Adding to her self-doubts is the arrival of a new dancer, Lily, who seems ideally suited to playing the black swan. To succeed, Nina will will have to transform herself into something she has never been. Consumed by an undisciplined desire for perfection that's gnawing at her, the beautiful, fragile, and devoted ballerina, Nina Sayers, has laboured for years at a prestigious New York City ballet company. Now, more and more--in the face of fierce competition in the shape of the newcomer corps-de-ballet dancer, Lily--the virginal prima ballerina finds herself entangled in a world of incessant rivalry, unbounded jealousy, and grotesque hallucinations, as Nina struggles to delve deeper and deeper into her well-hidden dark side.
The passionate Black Swan demands transcendence. What is the price of excellence? Sign In. Edit Black Swan Jump to: Summaries 5 Synopsis 1. While Nina is going through a mental struggle, it takes a physical form as the rash on her back. She has it before the search for a new Swan is declared, and it worsens after she gives in to her mania. When her mother sees it, she instantly cuts her nails and makes a big fuss.
But moving forward, a context begins to appear. Every time the rash appears, Erica knows that Nina is on the brink of a breakdown and so, she tends to it.
When the rash is gone, Nina is back. This time, however, Nina succeeds in keeping it a secret. She tells her mother that she is fine, but in truth, the unchecked wound festers. Perhaps this is what makes Erica be more controlling.
As Nina reaches her breaking point, Erica tries to keep her at home on opening night even when this is what her daughter has worked so hard for. In the ending credits of the film, every actor is credited not just with their role in the film, but also their counterparts in Swan Lake itself.
In accordance with the story of the ballet, it is the evil twin who takes everything away from Odette, but nothing of such sort happens with Nina. She does feel threatened by Lily, but the latter never really takes anything away from her. Nina thinks that she wants to steal her role, but then, as Thomas says, every other girl wants that.
Is it justifiable to call her that? Be it schizophrenia, or multiple personality disorder, or whatever else you want to call it, this is the only problem in her life. This is the thing that takes away everything, even her own self.
Nina had been suffering before she met Lily, but with her, she finds a face for her fears. In this respect, she is like her mother, finding someone else to blame for her own flaws.
But as her condition gets worse, the mask of Lily, too, begins to disappear. The faint resemblance that they had begins to take her own form, sharper and more defined with every hallucination. The part that she had suppressed for so long is let loose and in the end, she gives in to it. With the Black Swan manifesting itself on the stage physically, her emotional transformation is completed too. At first, she had been afraid of this transformation.
She had been concerned about the rash; she had been horrified when a feather comes out of it when her legs crack, and she watches herself literally turning into a swan. Even while performing on stage as the Swan Queen, she had not fully embraced it. It was only after she stabs her doppelganger , whom she believes to be Lily, that she completes the transformation. Because she has killed her. Black Swan follows Nina from simple member of the ballet corps to lead dancer, a promotion that sends her spiraling into paranoia and delusion.
As Nina succinctly describes the ballet, "It's about a girl who gets turned into a swan, and she needs love to break the spell, but her prince falls for the wrong girl so she kills herself. Since Black Swan centers Nina, and Nina quickly begins losing her mind, viewers have to do a great deal of reading between the lines to understand her ultimate fate.
Here is the ending of Black Swan explained, in all its sinister glory. From the very start, there is something off about Nina. This feeling of unease deepens when her mother Erica enters. Erica is massively overprotective, her relationship with her year-old daughter more like that of a mother and young child. Compliant and baby-voiced Nina is in a state of arrested development, enforced by her mother's firm, smiling control.
Erica notices a small scratch on Nina's back, which Nina brushes off as nothing. On the subway on her way to work, Nina sees a woman who looks exactly like her, only to realize, a second later, that it is an illusion. Nina is a dancer in an unnamed Manhattan ballet company, all of whom are surprised to find out that lead dancer Beth is being replaced.
The company's director Thomas springs an unannounced audition for the role of the Swan Queen, which requires the dancer to portray both the virginal White Swan, Odette, and the sensual Black Swan, Odile. Nina is one of the dancers selected to try out, and as the White Swan, she excels. When Nina is interrupted in her Black Swan audition by new dancer Lily, played by Mila Kunis , she panics and flubs the whole audition. At home, she rehearses the choreography she stumbled through, but cracks her big toenail in half.
Her mom admonishes her for pushing too hard, and says how unfair it is that Thomas would call auditions without giving anyone time to prepare. The next day, Nina puts on a see-through shirt and red lipstick, trying to convince Thomas she's right for the role. He disagrees, saying all he sees "is the White Swan. Shortly after, Nina is shocked to see that he has cast her as the Swan Queen. The other company dancers are as surprised as she is, and draw the worst conclusions: When Nina comes out of the restroom, the word "WHORE" is written on the mirror in red lipstick.
Back at Nina's apartment, we discover just how unhealthily obsessed Erica is with her daughter: Her bedroom is filled with terrible portraits she's made of Nina through the years. Erica tries to celebrate Nina's casting by guilting her daughter into eating cake.
The scratch on Nina's back is seen, grown far deeper and more serious. On Nina's first day of Swan Queen rehearsals, she's moved to a shared dressing room for lead dancers. Thomas praises Nina's work as the White Swan, but says she still needs major work to pull of the Black Swan. 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 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. I had just finished watching Black Swan after having not seen it for at least 5 years and the question I had concerning the plot and what was real and what was just imagined arose again.
I must have watched this movie half a dozen times when it first came out. Aronofsky is defiantly in my top 10 directors and I have seen most of his work I saw Pi when it first came out and was impressed but what really got me was Requiem for a Dream, which I consider to be a masterpiece. I love to read about the subtext and not so obvious messages some movies are able to provide and you did a great job in answering all the questions I have had for a long time about a great movie.
Please keep up the great work. Thank you. Was Nina really the black swan or was all that in her head? Did she really sleep with Lily or was that in her too?
I just have so many questions. If you could answer them that would mean the world to me.
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