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.
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.
Because the mother is a failed dancer, she lives vicariously through Nina while simultaneously harboring some resentment of Nina's success. It's the career she never had. She also is over-protective and treats her daughter like a helpless child.
As seen in figure 8.2, Nina supposedly bleeds to death as a result of a wound in her abdomen that she caused by stabbing herself with a mirror shard in her changing room before dancing the part of the sensuous black swan. Erika stabs herself with a kitchen knife in the final scene of the film.
Black Swan (2010) - Dance of the White Swan Scene (5/5) | Movieclips
Why did Nina stab herself?
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.
The Black Swan explained that, while killing her own doppelgänger, Nina fatally injured herself in the process. Earlier scenes also revealed scratch marks on Nina's back after her hallucinations showed a pattern of self-harm.
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!)
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.
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.
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.
Thomas notes that Nina clearly came with the intention to change his mind, to try and seduce him, in the mildest sense of the word. Thomas wants Nina to lose herself, that is how she can become the Black Swan. Thomas forcefully kisses Nina and she bits him.
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.
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.
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.
It has now been revealed that Ricky Mitchell, also aged 12, is the father of Lily's baby. Lily ended up telling Ricky the news after she was worried that one of her angry family members would go to him first.
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.
A black swan is an unpredictable event that is beyond what is normally expected of a situation and has potentially severe consequences. Black swan events are characterized by their extreme rarity, severe impact, and the widespread insistence they were obvious in hindsight.
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.
Both involve young women attempting to perfect their craft, and slowly giving up their morals as they spiral into delusion. There is debate over whether or not Aronofsky “copied” Perfect Blue. He denies it, but any viewer can see the similarities between the two.
