Having nailed her performance, Nina returns to her dressing room to change for the final act, in which she will depict the White Swan's suicide. While she's changing, Lily arrives at her door to congratulate her for her incredible job. In a shocking turn of events, Nina realizes that she didn't actually kill Lily. She looks down and sees a shard of glass sticking out of her own stomach.
Nina pulls out the broken piece of glass and looks in the mirror, realizing this is the end for her. As Thomas had said, she really was her own worst enemy.
Nina pulls herself together and brings the house down with her glorious final act. After her final jump onto a concealed mattress, the wound in her belly pours blood, turning her White Swan costume maroon. He calls her his little princess, just as he did with Beth, the first and probably last time Nina hears that potent pet name. But as her blood gouts, she smiles beatifically. There is a lot about Black Swan we as the audience simply can't trust. As the movie focuses on Nina's experiences, all the information we receive is clouded by her growing paranoia.
For example, we can't exactly know what is truly going on between Nina and her mother, since Nina might be making up certain events for her own benefit. Take the scratches on Nina's back. By the time she performs in Swan Lake, we see her skin is absolutely perfect. But throughout Black Swan, Nina's mother is constantly nagging her about the injury.
Is this a delusion shared by both daughter and mother? Or has Nina been imagining her mother tending her?
If Lily didn't actually meet Erica, we might even consider that she's not there at all. It's virtually impossible to know what exactly was going on with the ballet as well. Black Swan's use of mirrors and doubles, not just in Nina's hallucinations but also in the use of Swan Lake as the movie's central ballet, keeps us wondering which Nina is real — if any of them are.
The metaphor of mirrors as reflections of a fragmented self is also a key visual theme in Black Swan, thanks to Nina's unreliable perspective. There are no singular Ninas — only hodge-podge collections of anxiety and talent. Nina's mother's story is tragic. She never made it to the heights of the ballet world, due in her opinion to her becoming Nina's mother when she was Nina's father was someone involved in the ballet as well — a fact we glean when Erica expresses concerns over Nina sleeping with Thomas, and potentially "[making] the same mistake I did" — but we receive no further mention of who he was and whether he's had any part to play in Nina's life.
As her only daughter, Nina is Erica's do-over in the ballet world, and that pressure is a huge contributing factor in Nina's eventual breakdown. Can you imagine your mom's bedroom being filled wall to wall with terrible portraits of you? Nina is a grown woman, yet her mother insists on undressing her when she comes home from work. Not allowing Nina any privacy, even a simple lock on her door, is also troubling. Erica's unhealthy obsession with her daughter is as distressing as Nina's own psychological break — maybe even worse, as we don't know what's at the root of Erica's own mental illness.
To the outside observer, ballet is the epitome of high art. The dancers reach for the sky, floating inches off the floor like delicate angels, only touching down on Earth to bless the rest of us mortals with their exceptional beauty and grace. But underneath that divine facade of control and majesty, ballet is the stuff of blood and bone. Ballerinas, needing to stay slim, often live by extraordinarily restrictive diets. They also must control how much they exercise to prevent becoming overly muscular, which would ruin their lithe illusion, though they are simultaneously expected to be extremely strong.
Dancing on pointe causes cracked toenails that sometimes never grow back properly, even when the dancer retires. Ballerinas also often dance on jammed or broken toes , yet the pain they are in must never show on their controlled faces. Rehearsals are grueling ordeals and practice is never-ending. When receiving physiotherapy during Black Swan , it's stomach turning to watch the therapist put almost her entire hand under Nina's rib cage to massage her spasming diaphragm.
Ballet is beautiful, yes, but the price of that beauty is extreme, and painfully paved with horror movie-worthy bricks. Black Swan does not shy away from showing these beautiful and grotesque forces, nor how they come together to form ballet as a whole. It's a transcendent art, but it's also a punishing physical journey. Nina and the ballet company. Fighting for the role of Swan Queen. The ousted queen. Struggles in rehearsal. Downward spiral.
But that's not the sole reason the mother babies Nina. It's hinted at, then told to us, that Nina has had psychological issues in the past.
These mostly had to do with scratching and other means of self-mutilation. There's a sad tension. The mom's trying to do her best to help her sick daughter not go over a psychological waterfall for a second time. But the mom is also so jealous and bitter that she's one of several primary reasons why Nina is about to breakdown again. I mean, there's a whole room in their apartment dedicated to grotesque paintings of Nina. This isn't a healthy environment, and it's hard to determine what came first: the mental illness or the mother's obsession.
