BLACK SWAN

We don’t deserve a film this great. Based on a ballet—the art form most like poetry in that it has to convince you, every single time you encounter it, that despite your every presentiment and memory it might actually succeed. Can you imagine the movies having to stoop so? On the contrary, we like this one before the tickets are even bought. Jason and Ethan gush over all the spectacle, while Michael teases me, at the bar, telling me his male students are driving him nuts, stuck on what he calls the merely distracting question of fate vs. free will in The Odyssey. I know he knows, of course, that I’m stuck on it, too. How else can we decide if events are the crucibles of our affinity, or if they are themselves, rather, the wedges sledgehammer time pounds into the chinks between us.

WINONA FOREVER. But everyone’s bonkers for Portman, those cheekbones, that you-know-what neck, my old mentor is reported to have said that he could watch this movie “a thousand times” and I think I might know why. As Nina, she’s a frozen little girl, a Rapunzel about to awaken, cram an armload of stuffed animals into her apartment’s incinerator—how amazing was Toy Story 3?—and push, out of desperate ambition, past mere technique. And yet, Zizek: “Death drive means precisely that the most radical tendency of a living organism is to maintain a state of tension, to avoid final ‘relaxation’ in obtaining a state of full homeostasis. ‘Death drive’ as ‘beyond the pleasure principle’ is this very insistence of an organism on endlessly repeating the state of tension.” Eros and abandon, you deserve this tale’s paean, but it’s just as much a fundamental instinct that makes both she and I so spectacularly uptight.

Your paranoid delusion going down on you is like nothing else. After all, it knows your unbearable organ: the skin under skin: rashed, stippled, enflamed. I keep mine raw, too, the beds of my nails are always healing, never healed. Plier: to fold, and unfold, and enfold, replicate and duplicate and explicate. Places, everyone! In this city you’ve got to kill your double every fucking night.