We all know the story. Virginal girl, pure and sweet, trapped in the body of a swan. She desires freedom but only true love can break the spell. Her wish is nearly granted in the form of a prince, but before he can declare his love her lustful twin, the black swan, tricks and seduces him. Devastated the white swan leaps of a cliff killing herself and, in death, finds freedom.–Thomas Leroy, Black Swan

I was utterly blown away by Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan, a dance thriller centred around ballet dancer Nina’s attempts to carry off the dual role of White and Black in Swan Lake. Her artistic director Thomas Leroy believes she needs to let go of her unrealistic aims for perfection; “You could be brilliant, but you’re a coward.” This obsession with fulfilling her dream (“I just want to be perfect”) ultimately leads to her losing her own mind as she sinks deeper and deeper into her preparation for the role.

Back in her dressing room during a break, Nina sees Lily, the uninhibited and passionate new dancer and her closest dance rival, in the black swan costume. Within seconds they are fighting about Nina’s ability to play the black swan herself and suddenly she smashes Lily into a mirror. ‘Lily’ then transforms into Nina’s dark, sultry doppelganger and it is in effect an aspect of Nina herself trying to strangle her! Once more turning back into dancer Lily, Nina believes she has killed her and hurriedly hides the body before going on stage to perform an exceptional performance as the black swan herself.

This part of the film was possibly one of my favourite cinematic moments I’ve ever seen, as we see Nina finally becoming the embodiment of the black swan, complete with feathers and reddish swan eyes. I couldn’t find any stills of her actual metamorphosis into the black swan during the performance, so the two shown below will have to do!

***SPOILER***: Nina embodies the white and black swan so perfectly that she is consumed by the story itself. As the quote at the top of this post mentions, only in death can the white swan find freedom. And, only in death, does Nina finally achieve her goal of perfection. Seconds before the final frame of the film is drenched in bright white light, her final words, “I felt it — perfect. It was perfect” are almost drowned out by the audience’s rapturous cheers for her.

     

Women’s increased participation in the workplace is seen as evidence that with every passing day, women draw closer to fulfilling their potential. Yet the cheering and applause drown out the reality: this is not what women want. Most women don’t aspire to the kind of lives that their supposed champions are busily engineering for them.

I stumbled upon Cristina Odone’s report What Women Want the other day, and it raises some interesting questions about how we find fulfillment in today’s environment of career culture. The report claims that the overwhelming majority of women would prefer to opt out of a career and being financially independent. It’s never ocurred to me to aspire to anything other than become successful, work my way up the career ladder and earn my own money to dictate my own life. So I was really surprised to read in this report that, actually, most women don’t buy into the philosophy that we should aspire to a successful career as well as being mother/wife/homemaker. If anything, the more I read about the topic the more it seems that actually, NO, if you’re a woman you cannot expect to bring up a family, run a perfect home and achieve highly in the workplace all at once! Rather, you must make a choice between one or the other role, as it’s nigh on impossible to do it all simultaneously.

I don’t know many women whose sole life goal is to become a housewife, but then again I don’t particularly know many women who are ruthlessly driven to climb the career ladder at the expense of other areas of their life. The consensus around reports such as Odone’s is that women cannot expect to have a perfect family life and career simultaneously. I want to have a successful career and have a family one day, but are they mutually exclusive?

Maybe this isn’t a gender issue, but more of a lifestyle issue for both men and women. After all, who wouldn’t want the perfect balance between a fulfilling career and a home life as well? For me, I think building a successful career at the expense of having a family is just as scary as giving my life away to have children and never achieving anything else outside of that. I can’t wait to have my own family one day, but at the same time I know I could never be content to merely live my life as a homemaker.

I’m currently reading Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything and there’s a section which goes right to the heart of how women find a purpose in life these days; if not, through children, then how does one find meaning?

What if, either by choice or by reluctant necessity, you end up not participating in this comforting cycle of family and continuity? [...] How do you mark time’s passage without the fear that you’ve just frittered away your time on earth without being relevant?

Ironically, I read another article this week which seems to declare that it’s not just the pursuit of a career and a home life that’s impossible to attain. Apparently high-achieving women are at a bigger disadvantage than ever when it comes to dating and relationships as well:

Women [...] outnumber men in college and they are out-earning their male peers when they first enter the work world … This success has come at a great cost to women’s sexual bargaining power. When it comes to relationships, they say men are calling all the shots — which means less commitment and more sex.

Wow. If you believed all of these opinions about what today’s women can realistically aspire to, it all seems pretty bleak. The article mentioned above seems to suggest that the only way for young women today to end up with the right guy is by curbing your sex drive and holding out just so you up your market worth among the ‘good guys’.

The article goes on to say that: “Presuming that people are attracted to people who are like them educationally, it means looking for secure relationships becomes challenging because the sex ratio is so imbalanced.” The main gist of it seems to be that women can only get the type of relationships they apparently crave if they keep their legs shut, and men only want sex but will commit to someone ONLY if she shows her self-respect through abstinence. It’s definitely a controversial but not entirely unfounded point if you read the various comments of the article!

