The Gray Swan

This is not a review of “Black Swan”, it is a response to it. It’s been awhile since a film affected me so strongly. Sure, on one level, the film is about ballet but that is just on the surface, what drives the plot.

The film is about so much more.

The film is about film, painting, writing, acting, singing, music and on and on. Anyone who wants to create, to engage in art, doesn’t do it passively, they give of themselves, they throw themselves into the creative process.

“Black Swan” really struck a chord with me because, even though it is about ballet on the surface, it is really about all art and anyone who struggles to create something. At one point the creative director of the ballet criticizes his star dancer for being too perfect, too precise, mechanical, cold and distant and, to me, it came off as Darren Aronofsky, the director of the movie, making a statement about big-budget Hollywood movies --- this film is relatively low-budget, shot with really grainy film and herky-jerky hand-held camera movement.

I remember watching “It’s Complicated” not long ago and being so distracted by how obsessively good the lighting was in one particular scene. It was ridiculous, I could tell that, in this kitchen location, a light or lights had been set up “just so” in order to make a bowl of fruit stand out, not even a bowl of fruit that was an important prop, a plot device. It was like this throughout the whole movie and not just this one film, most “big” films. It didn’t have anything to do with art per se -- all due respect to the DP and the gaffer who are obviously master craftsmen -- it was about technical precision.

Artists don’t just wake up one day and suddenly decide that they want to be artists, it is not intellectual at first, it is instinctual, we are drawn to create, to perform. I teach screenwriting at an art school. My students want to be filmmakers. I don’t think that any one of them had a meeting with their high school guidance counselor, had to come up with something to say and spat out “I want to go to film school.” Okay, maybe one or two of them once said “Well, um, I like movies, can I go to college for that?” No, I like to think that, like me, they had a long-standing burning desire to create, to express themselves, their worldview, to tell stories and to connect with others, to make work that resonates.

Still, even if we are “good at art”, it is often not enough, we want to be great at it, we want to be perfect.

While I was into acting, theater and film from a very early age, by the time I became a teenager, I think I wanted to become a stand-up comedian, I wanted to be on Saturday Night Live. I inhaled comedy, studied it, practiced it, listened to Bill Cosby, Richard Pryor and Steve Martin over and over again.

I saw Cosby at the York Pennsylvania State Fair when I was 15 and it was breath-taking, life-changing. I am pretty sure that I had never experienced that level of stage craft before but I know that I have never witnessed anything quite like it since. The show was so coherent and cohesive, like an intricate puzzle with many, many pieces that all fit together. Cosby came out on-stage, did one joke that served as something like a thesis statement from which every other joke evolved, even developed into a seemingly unrelated tangent but always came back, always had something to do with the original joke, which he would touch on for a bit and then go off in another direction and so on.

I think I knew, at that moment, deep down, that I could probably never attain that level of perfection, the thing that Nina, Natalie Portman’s character in “Black Swan” is obsessively after.

Also, in a really lucky moment of self-realization, while I was slitting the throat of my comedy career, I admitted to myself that I probably didn’t have what it takes to become an actor. Sure, I had talent but I didn’t have the looks, the body and, most importantly, the drive or the thick skin to make it in the world of making it as an actor.

A friend of mine who was a year ahead of me in high school was nearing graduation and, when I asked her what she was doing about college, she said that she was going to film school and, of course, my reaction was “Well, um, I like movies, can I go to college for that?”

Who knows? Maybe we seek attention and crave adulation. I always tell my students about the role of art in society, that artists are vessels for the human experience, that they cannot help it but take in the world at large, the things around us and then re-present or represent everything from their perspective, hopefully in a way that resonate with those who look at whatever it is that we do. Whatever the reason, we can’t do anything else, our art consumes us.

I can even see the beginnings of it, to a degree in my kids. Three weeks ago, my 16 year old daughter got up on a stage and with grace, poise and passion performed a long, intricate, complicated Beethoven piece in a recital. That one performance was the result of hours and hours of practice during which I can tell you, she sometimes resembled not Vladimir Horowitz but Keith Moon. Sure, practice makes perfect but if can drive you mad sometimes.

My 13 year old daughter has had a number of poems, short stories, book reviews and articles published in very high end literary magazines for young writers. Last year she entered two novel excerpts into a competition for homeschoolers. Both of her entries were among the five finalists and, in the end, she wound up in first and second place. Still, there is little that I can do when I see her in the agony of writer’s block or suffering the self-doubt and second-guesses about our talent that all artists go through.


Choosing an artistic path can be a painful, scary thing. Art succeeds when others respond to it. In order to get a response from an audience we have to put it, ourselves out there, be it as a ballerina, a singer-songwriter, a poet, a painter. Somewhere down the line, we say to ourselves “I think I am pretty good at this” and, in a best case scenario, we work up the confidence to create something, to show something, to play something and people agree with us and encourage us --- often to pursue often at the expense of learning how to do anything practical or developing marketable skills.

I wanted to be a perfect stand-up comedian and I could have driven myself crazy in pursuit of this goal. There is a scene in the wonderful Jerry Seinfeld documentary “Comedian” where, in an effort to rebuild and reinvent his comedy career from the ground up, he pays a visit to Bill Cosby who comes off as uncharacteristically laid back and humble, almost like a holy man of comedy. Seinfeld leaves the meeting speechless, his breath taken away. He is inspired. Maybe if I could have met Cosby when I was 15...

I don’t strive for perfection. I feel like I can never be perfect, that maybe, if I am lucky, I will be good enough. I am not perfect and I never will be. Most of the time, I think I am a pretty good screenwriter. Sometimes I wonder if I am fooling myself or anyone else when I say that this is what I “do.” I learn something new every time that I sit down to write and I know that I can never learn it all, that there isn’t even an “all” to learn, that it is infinite, that it keeps going, that I will never be the black swan or the white swan but somewhere in between, the gray swan.