Thomas Leroy Vincent Cassel is directing the ballet, and the movie sees a production that has an ending where only the White Swan dies. She jumps to her death. Over the century the standard practice for all productions has been to cast the same ballerina as the White and Black Swan. Thomas intends to do the same. Her mother is shown to be overly protective and controlling. That said her mother has given up a lot apparently, a career as an artist to raise Nina.
It also seems that Nina may have been conceived because her mom was naive and somebody in the art field took advantage of her. Because of her mother, Nina has grown up to be a very delicate, sweet girl. It appears that she may have been bullied along these lines in her growing years. Nina is a dedicated dancer who is looking to achieve perfection. In short, she is exactly like the White Swan. The film begins with her dreaming about her playing the scene where Odette is cursed by Rothbart to becoming a swan.
The production company has not seen a lot of visitors, and Thomas wants to change things up. Lily Mila Kunis a ballerina from San Francisco who has come to join the group for this production. Nina auditions for the role of the Swan Queen and Thomas tells her that if he were casting only the White Swan, it would be Nina. Lily enters the audition room, and this causes Nina to stumble.
Thomas ends the audition. She goes back crying to her mother who consoles her and puts her to sleep. On the way back home Nina notices another woman in black. Nina is at the onset of a Dissociative Identity Disorder. The character is to throw the audience off. The next day Nina dolls herself up to have a word with Thomas and says that she has completed her practice of the Black Swan act.
Nina thanks him and is about to leave. Thomas notes that Nina clearly came with the intention to change his mind, to try and seduce him, in the mildest sense of the word. Thomas wants Nina to lose herself, that is how she can become the Black Swan. Thomas forcefully kisses Nina and she bits him. Thomas is known to be a jerk but this moment makes him realize that Nina probably is the right choice. She heads out, and the results are soon put up.
Innocently, thinking that Veronica as made the part she congratulates her. Many assume that Nina must have slept with Thomas to get the part. Nina has been developing a rash on her back. This is not a rash. Her mother comes in with a cake to celebrate. Nina, avoiding the calories, says no. Her mother gets annoyed, and so Nina has a little. The scene again shows the kind of control her mother has on Nina. Things that never really happen. Thomas tells Nina that he saw a flash of the Black Swan in her and he wants her to give him more of that bite.
There is a banquet thrown to announce the retirement of Beth, and Nina the new Swan Queen. Beth is terribly annoyed for being patronized and leaves. At the restroom, Nina meets Lily who seems friendly. Beth says that Thomas always considered Nina to be a frigid little girl. Looks like that bite really changed things up. Nina leaves with Thomas to his place. He asks her to go home and touch herself as a homework assignment.
He wants Nina to connect with her sensuality which is crucial for the role. Nina sees her mother crying in front of her art. Her mother knows about the scratching habit that Nina has. She attributes it to the pressure of the role. Her mother is not wrong about this. Nina wakes up the next morning and begins touching herself but soon notices that her mom is on a chair sleeping. Looks like she has been there all night to keep an eye on Nina. After the party, Beth walks into the road and gets hit by a car.
Thomas explains how everything Beth does comes from some dark impulse. Which is what made her so thrilling to watch. But the same thing also makes her self-destructive. This dialogue here is pretty much laying out what is going to happen to Nina. Thomas still finds Nina to be stiff, and not letting go.
Thomas sends everyone off and continues the rehearsal alone with Nina. What did they call the movie about Muhammed Ali? What did they call the movie about Ray Charles? All very specific titles to ensure people understood the topic that was being discussed.
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. Psst, want movie updates?
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?
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. 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. 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 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 an attempt to be perfect. 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 Wrestler was concerned with showing the issues that follow a wrestling career.
Ram had barely any money, but didn't have the appearance and skills for a part-time job much less a salaried He was physically limited. He didn't have a marriage because the road and work was too problematic for a romantic relationship.
Likewise, his relationship with his daughter is in the gutter. This is the result of all the fame and pain Ram underwent to be a great performer for so many years. Not to mention then all the humiliating things he still has to put up with 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 Ballet is often a beautiful tragedy.
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? New research from Portugal finds evidence of just such a dynamic among young ballet students. 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 in 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. 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 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. Visually, we really pushed that idea of what it means to look in a mirror. The Black Swan Nina who emerges from the mirror is built up to through the movie not just 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 year old women. 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. We see her progress, though.
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 seen 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 is like, "Jesus Christ. Of course, then, it's that night she comes home, locks her mom out, and masturbates fully 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.
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.
Venue Heath Ledger Theatre. Duration 2 hrs 20 minutes including interval. Warning Adult themes, sexual intimidation, coarse language, depictions of sexual scenes, use of herbal cigarettes, racism, islamaphobia and possible use of stage firearms. For accessible booking information please visit the State Theatre Centre's website. We recommend all accessible bookings are made at the venue box office or by calling 08 Admit two Oil. Admit two Toast. Memberships Admit two Oil. Buy Package Learn More.
Grace Chow Cast. Hayley McElhinney Cast. Adam Mitchell Director. More Creatives. Thanks to our partners Principal Partner. Other events this season. City of Gold An unflinching force of drama that questions injustice and racism today, and asks: have things changed? Learn More. Barracking for the Umpire A funny drama about footy, family and fragility, and what we're willing to sacrifice for the game.
Toast A hilariously frank story of sibling grief after three sisters suddenly lose their mother. Have a question for us? Leave this field blank.
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