Black Swan explained
I think we can all agree that when you first watch Black Swan the immediate questions you have are “How much was real? What was real? Why was Nina seeing what she saw?”
There’s some good news and bad news. The good news is there’s an answer. The bad news is you’re gonna have to deal with me for some paragraphs. But, I promise you, you’re going to come away from this article with a whole and profound understanding of Black Swan.
To start you on that path of Black Swan mastery, we’re actually going to begin with Darren Aronofsky‘s previous movie—a little ditty called The Wrestler. And, honestly, if you just want the shortest answer, then behold.
I’ve always considered the two films companion pieces. They are really connected and people will see the connections. It’s funny, because wrestling some consider the lowest art — if they would even call it art — and ballet some people consider the highest art. But what was amazing to me was how similar the performers in both of these worlds are. They both make incredible use of their bodies to express themselves.
Black Swan is artsy and full of cinematic tricks and techniques that make art house lovers drool. The Wrestler is a stripped down version of that. In both, Aronofsky employs a handheld camera that not only lends a rawness and reality to the scenes but also serves to visually link two disparate performers and two disparate performances. Combine that with Darren’s own admission about them being “companion pieces” and what’s happening in Black Swan becomes less mysterious.
The Wrestler is pretty upfront about how Robin Ramzinski’s career in the ring as Randy “The Ram” Robinson has left him in less than stellar circumstances. Despite having been a huge star, his twilight years are a struggle. There’s a brutality in the contrast of the man beloved in the squared circle vs. the man who wakes up alone in his run-down trailer in such pain he can barely move. We see how the pressures and demands inherent to the industry have left the performer in physical, mental, fiscal, and emotional ruin.
By the end of The Wrestler, our performer has been told that if he wrestles in the ring again his heart could give out. At this point, he’s faced with a choice between building what life he can as Robin or going out as the Ram. In his final match, feeling his heart on the brink, he makes the choice to climb to the top rope for his finishing movie. It’s what the fans want—the match wouldn’t be right without his diving headbutt. And Ram has decided he needs to and wants to give the fans what they demand and deserve.
Sound familiar?
Why is the movie called Black Swan?
Real fast, let’s talk about titles. What did they call the movie about Muhammed Ali? Ali. What did they call the movie about Ray Charles? Ray. What did they call the movie about the Oakland Athletics changing the economics and talent evaluation in baseball through the “moneyball” system? Moneyball.
Those are all very specific titles to ensure people understand the topic being discussed. Why then wasn’t the movie about Facebook called Facebook? Instead, it’s The Social Network. One potential reason is you’re crowning Facebook as more than just a social network, it’s the social network—which, at the time, in 2011, it was. But another reason is that maybe the focus on the movie goes beyond Facebook. Maybe the founding of Facebook is just an aspect in an examination of the effect of social dynamics on people. How our social networks and interactions bring out the best and worst in us. And how the smallest network possible, that between two people, can often be the most powerful thing in the world.
If The Social Network were just called Facebook then you potentially lose that added layer of meaning a title can give. So when you look at Aronofsky’s choice to use the generic, The Wrestler, rather than the specific, Ram, it begs the question: why make that choice?
You might already know what I’m going to say.
The Ram’s woeful tale is, unfortunately, a common fate for wrestlers. Which means the Ram is representative of the whole. His story is the story of many. The final message, when stripped to its core point, is a bleak one—wrestlers literally kill themselves for our entertainment.
While Black Swan wasn’t called The Ballerina, it’s nearly the same thing, just more specific. Ballerinas dance in ballets, a famous ballet is Swan Lake, one of the starring roles of Swan Lake is the Black Swan. This specificity might seem the opposite of The Wrestler but hear me out. The Black Swan metaphorically represents the negative “other”. The evil twin. The darker nature. The more dangerous emotions. Aronofsky could have gone with the title, The Ugly, Troubling, Destructive Reality of Being a Ballerina. But that’s long as hell and very un-poetic. Instead, you can capture that same connotation and energy and meaning with the more mysterious Black Swan.
This was a long way to set up the point that Black Swan isn’t just a cool movie where a girl goes crazy and just happens to be a ballerina. It’s Aronofsky exploring and presenting the pressures ballerinas face in an industry that demands very much of them. In a sense, the point Aronofsky makes with the title is that in the world of professional ballet, these artists aren’t allowed to be mere ballerinas…they’re forced to be perfect Black Swans.
