Masculinity-Movies blog
posted by Eivind on February 6, 2011, at 1:32 am
I just came back from watching Black Swan at the movies and hanging out with the guys afterwards. It's not a movie appropriate for featuring in the main database of this site and I had never planned to watch it, but when my Brother Vegard invited me, I wanted to come along. Best movie I've seen in ages. Fuck, it's awesome!
Darren Aronofsky is a very impressive director (who really understands how to portray non-ordinary states of mind on camera extremely well), as I'm sure many of you are already aware of, but I think this is his greatest masterpiece so far. I think I would place it up there with the ten best movies I've ever seen.
For those who haven't seen it already, the movie is about Nina Sayers (amazingly portrayed by Natalie Portman), a talented and hard-working ballerina whose big breakthrough has not yet happened. But when artistic director Thomas Leroy at the company she dances for decides to produce a unique version of Swan Lake for the opening of the new season, he picks Nina for the role.
I'm not going to go into too much detail here, but what is so incredibly rich about this movie is the understanding of shadow territory and the consequences of suppressing the darkness in us. Nina is an incredibly repressed girl, both emotionally and sexually. Her technique is impeccable and Thomas tells her repeatedly that she is perfect for the role of the white swan. "But would you want to fuck her?," he asks one of the male dancers. By being outrageous, the controversial Thomas seems to want to tease the black swan out of Nina. He wants her to rise in her power and stop being so "fucking weak". He is provoking her, but she keeps repressing that which he desires for her to express, and the darkness in her starts becoming out of hand (some scenes showing this are incredibly freaky - I had to really breathe deeply not to lose composure in some of these).
I actually like Thomas. It's easy to conclude that he is abusing his role of authority to seduce Nina as a means of "teaching her", but it seems to me that he is actually doing exactly what is needed to wake up the black swan in her. There is a scene in which he ends up making out with Nina, and then he walks out on her while telling her "I just seduced you. It's supposed to be the other way around." Ouch.
There is something amazing going on here – Darren Aronofsky really understand that dark Feminine that I once described in the movie review for Beowulf and the way in which he deals with it in this movie is so fucking exquisite and enlightened. When Nina starts embodying the black swan towards the end of the movie, the shift in her character is awe-inspiring and people LOVE her. It's so easy for women to suppress that part in themselves because they have taught to be nice girls or whatever. But the dark Feminine is so incredibly sexy. Juicy as all fuck. There is so much life and vitality in the dark. For women as well as for men.
As a recovering nice guy, there is much to learn from this movie. Nina suppresses her inner darkness and sexuality because she wants to remain in control and that is exactly what creates her problems and tensions (any "nice guy" will recognize what this feels like). When she finally enters the darkness, she becomes a fully embodied, sexy woman, just as I and you reading this would become a fully adult man (or woman) were we to do the same.
This movie has inspired me even further to stop holding back my truth and to just inject myself into the world, no matter whether what I have to offer is dark or bright. I'm not going to let myself become a traumatized wreck of a person like Nina Sayer and the only way to prevent that from happening is to speak it out. No holding back of myself anymore.
Black Swan reminds me both why I think Darren Aronofsky is one of the best directors working in Hollywood today and that it's time to start being ourselves and live fully! Time and money incredibly well spent. We all fucking loved it. Amazing.
Watch trailer on IMDB.
Discuss the movie in The Tribe (requires registration).
posted by Eivind on January 28, 2011, at 10:25 pm
An early test version of The Tribe is up and running here:
http://tribe.masculinity-movies.com/
It's not running on Ning after all, but on BuddyPress. Let's see if it is good enough for us.
posted by Eivind on January 28, 2011, at 11:54 am
Hey guys,
I just migrated this entire website to a new webserver to facilitate updates/changes to the website in the near future. I have been looking at BuddyPress for the tribe I have been planning. I was meaning to go for Ning as the community platform, but then BuddyPress showed up at work and looked like an interesting candidate.
Not only that, I'm also looking into making Masculinity Movies a multi-site environment, which means in effect that any reader who becomes sufficiently inspired can get his own mini-version of the Masculinity Movies framework where he can write his own reviews, articles and blogs for our enjoyment.
I'm really serious about growing this site into a thriving community in 2011.
If you have any input, I would love to hear about it.
