- Give a brief plot overview.
- Reflect on the elements of the tragic hero and how Nina exhibits these.
- Give a summary of the effective cinematography/sound engineering techniques. Why were they effective?
- Comment on the title of the film What is significant about it in relation to the plot?
- What does the director want us to reflect on from this piece What broader issues.messages are tackled?
The black swan a young ballerina called Nina receives the role of the Swan Queen in the Swan lake ballet. After being cast as the role she begins to go insane due to the immense pressure she places on herself to be perfect. This then leads to hallucinations and signs of insanity, from which she stabs herself between acts of the show, thinking she is being attacked by Lily.
Nina exhibits the elements of a tragic hero through her excessive pride and need to be perfect, thus causing her to constantly fear for the things such as her role that she bases her identity on to be taken from her. Her downfall occurred as she began to go completely insane, unable to distinguish reality from fiction.
While the character herself never completely experienced a true anagnorisis, it is the audience who has that anagnorisis in the realisation that the character is crazy. While following along with the movie it is never explicitly stated that some things aren’t real and some are, and it is the audience who slowly come to the realisation that not everything we see is real. While Nina slowly does realise her own insanity (after things such as fantasising over Lily and realising the next morning it wasn’t real) there is no true trigger point of her realisation, and instead she continues on her quest for perfection. However, upon her returning of the old dancers things when she is injured we are able to see that she wants to give it all back, and escape the ‘punishments’ going on in her own head. These are only glimpses in which we spy her awareness to her insanity, however she never truly accepts it. We know she has not accepted her own fault for what is going on when after a mistake in the dance she points at her partner and says ‘It’s not my fault, he dropped me,’ when in fact it was due to her own internal struggles that she was unable to be held.
Thomas defines each of the swans in the movie, the white swan being ‘beautiful, fearful, fragile.’ and the black swan being about seduction, imprecision, fearlessness, lack of control, or someone with a bite. The title of black swan shows the lack of control that Nina feels throughout the movie as she starts as the white swan, progresses to the black swan and slowly loses her mind in the pursuit of perfection. Her teacher is pushing her to loosen into the black swan, but along with this lack of control of her own head comes many dark affects as she herself becomes more than the dancer playing the swan queen, but physically develops into the black swan herself. Nina also believed that she was perfect, however as the white swan she was dropped and the dance was not perfect, however she became the perfect black swan by the end of the show. In the end it was the white swan that fell from the thing at the top, and her blood from where she stabbed herself was only shown when she had the costume of the white swan on, meaning that her innocence was completely destroyed as the white swan within her died. In the ballet, the white swan commits suicide in order to contain the black swan within herself. This is similar to what Nina does, as in order for the psychosis to disappear both the white and black swan have to be there.
The director wants us to reflect on the ideas of innocence and obsession. To become so fixated on a singular goal that the rest of our lives can be destroyed because of it. This idea of psychosis and reality also comes of the idea that perception is or isn’t true… Humanity itself is a balanced relationship between light and dark traits, and one is unable to exist without the other. If there is no darkness in the world then there is no way to show the light – people would no longer need help and we would no longer search for gains in society.
However the main idea that the director wants us to reflect on is the idea of perfection. It is a fact of human nature that we are all flawed, and there is no way that ‘perfection’ can be created in an individual. Perfection can also be looked at in many different ways, meaning that across different cultures and lifestyles there is not one perfect ideal that we should all conform to. Nina is trying to become truly white, however the dark traits within her are overall unable to be contained.
As Nina essentially becomes the black swan, her life mirrors that of the swan queen she is performing as she essentially comes to her downfall by the end of the ballet. As the swan queen is being torn between showing traits of the white and black swan, Nina is too in her own life. There is a battle between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ going on in the swan queens head, which is mirrored in Nina’s life.
We can also reflect on the black swan movie to show mother-daughter (paternal) relationships. Nina’s mother has an internal resentment for Nina due to the way Nina took over her mothers career. This means that the mother is trying to live through Nina, and force Nina to be ‘essentially perfect,’ as she must live up to the potential her mother could have been, as well as more in order to prove to her mother that her sacrifice was worth it. The mother would have felt that her daughter owed her something before she was born, meaning the relationship showed issues of leverage before it even began. The pressure we see being placed on Nina (by not only herself but her mother also), shows the way in which her upbringing and values had always been toward that perfection, and shows the striving for perfection was an ingrained trait from her upbringing. (This also shows that it was in fact her own trait and flaw that causes her downfall, rather than an obsession developed only through the movie). This is portrayed in the movie where Nina locks eyes with her mother right before the audience begins to cheer and she falls backwards off the stage thing. Her mother has tears in her eyes and is obviously proud of her daughter. It’s in this moment that Nina feels perfect as she finally feels like she is enough for her mother and therefore herself. Having made her mother proud she wants it all to end in that moment, and would be happy to die, because she is aware that as soon as she comes out of this moment her mothers never-ending control and pressure will once again be placed upon her. However, as the swan queen she is untouchable, having reached that feeling of being on top, in that moment no longer having to worry about her insecurities or the going ons inside her own head.
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