Nina’s woeful tale is an exaggerated but common fate for ballerinas. Which means Nina is representative of the whole. Her story is the story of many. The final message, when stripped to its core point, is a bleak one—ballerinas literally destroy themselves in the pursuit of perfection.
“My worst injury occurred when I attempted a barrel turn and moved my foot wrong,” he said. “I heard four pops, pulling my fibula and tibia apart. I also tore a few tendons in my foot. In the dance world you are expected to go on, so I danced the rest of my set like that before going off stage and collapsing in pain. I didn’t walk again for two months and was out for over four months…”
The themes and meaning of Black Swan
The Wrestler is concerned with showing the issues of a wrestling career. Despite his fame, Ram barely has any money and lacks the appearance and skills for a part-time job (much less a salaried 9-5). He is physically limited. He isn’t married because the travel and strain has always been too problematic for a romantic relationship. Likewise, his relationship with his daughter is in the gutter. It’s all bad. And the result of Ram’s pursuit of being a great performer for so many years. It gets worse, as he puts up with a number of humiliating things just to scrape by (steroid use, local wrestling shows that don’t pay well, being yelled at while working at a deli counter, etc).
Black Swan inverts the time frame. Instead of being at the end of her career, we’re at the moment Nina could breakthrough to the next level. Despite the difference in age, her situation is, like Ram’s, pretty bleak. She doesn’t make a lot of money so has to live with her mom. Living with her mom and the little time she has outside of dancing has left Nina infantilized (look at her bedroom!). The infantilization stunts her. Nina being stunted means she barely has a social life much less a romantic one. The lack of social and romantic opportunities means she just focuses on ballet. The focus on ballet means she’s a great ballerina but her whole identity is wrapped up in ballet. It’s all she has. Combine the singularity of her being with her stunted emotional development…and we have a recipe for psychological disaster that’s very common in ballerinas.
Some context:
Ballet is often a beautiful tragedy. The art of ballet is one of stunning beauty and grace– it is world renowned and it’s alluring nature touches many lives. However, the health problems that many ballerinas face is devastating….
Many women, including a majority of young dancers, go to drastic measures to obtain this body type. Anorexia Nervosa, Bulimia Nervosa, and Binge Eating Disorder are all life-threatening eating disorders that a large amount of people and a statistically high amount of dancers have. One in five dancers has an eating disorder. Why is this the case?
The “Ballet Body” (as of 2024, the site no longer exists)
Some insight from Can Ballet Hurt Your Psyche:
…dance training may produce or exacerbate some less-than-healthy psychological pressures. New research from Portugal finds evidence of just such a dynamic among young ballet students.
It reports that, compared to both music students and peers who studied neither art form, dancers had higher levels of “psychological inflexibility” — a state of mind that has been linked to anxiety and depressive symptoms in adolescents.
Researchers Telmo Serrano and Helena Amaral Espirito-Santo define psychological inflexibility as “excessive involvement with the content of internal events,” such as emotions, thoughts, and memories. They note that this inward-pointing focus can “bias the way the present moment is experienced,” increasing fear of failure, and leading students to avoid stressful situations rather than accepting the challenge.…That finding is consistent with previous research linking ballet training with perfectionism.
When you have all of this in mind, it’s pretty wild to go back and watch Black Swan and see how deliberate Aronofsky is in detailing the emotional and physical pressure of the ballet world. The competition between dancers that breeds isolation. The parents who are desperate to live vicariously through the success of their children. The injuries. The doubts. The ease at which you can be and will be replaced. The uncertainty of what opportunity you’ll have and when you’ll have it. Oy vey.
As Aronofsky develops and escalates this ecosystem of very real, very common stressors in the world of ballet, he dramatizes the effects of the anxiety through Nina’s hallucinations and self-harm. So the reason why Nina’s story plays out how it does is because Black Swan is an extreme depiction of the well-documented psychological issues ballerinas face.
With this understanding of the external context, we can now dive into explaining what happened in the movie.
Nina and mirrors
We open the movie with Nina’s dream. She soon awakens and explains to her mom (and to us) that it’s from the prologue of Swan Lake, when the evil sorcerer Rothbart casts his spell on Princess Odette. The dream has a few purposes. First, it introduces and promises a surreal tone to the film. Second, it aligns the story of the movie with the story of Swan Lake, meaning we should look at the movie as a retelling of the ballet. Third, it’s a sign Nina herself has fallen under some kind of trance.