If Black Swan was only about a mentally ill girl finally tipping into insanity This is why we have the secondary aspect of Nina's hallucinations.
And a far more sinister interpretation of the hallucinations. When Nina confronts the director, Thomas Vincent Cassel , about whether she'll get the part, this is the conversation:. Yes you're beautiful, fearful, fragile—ideal casting. But the Black Swan? Thomas: Really?! In four years, every time you dance, I see you obsess getting each and every move right, but I never see you lose yourself.
All that discipline, for what? Thomas: Perfection is not just about control. It's also about letting go. Surprise yourself so you can surprise the audience.
And very few have it in them. Thomas kisses her. During the kiss there's a strange feminine soundscape that ends with what sounds like playful laughter.
Nina then bites Thomas's lip. Ending the kiss. This scene occurs 20 minutes into Black Swan. A general rule for movie structure is that there are a few places for important information: the opening scene, the final scene, the climax, and 20 minutes in. Look at many of the movies you love and about the minute mark is when the main story conflict announces itself.
The minute mark of The Lion King is when the hyenas attack Simba for the first time, a stark contrast to the lightheartedness that had defined Simba's story up to that point. Check out our deep-dive analysis of Fight Club if you really want to get weird.
What's the last thing we hear Nina say? She's finished her masterpiece performance, the crowd's giving her a standing ovation, everyone in the company has surrounded and congratulated her, Thomas has praised her, but then there's horror as they see Nina's nearly eviscerated herself. What did you do? And Thomas gives a look of shock and what could be read as understanding. Nina continues, clearly pleased despite dying , "It was perfect.
That conversation shows Nina was very aware of what happened to her. She's not some confused girl having a moment of stunned clarity. She's a professional dancer who wanted to give a perfect performance, and she did what she had to do to give that performance. She straight up told us at the beginning, "I wanna be perfect. But this plays back into what happens in the real world: ballerinas are held to insane standards, and the stress they face to maintain those standards is physically and psychologically destructive, at best.
But it can be outright annihilating. I started doing some googling about the rates of suicides in ballet dancers, and even though there was not a lot of hard hitting solid statistical data, the number of articles was very upsetting. The most noted dancer who committed suicide was a year-old lead dancer with the New York City Ballet, Joseph Duell in after performing in Symphony in C, and rehearsing Who Cares? So while we can pretty safely assume Nina's dealing with some mental illness caused by her career and mother, she's also, in a way, aware of what's happening because she wants it to happen.
If she wants to be perfect, to be both the White Swan and Black Swan, then this is what has to happen. Swan Lake is, after all, a tragedy. The distinction between the White Swan and the Black Swan is, I think, the final piece to the puzzle. In the climax, when Nina finally gets to dance, we see her oscillate between two emotional states.
The first is someone completely frayed and overwhelmed and either on the brink of tears or crying. The second is angry, violent, territorial, confident, sexy, dangerous. At one point, these two sides of Nina actually fight one another.
Some read this back and forth as indicative of Nina's mental health woes. And yeah, definitely. But we know that Nina wanted the performance to be perfect. And we're straight up told by Thomas what defines each of the swans.
The Black Swan is about seduction, imprecision, effortlessness, lack of control, letting go, an evil twin, someone with bite.
As we see Nina in those backstage moments, it's easy to read her mood swings as a complete psychological break. But it could also be representative of an artist inhabiting their character in order to perform to the best of their ability and even approach perfection. To dance the part of the Black Swan, Nina allowed herself to fall under a spell.
She drove herself to that darkness. By letting go, she surprised herself, surprised everyone else, and found transcendence.
To reach that state, she stopped rejecting the pressure and duress of her career and mother. Instead, she let it devour her. She gave into her urges and rage. She allowed the repressed part of her to emerge.
At first in the mirror, but then in reality. That dichotomy explains the hallucinations we see. On the whole, the hallucinations serve to coax out of Nina either the fear and fragility of the White Swan or the darkness and negative energy of the Black Swan. A lot of the time it's a mixture of the two. The hallucinations ramp up for a reason: Nina's getting into character, and the closer we are to the performance the more in character she has to be. The night of show, of course, she's at her most psychologically broken.
