So I went to see the movie Black Swan today. Amazing movie! One of the best movies I've seen in a long time. The story is told brilliantly and the acting is top notch! Natalie Portman completely loses herself in this so utterly self-destructive character that it's almost scary to see. But the one thing that struck me most about this movie, is how depicts completely human emotions in a kind of over the top way. The lead character Nina is so emotionally stunted, yet so driven for perfection, but she doesn't know how to get it.
And this is the part where I stop talking so much about the movie and more about how this part of the movie totally spoke to me. As a singer and an artist, I often strive for perfection with everything that I do. Be it recording a song in the studio, or giving a live-performance or writing a song. I always want it to be the best that I can achieve and better than the last thing I did, and I've noticed that it's this need for perfection that more often than not stands in my way. I always try to be focused whenever I'm working on something, but once something doesn't go exactly the way I want it to and the way I imagined it, I lose my focus. And the perfection I was striving for gets lost along with it.
I find this such a fascinating subject, cause it seems that once you strive for outright perfection too much, that's when things go quite imperfectly.
The way the character in this movie finally found perfection is quite extreme and tragic, and absolutely not the way I plan to achieve it in my own life.
But it does make you wonder how far people are willing to go to achieve what they deem "perfection".