In the very next scene, Nina’s on the subway. A few defining things happen here. First, it’s the introduction of the visual duality. We see Nina reflected in a window on the subway, her mirrored face (purposefully) obscure as this other persona hasn’t fully emerged yet. The reflection is a huge motif that escalates all the way to the climax when Nina “fights” in her dressing room, breaking the mirror, then fatally stabbing herself with the shard of glass.
The mortal wound being from a broken piece of glass from a mirror makes sense, right? Black Swan is all about duality. The mirror is representative of duality. Aronofsky highlights that throughout by having moments where the Nina in the Mirror acts separately from the Regular Nina. At first it’s harmless, but the Nina in the Mirror grows more aggressive and scary until we get the dressing room fight that occurs right before her transformation into the Black Swan. She straight up says, after the stabbing, “It’s my turn.”
Dancers are always looking at themselves, so their relationship with their reflection is a huge part of who they are. Filmmakers are also fascinated by mirrors, and it’s been played with before, but I wanted to take it to a new level. Visually, we really pushed that idea of what it means to look in a mirror. Mirrors become a big part of looking into Nina’s character, which is all about doubles and reflection. -Darren Aronofsky
Nina and puberty
The Black Swan Nina who emerges from the mirror is foreshadowed by the escalation of the Nina in the Mirror but also by the subplot of Nina going through the stages of growing up.
She starts the movie in a very childlike way—waking up from a bad dream and going to tell her mom about it. You look at her bedroom and it looks like a little girl’s room, not that of a 28-year old woman. We know this stunted development is partly due to Aronofsky’s critique of ballet as a whole. But it’s also there because the story is about Nina’s loss of innocence and her struggle to tap into that darker side of herself. By defining her as childlike, it highlights her innocence and why she struggles with the role.
But we see her progress. For much of the movie, there’s a sense of building rebellion when it comes to Nina and her mother. Which is very typical of teenagers and young adults. Then the whole sexual awakening sub-sub plot. God, that first scene where Nina touches herself and starts to get into it until she looks over and sees her mom asleep in the chair beside the bed. It’s one of the most awkward and realistically terrifying things I’ve ever witnessed in a movie. That’s exactly the point, too: this is why Nina’s stunted as she is, because her mom’s presence is so overwhelming it limits Nina’s privacy and choices and thus her experiences.
The night out with Lily begins how? It could have simply been: Lily shows up and asks Nina to go out, Nina hesitates, but Lily convinces her. Instead, it’s: Nina hesitates, and Nina’s mom keeps showing up and demanding Nina come back inside. To the point where Lily exclaims “Jesus Christ.” The reason Nina ends up leaving is because she wants to rebel from her mother, like a teenager. Of course, that’s the night she comes home, locks her mom out, and fully masturbates after being denied and frustrated for so long. This is a breakthrough.
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.” It’s not something that gets any more time than being shouted as Nina storms out of their home. 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.
The ending of Black Swan
Nina and hallucinations
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…that’s interesting for a story, but it wouldn’t be as strongly tied to Aronofsky’s larger point about the profession and trappings of the profession. 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:
Thomas: When I look at you, all I see is the White Swan. Yes you’re beautiful, fearful, fragile—ideal casting. But the Black Swan? It’s a hard f***ing job to dance both.
Nina: I can dance the Black Swan, too.
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. Ever. All that discipline, for what?
Nina: …just wanna be perfect…
Thomas: You what?
Nina: I wanna be perfect.
Thomas: Perfection is not just about control. It’s also about letting go. Surprise yourself so you can surprise the audience. Transcendence. And very few have it in them.
Nina: I think I do have it in—
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.
Thomas: You bit me?! I cannot believe you bit me?!
Nina: I’m sorry.
Thomas: That f***ing hurt.
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 20-minute mark is when the main story conflict announces itself. The 20-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. 22 minutes into Fight Club is when Brad Pitt speaks for the first time.
It’s right after this conversation with Thomas that Nina’s announced as the Swan Queen.
With that in mind, let’s flash ahead to the final lines of dialogue. What’s the last thing we hear Nina say, prone on the mattress after jumping off the “mountain”? She has finished her masterpiece performance. The crowd gives her a standing ovation. Everyone in the company surrounds and congratulates her.
Thomas: “Can you hear them? They love you. My little princess, I always knew you had it in you.”
Then Lily gasps. The others finally notice the wound.
“What did you do?” Thomas asks. “What did you do?”
