Black Swan is a film about the ballet, adolescence and psychosis. It is a “psychological thriller,” a “suspense thriller,” a “horror movie” and a tragedy. It blends psychological insight with theatrical melodrama, myth with personal story. It depicts a mother/daughter relationship which is loving and protective at the same moment that it is rivalrous and destructive.
The story concerns the adolescent conflicts of a young ballerina, Nina Sayers, who is vying for the starring role in a production of Swan Lake. We are never told her age, but her conflicts are clearly those of a young adolescent. She is torn apart by intense conflicts between ideals of innocence and kindness and sexual and aggressive passions. Her conflict is reified in the form of the twin swan princesses, the innocent White Swan, Odette, and her seductive, aggressive twin Black Swan, Odile.
That story is laid out for us by the ballet company’s director, Thomas (pronounced in the European style) Leroy: “We all know the story. Virginal girl, pure and sweet, trapped in the body of a swan. She desires freedom, but only true love can break the spell. Her wish is nearly granted in the form of the prince, but before he can declare his love, the lustful twin, the Black Swan, tricks and seduces him. Devastated, the White Swan leaps off a cliff, killing herself and in death, finds freedom.”
At its surface, Black Swan is about the soaring and grinding world of ballet, which one analyst, referring to this film, described as misogynistic. Even before the film’s major conflicts are apparent, we see Nina attending to her bruised and bleeding feet and hear loud, crunching noises as she tries to manipulate them or to dance upon them. But the physical punishment is secondary to the psychological demands of pursuing technical perfection and artistic expression. We will see that Nina is driven and tortured by her own ambition and by the ambition of her director, Thomas.
Black Swan is a psychological drama that can take us out of our usual exterior clinical perspective and into the experience of increasing psychosis. There are hints early in the film that Nina has a longstanding habit of compulsive scratching to go along with the self-destructive exercises that the rigors of her career demand. Under the strain of her new role, she will begin to hallucinate and to experience paranoid fears, and we with her. We experience them with confusion and some loss of reality, but also with fear and, at times, shock as the film uses techniques of timing and sound effects borrowed from the genre of the horror movie.
The film accomplishes all of this by throwing us into the maelstrom of an adolescent trans- formation contracted into what feels like a few days. Under the strain of this precipitous change, the cracking of reality feels almost inevitable.
The opening scene portends this transformation. We see a young beautiful ballerina, Nina, dressed in white and dancing beautifully and freely. Suddenly, a dark male figure approaches and seems to attack her. Terrified, she attempts to dance out of his clutches, but is transformed by him into a swan. As the scene ends, we see Nina lying in her bed, awakening from this dream, which she explains to her mother is the prologue to Swan Lake in the Bolshoi version.
Nina appears to be locked in childhood in symbiosis with her adoring single mother, Erica, herself a former ballet dancer. As she sits for her breakfast and looks at the half grapefruit in front of her, she smiles at it and says “pretty.” As she does so, her mother joins her in the refrain and they laugh and smile together at what is obviously a standard shared exchange that gives us the feel of a mother/child relationship at a much younger age. In keeping with this, we will see that Nina’s room is filled with light, fluffy, airy stuffed animals, making it seem like a child’s room. Her mother, Erica, lovingly calls her “sweet girl.”
There is a hint of conflict when Erica sees scratch marks on Nina’s back and questions her about them. We experience a further vague sense of danger on the subway train that takes Nina to the ballet company at Lincoln Center. Nina first sees her reflection in the train window, then turns the other way to see a young woman in another train who looks like her, suggesting another reflection, or, perhaps, her double.
There are two catalysts for the rush into adolescent conflict. The first is Thomas, the middle aged, accented company director. We are told by various characters that he is ruthless, a bastard, a womanizer and user of women. He tells Nina that she is perfect for the role of the White Swan, innocent, beautiful, perfect and cold, but that to dance the role of the Black Swan, she must be able to let go. That role requires sexual aggressiveness and a capacity for ruthless competitiveness.
Having slipped while dancing for him and afraid that she won’t get the role of the Swan Queen, Nina goes to Thomas to tell him that she had completed the routine afterward. He tells her that he knows she has the technical skills, but lacks the ability to unloose the emotions needed for the role of the Black Swan. He suddenly grabs her and kisses her on the lips and is surprised when she bites him, drawing blood. For that show of spirit, he reverses his decision and awards her the role of the Swan Queen.
The second catalyst is Lily, a new girl to the company, “straight off the plane from San Francisco.” Lily will play a complicated role in this psychological drama. She is what Nina is not, relaxed and unafraid to be sexual. As the story develops, she will become a real life version of Nina’s “evil” double, the Black Swan to Nina’s White Swan. Nina will be both drawn to her as her other half and fearful of her as a rival for the part. But Lily serves another, equally important role. She represents the seduction of peer pressure that helps to move the young adolescent away from the protection of home and the child’s role that she plays there.
Pulled by the seductions of the older man and the freer girl, as well as by her own ambition to conquer the role of the Black Swan, Nina is suddenly jerked into conflict, long suppressed with her mother’s help, between innocence in a comfortable but confining dyad with her mother and the freedom to express and explore her own sexuality and aggressiveness.