Cheers
posted by Eivind on January 26, 2011, at 8:52 pm
Not so long ago, I woke up to this e-mail:
Pelle, I really enjoy your writing, even when I disagree or question some things that you write. I think that what you say is incredibly important. This particular blog is interesting, and there are some comments that I might make at another time, but this time around i want to address the comments made on here by EIVIND.
Att’n EIVIND:
Eivind, goodness me, although your saturated self-righteousness would never allow you to see this, your approach is dripping with patronising, smug, self importance, and you use words very cleverly to create exactly the ‘I am right and you are wrong’ energy that you so patronisingly caution others against. I mean, seriously mate, eeeeewwwww! Immature, I know, compared to your skilled mastery of new age vernacular, but that is what I get when I read your passive aggressive drivel….eeewwwwww! It makes my skin crawl. The way you deal with people on here is so disempowering and deliberately (though disguised) humiliating and so horribly righteous, but you have the language skills and self belief (pathalogical!) to frame it in a way that makes you sound so new Age and sensitive and right. Mate, you are guessing like the rest of us, just trying to get through like the rest of us; if you were even nearly as evolved as your self-obsession tells you you are you would learn some humility. True humility, not the false ego version that your ego is right now telling you to respond that you have.
That said, Eivind…… men are here on this plane to serve women?? That is our entire reason for manifesting here?? Man, that is a theory, not a fact. Which I think is what Erik was trying to get at, but you passive-aggressively attacked him (oh yes you did, even though right now your little mind is going ‘no, brother, I don’t attack, I’m too evolved’), and used the fact that you are better with words than him to put him down, and he gave up. I am sure that you are used to that, and see yourself as having made some kind of point to him, but man, in your own new age terms, you are darkening your own soul with your smug continued conviction that you are in the right. (Erik, hang in there, and be true to yourself, don’t feel disempowered by knobs like Eivind). Anyway, ‘men are here on this plane to serve women’….just a theory, and very, VERY similar (in reverse) to the Scriptural interpretations, ALSO THEORIES, that were used to keep women in servitude for so many centuries. Is ’serving women is your reason for existence, brother, if you were really spiritual you would understand’, any different to the crap that women were fed about God placing men above them? Eivind, if you weren’t so damaging, i would just laugh and say eeewwww, what a silly, self-righteous, smug wanker. But you are damaging, and the nature of your righteousness is that you will go through life convinced that you are evolved. Sad.
It was a response to a thread I participated in just about a year ago on my friend Pelle Billing's blog, sent to my mailbox because I was still subscribed to it.
You can imagine it got my attention. I found myself strangely enlivened – the energy of the words actually gave me energy. My nervous system went alert and I felt alive. And then I became happy. I actually giggled. What was going on? I realized that this dude had actually, although he was clearly swimming in a lot of his own shit, identified some things about my past self which were true. I laughed because the criticism of my past self – just one year back – was so out of line when applied to who I am now. I sensed how much my life had changed in so little time and it made me rejoice.
I just read that thread again and actually find my presence there to be somewhat intolerable. Quite arrogant actually. "A pompous arse" comes to mind. I agree in principle with many of the things I said, but the way in which I said them are strangely out of sync with how I now think and what I now feel to be appropriate communication. My absolutist stance is passive aggressive, the dude was right (I have since learned how absolutist statements are a sign of insecurity). And I was shaming another dude in the thread and saying pretty much explicitly that I was further along on the path than him. That's not a decent way to communicate in my book.
The claim that "the nature of your righteousness is that you will go through life convinced that you are evolved" had just enough truth in it to wake me up and was so out of line with reality that it made me feel freedom and joy inside.
HOWEVER, I realized that this is likely to happen more as my audience widens – I will be criticized for words both past and present. What better way to deal with it than starting the "Humble Pie Project". Whenever someone says something nasty about me, something that will make me look like shit, I will post it here, provided it was published in a public forum. Don't let that scare you off from criticizing me – I invite it.