Nina responds, “I felt it.”
He says, “What?”
“I felt perfect. I was perfect.”
Then, as the crowd chants “Nina”, white light annihilates the screen.
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.” It just so happens that her understanding of perfect was extreme. 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 obliterating.
From Beware of the Ballet Monsters…they wear pink: I started doing some googling about the rates of s**cides 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 s**cide was a 29-year-old lead dancer with the New York City Ballet, Joseph Duell in 1986 after performing in Symphony in C, and rehearsing Who Cares? But, he wasn’t the only one, Juan Carlos Amy-Cordero a principal with Eugene Ballet took his life in 2013, Tallulah Wilson was 15 when she took her life in 2014, in 2012 it was Rosie Whitaker, and the articles went on and on.
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.
The White and Black Swans
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 wants the performance to be perfect. And we’re told by Thomas what defines each of the swans.
The White Swan is “beautiful, fearful, fragile.”
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 allows herself to fall under a spell. She drives herself into darkness. By letting go, she surprises herself, surprises everyone else, and discovers 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 she lets herself be consumed by all of these emotions in order to bolster the performance.
(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).
The connection to Perfect Blue
Aronofsky denies it, but Black Swan is a retelling of the Japanese anime film Perfect Blue. Back in 2000, he referenced Perfect Blue in Requiem for a Dream, doing a full recreation of a shot—like, straight up copy and paste. Which is fine. There’s nothing wrong with that kind of homage. But the main character in Perfect Blue is named Mima. She’s stalked by another version of herself. She’s trying to be an actress and the plot from the murder mystery she’s working on dovetails with her own life. Sound familiar? Speaking of sound: Nina. Mima. Nina. Mima.
One of the visual motifs in Perfect Blue is light intensity. The first instance happens at the end of a brutal scene where Mima, as part of the murder mystery TV show, has to act out a r***. It starts fine and artificial but quickly loses that sense of pretend. By the end, it looks, sounds, and feels real. The camera cuts between Mima, the faces of the men holding her, and the stage lighting. It then rapid-cuts between Mima’s face and the lights and she suffers a mental break that ends with the light washing everything out.
For the rest of Perfect Blue, there are moments of bright light. And it’s always associated with the idea of stardom. Whether it’s the stage lighting or camera flashes or the lights of an oncoming truck. At the very end, the character who is completely broken is surrounded by white light. While the character who has recovered is not.
Since Black Swan is so heavily inspired by Perfect Blue, it makes sense that the last shot is of the stage lights. It’s borrowing the same symbolism that “bright light” equals the toxic pursuit of performance and the stardom and praise that comes with it.
Questions & answers about Black Swan
Did Nina kill Beth?
Beth is similar to The Wrestler’s Randy “The Ram”. Someone who was brilliant and beloved but has aged out of their prime and is struggling. Having lost the limelight and attention she’s harmed herself and ended up in the hospital. Nina has looked up to Beth, has dreamed of being the next “Beth MacIntyre”. Going so far as to steal Beth’s earrings and perfume just to feel a bit closer to her, to being perfect.
The point of the scene is to set up Nina’s rejection of Beth. Beth was Nina. Young, beautiful, an amazing dancer, and favored by Thomas and the public. Now, she’s in shambles. She’s not perfect. She is, as she declares, nothing. So here Nina’s biggest role model, the person Nina was striving to be, is suddenly the opposite of that ideal. Whether Nina stabbed Beth or not, this is the motivation. She wants to kill this person who represents her future. In that way, she’d be rejecting her future. She refuses to become nothing. She wants to be perfect. Which foreshadows her mortally wounding herself in order to give a singular, perfect performance.
All of the heady, thematic and symbolic stuff aside—what happened is totally unclear. There’s no random line of dialogue where you overhear a stage hand say “Did you hear someone attacked Beth?” It just never comes up. We do know that Nina is capable of dramatic hallucinations. Like after her “fight” with “Lily” there’s the whole thing where she hides the body then comes back later and sees a pool of blood on the ground. Only for it all to have been made up. So having the blood on her hand and the shoe knife could also very well be made up.
So as far as we’re aware, there’s zero definitive answer here. Just a symbolic one. Seeing what Beth’s become is what motivates Nina to go out in a blaze of glory. That’s the only way she believes she can stay perfect forever.
What’s the deal with Nina’s mom?
