Black Swan

Black Swan poses honest, albeit disturbing, questions about us; how far would we go to achieve what we want, and it's that sometimes what we want to achieve is at odds with who we are, or at least thought we are.

Human beings are not brought up, much less born, with a personality, the elements of which easily reconcilable with the other elements. We are hosts to a number of contradictions, between competing values, between values and the reality as we perceive, or between what people expect of us and what we expect of ourselves. They can be so irreconcilable that we don't really know who we are; these contradictions could run deeper, they affect the core of our self-identification.

Nina Sayers' own inner contradictions were incrementally revealed to be more dramatic, between whom she thought she was and the side of her that she repressed, against the backdrop of the innocence of ballet dancing and the vicious ambition that fuels it. Maybe it's not apt to say that she always had that darker side of her that she's been suppressing, but more appropriate to say that she develops a pattern of behaviour in response to her surging desire. But the fact of the matter is that that combination of desires, or pulse was there, and it grows from strength to strength in the competitive environment that she's in. It makes me wonder if the contained personality that she had in the beginning of the movie was the result of her upbringing by her mother, who seemed to have expectations in how her daughter should turn out to be, instead of letting her grow organically, irrespective her mother's approval.

That's all I have to say about this movie. But it's a movie worth pondering upon after you're done watching it.