The pressure to perform as the more sensual half of her stage persona, the Black Swan, becomes more than the sheltered ballerina can bear and her internalizing, masochistic personality rears its ugly head.
Nina is forced to contend with the presence of a new dancer, Lily (Mila Kunis), who embodies all the qualities the company’s smarmy stage director, Thomas (Vincent Cassel), is looking for.
psychologically fragile ballerina becomes reckless as her relationship with Lily — and her overbearing, veteran ballerina mother (Barbara Hershey) — starts to transform her.
While the film is drawing comparisons to everything from The Red Shoes and Repulsion, to Mulholland Drive and Dostovesky’s The Double.
Black Swan’s tension deliciously teeters between the visible reality (the gorgeous, competitive, and strenuous world of ballet) and the hidden netherworld (the anxious, repressed, and viscerally terrifying traumas of ballet’s inhabitants) of Nina’s subconscious.
like an exploitative, male-laden fantasy, but this “other” perspective — which sometimes feels like an outsider’s view of a feminine world, quite deliberately — plays with the notion that Nina is always living her life on the outside, through the wants and needs of others.
Ballet itself is full of doppelgängers – sylph-like creatures who on stage appear nearly identical.
Nina is so completely fractured by her own anxiety on the climb to perfection that she becomes a vessel for those around her — absorbing their neuroses and complications. This creates a kind of hive mind — a collective psyche torn and bursting at the seams – where twinness and duality reign.
Creation is only possible by way of destruction, characters who at first appear to be cruel are later seen as kind, symmetry is fearful – not comforting, cracked and twisted and torn limbs belie the beauty of the dance, and the uncoiling of it all is never-ending.
Nina’s strained and suffocating relationship with her mother, Erica, is at the heart of her disintegration. As a former dancer, her mother puts an immense amount of pressure on Nina to not only be the best, but also to never grow up. Nina is referred to as “girl” by her mother, her bedroom is decorated for an adolescent, and the nature of ballet itself is rampant with social physique anxiety – the pressure to maintain a lithe (young, girl-like) figure.
It makes sense that the camera trails behind her — acting as much as a voyeur to the spectacle of Nina’s descent, as a specter of her disconnected sensibility. Mirrors and reflections become other characters in the film, reminiscent of Primo Levi’s story, The Mirror Maker. Timoteo was born in a family of mirror makers, but had a vision of putting his own twist on the looking glass. His “Metamir” was a flexible mirror, that when applied to the forehead would reflect the looker’s perceptions rather than reality. On his mother, Timoteo was reflected as the perfect angel. On his girlfriend, he saw a broken and weak man. On another woman, Timoteo was reflected as the ideal man. The illusions and invented narratives of Nina’s life eventually overtake her, and she becomes a Metamir herself – reaching to preserve her very existence by nature of these doubles.
They remind us that Nina’s point of view is unreliable, as her reflections manifest themselves channeled through the eyes of her mother, her mentor, her rivals, and her audience. That she often double-takes at the appearance of her own mirror image, and identifies herself in the faces of strangers on the street more than her own reflection.
This constant push and pull between Nina and Erica happens throughout the film (strip/shield, heal/harm, etc.). Kristeva goes on to introduce parallels to Thomas — who is at once a father surrogate and the object of Nina’s naïve psychosexual attachment. It’s easy to see how he falls into place surrounding the idea of “Repelling, rejecting”.
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