Black Swan is about performers and pressures they face. And it’s pretty common for high-level performers to have obsessive parents who push them. Usually, there’s a degree of the parent wanting to live vicariously through the child. Like the parent never achieved what they wanted so they try and force the kid to do the same. But this can come with a degree of resentment. In this case, Nina’s mom, Erica, is both rooting for and jealous of her daughter. Part of her controlling behavior is because she’s fearful of Nina’s mental health. But the other part is Erica doesn’t want Nina achieving anything on her own. Which has resulted in Nina’s stunted psychology and why Black Swan is a regressed coming of age story.
Did Nina and Lily really hook up?
Probably not. Nina is an unreliable narrator so her version of events isn’t really accurate. What we hear from Lily is that she went home with one of the guys from the club. So what happened with Nina, then?
Nina has been infantilized by her mother. Part of that has been a complete walling off of her sexuality. Which is something Thomas points out. That Nina doesn’t have access to this sensual part of herself that’s necessary for the Black Swan role. It’s something Lily does have. Lily’s carefree and expressive in all the ways Nina isn’t.
So her night with Lily is just a visualization of her unlocking that part of herself. Lily’s involved because Lily’s her model for this behavior. It’s essentially a dramatization of Nina asking herself, “What would Lily do?” The reality of that night is probably just self-gratification. But for someone as repressed as Nina, that’s a breakthrough. Having broken through that mental barrier, she can commit to being the Black Swan in a way she previously could not.
Why was Nina scratching herself?
It’s an anxiety tick. The National Library of Medicine has a paper by Kristen M. Sanders and Task Akiyama called “The Vicious Cycle of Itch and Anxiety“. The abstract says: Chronic itch is associated with increased stress, anxiety, and other mood disorbes. In turn, stress and anxiety exacerbate itch, leading to a vicious cycle that affects patient behavior (scratching) and worse disease prognosis and quality of life.
So the scratches are a very real thing that happens. But it also foreshadows the emergence of the feathers and wings as Nina fully embodies the Black Swan. So Aronofsky blends the reality of the anxiety with the fantastic aspects of the character’s metamorphosis.
Cast
- Nina Sayers/White Swan/Odette – Natalie Portman
- Lily/Black Swan/Odile – Mila Kunis
- Thomas Leroy/The Gentleman – Vincent Cassel
- Erica Sayers/The Queen – Barbara Hershey
- Beth MacIntyre/The Dying Swan – Winona Ryder
- David Moreau/Prince Siegfried – Benjamin Millepied
- Written by – Mark Heyman, Andres Heinz, John McLaughlin
- Inspired by – Perfect Blue by Satoshi Kon
- Directed by – Darren Aronofsky
Now it’s your turn
Have more unanswered questions about Black Swan? Are there themes or motifs we missed? Is there more to explain about the ending? Please post your questions and thoughts in the comments section! We’ll do our best to address every one of them. If we like what you have to say, you could become part of our movie guide!
Hi Chris,
What do you think Thomas’s role was in the movie? Was it significant to the plot at all or was he just there as a love interest? Perhaps not even that; maybe just the person who caused her to ‘grow up’ in a way and lose her innocence. Also what was their relationship status? Did they have feelings for each other at all or was it all just lust?
Hey Gale! Broadly, Black Swan retells the ballet Swan Lake. So each character has an equivalent in the original ballet. To the point that at the end of Black Swan the credits show the movie character and ballet character. So Natalie Portman played “Nina Sayers/The Swan Queen.” And Barbara Hershey played Erica Sayers/The Queen. Thomas is, surprisingly, not The Prince, despite being, at times, the love interest. His counterpart is “The Gentleman.”
But if you look at the Swan Lake cast there’s no character called The Gentleman. And if you google “Swan Lake The Gentleman” you get absolutely zero responses. So that’s weird. The obverious parallels would be The Prince or the evil wizard Rothbart. Or a combination of those two. I think Thomas definitely fooled around with his ballerinas, but also had that fucked up idea that he was trying to get Nina out of her shell. But his role in the movie is someone Nina needs to impress and win over. The judge. When the movie is about her performance in a role, you need someone to grade her performance and give her hurdles to overcome and drive the story forward. It’s no different than the power dynamic in Whiplash, if you’ve seen Whiplash. Or, weirdly, Good Will Hunting.
Good Will Hunting is less dramatic, kind of. But the dynamic between Matt Damon and Robin Williams is kind of similar, narrative wise. As Williams is the judge on Matt Damon’s mental health. Damon starts changing his behavior based on the interactions he has with Williams and the expectations Williams sets. In this case, it’s uplifting. Where in Black Swan it’s more complicated and destructive.
