Flights of Vision: Psychological Realism and the Pressures of Artistic Perfectionism in Black Swan A film analysis of Black Swan (2010) Written by Jaclyn Pahl1,2,3 Department of English, 2Cinema Studies Institute, University of Toronto 3 Fourth-year undergraduate of University College, University of Toronto
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A flock of fluttering birds, ballet dancers reduced to bleary outlines, hallucination, and perfectionism— this is the exuberant and indulgent world of Black Swan. Directed by Darren Aronofsky, the film follows Nina, a ballet dancer in a New York City dance company, as she succumbs to an extended and vivid psychotic episode. The film is focalized entirely through Nina. Her fixations, obsessions, fears and desires compose the whole of the diegesis. Just as Nina can scarcely differentiate between what is real and what is a delusion, neither can we the viewer. Through Nina’s psychological neuroses, the film mediates on relationship between sacrifice and greatness. Nina achieves perfection only as she embraces her delusions. Nina must lose control in order to succeed as the both the Black Swan and the White Swan. She is successful only when she accepts her own mental derangement, embracing her dark side. In this way, the film constructs a metaphor for artistic perfection. Black Swan suggests that individuals must release themselves from control and embrace darkness, even when that darkness is self-destructive, for artistic greatness to be achieved. In this way, Black Swan is a lavishly over-the-top ode to creatives.
An Edification of Filmic Reality In Black Swan, the fluid relationship between the real and the imagined creates an enthralling albeit confusing viewing experience. Nina hears a flock of birds, presumably swans, fly through the tunnels of the New York City subway. The film presents this hallucination to the viewer just as Nina experiences it. We the viewer experience Nina’s reality, including her hallucinations, just as she does. The horror of the film lies in the anxiety Nina feels due to her own deteriorating mental state. The film capitalizes on the fear Nina experiences as her experiences becomes increasingly unhinged from reality. The film ensures we the viewer experience this fear alongside her, utilizing generic horror conventions—such as the body becoming a psycho-spiritual domain where woman and bird converge. The world we experience through Nina is a subjective one. Nina’s subjectivity guides the viewer’s experience of filmic reality. It is, therefore, necessary to breakdown which parts of the filmic reality are, by all available measure, true in reality, and which are merely a product of Nina’s delusions. Most of the basic elements of the plot are true in reality. Nina herself exists, and she does dance in a New York City ballet company. The male show director exists more or less as he is portrayed. The same is true for Nina’s fellow ballerinas. Both Beth and Lily exist in reality, however, throughout in the film, Nina has hallucinations that involve them. The most obvious example of such a hallucination is the sex scene between Nina and Lily, which is purely imagined. Lily’s reaction to Nina’s false recollection of their sexual encounter indicates that Lily is not completely imagined and that she exists outside of Nina’s imagination. Lily assures Nina the two did not have sex, and her surprised reaction to Nina’s false memory is the first time the film makes it absolutely unambiguous that Nina is hallucinating. Screenwriters’ Perspectives Vol. 2 No. 1 2021
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