     

He had gifts that would have made him an explorer, a soldier of fortune, a revolutionist: they were qualities fatal to a poet.
–Malcolm Cowley’s summary of Harry Crosby

Having studied the works of the likes of Ernest Hemingway, D.H. Lawrence, and James Joyce at university, I was really surprised that I hadn’t heard of their mutual friends, Harry and Caresse Crosby earlier. I’m currently reading Lucy Moore’s Anything Goes: A Biography of the Roaring Twenties, a portrait of American society in the 1920s, and it introduced them as a unconservative couple who emigrated to Paris, where they launched their own publishing house, the Black Sun Press. Lucy Moore’s book really drew me into their hedonistic, scandolous and unrestrained lifestyle in Paris, where they had lived from 1922 onwards. Harry Crosby’s life came to a premature but self-imposed end with an apparent murder-suicide pact aged just thirty-one – his body was found alongside his mistress Josephine Bigelow on the twenty-seventh floor of the Savoy-Plaza Hotel, their temples adorned with bullet-holes.

After reading about him I felt compelled to write a post about him, not so much for his contributions to literature but just purely because he seems to be such a fascinatingly enigmatic character. I wanted to write a post to capture his unrelenting quest for adventure and his rare approach to living. As his friend Stuart Gilbert commented, Harry ‘feared the terre à terre, the normal, as most of us fear celestial heights’. He believed life was ‘futile’ and that ‘passionate memories are the utmost gold; poetry is religion [for me]‘ and ‘one should follow every instinct no matter where’ it led.

His suicide might be seen as the ultimate symbol of his defiant grab on his own destiny, a fearless desire to experience in the life after death he so vehemently believed in. Below are just some of the interesting details I’ve read about the couple… I had to share them in their entertaining glory:

• On a whim, Harry once hired four horse-drawn carriages and raced them through the streets of Paris.
• At one of the annual Beaux Arts costume ball, Harry, naked to the waist, wore a string of dead pigeons around his neck. Caresse went topless and sat astride a baby elephant. She led the parade down the Champs after the ball.
•Caresse Crosby held a surrealist picnic that included Henri Cartier-Bresson snapping pictures, random gunshots, and a symbolic suicide by painter Max Ernst.
•Interestingly, under her real name Mary Phelps Jacob, Caresse Crosby patented the first modern bra!

I’m definitely going to read up more on the 1920s literary scene in Paris in the future. As well as that the internet is full of recommendations for Geoffrey Wolff’s biography of Harry Crosby, and his published memoirs Shadows of the Sun, said to have been written in syntax inspired by James Joyce’s Ulysses.

Thanks to my lovely Hitchcock Box Set, I now have a chance to make my way through some of the many Hitchcock masterpieces still on my must-see list. I don’t have much time to blog but I wanted to say a word or two about the two films I’ve watched recently.

Rope

Rope stars James Stewart, John Dall and Farley Granger, it is the first of Hitchcock’s films in colour, and is notable for taking place in real time and being edited so as to appear as a single continuous shot through the use of long takes. It’s a style I’m not used to seeing in film, and as such my concentration did drift slightly! Suspense intensifies with every minute, helped along by the fact that the trunk (with a corpse inside it) is never far from the view of the camera, and as events unfold in real time we watch as Phillip Morgan slowly but surely becomes a nervous wreck who is just about ready to confess! The film’s absolutely worth a watch, although I didn’t find it as gripping and as effective as any of the other Hitchcock films I’ve seen.

Rear Window

Other than Psycho, I would class this as my favourite Hitchcock film so far, and even Hitchcock himself modestly remarked that his batteries were ‘fully charged’ while making this film. Grace Kelly and James Stewart make a great on-screen couple, but for me the insurance nurse Stella McCaffery, played by Thelma Ritter, who gets some of the best lines in the whole film! Here are some examples:

+ “Intelligence. Nothing has caused the human race so much trouble as intelligence.”

+ “We’ve become a race of Peeping Toms. What people ought to do is get outside their own house and look in for a change. Yes sir. How’s that for a bit of homespun philosophy? ”

+ Stella: “You heard of that market crash in ’29? I predicted that.”
Jeff: “Oh, just how did you do that, Stella?”
Stella: “Oh, simple. I was nursing a director of General Motors. Kidney ailment, they said. Nerves, I said. And I asked myself, “What’s General Motors got to be nervous about?” Overproduction, I says; collapse. When General Motors has to go to the bathroom ten times a day, the whole country’s ready to let go.”

American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I don’t need to write up a summary of what this novel is about, as it’s been written about to death. But what I have to say is that after reading this Bret Easton Ellis has become one of my new favourite authors – what many people dislike about this novel (the repetitive tropes, the plotless structure and the excessive violence) are precisely what I think makes this novel so memorable. It’s a terrifyingly unrelenting attempt to hold a mirror up to New York culture in the late 1980s, a culture where uniformity, rampant materialism and the superiority of outward surface over inner truth ushers in the corruption of the individual and society as a whole.

This is a world where people are identifed by what they’re worth, what they’re wearing and in particular which labels they wear. While the incessant listing of commodities, brand and price tags might come across as excessive, it’s a necessary device to convey to the reader just how important such things are in constructing identity in Patrick’s world.

One of Patrick’s final remarks is that “this is what being Patrick means to me, I guess, so, well, yup, uh”. You’re left with the feeling that it’s completely impossible to strive for any coherent personality in such a consumerist world, and for that reason should be remembered just as much for this critique on the ‘American dream’ as the infrequent but graphic depictions of violence.

American Psycho is a thought-provoking, difficult yet memorable read which I can easily say is one of the most interesting and unforgettable novels I’ve read all year. I finished reading it two days ago but it’s still on my mind, and as such makes me desperate to read more of Bret Easton Ellis’ works.

View all my reviews
If you’re interested in the book the following podcast is definitely worth a listen: John Mullan meets Bret Easton Ellis (Guardian Book Club).