The love interest stuff is more a byproduct of Nina’s sexual repression. You could bring in a separate character to bring out that aspect of her. But you create more efficiency by having the judge kind of be that person. Ultimately, it’s Mila Kunis and that random guy that take it to the next level. Thomas just lights the spark.
I guess all of that is a long way of saying, yes, the person who caused her to grow up lol. I think Nina probably had feelings for Thomas born out of her desire for approval and lack of a father figure? But she didn’t love him love him. And Thomas probably had feelings for Nina but he wouldn’t marry her, even if he did like her enough to coach her up and everything.
I have to say its a shame you didn’t dive into the toxic dynamic between Nina and Thomas in your original explanation. This drives her psychological distress equally to that of her mother. It’s really convenient that you’re a man and have avoided to mention the presence of a male abuser.
” It’s really convenient that you’re a man and have avoided to mention the presence of a male abuser.” What the fuck. The guy writes a brilliant detailed response and you have to bitch about it.
Was a great article with some good references
I don’t think Lily ever existed. She was Ninas muse, what she envisioned the black swan to be, but her decent into paranoia and madness to be perfect makes it difficult for her to separate imagination from reality, almost like an imaginary friend a child might have. Nina is treated like a child by her mother. Lily is a rebellion against her mother and how she feels others see her. I absolutely love this movie and see something new and more disturbing with each viewing. Especially with Nina. A part of her is well aware she’s slipping but she lets it happen anyways.
Great explanation! Finally the movie makes sense. Thank you
I just want to know if her mom was actually real.
when i watched the film,i somewhat connected to it on some levels because i am a little obsessed with perfection too and it takes its toll on me. your interpretation is just great and i would try to add some concepts of my own.
the way i saw it was that nina’s concept of perfection is instilled to her core because of her mother.she wants her to be her perfect little girl who always listens to her and stays in the bubble consisting only the two of them so that nina can focus on her career and could do what her mother couldnt.and it seems highly probable that she was sexually abused by her mother at a young age due to which she fell mentally sick and used to scratch herself,and her mother stopped doing so so that she could focus on what she wants her to focus on.her mother is obsessed with her and its clear from that room which consisted so many distorted paintings of her.there was one scene where nina saw her mother crying and drawing,and she ran to take that rod so that she could prevent her from barging in,and in that scene nina was quite sane and her run into confusion did not begin yet,still she was scared and did that.its hinted in many other scenes that her mother abused her. and that actually explains a lot about why nina was so sexually inexpressive. nina also sees her inability to express her sexual desires as something pure,perfect,and this feeling has been inflicted upon her by her mother. at times when her other dual whom she suppresses seems to get to her in her hallucinations we hear her mockingly saying “sweet little girl”,as if its her failure to keep up to those words.the role of the black swan demanded her to let lose of herself,of her so long suppressed dark side, which is not perfection in her ideals. and as she tries to let go of her dark side in such pressure and short time,she sees the so long perfected herself crumbling.but because the performance demands of it she tries to get along,ultimately bringing her own demise.but still even in her demise she is happy and content as she dies doing what she was considered to do in perfection.to nina,her own life didnt even matter as long as she is perfect .
its pretty clear nina mates with lily in her hallucinations,but whats important to notice is that she did so locking her mother out,and her mating with lily signified her willingness to succumb to her dark side which is necessary to achieve the required perfection she demands.its generally told that when we have sex with somebody in our dreams with whom we would rather not in our reality,it signifies that we aspire to have qualities of that person and that there are things we admire about them.gets along pretty well with nina and lily.what i couldnt fully understand was the beth stabbing scene and is greatly described by you.
thank you very much for giving such a beautiful insight on the film.
“Who wrote that – your mother? Referring to a great review in the N Y Times – we were in an elevator going to the fifth floor in the Hotel Ansonia.
