Subconcious Impact of Representation
From a young age, I never paid much attention to what most of my idols and heroes looked like or where they were from. Superman soared across the sky and Spider-Man swung across New York buildings and their alter-egos just looked like what the child version of myself believed the average person looked like. Part of growing up for me was realizing that I looked different from what I and many of my peers had been conditioned to consider the average. Most average looking pop culture figures did not share that many physical attributes with the little Latino kid that was looking up to them; it did not bother me at a young age since it was just the established norm. This established norm is eroding more and more every year though media continues to take significant strides in representation.
Like all cinema worth watching, Black Swan is an amalgamation of inspirations from the wide world of cinema. Without a doubt, the most notable inspiration comes from one of the most tragically short-lived artists in Japanese cinema, Satoshi Kon, and more specifically, his debut feature film masterpiece Perfect Blue. 
Born in Guadalajara, Mexico, Guillermo Del Toro has become one of the most prolific filmmakers of the modern age thanks to his unique voice, resilience on non-CGI creatures, and his unrelenting patience for his craft. Before working behind the camera, Del Toro worked for much of his early career in makeup and special effects, trained and mentored by Dick Smith. Working alongside Smith for ten years, Del Toro eventually cofounded his own visual effects studio named “Necropia”. This early interest and experience with practical effects laid the groundwork for almost all his projects to come, beginning with his first film Omnivore.
Comic books used to be a predominantly white-representative medium, with little to no diversity in their characters. It wasn’t until the latter half of the 20th century when things began to change. Marvel comics introduced characters like Black Panther in the 1960s, as well as the X-men, who serve as a metaphor for minority groups all across the world still to this day. It wasn’t until 1975 when the first mainline Latino comic book character was introduced by Marvel. Hector Ayala A.K.A. White Tiger, a Puerto Rican college student, donned a white suit that, curiously enough, showed nothing of his skin. Whether this was intentional or not, the comic book world had now been introduced to a true Hispanic character for the first time ever, and his creation paved the way for many more beloved Hispanic characters today. 
Once I learned about the Criterion Collection: It was game over. A company that literally specializes in putting out the very best, most high-quality versions of great films on physical release was destined to be my new obsession. But what fascinates me the most about Criterion is not just obtaining their beautiful releases in mass buying sprees, but the process behind how their releases come to be. 
Few television series managed to accomplish exactly what Avatar: The Last Airbender did in terms of story, characters, and worldbuilding. It transported us to a world of fantasy, where we actually felt connected to each and every character and the story arcs that they went through over the course of the show’s three seasons. Avatar excelled at building an epic overarching story with its episodes, while also providing smaller-scale episodes that, while maybe not advancing the entire plot, enhanced the characters themselves. Perhaps the most poignant example of this is Season One’s Thirteenth episode entitled “The Blue Spirit”. For a multitude of reasons, I consider this episode to be the best episode of the entire show and one of the greatest episodes of television of all time. 
Barbie goes through an almost hero’s journey as she is thrust out of her world- Barbie Land- into the ‘real world’ and learns that maybe Barbie didn’t have the all-encompassing fix-it effect that the Barbies thought. She learns of patriarchy, misogyny, and the anxiety and insecurity that womanhood inherently possesses in society today. It’s overwhelming; she feels, for the first time, something other than ‘awesome’ and ‘amazing’. 
As I left the SLC following my third viewing of Past Lives, I heard an overwhelming murmur of phrases which included, “It’s so good!” or “The characters are so real,” and “That was so sad!” all of which are valid assessments. However, while I, too, was repeating many of these phrases, I couldn’t help but feel like the movie was deserving of more than an assessment similar to so many others. In its brisk 106-minute runtime, Past Lives excels in the task of taking the audience into the lives of a mere three characters, giving very little in terms of information on who they are or any in-depth character traits, and bringing us to tears, as we wallow in the idea of lost time.
