How about I Dance the Black Swan for You?
Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan was on TV tonight and as I write this it's currently trending on Twitter. Scrolling through the comments has left me a little... confused? annoyed? I'm not quite sure. 'Unsettled' perhaps covers it best.
You see, the vast majority of the comments focus on a scene in which Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis have sex. It's a couple of minutes long, at the most, and it isn't massively pivotal in the context of the plot. But because it features two women in bed together, it's a talking point. Noticeably, what isn't on everybody's lips is the other hundred or so minutes of the film, which largely centres around Portman's fragile mental state and decline into madness, for lack of a better word. Black Swan truly is a terrifying watch, but it seems as though most people who watched it tonight were more horrified at having sat through a sex scene with their parents in the room than witnessing a woman suffering with mental illness.
Thanks to the likes of Fifty Shades of Grey and the loosening of censorship laws sex is no longer the taboo it once was. If we can now talk relatively openly about our bodies, as evidenced by the amount of tweets on the subject, why can't we do the same about our minds? Mental health is a blot on the typically British 'stiff upper lip' way of life. It makes people uncomfortable because they can't see it, because they can't wrap their heads around the idea that someone is compelled to open and close a drawer a certain number of times amid fears that something bad will happen if they don't, or that a person can spend all day in bed not because they're lazy but because they genuinely see no point in getting up. And I accept that it can be hard to grasp if you've never experienced it; there can be no logic behind it, no reason, but mental illness can be just as dehabilitating, if not more so, than physical ailments, and reducing it to scandalous newspaper headlines and whispered comments about funny farms only aids that. Stigma is a powerful thing and the labels attached to those with mental health issues as a result of ignorance, of not talking about it, serves to further injure those people by way of prejudice, discrimination, and isolation. The veil of silence covering mental illness is reinforcing the problem and it is long past time that it was lifted.
I just hope it doesn't take another E.L. James book to do it.
You see, the vast majority of the comments focus on a scene in which Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis have sex. It's a couple of minutes long, at the most, and it isn't massively pivotal in the context of the plot. But because it features two women in bed together, it's a talking point. Noticeably, what isn't on everybody's lips is the other hundred or so minutes of the film, which largely centres around Portman's fragile mental state and decline into madness, for lack of a better word. Black Swan truly is a terrifying watch, but it seems as though most people who watched it tonight were more horrified at having sat through a sex scene with their parents in the room than witnessing a woman suffering with mental illness.
Thanks to the likes of Fifty Shades of Grey and the loosening of censorship laws sex is no longer the taboo it once was. If we can now talk relatively openly about our bodies, as evidenced by the amount of tweets on the subject, why can't we do the same about our minds? Mental health is a blot on the typically British 'stiff upper lip' way of life. It makes people uncomfortable because they can't see it, because they can't wrap their heads around the idea that someone is compelled to open and close a drawer a certain number of times amid fears that something bad will happen if they don't, or that a person can spend all day in bed not because they're lazy but because they genuinely see no point in getting up. And I accept that it can be hard to grasp if you've never experienced it; there can be no logic behind it, no reason, but mental illness can be just as dehabilitating, if not more so, than physical ailments, and reducing it to scandalous newspaper headlines and whispered comments about funny farms only aids that. Stigma is a powerful thing and the labels attached to those with mental health issues as a result of ignorance, of not talking about it, serves to further injure those people by way of prejudice, discrimination, and isolation. The veil of silence covering mental illness is reinforcing the problem and it is long past time that it was lifted.
I just hope it doesn't take another E.L. James book to do it.