Black Swan
Nov. 20th, 2012 08:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerWatched Black Swan today! It was so petrifying that I went for a three hour walk thereafter to let the wind wash the terror from my mind! Hallucinations! Feathers growing out of people! Lots of inexplicable bleeding! And everyone aside from Lily is so mean all the time!
Nina clearly sees Lily as a terrifying rival, but I think its pretty clear that's one of her skewed perceptions. The scenes where Lily is clearly Lily rather than a hallucination, she's genuine and kind, if not always deeply observant. "Someone's got the hots for teacher," Lily observes, and she's half right: Nina is half in love with her ballet teacher, who is also her company's visionary director and an all around terrible human being.
But Lily's also half-wrong: Nina's upset not just by unrequited love, but because her director just fondled her in an attempt to unleash her sexuality so she could play the sensual black swan in Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake. This is heinous enough on its own, but the fact that she is a bit in love with him adds another level to it: he's twisting a fragile girl's emotions to try to reshape her, Pygmalion-like, into what he wants her to be.
Which, among other things, is "sexually available to him."
I think Nina's repression is, at least in part, an attempt to protect herself from the creepy, exploitative sexuality that surrounds her, both in the ballet company and in the city at large. She's fragile and frightened and trying to make it go away by ignoring it, which doesn't work, but what other recourse does she have? She has no support system. Her life consists of ballet (under the thumb of her emotionally abusive director) and home, under the overabundant scrutiny of her mother.
Some reviewers have clearly slotted Nina's mother into the role of "psycho stage mom," which I don't think is quite fair. She seems suffocatingly overprotective - there are no internal locks in the apartment, which seems to stem from Nina's history of self-harm - but at the same time it's clear Nina needs protecting. Is Nina's mother wrong to try to prevent her from dancing the ballet at the end of the film? Does Nina really seem well enough to be anywhere but a hospital at that point?
The real question is not "Why is Nina's mother trying to prevent her from dancing?", but "Why does Nina's mother not try to put her into psychiatric care?"
I think we're supposed to presume that Nina died, but I'm not quite sure that makes sense and, more importantly, I don't like that ending at all. So. I don't think Nina could have got through the dance, let alone danced without blood getting all over her spiffy white costume, if she had stabbed herself either before the last act or before the second act when she had her fight with her hallucination of Lily. (Did she attack the mirror?)
So did she fall off the pedestal thing and then stab herself? Or is the final blood-covered Nina a hallucination, too? She's danced her swan song and has suffered a complete psychotic break?
Nina clearly sees Lily as a terrifying rival, but I think its pretty clear that's one of her skewed perceptions. The scenes where Lily is clearly Lily rather than a hallucination, she's genuine and kind, if not always deeply observant. "Someone's got the hots for teacher," Lily observes, and she's half right: Nina is half in love with her ballet teacher, who is also her company's visionary director and an all around terrible human being.
But Lily's also half-wrong: Nina's upset not just by unrequited love, but because her director just fondled her in an attempt to unleash her sexuality so she could play the sensual black swan in Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake. This is heinous enough on its own, but the fact that she is a bit in love with him adds another level to it: he's twisting a fragile girl's emotions to try to reshape her, Pygmalion-like, into what he wants her to be.
Which, among other things, is "sexually available to him."
I think Nina's repression is, at least in part, an attempt to protect herself from the creepy, exploitative sexuality that surrounds her, both in the ballet company and in the city at large. She's fragile and frightened and trying to make it go away by ignoring it, which doesn't work, but what other recourse does she have? She has no support system. Her life consists of ballet (under the thumb of her emotionally abusive director) and home, under the overabundant scrutiny of her mother.
Some reviewers have clearly slotted Nina's mother into the role of "psycho stage mom," which I don't think is quite fair. She seems suffocatingly overprotective - there are no internal locks in the apartment, which seems to stem from Nina's history of self-harm - but at the same time it's clear Nina needs protecting. Is Nina's mother wrong to try to prevent her from dancing the ballet at the end of the film? Does Nina really seem well enough to be anywhere but a hospital at that point?
The real question is not "Why is Nina's mother trying to prevent her from dancing?", but "Why does Nina's mother not try to put her into psychiatric care?"
I think we're supposed to presume that Nina died, but I'm not quite sure that makes sense and, more importantly, I don't like that ending at all. So. I don't think Nina could have got through the dance, let alone danced without blood getting all over her spiffy white costume, if she had stabbed herself either before the last act or before the second act when she had her fight with her hallucination of Lily. (Did she attack the mirror?)
So did she fall off the pedestal thing and then stab herself? Or is the final blood-covered Nina a hallucination, too? She's danced her swan song and has suffered a complete psychotic break?
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no subject
Date: 2012-11-21 02:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-11-21 03:26 am (UTC)Is it possible to fix-it and still let Nina dance? Or is ballet so tied into her dysfunction that she simply has to be separated from that to get better?
no subject
Date: 2012-11-21 01:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-11-21 06:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-11-21 12:48 pm (UTC)one handthe V of a peace sign), since it's the sort of movieno subject
Date: 2012-11-21 06:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-11-28 01:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-11-28 05:52 am (UTC)