Watched
The Black Swan yesterday: it is not very good, for a number of different reasons that I won’t really bother to expound upon. It is, however, more interesting than good; it’s interesting in a sort of puzzling-out of what’s-not-working-here kind of a way.
Specifically: it has some weird attitudes. The
Black Swan is a movie about an ambitious ballerina, Nina Sayres (Natalie Portman) who is innocent, fragile, a goodie two-shoes who’s bullied by her dragon lady stage mother (that the mother can be described easily in this way is probably a tip as to why the movie isn’t good; would you believe that the mother once held dreams of being a top ballerina herself? That plot element has never been used before!) and Sayres’s deep ambition is to get the lead in the ballet “Swan Lake.” The ballet requires two roles: a white swan, whose character matches up perfectly with Nina’s, and a black swan, which is, I suppose, the classic bad girl-rebel role. Nina’s reticence and reservedness makes her ill-suited for the latter role; moreover, there is the suggestion that although Nina is perfectly practiced and technically perfect, she is—what, too robotic? Too self-controlled? Something of all these, I suppose. Her counterpoint is Mila Kunis’s (that’s the actress’s name; I’m too lazy to look up the character name) ballet dancer who is, would you believe, the exact sort of hard-partying, drug-using kind of a girl who seems perfectly suited for the black swan half of the role. The equal and opposite suggestion is that Kunis’s character transcends technicality (her dancing is described as “imprecise” yet soulful, or something of the sort.)
Anyway, that’s the point at which the review of the movie in of itself will stop, because the idea here—of the over-practiced robot versus the natively genius savant—is one that bothers me. As far as I can tell, variations of this idea have been floating around since Rousseau, with the idea that we were all happier when we lived in a pre-civilization state, because we didn’t have the various encumbrances of modern life, with the rules, the rush, the spontaneity shackled, and so on and so forth. It is the view, then, that there’s something wrong with civilization in itself.
At Rousseau’s time and place, the idea was much more reasonable than it did now. Rousseau was writing in the middle of the 1700s, and from that period until roughly the beginning of the 1900s might be described as surprisingly ambiguous. Yes, the total capabilities of the human race were increasing at a pace previously unprecedented, and yet contributions to human welfare, broadly defined, were muted. Consider Rousseau’s Paris—like most cities in Europe, it did not achieve self-sufficiency in population until the public sanitation movements of the latter part of the 1800s; without migration, Paris and other cities surely would’ve died. Consider that, were you born in the boomtowns of Manchester and Liverpool in the middle of the 1800s, your life expectancy would be 29 (the comparable life expectancy for all Englishmen was 45). Wage growth was hard to define, but certainly not explosive. English people were eating more, but not as much more as you’d expect, given the growth in GDP. It was not unreasonable, then, to conclude that civilization was a compromised invention.
I’d say the idea has considerably more problems today, and considerably more problems than the average if you’re talking about artists. (It’s also somewhat amusing that, for a movie that posits that Sayres’s problem is a too rigid artistic and personal self-control, we are dealing with a very technically controlled movie, in a way that echoes basically all of the horror/suspense tricks you’ve seen before, if you’ve seen the trailer of even one horror movie.) I very much doubt there’s such a thing as an artist who, with very little practice/formal technical ability, just feels his/her way to success. A bit of a straw man, to be sure, but still…practice makes perfect. The thing separating the robots, the ones who are slavish imitators who don’t feel passion, from the real great artists isn’t practice or too much practice but the right kind of practice; since that’s so, the argument is for the right kind of civilization rather than none at all.
, Charles Ellis’s account of the history of Goldman Sachs. It’s interesting, if not written in a particularly sparkling fashion. There is one incident, which contrasted with one of their business principles (which Ellis spends some time on), is kind of interesting: 