Give it to me 
posted by Eivind on January 18, 2011, at 11:11 pm
I had a great conversation with a Brother at lunch today about the Warrior archetype and the ways in which we have been naive and held back. So when I read the following passage in Iron John at a pleasant cafe after work, it crystallized as something of a theme today. Robert Bly is always worth quoting. Here are some of his sage words on the naive man:
A naive man acts out strange plays of self-isolation. For example, when an angry woman is criticizing him, he may say, quite sensibly, "You're right. I had no right to do that". If her anger turns to rage, he bends his head and says "I've always been this way". In the third act, he may implicate his father. "He was never there; he never gave me any support". Her rage continues and he bends over still farther. He is losing ground rapidly, and in the fourth act he may say: "All men are shits." He is now many more times isolated than he was a few minutes ago. He feels rejected by the woman and he is now isolated from all other men as well. One man I knew went through this play every time he had a serious fight with a woman, about once a week.
The naive man will lose what is most precious to him because of a lack of boundaries. This is particularly true of the New Age man, or the man seeking "higher consciousness". Thieves walk in and out of his house, carrying large bags, and he doesn't seem to notice them. He tells his "white light" experiences at parties; he confides the contents of last night's dreams to a total stranger. Mythologically, when he meets the giant he tells him all his plans. He rarely fights for what is his; he gives away his eggs, and other people raise the chicks. We could say that, unaware of boundaries, he does not develop a good container for his soul, nor a good container for two people. There's a leak in it somewhere. He may break the container himself when he sees an attractive face. As an artist he improvises; as a poet his work lacks metre and shape.
Improvisation is not all wrong, but he tends to be proud of his lack of form because he feels suspicious of boundaries. The lack of boundaries will eventually damage him. The naive man tends to have an inappropriate relation to ecstasy. He longs for ecstasy at the wrong time or in the wrong place, and ignores all masculine sources of it. He wants ecstasy through the Feminine, through the Great Mother, through the goddess, even though what may be grounding for the woman ungrounds him. He uses ecstasy to be separated from grounding or discipline.
The naive man's timing is off. We notice that there will often be a missing beat a second or so after he takes a blow, verbal or physical. He will go directly from the pain of receiving the blow to an empathetic grasp of the reason why it came, skipping over the anger entirely. Misusing Jesus's remark, he turns the missing cheek.
Anyone recognize themselves in these words? I sure as hell do. In fact, when it comes to the last paragraph, I experienced exactly that about two years ago. I had started martial arts practice understanding that my Warrior archetype needed to power up, but I was still naive as fuck. One day, there was a deranged man on the train platform who walked around saying stuff that scared people. For some crazy reason, I thought it was in my power to handle this dude by talking some sense into him – trying to protect the others from their discomfort (though of course it was really my own I was concerned with). I addressed him and he came right over to me and punched me in the face "I'm just trying to win friends," he told me.
I was flabbergasted. I had no response. So he landed another punch. My glasses flew across the platform and my lip cracked. I was still flabbergasted – my martial arts skills nowhere to be seen. And the fucked up thing was that my first feeling was empathy – "oh, you must have a rough life to treat my like that". Afterwards when I started thinking about it, I realized my "empathy" could have got me killed. I thought about this at a friend's funeral – because that's where I was headed. Worse, it could have got my family killed (if I had one). This became somewhat of a dilemma for me (similar to the one which got me to take up martial arts in the first place). These thoughts made me upset that I hadn't had a knee jerk reaction of anger and high physical alert. I was frightened by my apathy and that twisted willingness to feel soft compassion for a man who just attacked me in a most violent fashion. There's a time and place for everything. That wasn't it.
In my conversation with my Brother today, I talked about the Warrior archetype and how there's a knee jerk component to him. A true Warrior is prepared to defend himself and that which he is assigned to protect within a moment's notice. Otherwise, he may die (in a bloody mess), and that which he was meant to protect with it (including the goodness and beautiful innocence of our own innermost nature).
Being punched in the face on that train station platform was a huge learning experience. I lost some naivete that day. And it forms a background understanding for why the Warrior archetype is exactly what this naive man that Bly speaks of so desperately needs.
Finally, the first paragraph pinpoints why I claimed that last years Manifesto for Conscious Men was a hurtful (and, I feel inclined to add right now – dangerous) document in the wrong hands. I wonder how many naive men liked that text on Facebook thinking that they were protecting the Feminine and doing some true and beautiful thing, whilst really being in the unconscious process of trampling on all that was beautiful and worth honoring in themselves. I hope it wasn't too many. Though the danger was acute.
Something to chew on.
That just made me smile. What do you despise about it?
more »
