat you up inside, and sooner or later, you are going to crash, and crash hard.

And that is what I think happens over the course of the movie. I am sure there are many other theories as to “what is really going on” in a movie like Black Swan, but to me, the movie is clearly about what happens when one of these pent-up timebombs who seem so “perfect” on the outside finally reach the limits of their sanity and break down.

In her case, she went so long staying under her mother’s oppressive wing, living in the incredibly competitive world of ballet that demands so much sacrifice and self-control from girls from a very young age, with absolutely no outlet for her tensions and stresses, that when she broke, it was with such monumental force that it shattered her mind all the way into psychosis.

So in many ways, the Black Swan of the title is her long-suppressed id finally fighting free of the smothering influence of her mother/superego.

Her encounter with the self-puncturing Beth, who walked into traffic rather than face the fact that she was not the bright young star any more, was a particularly poignant (and extremely horrifying) illustration of the kind of self-destructive passion that drives these high achievers.

Stabbing herself in the face and screaming that she is nothing… this comes from a person whom the entire ballet world thinks is a goddess. Anyone would think she should be happy. But none of that matters. To her, she is nothing, nothing, nothing.

And it is this very dangerous cocktail of ambition and self-loathing that I think drives Nina over the edge. When she is chosen by Tamal (who bears some of the responsibility for her tragic end, I think), and then Tamal carelessly pokes about in her mind with his half-seducing her and telling her to “live a little” so she can be a better Black Swan for him, that is more than enough to trigger a breakdown. The combination of an extreme increase in pressure to be “perfect” and the stirring up of tightly suppress id-related adult emotions was simply too much for her brittle mind to take.

And so the movie, like the ballet, is ultimately a beautiful tragedy.

I think I like the movie a lot more, though.