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.
She continuously scratches a specific spot on her back, which viewers are told she has done in the past. This behavior develops into the visual and tactile hallucination of Nina sprouting wings.
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.
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.
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.
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.
These tics, such as skin picking and nail biting, often appear during times of stress as a method to center oneself. This is one of the most explicit instances that illustrate Nina's own difficulties with OCD, due to the sights of the scratches and the verbal confirmation from her mother.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!)
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.
She envisions the black swan version of herself on multiple occasions. She has fantasy encounters with her understudy Lily (Mila Kunis), one where they are romantic and another where Nina appears to kill her. However, the latter is when Nina actually appears to stab herself.
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 ...
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.
She says "Swan Lake" is "about a girl who gets turned into a swan, and she needs love to break the spell, but her prince falls for the wrong girl, so she kills herself." This is what happens to Nina as she descends into a whirlwind of hallucinations and self-destruction toward the end.
What eating disorder does Nina have in Black Swan?
- 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.
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.
It is a destructive self-soothing mechanism that even her mother (Barbara Hershey) recognizes. She says to Nina, “you've been scratching yourself again, that disgusting habit.” She also even tells Nina that it's because of all the pressure with Nina's lead role as the Swan Queen.
(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.
