Away

A poem, from a Christchurch newspaper my parents brought home for me.

Away
Victoria Broome

At first the dead return
as if they have only been away
on holiday or a business trip.
They cannot help
but surreptitiously look
to see what you have changed.
The back door shoes are gone,
the wardrobe is leaner,
certain possessions
have become artifacts.
Still, the comforts remain.
You look at the dead
amazed, they evade
your questions; say –
they’ve only been away
for a while, look pointedly
around the room, let the
wine glass linger
at their translucent lips.
You lay the table, white plates,
cutlery, linen napkins, salt and pepper
quartered lemons, olive oil,
parmesan and a fresh salad;
give them a placemat
light the tapered candles,
bring out the cellared wine.

Black Swan

Watched Black Swan today! It was so petrifying that I went for a three hour walk thereafter to let the wind wash the terror from my mind! Hallucinations! Feathers growing out of people! Lots of inexplicable bleeding! And everyone aside from Lily is so mean all the time!

Nina clearly sees Lily as a terrifying rival, but I think its pretty clear that's one of her skewed perceptions. The scenes where Lily is clearly Lily rather than a hallucination, she's genuine and kind, if not always deeply observant. "Someone's got the hots for teacher," Lily observes, and she's half right: Nina is half in love with her ballet teacher, who is also her company's visionary director and an all around terrible human being.

But Lily's also half-wrong: Nina's upset not just by unrequited love, but because her director just fondled her in an attempt to unleash her sexuality so she could play the sensual black swan in Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake. This is heinous enough on its own, but the fact that she is a bit in love with him adds another level to it: he's twisting a fragile girl's emotions to try to reshape her, Pygmalion-like, into what he wants her to be.

Which, among other things, is "sexually available to him."

I think Nina's repression is, at least in part, an attempt to protect herself from the creepy, exploitative sexuality that surrounds her, both in the ballet company and in the city at large. She's fragile and frightened and trying to make it go away by ignoring it, which doesn't work, but what other recourse does she have? She has no support system. Her life consists of ballet (under the thumb of her emotionally abusive director) and home, under the overabundant scrutiny of her mother.

Some reviewers have clearly slotted Nina's mother into the role of "psycho stage mom," which I don't think is quite fair. She seems suffocatingly overprotective - there are no internal locks in the apartment, which seems to stem from Nina's history of self-harm - but at the same time it's clear Nina needs protecting. Is Nina's mother wrong to try to prevent her from dancing the ballet at the end of the film? Does Nina really seem well enough to be anywhere but a hospital at that point?

The real question is not "Why is Nina's mother trying to prevent her from dancing?", but "Why does Nina's mother not try to put her into psychiatric care?"

( I'm still trying to sort out the ending in my mind... )