Superficially, it's because she's overwhelmed by everything that's happened: the pressure of the role, the pressure from her mom, the years of psychological deterioration, the mix of paranoia and sexual confusion regarding Lily. It's a lot. But what's scary is that this is also what she wants, it's a choice. Nina's such a perfectionist that in order to perform as the Swan Queen, as the best version of the Swan Queen, she needs to embody the character completely.
So it's kind of like she lets herself be consumed by all of these emotions in order to bolster the performance. Real fast, I do love that Nina's dropped during her White Swan performance. It increases the fragility and fear because it's a huge flaw in the overall show.
But at the same time, that kind of imperfection is part of what Thomas tells her makes for a perfect performance. So she applies that lesson to increase the vulnerability and fragility of her White Swan character in the moments before the Black Swan emerges.
With most of the hallucinations, the movie tells us what happened. Like we're told Lily never stayed the night with Nina. We know Nina's legs didn't break backward because she can walk perfectly fine the next morning. There are two hallucinations we really don't get an answer to. Did Nina see Lily and Thomas hooking up after hours? And did Nina stab Beth? With Lily and Thomas, the answer probably doesn't matter much.
Nina wants to be Lily, as Lily is her role model for the Black Swan. So it's likely that Nina imagined Lily and Thomas together because it helps her imagine herself and Thomas together. It's part of her growing sexuality, while also being part of the fear and fragility she needs as the White Swan.
So for Nina, it's a win-win. With Nina and Beth. I honestly don't know. I imagine if she had stabbed Beth, we would have heard someone mention it the next day, the same way we heard about Beth getting hit by the car. With Beth, we see Beth use the shoe knife on her own face which then becomes Nina's face , causing Nina to run to the elevator.
In the elevator, Nina's holding the shoe knife. The implication is Nina attacked Beth. Which is why we think, later, Nina attacked Lily. But since it turns out Nina just stabbed herself and Lily was never in the room Given Nina's insanity levels, it could just be she imagined the whole thing—the shoe knife was still on the table, no one had ever touched it.
She could have cut herself somewhere though we never see it. Or she really could have stabbed Beth. It's a "is the glass half full or half empty" kind of situation. We don't have enough information to say conclusively one way or another what the truth is, meaning that it's up to each of our own interpretations. Personally, I could see Nina attacking Beth as a precursor to her harming herself, also as a means of sealing her own fate—if she doesn't go through with the "perfect" performance then what awaits her is prison.
But I think more likely is that she just imagined it as part of her ramp up to the performance. Overall, the main takeaway from the Beth scene would be, I'd argue, how it plays into the concept of perfection. As Nina tells Beth, "I was just trying to be perfect like you. I'm not perfect.
I'm nothing. If it's Nina attacking Beth, that'd be because Nina's so violently against the ideal of imperfection and ending up imperfect that she tries to destroy the representation of that fate which is why she sees herself imposed on Beth. There you have it. I hope this was helpful. I think if you re-watch Black Swan after reading this, then the movie is going to feel way more obvious in what it's doing and why.
If there are any other questions you have, then please leave a comment and I'll get back to you! Thanks for reading. Chris Lambert is co-founder of Colossus. He writes about complex movie endings, narrative construction, and how movies connect to the psychology of our day to day lives. View all posts. Join our movie club to get similar movie recommendations and stories delivered to your inbox every Friday.
Hi Chris, Good day. I just wanted to thank you for sharing your insight into what is a great movie. She shows elements of an anxiety disorder with obsessive compulsive behaviors. She also manifests self-injurious behavior and some signs of an eating disorder.
She dabbles with substance abuse. She has psychotic breaks if not outright psychosis. A case could also be made for a personality disorder. It is highly unlikely all of these elements could coexist in one person, especially someone performing as a ballerina at such a high level. Despite this particular criticism, the movie does a fantastic job of portraying the struggle with severe psychological illness.
The Black Swan is a deep and compelling story with outstanding acting and cinematography. The intertwining of this psychodrama with the story of Swan Lake can only be described as brilliant. Get Directions Contact Us. While there is no singular cause of obsessive-compulsive disorder, it can be helpful to understand some of the underlying factors behind the diagnosis.
Understanding the Causes of
0コメント