I understand the people-watching, but I've never done it where people have to race to three different shows, from here to there. I mean, the biggest zoo I ever faced was Comic Con, and Comic Con takes place in one big hangar.

People want to be special. I think ambition can take in a whole package of things, power or sexual excitement.

The whole ecosystem of celebrity has broken down for writers. If you go back to the '50s, '60s, and '70s, writers were on TV a lot, and they were allowed to misbehave a lot. Truman Capote was a pop figure, but it wasn't until he went on David Susskind's show and had that extraordinary voice and manner that everyone could imitate, that he really took off as a figure. Norman Mailer and Vidal, the same thing. The bestselling writers now, there's no great animal energy with them.

Today a celebrity sex video isn't a stigma that requires penance and smarm removal; it's a branding device, a platform enhancer, a show reel.

My high-school papers, my college-application essays, read like Norman Mailer packed in a crunchy-peanut-butter sandwich.

In the voyeurism of Reality TV, the viewer's passivity is kept intact, pampered and massaged and force-fed Chicken McNuggets of carefully edited snippets that permit him or her to sit in easy judgment and feel superior at watching familiar strangers make fools of themselves. Reality TV looks in only one direction: down.

With 'Black Swan,' the ballerina saga flips its tiara and goes on a hallucinatory bender, a scary acid trip where transfiguration and disfiguration meet.