There is a third character who plays a role in this conflict, the aging star, Beth McIntyre, Thomas’s former “little princess” who is now losing her appeal and is being forcibly retired. Just as Lily is Nina’s double, Beth doubles for her mother, as a displaced older rival, jealous and angry at her successor. It is through Thomas and Beth that Nina will, as an adolescent, play out her Oedipal drama.
Early in the film, Nina defends Beth. The other young women in the company are talking about declining attendance and blaming it on Beth, saying they need “someone new,” “someone who’s not approaching menopause.” Nina shows her admiration and sympathy, saying that it’s sad because “Beth is such a beautiful dancer.” Shortly afterwards, she hears Beth throwing a tantrum in her private dressing room. After Beth leaves in a huff, Nina sneaks into the dressing room and steals a lipstick. Later in the film, she is put into Beth’s dressing room and steals a few other small items. It is clear that she is looking for totems from the admired older dancer.
But Beth does not reciprocate the sympathy. She sees Nina as a rival and usurper. After a fundraising dinner at which Thomas has announced Beth’s upcoming retirement and presented Nina as his new Swan Queen, Beth approaches Nina angrily, finally drawing an angry response:
Beth: What did you do to get the role? He always said you were a frigid little girl. What did you do to make him change his mind? Did you suck his cock?
Nina: Not all of us have to.
Beth: You fucking whore! You fucking little whore!
We soon hear that Beth has suffered an accident, hit by a car. Thomas tells Nina that he thinks she ran in front of the car on purpose. With obvious guilt, Nina visits Beth and is horrified to see under the covers that her legs are badly damaged.1
Her relationship with Beth reflects her relationship with her mother. Unlike Beth, Erica’s ballet career was apparently unsuccessful. In small interactions, it becomes clear that Nina sees her mother as a failure as a ballerina. With Erica and Beth, we have the Oedipal rivalry, one the mother she is surpassing, the other the successful ballerina she is replacing as Thomas’s “little princess.”
Winning the role and feeling the pressures upon her to let out her feelings, Nina begins to show signs of rebelling against her mother’s attempts to keep her as her “sweet girl.” After she wins the role, Erica brings her a gift of a large stuffed bear. Nina clearly does not want it. Later, she will throw out all of her stuffed animals. Her mother has made her a cake, which she does not want to eat. When Erica starts to take the cake to the garbage can, Nina relents and tries to make peace, but the movement towards growth and independence has started.
Thomas gives it further impetus in an attempt to get Nina to allow her sensuality to come to the fore. After the fundraiser, he takes her to his apartment, but instead of seducing her, he sends her home with a homework assignment, to masturbate. We see Nina in her bed beginning to excite herself. She rolls over in an orgasmic frenzy, then sees her mother sleeping on the chair beside her bed. Afterwards, she finds a board in the garbage room and uses it to block the door to try to establish some privacy, attempting to set a boundary with her intrusive mother.
As this develops, we can begin to notice an ambiguity in Erica’s attitude. She clearly gets vicarious pleasure from hearing about her daughter’s success, pumping her for information about the fundraiser at which Nina was brought out by Thomas. On the other hand, it is not clear if her ready acceptance earlier of Nina’s not getting the role—discouraging her from approaching Thomas to try to change his mind and telling her about the good lesser roles she’ll probably get—is an attempt to comfort or a hint at her unconscious jealousy of her daughter’s success. As the story develops, there is a continued obvious ambiguity about Erica’s attempts to hold her Nina back, ostensibly in an attempt to protect her. The fact that Nina increasingly needs protection adds to the ambiguity, but when Erica tells Nina she wants her sweet girl back, the attempt to arrest her development is palpable.
Their conflict comes to a head. Questioning Nina about whether Thomas has made any advances, Erica goes on to say that she doesn’t want Nina to repeat the mistake that she had made with her career.
Nina: What career?
Erica: The one I gave up to have you.
Nina: You were 28.
Erica: So?
At this point, Erica becomes controlling. Her face hardens and she angrily questions Nina about her skin, demanding that she take off her shirt. Nina angrily refuses. With Thomas pushing her to let go of her
inhibitions—dancing with her and physically seducing her—Nina is unable to contend with her unrepressed sexuality and aggression. She begins to project her impulses, hallucinating with more intensity, and we, the viewers hallucinate with her.
Up to this point, there have been ambiguous occurrences—seeing her double on the train, passing a woman in the dark who appears to be her double—made ominous by the film’s sound effects and lighting. But as the genie of sex and aggression is let out of the bottle, the hallucinations become more definitive and frightening. Nina tries masturbating in her bath. As she does so, we see drops of blood landing on the bath water above her body. She lies down under the water and with her we see the view as she looks up from beneath the surface. Suddenly, a young woman, her double, is leaning over her. We experience it with her with horror movie shock. This is one of several times that Nina will suddenly and shockingly be confronted by another woman, sometimes real, sometimes an apparition.
