Black Swan, Perfection and Broken Symmetry

I have a confession to make, I love to watch movies. Not that big of a secret, many people love to watch movies. I have fallen asleep listening to homilies, speeches, at the symphony, at meetings and even have gotten a bit drowsy at times when working with clients. But when it comes to a movie, I can be so very tired and something in me gets more alert when the movie starts. All the visual stimulation must hit the “wake up” centers of my brain.

This has been a great year for Oscar nominated films. I have seen five of the ten nominated films and have enjoyed every one of them. The last nominated film I watched was the most haunted and complex film of all of them, The Black Swan staring Natalie Portman. She plays the role of Nina, a ballerina who auditions for and gets the starring role in Swan Lake. In this version not only must she dance the role of the White Swan, she must also dance the Black Swan. This is where the tension begins.

As the movie progresses Nina struggles with conveying the emotions and spirit of the black swan. She also wants to be perfect, and her quest for perfection takes her down a pathway of psychological decomposition. There is interplay between reality, fantasy and delusion that sometimes made me wonder if I had wandered into a Stephen King thriller. The viewer can be disturbed and confronted with distinguishing between what is real and what isn’t. On some levels this movie is disturbing and on other levels it is a great psycho drama. Of course, the acting, directing and the score are superb.

What struck me the most in this movie was Nina’s quest for perfection that led her to a neurotic need to be in control. There is a tension between achieving our ideals and falling short of them. It is in the resolution of that tension that we discover more of our real self. Of course, the crisis that we all face is that of failure and disintegration, of things falling apart when we suffer failure, defeat and the loss of our dreams.

I think too of the notion of broken symmetry, a concept from cosmology and physics that is used to describe the creation of matter. This theory holds that before the universe began things existed in a super symmetrical state. Can we call it a perfect state? It was only when the symmetry was broken that matter leapt into existence and our universe was born. We humans are built on symmetry; we have mostly two of everything in our bodies which exist in symmetrical relationship. We have two eyes, two feet, two hands, even two halves of one brain. Yet at the same time it is not a perfect symmetry. You can see this when you look at experiments that put together a mirror opposite of someone’s left or right side of the face. When one looks at pictures like that the human person actually looks a bit more weird or sinister. Our symmetry, while mostly perfect, is still broken a bit.

Think of a car, look at its rear and you will find that the lock for the trunk is often put off center a bit. Nearly perfect symmetry, yet broken a bit. Most things of true beauty, like a great piece of art, participate in some way in this concept of broken symmetry. The smile of Mona Lisa is another example of that, just a bit off in a way that gives the work some creative tension.

In the Black Swan Nina strives for perfect symmetry, yet at a great cost to her own sense of self. It seems that embracing our own broken symmetry in our quest to be better is an important part of being human. Karl Jung called it embracing our shadow; Dr. Karen Horney (a contemporary of Freud) called it resolving the tension between the real and the ideal. It’s in the tension that we come to realize more fully who we really are, and it may be that collapsing the tension between the real and the ideal will make us either a first class cynic or a delusional idealist.

The movie is worth seeing, but it is disturbing on some levels; itt will make you question the dividing line between reality and delusion. It might also lead you to question what it takes to be really good at something, even perfect, and how you integrate all the different forces in your life into one unified personality.