Maybe she had the first one at the bar with Lilly and the two guys, because Lilly confirmed they existed the next day. NOT REAL: Therefore, Lilly and Nina did not have actual sex (we know this because after sex, Lilly said something to Nina about being a ‘Good girl’ and then tried to smother her. Not real!)
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.
But given the artist she is, she continues performing the ballet's final act as a dying Odette, landing on a mattress with thunderous applause. Like other endings of Aronofsky movies, this incorporates surrealist elements as Lily's death was a hallucination.
Throughout the movie Nina “discovers” scratches and bleeding on her body seemingly derived from self-injury. However, it is difficult to tell which injuries are real and which are not throughout the film. As the stress and anxiety increase, Nina begins having psychotic breaks.
The night before she is set to perform, Nina becomes convinced that Lily is going to take her place. Her paranoia and mental strain cause her to hallucinate that she's physically turning into the role of Odile, the Black Swan, complete with red eyes and black feathers protruding from bird-like skin.
When she returns the things she took from Beth's (Winona Ryder) dressing room, the shoe knife becomes a weapon of self-harm, as Beth repeatedly stabs herself in the face. Again, there is no confirmation whether this is imagined or actually happened but the theory that it is part of Nina's psychosis certainly adds up.
What are the scratches on Nina's back in Black Swan?
Early in the film the audience is shown a small rash on Nina's back; this has to do with a nervous tick she has developed where she scratches herself. When the mother finds that the rash has gotten worse, she strips Nina down to her underwear and pulls her into the bathroom to cut her nails.
The two fight, breaking a mirror. Nina stabs her doppelgänger with a large shard of glass from the mirror, killing her. The body reverts to Lily. Nina hides the corpse in the bathroom and takes the stage, dancing flawlessly as Odile and seemingly turns into a black swan, her arms covered in feathers.
Odette (Nina), the white swan, embodies purity and grace, whereas the evil Odile (Lily), the black swan and daughter of the malicious sorcerer Von Rothbart (Red Beard), serves as Odette's dark Doppelgänger.
Natalie Portman has transformed herself for many film roles, but nothing was as grueling as her Black Swan makeover. The actress shed an astonishing 20lbs from her already slight frame to play a ballerina in the 2011 film and admitted it put such a toll on her body that she thought she was going to die.
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.
Mirrors routinely dominate the mise en scene, suggesting that Nina's fragile self-identity is entirely contained and defined by external 'surface' reflections; she is effectively reduced to what she sees staring back at her in the mirror.
Can child stars go on to credible careers? With her Ivy League credentials and a performance in Black Swan that's put her in line for an Oscar, Natalie Portman proves it can be done... At 29, Natalie Portman has already been in the business a long time.
I originally replied that the combination of weight loss due to smoking, aging, bad eyebrows and a bad wig was the reason why she looked different. Just recently found out she got plastic surgery too, which I had no idea. I couldn't put my finger on why her eye area looked so different and now I finally understand.
The story's simplicity (an up-and-coming ballet dancer earns the coveted main role of White Swan/Black Swan in a production of "Swan Lake") belies what's really going on: an internal/external struggle that touches on the duality of women's lives and asks what we're willing to sacrifice to achieve success.
Rachel Loewy, assistant adjunct professor of psychiatry at UC San Francisco, agrees that Nina's troubles could be consistent with a borderline personality disorder (in which a person has difficulty setting proper boundaries between herself and others) rather than a full-blown psychosis.
Synopsis. The movie opens as Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman), a young ballerina in her mid twenties, is dancing the prologue to Swan Lake. Swan Lake is a ballet in which a princess is turned into the White Swan and can only be turned back if a man swears eternal fidelity to her.
In contrast, Siegfried's male lover is giving and compassionate. As the Black Swan, though, he represents what some South Africans, according to Masilo, see as dark forces in society: homosexuality and AIDS. Masilo plays up this dichotomy between the two swans in a pair of pas de deux.
Prince Siegfried tells Von Rothbart that he would rather die with Odette than marry Odile. He then takes Odette's hand and together they jump into the lake. The spell is broken and the remaining swans turn back into humans. They quickly drive Von Rothbart and Odile into the water where they, too, drown.