There are other images as well. An older man in the subway makes obscene gestures with his face and mouth. It might be real, might be a hallucination. We are losing our own grip on reality along with Nina.
To Thomas’s push is added Lily’s pull. On the heals of Nina’s confrontation with her mother, Lily offers her the alternative of a peer, asking Nina to join her for drinks. Against her mother’s wishes, Nina grabs her coat and joins Lily for a night out that turns into an encounter with men and drugs in a club. We see her leave the club with Lily, who accompanies her home.
Nina taunts her mother with her escapade, locking her out of the room, saying “It’s called privacy. I’m not twelve any more,” with Erica shouting, “You’re not my Nina right now.” With the room effectively locked with the wooden board, Nina and Lily have an intense sexual encounter.
But the next morning, Lily is not there and the room is boarded shut. We begin to suspect that the scene was a hallucinated fantasy as a puzzled Nina goes to the dance company. Lily is dancing the part of the Black Swan, arousing Nina’s suspicions of rivalry and a deliberate attempt to usurp. She confronts Lily, who says that they were separated at the club and that she never went home with her. Lily, in a friendly teasing voice says, “Did you have some screwed up Lezzy wet dream about me? Oh, my God, you did, you fantasized about me!”
The drugs at the bar and hallucinated sex magnify the rate of transformation. As Nina morphs into adolescent rebellion and pleasure seeking at an accelerated pace, we are drawn into a psychosis that we are made to experience with confusion and terror, the lighting and sound adding a sense of threat. In a sequence with the artistry of a good horror movie, Nina becomes frightened when left alone in the ballet studio. At first she sees strange things in a subtle way, her mirror image seemingly separating its movements from hers. The lights go out and she anxiously pur- sues a possible shadow and noises, finally peeking in on Thomas having sex with Lily, then with Nina’s double, who stares back at her with an eerie smile.2 Thomas becomes a grotesque swan figure from the ballet.
Frightened and horrified, she flees and goes to the hospital to see Beth, to return the things she has taken from Beth’s dressing room and to apologize, telling Beth, “I know how it feels now. She’s trying to replace me.” But Beth rebukes her for stealing her things and begins to stab her own face with an emery board. As Nina runs from the hospital room, she is holding the bloody emery board. We may tell ourselves that we are watching a psychosis, but we feel the effects of horror, experiencing the dread of the psychosis ourselves, directly.
This sets us up to careen towards the film’s finale. Back in her apartment, the horror continues as we and Nina see apparitions and hear voices. When her mother tries to intercede, she slams the door on her mother’s hand to force her out, finally blocking the door, setting a boundary with new-found violence.
But when she wakens, Erica is with her. Nina soon realizes that this is the night of her debut in Swan Lake. Erica tells her that she has called Thomas to let him know that she is too ill to perform.
As they grapple, Erica asks, “What happened to my sweet girl?”
Nina answers, “She’s gone.”
With Erica telling her she can’t handle the role, Nina’s parting words are, “I can’t? I’m the Swan Queen. You’re the one who never left the corps.”
Adult viewers who were once adolescents may be caught up in the ambiguity of Erica’s attempt to protect her daughter by thwarting her ambitions, but Nina sees it unambiguously as a threat to her success and independence,
When she arrives at the theater, Lily is prepared to fill in as the Swan Queen. Now, she clearly sees Lily as the jealous rival who wishes to take her place, the evil double. Nina convinces Thomas to let her do the part. From this point, the action is backed by the sound of Tchaikovsky’s music.
After the first act, in which Nina has danced as the White Swan, Lily appears in her dressing room, aggressively demanding to take the role of the Black Swan and morphing into Nina’s double, choking her in a grotesque manner and saying, “It’s my turn.” Nina says. “It’s my turn,” and stabs the double/Lily with a piece of broken glass, leaving her for dead.
Now she dances the challenging Black Swan role with intensity and perfection, the audi- ence responding. When she goes back to her dressing room and realizes what she has done, mopping blood from the floor, there is a knock on the door and Lily appears, alive and well, congratulating her on her amazing performance.
Nina looks around the room and sees no blood and no body. But putting on her White Swan costume, she sees in the mirror that she is bleeding. Pulling a shard of glass from her belly, she goes out to do the final dance as the distraught White Swan, eventually jumping off a balcony onto a mattress on the stage, ending the performance to thunderous applause.
With Thomas leaning over her admiringly, the others, Lily first, see that she is bleeding, now copiously. Through her vision, we see the screen turn white and then black for the cred- its.
It is only at this point that we can separate ourselves from Nina and her psychosis, wiser in our first-hand knowledge of adolescent conflict, ambivalence and violence directed inward, coming both from the passions of sexuality and competitive violence directed at the child being left and from the rage of conscience against the violation of that child-like ideal.
1. This is a reminder of and possible homage to the dramatic closing scene in The Red Shoes, in which the camera shows the bruised, broken legs of the heroine, a ballerina, who has thrown herself under a train.
2. For me, at least, reminiscent of a very similar scene in Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist.
Published in the PANY Bulletin, Spring, 2011