Your heart begins beating its way out of your chest and the lump in your throat becomes unmistakable. The world feels suffocating even as you try to inhale and your fingers grip on to your own body for dear life, back pressed against a bathroom stall as you beg to feel safe for just a second. But you know it’s looming—you’ll have to take that next step out into what you dread and fills your mind with images of imagined danger. You may notice it or you may not—the feel of your nails digging into flesh again, picking and peeling at your own skin. Shame, guilt, fear, anxiety all join the array of “what ifs” and paralyzing terrors as you realize what you’ve done to your own body and every time your eye catches the mirror, you can see it happening again, your own reflection urging you to “dig deeper” with every passing second.
Welcome to life as Nina Sayers.
Not only did Black Swan give we at PGW a thrilling cinematic experience, the tribulations of Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman) provides a perfect chance to flex those diagnostic muscles. However, if there were just a single diagnosis to explain away Nina’s menagerie of disorders, the story wouldn’t carry half its thrill. Every one of us at one point in time has been prey to anxiety—it can often motivate us or prevent us from being harmful to ourselves. For many others however, anxiety moves from comfort and well into a disorder, which can easily manifest with compulsivity like picking at hair or skin. What Nina suffers from however is obviously beyond anxiety alone but the leap from self-mutilation to psychosis probably isn’t far for a hyper-focused girl in her twenties under fire from every relationship she has.
Take, for instance, her mother Erica (Barbara Hershey). We’ve all seen that parent before… the kind-hearted, worrier who forever wants the best for her daughter. But these parents often have their “Mr. Hydes” to match the pretty smile don’t they? And it isn’t hard to see that Erica’s feigned smile is laced with a sick expression lying just beneath the surface. From the first moment Nina’s mother orders her to lift up her shirt and examine her back, we begin suspect the truth—self-mutilation is not a new trick for Nina Sayers and mom probably has a lot to do with that.
When the screen opens up to a room full of obsessive, ballerina-themed works of art, the audience knows instantly that the mother is not well and her tendencies for obsession carried on into her daughter without question. Nina is a girl who starts off the movie with a history of anxiety and compulsive mutilation, gets the part of a lifetime only to be sexually harassed by her instructor, gets taunted by rivals, and fails to become the out of control bad girl everyone (but her mother) wants her to be. The ballet is literally the only real thing in her life, changing from a dream to an outright obsession.
Her mind makes the reality come true and every major experience Nina has is revealed to be a delusion. She hallucinates a lesbian experience with her rival dancer, Lily (Mila Kunis)—a girl with black wings conveniently tattooed on her back. Her mind screams at her to fulfill every self-mutilating compulsion through mirror reflections of herself picking at her shoulder blade. Probably one of the more graphic scenes includes a delusion of Nina peeling back her cuticle to the point of spilling blood. And in the end, she acts out probably years of internalized self-hate in murdering a hallucination of her rival, Lily (who at one point during the fight actually bore Nina’s face), only to find the murder weapon, a shard of glass, lodged within her own abdomen. In effect, Nina sleeps with and murders her idealization of the Black Swan in a series of delusions that warp reality to the point of no return—all to become the Black Swan herself. Her obsession with ballet causes her to create experiences, and even an alternate, out-of-control self, that turns her into the perfect woman for the part.
And that’s the real problem isn’t it? Perfection. If nothing else, Black Swan highlights the suicidal reality characteristic of the need for absolute perfection. Working your limbs to the bone as Nina had—bleeding from her toenails—might seem like a powerful commitment to a dream, however, I doubt most of us are looking forward to fist fights with imagined versions of ourselves/our enemies only to end up bleeding from the gut. Realistically, Anorexia, Bulemia, Self-Mutilation, Depression, and many other disorders result from the wish to be flawless. And how long does perfection last? Both Nina’s mother, and the ballerina she replaced, Beth MacIntyre, were left with obsessions that destroyed their personal lives. That is often the price of “perfection”—to mourn days lost and compromise what little future comes thereafter.
This isn’t to say that seeking greatness and realizing your dreams is counterproductive to your health. But perhaps, craving perfection at all costs, trying to please everyone except yourself, and making life about just a single reality probably isn’t the greatest exercise of your time. Hopefully Black Swan drove the point home…
