The movie Black Swan tells the story of ballerina Nina and the mental and physical devastation she endures to perfect the roles of the swan and black swan. Nina grows up free of her mother’s control and confronts her own desires, but along the way, she suffers from extreme anxiety and obsession, leading to a tragic ending. However, she achieves perfection and experiences a kind of liberation.
Black Swan (2010) is a masterpiece by American director Darren Aronofsky, which depicts the destruction and growth of an individual through the delicate performance of Natalie Portman and intense audiovisual direction. The film is set in a ballet company in New York City, where the main character, Nina, is a ballerina who aspires to be the lead in the company’s newest production. That performance is Swan Lake. Nina’s ballet skills and innocence match the image of a swan, but there’s one problem: the lead role requires the ballerina to play two roles, one as a swan and one as a black swan. Nina strives to become the ballet’s prima donna by becoming a black swan with an eerie allure that she doesn’t possess, but as she endures the pressure and clashes with her fellow ballerinas and her mother, Nina is forced to confront a different side of herself, one that leads her to hallucinate visions of mental and physical destruction. However, by the end of the movie, Nina is able to perform the first opening night of Swan Lake with great success.
The most important aspect of the film is the realization of Nina’s desire and the pain that comes with it. This is portrayed through Nina’s strong desire to be the perfect “Black Swan” and her struggle to break free from the controls that surround her. Nina is a ballerina who has lived her life with only one goal in mind: to be the best actress in the ballet company, but she is also a girl who has never fully grown up, or in other words, has never been able to be independent of her parents. Nina’s mother, Erica, is particularly overprotective of her daughter, trying to control and confine her desires by imposing a strict curfew and sabotaging her relationships. On the other hand, Nina’s fellow ballerina, Lily, is a rival who possesses a black swan charm that Nina doesn’t have, so Nina follows Lily and experiences a series of deviations that she has never experienced before, while simultaneously experiencing intense conflict with her mother, Erika. In this way, Nina is constantly trying to escape from her own limitations and the control her mother exerts over her, and her anxiety and OCD become more and more severe due to this clash between the old and new worlds. The anxiety and OCD culminate on the opening night of Swan Lake, and paradoxically, it is the same anxiety and OCD that allows Nina to reach the state of perfect black swan. She hallucinates, stabs her alter ego in the face, and feels a strange sense of liberation, which means she has broken out of the cage she was trapped in. Nina plays the black swan to perfection in Act II, but when she takes the spotlight in the final scene of the show, her stomach is bleeding. In this final moment, Nina’s greatest desire is realized, and at the same time, her greatest pain and destruction.
Through this opposition between the white and black swans, and the conflicts between Nina and the people around her, the film delicately and intensely depicts the process of Nina’s realization of her desires and the great suffering she endures in return. What is unusual, however, is that the sense of accomplishment of achieving perfection is more overwhelming than the doom she faces at the end. This is because when Nina breaks away from the old world and reaches the new world, she is not simply on the road to destruction, but is freeing herself from the restraints she was bound by. And that restraint would have been her mother’s control. The dreams and desires for success that Nina’s mother projects onto her, having not succeeded as a ballerina, and the need for control to stay in her arms as a good child. This is alluded to through various objects in the movie, such as the portrait of Nina that her mother draws every day. Therefore, Nina’s following Lily to experience the world outside of her mother’s arms and confronting her primal desires does not simply lead to negative consequences, but rather is a natural process of coming to terms with her ambivalent nature as a human being. In the final scene, the movie does not provide a definitive answer to the question of whether Nina is dead or alive. Instead, we hear Nina’s last words, “I felt perfect, I was perfect, I was perfect,” and we feel a kind of catharsis. What is it about human nature that allows us to achieve our artistic goals? At least in the movie Black Swan, Nina, the protagonist, finds freedom from her greatest fears by facing her own instincts. We conclude this article with the thought that we can learn a lot from this movie.
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