Nina becomes furious and crushes her mother hands to get to the doorknob and leaves. She heads to the theatre and Lily is surprised Nina is in given she was sick. Nina is now calm and composed. Thomas is happy to see Nina this confident. He tells her that the only person standing in her way is herself. The show begins. Nina is highly distracted and as a result, gets dropped by her partner. Thomas is furious. Yes, Lily is not actually here.
Imaginary-Lily suggests that she should do the Black Swan as Nina will not be able to. Imaginary-Lily then transforms into a Dark-Nina. Nina stabs her doppelganger who turns back into Imaginary-Lily and dies.
Nina hides the dead body, gets dressed for her Black Swan act and exits. She bashes herself against the mirror and eventually stabs herself. Her alternate personality takes over, and her metamorphosis is complete.
The White Swan has become the Black Swan. Before Thomas can say anything, she kisses him passionately. She completes her act, and we are shown her shadow to be a black swan. The audience is left cheering loudly. She puts a towel to stop the blood. We can see that there is no rash on her back, confirming these wounds are in her mind. Suddenly, there is a knock on the door, and it turns out to be the real Lily who has come to congratulate Nina on the fantastic performance.
Nina is confused and checks for the body, there is none. Then she finds a broken mirror stabbed in her stomach, and takes it out. With the wound, Nina goes on to perform her last act. As expected she nails it and is loved by the audience. The White Swan falls to her death. We are shown her mother who looks on proudly, fearing for her daughter. As this happens, her wound grows, and she begins to bleed more. Which also means that one day she will be retired because of a younger ballerina.
Nevertheless, Nina is in a trance. Thomas eventually notices the blood and calls for help. All she has left to say is that she felt it, that it was perfect. What she wanted to achieve she has, but at the cost of her very life. Perhaps, but does it matter? Nina, the sweet girl, is gone for sure, metaphorically dead.
She might even spend the better part of her life in a mental institution. Her death, right after achieving her one goal is truly sad, but etches her as a brilliant performer in the hearts of the audience forever. Barry is a technologist who helps start-ups build successful products.
His love for movies and production has led him to write his well-received film explanation and analysis articles to help everyone appreciate the films better. Click to browse all his film articles. Where To Watch? This is Barry. Load Comments. Later, Thomas and Nina watch Lily dancing. Imprecise, but effortless. She's not faking it," he says, shaming Nina through comparison.
Thomas organizes a gala to say goodbye to Beth and introduce Nina as the new Swan Lake lead. Beth is furious and makes no secret of it. Taking a break from the party in the bathroom, Nina notices she has a hangnail. She pulls on it; it tears and bleeds profusely. But when someone knocks on the bathroom door, the injury disappears.
Thomas invites Nina back to his place and as she waits for him, an enraged Beth accuses Nina of sleeping her way to the top. Later, to get her to loosen up, Thomas gives Nina a "homework assignment," telling her to explore her sexuality on her own.
At home, Nina's mom helps her undress and sees the wound on her back is worse. I thought you were done with this, Nina! Nina wakes the next morning looking stressed. She tries to finish Thomas' "assignment," but realizes her mother is sleeping in her room.
This is not a good start to the day, and Nina struggles in rehearsal. Her day gets worse when she finds out Beth has walked into incoming traffic and is badly injured, an incident that took place just after their gala confrontation.
Thomas comforts her, but Nina is spiraling. Nina decides to go visit Beth in the hospital and is horrified by the state of her injuries, including Beth's devastated right leg. Back at work, Thomas is losing patience with his White Swan.
Let it go! He sends home the male leads and tries to infuse some passion into Nina's dancing by making out with her. He cruelly says, "That was me seducing you, when it needs to be the other way around. Nina insists Lily doesn't understand. At home, Nina is having more breaks with reality as she sees blood in her bathwater that isn't actually there. The wound on her back is growing. Nina cuts her finger on purpose and seems to delight in the act.
Thomas' verbal abuse escalates. Nina confronts a dismissive Lily, and her paranoia grows that Lily wants her part. On the subway home, an elderly man sexually harasses Nina and instead of moving away from him, she just watches. At home, Nina's mom asks whether Thomas had "tried anything with her," and they have a huge fight about Erica's life choices. Erica claims Nina ruined her career, and she doesn't want the same thing to happen to her.
Angry, Nina reminds her mother that she was 28 when she got pregnant and had aged out of ballet anyway. Exercising control, Erica demands that Nina take her shirt off so she can check the wound on her back. Right at the height of their conflict, Lily comes to the apartment to apologize and Nina leaves with her, even though their dress rehearsal is the next day. After dinner, Lily doses Nina's drink with ecstasy to help her loosen up — or, perhaps, to sabotage her.
They meet cute boys, and Nina briefly loses herself in the electronic dance music as well as the drugs. One line that's always cracked me up is how not long after Nina "becomes a woman", she has a moment where she yells at her mom, "I'm moving out. But it's the cherry on top of the "Nina goes from a child to a woman" subplot. Aronofsky really wanted to make sure that was clear and the dialogue communicated it. As Black Swan is so heavily reliant on duality, it makes sense there's a duality to the hallucinations.
On the one hand, there are signs aplenty that Nina is mentally ill. On the other hand, there's her desire for perfection and what that means when it comes to being the white swan and black swan. Let's first look at the mental illness, then we'll look at her obsession with perfection.
The signs of extreme mental illness, like with everything else in this movie, build up over time. We know Nina's mother is overbearing and representative of an over-involved, over-protective type of never-had-success dancers who obsess over their daughter's careers. 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. At first, she is rightfully afraid of these images; as she continues to embrace her degeneration, she also embraces these illusions.
She begins to detach herself from the rational and instead choses the fantastical, reveling when she imagines her arms turning into wings at the height of her mania. Did Nina die at the end? You can surmise her fate by following the theme of transformation and duality. She progresses, she begins to become more worldly, losing her virginity and coming in to her own. However, her self-exploration comes at a cost: her relationship with her mother and possibly her own life.
How can we be reasonably sure that she is dead? The film itself explores one final duality: life and death. And in the ballet, the White Swan dies whereas the Black Swan lives.
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