The Black Swan, Speed Racer, and Why Good is Overrated

Last night, I watched The Black Swan for the first time.

Dawg, HER ARMS TURNED TO WINGS.

It has come to my attention that some fools didn't like this movie.  Specifically, some fools be saying that this movie is melodramatic camp filled with ridiculous imagery.

Fools, STOP BEING FOOLS!!  Of COURSE it's melodramatic camp!  Some among you might recognize that there's nothing fundamentally wrong and a lot right with well-executed melodrama.  But I'd argue that The Black Swan is cool and amazing beyond any camp elements.  I love a well told, well executed plot as much as anyone, but to me, that's not what movies do best.  Movies have the ability to take advantage of image and movement.  Where a movie like Frost/Nixon, which I also love, uses plot as the device to engage the intelligent viewer, The Black Swan uses imagery, psychology, and melodrama.  The Black Swan people spend just as much time thinking about what Natalie Portman should look like as the best traditional playwrites thought about crafting a coherent plot.

Besides, in the postmodern world, do you really care about why a really cool image hits the screen?  Of course you don't.  You care whether the sheer specter of Cthulhu coming out of the water is the most terrifying, nightmarish image you can think of, precisely because it comes from a place that doesn't entirely make sense to you.  Does it hit you on a really primal, pre-rational level?  Does it get into your dreams at night?  Does it mess with your head, stick with you, blow open your mind to new possibilities about things that crawl around in muck hidden from everyday experience?  These are the questions that matter for the most meaningful art of our age.

That might seem to lead to down the road where I'm apologizing for the Michael Bays and James Camerons of the world, but nothing could be further from the truth.  Those lazy hacks are just playing to people's expectations and giving them comfort food.  In of themselves, special effects do not blow people's minds, because special effects have become the expectation for a certain type of film.  The people behind movies like The Black Swan, Speed Racer, and other such movies are working as hard as they can to expand our horizons.  In true postmodern/hip-hop style, The Black Swan blends genres to create the effect.  I can't imagine how the jerk marketing executives at Fox Searchlight felt when they started watching what they probably thought was going to be a beautiful little dance movie with Queen Amidala that they could sell to families at Christmas only to realize that it became a psychological piece about 30 minutes in and a complete psychedelic mindfck for the last half hour.

Look, man, I don't know how many ways to say it: the organizing principle of TWEDP is that human perception is limited, and that anything that gets us out of our rational mindset to consider what we have previously excluded is a great thing.  I could never, ever, ever have imagined that a movie like The Black Swan, or the images within it, could be imagined by people.  That makes it a win.