Towards the end of the ballet's second act, Nina is distracted by another hallucination and loses her stability as Odette. This causes the male dancer playing the prince to drop her on stage, which infuriates Thomas. She returns to her dressing room and finds Lily preparing as Odile.
The first act goes well, until Nina is distracted by a hallucination during a lift, causing her partner, playing the Prince, to drop her. Distraught, she returns to her dressing room and finds Lily there. Lily announces she is to play the Black Swan.
Throughout the film, Nina and the viewer find it difficult to distinguish reality from psychosis. The symptoms begin as visual hallucinations in which she sees an eerie version of herself in various situations; she even sees her stuffed animals and her mother's paintings mocking her.
Although symptoms would not occur as rapidly as they do in Nina Sayers in most common cases of schizophrenia, it is plausible. Therefore, Black Swan is a decent portrayal of a person's descent into paranoid schizophrenia.
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.
Black Swan (2010) - Dance of the White Swan Scene (5/5) | Movieclips
Why does Nina's mom cut her nails?
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.
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.
Undone by Erica's haranguing, Nina impulsively goes to a bar with Lily, where she's persuaded to take a disinhibiting drug that Lily insists will just relax her and only last for two hours, “most.”Tempted by her desire to be free of her mother, and by Thomas's insistence that she “touch herself” as homework to help her ...
There are two ways to view the ending of Black Swan: Nina only thought that she killed Lily and actually stabbed herself... or Nina has imagined the entire thing and is still alive. Both make sense within the context of the movie and audiences are divided about what the end means.
Black Swan became a 2010 American psychological thriller film directed by Darren Aronofsky and starring Natalie Portman, Vincent Cassel and Mila Kunis. Its plot revolves around the true story of Nina Sayers. Production of Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake ballet by a prestigious New York City company.
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.
Aronofsky clearly enriches the film with a storyline that points to Nina's first psychotic break, likely triggered by a combination of her genetic heritability, childhood experience of abuse, age, and the heightened environmental stress placed upon her as principal ballerina.
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.
In the final ballet performance in Black Swan's ending, Nina is flawless and seems to have achieved the perfection that she has been striving for so long. However, given that her abdomen wound was still open and bleeding, she most likely succumbed to the bleeding as she fell through the air and landed on the mattress.
In both of these scenes, Lily is a near-physical manifestation of the growing duality inside Nina's mind, specifically of the persona that will allow her to portray the Black Swan. Lily seems quite different during her next appearance.
Nina was the white swan and Lily represented the black swan. The reason I think this is because in the movie the more Nina got involved with Lily the more of her bad side came out, she was less controlled.
It isn't clear if it is real or if Nina was the one who did it — the latter is more likely. 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.
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 has a huge ambition to be Swan Queen; however, she still finds difficulty to play as the Black Swan. Anxiety disorder becomes one of the causes of Nina's schizophrenia. It happens when Nina always feels anxious because of her ambitions to become a Swan Queen.
It is evident from the movie that Nina has a delusion that she is being followed and conspired against by Lily, who wishes to take her leading role; her actions are not bizarre or odd. Hence, Nina suffers from a delusional disorder of persecutory type (APA, 2013).
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.
Ambiguity and Duality: The relationship between Nina and Lily is also characterized by ambiguity and duality. As the film progresses, it becomes unclear whether Lily is a real person or a figment of Nina's imagination. Lily may represent Nina's alter ego or a projection of her desires and fears [2].
