My mother first noticed something was up when I was five. In fact, she knew she had a miniature perfectionist on her hands within the first few days of my kindergarten class. Apparently, we were all meant to draw a picture of a pig and I took the task a little too seriously. As I drew my pig I wasn’t content with my own depiction. What she observed in her little parents’ circle was that upon seeing others’ renderings of pigs, I slowly slid mine under a big pile of papers and began a new one to catch up to my tiny peers. Theirs looked like Cezanne's and mine like Keith Haring's. Within the short five-year period of my life, I had already demonstrated how seriously I took competition. It meant taking cues from others (no matter how small those cues might have been) to learn their understanding of a task so that I could come up with a way both to know their interpretations and to take them a step further.
This attitude and world perspective has led me to many interesting situations in my life, ones which I am both immensely grateful for and ones which I lament everyday. Perfectionism, from the time I was a wee one up until now, has defined a great deal of my life. It compelled me to pursue my academics strongly at Trinity, it pointed me towards Harvard and has landed me ultimately where I am now, studying abroad at Oxford University for the spring semester of my junior year.
The most interesting thing to me about perfectionism, though, is that although the goal is to attain statuses or situations that palliate the human fear of incompetency, they actually breed insecurity with the false suggestion that once you reach a certain goal, you'll feel completely satisfied.
As I wrapped up my final essays at the end of last semester, I decided, both because of peer pressure and out of sheer curiosity that I would go see the movie “Black Swan,” which dealt with these very issues. Disclaimer: I hate thriller movies and I rarely pay for the experience of being made to feel uncomfortable. I get enough of that for free having lived in New York for roughly two decades and having experienced Harvard life since the fall of 2008. I went, though, with the anticipation that this ”visual masterpiece” (as it had been described) would turn me on to a whole new worldview about the sins of perfectionism. Not so.
I can’t quite tell if I hated “Black Swan” because it was too extremist in its portrayal of a very real, common issue that many of my peers grapple with or because it hit too close to home. I do know for sure that within the first 7 minutes, I wanted to escape the theater. It’s always a really dumb idea, though, to sit in the middle of the row in a theater because you most definitely cannot get out and you will have to get your 11 dollar’s worth whether you like it or not.
The thing that got me about that movie was the problematic quality of a lot of American movies: extremism. Rather than tell the story of a repressed young woman who centers her life around dance, it included insanity and excessive personal repression as a means to convey the fact that the main character struggled emotionally. Must a woman live with her mother into her middle 20’s, sleep with full array of Mattel’s stuffed animal collection, speak with the quiet voice of a seven-year-old, self-injure, endure schizophrenia, have suppressed sexual desires for both men and women, and starve herself before the American public can recognize that she’s a perfectionist?
Sitting through those two hours, it felt like the Hollywood industry was insulting the American audience’s intelligence by suggesting that the only way they could “get” the issue of perfectionism is by constantly reminding us just how infantilized, debilitated, and repressed the main character is. Unfortunately, it’s much easier to be a self-destructive perfectionist than people might think and it doesn’t take that many personal/emotional issues to set someone over the edge…as frightening as that might sound.
The thing I’ve found over the past few days of being in England on my study abroad program is that people all over the world regard American media, including movies such as “Black Swan,” as incredibly over the top. The English people giving our orientation meetings repeatedly commented on how loud Americans are and on how they always insisted on making their presence known. It seems like, as a nation, we haven’t figured out how to narrate stories, however serious or inane they might be, in a way that gets to the heart the matters involved without sensationalizing the problems involved.
The film industry seems to suggest in “Black Swan,” for example, that one of the only ways for women to feel repressed is by restricting what they eat. It's true that thousands and thousands of women feel this way but it only taps into one aspect of many that accounts for the way women encounter oppression. It’s more exciting to focus on the extreme demureness and frailty of a thin body in order to get across point that Natalie Portman feels like a weak woman than to grapple with the fact that modern women are constantly torn between performing the standard traditional ideals of passivity and the modern perspective that women “can do anything men can do.”
We need constant visual and social cues (e.g. her inclusion of dolls in her life past the age of 10) to indicate when someone’s feeling oppressed or treated subserviently. Sadly, there’s more to the picture of the damaging effects of perfectionism than we’re comfortable tackling in a two-hour movie screening. Instead, we pretend that the only people who deal with these identity crises are starved women who suppress their sexuality and who hide behind anorexia and their mommies to protect them. Again, not so.
I’m not sure if it’s my short time in a new environment or my pent up frustration with American media culture, but I’m growing increasingly tired of the way United States entertainment denies the complexity of American women and men’s issues by pretending that it’s super rare to face the inherent problems of perfectionism, suffering, anxiety or depression by portraying characters with these problems as social pariahs.
Why do we pretend that these stories of pain are purely for consumption and entertainment value when we know for a fact that they are not fanciful, rare issues but commonplace factors in many peoples' lives? What is it about the nature of perfectionism in American culture that incites our media to embellish its qualities and our societal members to feel ashamed of taking part in its results? And furthermore, what makes us hungry to hear more and more tales about perfectionism, regardless of what end of this workaholic spectrum we fall under? What’s up with that?