Yes, I identified with Nina because she was me and I was her. Living the life of a tenor in New York City in one’s twenties – was a trip. First you were the mortal enemy of any baritone who roamed the face of the earth. Being hit on by everyone from Mr. X at Columbia to divos and divas backstage or in the coffee shops of Broadway. If you sang like a God and I did, and you were drop dead good looking and I was – you were red meat. This was the asphalt jungle. Take away the green and smell of the jungles of Vietnam and you have just as deadly a theater to play in. The psychological abuse is rampant – whether tolerated from a jealous teacher who was a flunky tenor and became a member of the New York Vocal Teachers Association, or an overpriced coach playing for one of your auditions at City Opera. The undermining comments were the same. “It’s O. K. – you’ll do better next time” “It’s only one audition” “You forget there’s a rest right before you come in on – “Vieni, Vieni!” “You’re not ready to sing Rodolfo” “I’ll let you know when you should have a recital” [$10,000 later] I was on the same roster as Placido and Jose and Eric Seman of the Seman Agency said to me with a very Austrian accent, “ I cannot speak with you now – I must see Placido at the State Theatre he sings Cav and Pag today – Cav at City Opera this afternoon and Pag at the Met tonight!” When I won a full scholarship to a well known conservatory in New York the teachers tried to dissuade me from enrolling. One was a puny little man with a puny little tenor and the other was an over-the-hill bass that sounded like he was in one of the sub basements at Macy’s.
I’ll never forget singing for a closet Nazi in Augburg, Germany. I entered the stage
from stage left and looked out to see someone who was supposed to be the director behind the glare of the stage lights under the balcony. I took my position in the crook of the piano. Vas vollen zi zingen hauter? Ich zing der regiment’s tochter aria! With all eight high Cs? No, with all nine high Cs – I responded.
The biggest indignity that I faced was actually being barred by one of my former
Tenor teachers and Member of the New York Vocal Teachers Association in front of Carnegie Recital Hall on the eve of my recital: He said with outstretched arms [though hell should bat the way] that: “You have no business having a recital here – you are not ready!” That’s why Robert Sherman spent a whole have page in the New York Times with a very positive review of a very successful concert.
I was never looking for ‘perfection’ – I was looking for a performance – a way to express myself at any cost – I always settled for near perfect and that is why I was always in demand and always singing. Beware the tyranny of the weak.
Well yours is the movie I want to see!
Thanks for such an in-depth analysis of Black Swan. I wanted answers behind the story plot and yours was the first article that appeared and the only one I needed to read.
I don’t think Mila Kunis’s character Lily existed at all. No one greets her in the dressing room, Nina’s mom says “”it’s no one” when she comes to the door, she is never mentioned by name by anyone, and who the hell would continuously seek out friendship with someone behaving so rudely as Nina did to her? She was the black swan, in a Tyler Durst role. Pulling out the very essence of the passion Nina needed in order to sacrifice herself for the art. I only noticed this on my third viewing.
Annie—Thomas introduces Lily in one of her first scenes as having flown straight in from SF. Lots of side characters acknowledge her presence.
Lily is in three scenes before she enters rehearsal late and is introduced by Thomas as having just arrived from San Francisco… why introduce her as new when we’ve already seen her
Isn’t the first time we see her on the train, on the way to rehearsal? I don’t think we see her in rehearsal. So the introduction makes sense.
No, the first time is when everyone is making fun of Beth at minute 7. She says she missed her stop, slams her bag on the table and everyone looks at her. She keeps talking until she realizes no one is responding. The viewer can infer she’s the faceless one in the subway who got off before Nina because they are dressed the same. Then at minutes 8:30, 9:19 and 11:02, she is one of the dancers who is not tapped on their shoulder. She is formally introduced when she interrupts Nina’s audition for the Black Swan (not the White) at min 14:22. She’s fresh off the plane, dressed nothing like the one from the subway, and doesn’t need to get warmed up.
Thank you! So I’ve been looking into this for the last 15 minute and this is the conclusion that I’ve come to.
Lily was there at the 7 minute mark. Didn’t get tapped in that 8 minute to 11 minute period. We’re told just before the 11 minute mark that the soloists who weren’t tap are supposed to come back at 5pm to audition. So there’s a time where Nina, Lily, and the others could leave the studio. Which is why Nina herself is also dressed completely differently than she was on the train. Different scarf, hoodie, pants, etc. She clearly left the studio and is now back because it’s close to 5pm. That means Lily probably also left the studio. But didn’t come back prior to 5pm. She was late. Again. But she’s introduced this time because Thomas wasn’t there on her previous arrival and didn’t think to mention it during the morning session. Now that it’s a smaller group and Lily’s there in front of him, he calls her out. Her clothes are different because she also left and came back. And she’s fresh off the plane as in she got to NYC within the last day or so. It’s more of a euphemism than literal. And she doesn’t need to warm up because of the morning warm up that they all already did.
