[Donald R. Howard, author of The Idea of the Canterbury Tales] has a fund of jazzy generalizations, as when he defends the dull Parson against the fascinating Pardoner: "If goodness is dull in literature--if Milton's Satan is more interesting than God, Iago more exciting than Desdemona--this is a fact not about goodness or about literature but about ourselves. Take someone to the zoo and he wants to see the snakes." But it doesn't occur to him that nothing in life or literature is more interesting and exciting than goodness: that Troilus, Criseyde, and Pandarus are all both good and wonderfully interesting; so too Elizabeth Bennet, Anne Elliot, Sophocles' Antigone, Pushkin's Tatyana, Trollope's Plantagenet Palliser, Lawrence's Tom Brangwen; so most of all the character Chaucer in Chaucer's poems, who is the best human being on record and marvelously interesting. And when someone takes me to the zoo I want to see the swans.
From Apollinaire Scherr's review of Black Swan for The Financial Times:
If [director Darren] Aronofsky had paid some attention to the ballet Nina is destroying herself over, he might have made a less odious film. Sure, there is a good maiden and a sly vixen in Swan Lake, but, like the ballet?s dopey prince, Aronofsky gets them mixed up. The virtuous woman has a self to lose; the schemer merely fakes it.
Odile the Black Swan is easy to understand. She does what her sorcerer daddy bids. She doesn?t transform herself, she merely impersonates - queen, swan, whatever is necessary - with a blatancy of timing and technique that looks spectacular. It is spectacular: what you see is what you get. ?Losing yourself? has nothing to do with it.
Odette - part swan, whole queen, once simply a woman - is complex: wild but also majestic, animal yet gentle. Feeling and animal sense direct her nuanced moves and help her decide whom to trust (a skill I wish Nina had). Eventually she falls slowly backwards into the prince?s arms in a luxurious rapture that makes Nina?s ?liberation? - getting banged in a club bathroom by a couple of drunken lads - seem especially pathetic...
Aronofsky and his movie double, the ballet director, get things backwards. If Nina can do the white swan she can do anything, because the Swan Queen has an inner life. Next to that, the lessons of random sex and other experiences pale.
Mudrick, not coincidentally, was a great fan of ballet, receiving his first revelatory wow at a performance of New York City Ballet's Nutcracker in 1958, seeing Allegra Kent and Jacques D'Amboise dance the final pas de deux. "And I was absolutely overwhelmed. [Not] only did I fall in love with ballet but i fell in love with Allegra Kent, and which came first I have no idea."
Source: http://www.vanityfair.com/online/wolcott/2010/12/swan-dives.html
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