After admittedly subsisting on very little for the duration of the shoot to keep her weight hovering around 98, a 20-pound drop from her already petite frame, Portman's first meal after they wrapped was pasta, "for breakfast, lunch and dinner," she told Collider. "I ate it all the time."
What mental disorder does Nina have in Black Swan?
Additionally, Nina's constant fixation on achieving perfection displays elements of an obsessive-compulsive personality disorder. The movie provides no explanation of Nina's diagnosis, nor does it show her receiving treatment, which left interpretation of her mental illness to the audience.
Although the film never outwardly declares that Nina is suffering from an eating disorder, scenes highlighting caloric restriction and purging allude to a battle with anorexia.
The Black Swan is a vegetarian. Food consists of algae and weeds, which the bird obtains by plunging its long neck into water up to 1 m deep. Occasionally birds will graze on land, but they are clumsy walkers.
It turns out that Nina hallucinated the fight with (and subsequent murder of) Lily, and actually stabbed herself while in the throes of a psychotic episode. But this doesn't stop Nina from performing the role she's worked so hard to attain. Bleeding, she returns to the stage to perform the last act of the show.
Nina flirts with men at the bar and Lily as well. After the two dance at a nightclub, they go back to the apartment, where Lily and Nina have sex. The next morning, she wakes up disoriented and hungover, and realizes that she is late for the dress rehearsal.
Nina's increasing neuroses are manifested in a bizarre, unconscious kind of self-mutilation. Repeatedly she picks at the skin around her fingernails and scratches her back viciously. She has awful hallucinations in which she sees herself tearing bloody strips of skin away from her fingers.
In particular, Nina's relationship with Erica feels incredibly abusive and restrictive. As the film progresses, the foundations of this precarious mother-daughter bond begin to crumble precipitously.
The nightclub scene is all in red light, so are the sex fantasy scenes and the scenes where Nina is becoming the black swan. Even her eyes turn red, a symbolic color of madness, passion, danger.
Lily was the evil twin and the director of the play was the prince, Lily was seducing the director (Thomas) but Nina becomes the black swan and seduces him but ended up killing herself to finally free herself from the constant burden she puts on herself to be perfect all the time.
- She is under her mother pressure to become a perfect ballerina and her mother does not aware that Nina has problem in that ballet world. Based on the movie scenes she experiences Anorexia nervosa. The hints of this clinical condition is when she refused to eat cake that her mother have bought.
Because of height limits due to partnering as well as weight considerations for lifts, the average ballerina is small and weighs between 90 to 110 pounds. Of course as in everything, there are exceptions. Many taller, heavier ballet dancers have gone on to glorious careers.
The 39-year-old actress - who plays the supporting role of ageing ballet dancer Beth MacIntyre in the Darren Aronofsky-directed project - found being nasty to its lead star Natalie Portman tough because she knew how much she had worked to perfect the role of psychologically-troubled Nina.
She is anxious, moody, and temperamental. Nina is fixated on the romantic tragedy of Swan Lake and she ultimately kills herself in tribute to it. However, while Nina is clearly and explicitly suffering from mental illness, many of her symptoms are considered standard for an elite ballerina at the height of her career.
Destruction of the body is the basis of all horror, but Black Swan's body horror serves a dual purpose by not only freaking out the viewer but also using symbolism to represent the decline of Nina's mental state. Though it isn't as overt as most other horror films, Black Swan is no less terrifying.
Nina says they're nothing but a rash and her mother becomes angry and hints that Nina hasn't scratched herself like this since she was younger, and she thought Nina was over this. Nina tries to brush her off but her mother grabs her hand and takes her to the bathroom to cut her fingernails with scissors.
There are 139 dance shots in the film. 111 are Natalie Portman untouched. 28 are her dance double Sarah Lane. If you do the math, that's 80% Natalie Portman.
The broken mirror symbolizes that she is no longer a victim to the black swan and that she is in control of its dark power. As the corruption of the Black Swan effected her mentally, emotionally, and spiritually, the transformation attributed to her fall as the White Swan that was completely diminished.
Soon after the L.A.-based Kunis was cast in "Black Swan," the film's choreographer, Benjamin Millepied, contacted the Los Angeles Ballet's artistic directors and asked if they could provide Kunis with ballet training. Instead of taking on the task themselves, they recommended Blacker for the assignment.
The final twist reveals that Nina had hallucinated Lily's death and instead stabbed herself in the abdomen. However, given the artist she is, she continues performing the ballet's final act as a dying Odette, landing on a mattress with thunderous applause.
(at around 1h 22 mins) In Winona Ryder's final scene in the movie, where she is in the hospital with metal bars in her legs following her catastrophic accident and Nina returns the items she stole from Beth's room, Beth appears to go insane and stab herself graphically in the face right in front of Nina.
The mother, on the other hand, is constantly trying to control Nina, and in the end, she even tries to stop her from playing the Swan Princess because she thinks Nina is losing her mind due to her role.