You can definitely make the argument that Nina’s already started to hallucinate and that Lily was never on the train and that the 14:22 mark is her first true appearance. But it would be a bit strange for Nina to be seeing Lily before having met Lily. I’d argue, rather, that Aronofsky just wanted to create that sense of duality by having her arrive late twice and have that slight moment of doubt and deja vu.
It just occurred to me that Lily interrupted Nina’s defense of Beth when everyone else was calling her a has-been. Then she did it again during Nina’s audition for the role of the Black Swan. She was the foil twice and in mirrored ways. She was mess when Nina was defending Beth and the other she was confident and flown in from SF during Nina’s most important audition of her career/life. The point is that we have already seen Lily three other times before she was introduced. She has already been the foil once
I 100% believe her character was real. If she wasn’t, Thomas wouldn’t have introduced her to the other dancers in the beginning and he wouldn’t have said that he talk to her about Nina whining. There are moments where Lillys character even denies things that Nina was hallucinating. I think her presence in Nina’s life was over exaggerated in nina’s head because she was hallucinating. Lily probably wasn’t even around Nina as much as Nina imagined. It was getting to her head that Lily wanted her spot, and she saw her face more and more.
My question is Does Nina really die at the end of the movie? It’s hard to believe that she stabs herself with the piece of glass in the dressing room fight scene. I’m wondering if she was hallucinating then to.
she hallucinated stabbing Lily. She actually stabbed herself. It’s part of what made her performance perfect. She dies at the end, just like how the white swan kills herself at the end of the performance. The ballet performance in the movie are supposed to parallel.
Not necessarily. I think that both Aronofsky and Portman have said that Lily survives. What dies (what she killed!) is her protracted girlhood, repression, etc., i.e. the White Swan. That’s why the blood’s position is almost menstrual (Aronofsky apparently told Portman this at the time).
Also, there are the practical concerns: The wound wasn’t very deep, and thus didn’t cut any internal organs, otherwise she wouldn’t have been able to perform. The dancing causes it to open up, hence the increasing blood, but it’s survivable. Thomas and the dancers run to get help immediately, putting pressure on the wound fights the bleeding, and Lincoln Center is across the street from a hospital.
It was Nina removing the glass from her self-inflicted wound that caused it to open up onstage.
I’m not sure if you receive this as a message, but if you do, see my reply to Ema. I’m among those who thinks that Nina survived.
Did she write “whore” on the mirror herself? Also what was the point of the lipstick, like what did it symbolize?
I believe Beth wrote “whore.” She believed that Nina was sleeping with Thomas to steal her place. Nina stole the lipstick to be more like Beth
Quite sure the red lip stick symbolized “womanhood”, or at least sensuality ( a red lip isn’t often considered very bold and seductive.)
Half of the article is about The Wrestler. I know it is directed by the same person but I don’t see the need of the comparisons between Black Swan and The Wrestler. They are two different movies.
Yeah but after watching Black Swan, I have a question regarding the relationship between Nina and her mother. Was Nina abused by her mother? Was her mother jealous of her?
Watch on YouTube “Narcissistic Mothers, Part 2” by Joseph Burgo, PhD. He focuses on Nina’s mom as a representative example of Narcissistic Abuse. He has included a few clips from the movie!
So I just watched the actual ballet, Swan Lake after having watched the movie about 3 or 4 times. While the ballet originally has the two parts, the white swan and the black swan, increasingly, both parts are danced by the same ballerina. The few parts where the two dancers would appear onstage together have been gradually removed and merged into a part of just one dancer. Which begs the question, did Lily ever exist at all? How is THAT for a mindf*cK
Karen-I had the same thought process regarding lily. Wondering if she ever existed, or just one of Nina’s hallucinations; the ideal inspiration for the black swan. She is present for most all of the pertinent moments in Nina’s development as a character. Every person who “wrongs” her has some vignette with Lily; even the male lead who drops Nina…we see Lily have a sexual moment with him right before the scene with the drop.
Or Lily could be real, but just simply a soloist. One who’s Nina’s obsession, the star of Nina’s hallucinations, the one who causes Nina to grow up and become a “woman.” Makes you wonder…
I thought Lily was a hallucination multiple times while watching. I think there are multiple scenes that allude to this interpretation.
I’m still so confused about everything. 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.
It was all in her head. Read the article
Hi Chris,
Good day. I don’t have any questions, your article answered them all. 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.