Flights of Vision: Psychological Realism and the Pressures of Artistic Perfectionism in Black Swan

Written by Jaclyn Pahl

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.

In contrast, Nina’s mother is entirely a hallucination. Nina and her mother have a relationship more appropriate for a mother and a young child. Nina’s mother is overprotective and controlling, at times attempting to break into Nina’s room and trimming Nina’s nails for her. Nina is also exhibiting signs of age-repression in her mother’s presence. Her bedroom is a childish shade of light pink and large stuffed animals cover every surface. This suggests that the mother is a projection of Nina’s need for protection, that she is merely a comforting and restricting delusion. The film leaves some ambiguity in regard to how much of Nina’s mother is Nina’s delusion, but, considering the film’s final sequence, there is little evidence that she exists outside of Nina. The mother cries happily as Nina gives her climatic performance at the end of the film, despite fighting with Nina before the show, and is thus suggested to be merely a hallucination, seen by Nina when she looks out into the crowd.

The Psychological Unfolding of Nina

When Nina’s mother tries to prevent her from going out with Lily, it is really only Nina’s own fear that is preventing her from leaving with Lily. Nina, however, fights through her overprotective urges, and literally opens the door to Lily. Catalyzed by the influence of alcohol and ecstasy, Nina’s mind creates a fantasy where she and Lily have sex. During this scene, Nina’s mother, locked out, bangs at Nina’s bedroom door. Here, the restrictive mother delusion is the superego interrupting the id. Nina is constantly at war with different parts of herself. This manifests in this scene as the combatant delusions of Lily and her mother. Nina is ashamed, or in some way opposed, to her sexual desires. Her fear and shame manifests in her hallucinatory mother, while her desires manifest in Lily. This same type of scene also occurs earlier in the film, when Nina masturbates, and is horrified to find her mother asleep in a chair by her bed. In this scene it is extraordinarily clear Nina’s mother is not there to begin with, because Nina would have noticed her earlier. She only appears in the chair when Nina’s own mind finds it necessary to carrel her desires. In this way, Nina is at war with her own desires. She is constantly observing herself and attempting to stifle the parts of herself she deems abject. Nina suffers under the burden of repression— sexual and psychological. The film makes use of Nina’s sexual repression in order to draw the viewer’s attention to her greater psychological repression. Nina lives in denial of her psychosis, repressing the feelings she knows deep down are not rational, so as to function day-to-day. For Nina to achieve greatness as a ballerina, she must embrace her derangement.

The Search For Artistic Perfection

Throughout the film the show director and Nina’s mother describe great art as self-destructive. Nina cannot be both the White Swan and the Black Swan because, as the show director tells her, she cannot lose control. For Nina, a need for control is important because without it she would fall victim to her psychosis, but for Nina to be truly great, she must learn to accept the good and bad parts of herself— she must play both the White and Black Swan. She must learn to balance her simultaneous impulses of restrained perfectionism and deranged ardor. Nina’s rejection of her demons, made literal in the form of demonic bird-like hallucinations, prevents her from achieving greatness. The films suggests that the recesses of the mind must not be turned away from. Instead, they must be acknowledged, embraced, known, in order for great art to be made. As the show director reminds us, this process can be self-destructive, and, thus, Nina stabs herself before performing as the Black Swan. The show director refers to Nina sincerely in the last few moments of the film as his “little princess,” a moniker by which he used to call Beth when she was the company’s Prima Ballerina. It is this self-destructive rave through personal hell that allows Nina to shine as the Black Swan. The film suggests this process is “perfect” even as it is destructive, as edified by the last few lines of the film: “I felt it. It was perfect.”

Nina’s horrifying reality is presented to the viewer as it is experienced by Nina. This allows us to experience with her the fear that accompanies psychosis. As the film progresses, Nina’s delusions worsen and her need to control them increases. By the film’s conclusion, Nina learns to embrace the parts of herself she wishes were not there. Only in doing this, is she able to successfully play both the White and the Black Swan. The film uses this a metaphor for artistic greatness, and suggests that artists must embrace psychological darkness, even when it is self-destructive, for perfection to be achieved. This is the virtue of the Black Swan. Black Swan makes for an enjoyable guilty pleasure viewing experience as effervescent and as wild as a bird in flight.

Works Cited

Black Swan. Directed by Darren Aronofsky, Cross Creek Pictures, 2010.