Black Swan Interpretation – SPOILERS

[rbnyc]

I just watched this for the first time over the weekend. I have a certain take on it. I talked about it with a coworker. He hadn’t thought of it, but thought it was plausible and wants to watch the movie again.

Maybe it’s obvious to everyone, or maybe you haven’t thought of it this way either.

The mother is dead. Nina killed her mother a long time ago. When we join the story, she is already deep in a fantasy world.

When Lily comes over and has such a big reaction, it’s not about the mother trying to get Nina to come back in. It’s about Nina talking to no one.

When Nina comes home from stabbing Beth in the face and washes her hands in the kitchen, she turns out the light, then hears her mother say “sweetheart” then turns on the light and there is a figure in the background bleeding from the neck. Later Nina runs to her room and her mother chases her and for a flash, is that same figure. When Nina passes out and her mother tells her she’s called the theatre to say she can’t perform and that this role is destroying her, Nina escapes and goes to the performance. Her mother is just sitting happily in the audience. And earlier, when Nina was masturbating and then discovers her mother sleeping in the chair, it makes perfect sense that given her internal conflict with sexual expression, she would put her mother there. I also think it’s likely that Nina killed her mother because she was abusive, possibly sexually.

I think that Nina’s mother was schizophrenic or schizoaffective, that she oppressed and abused Nina until she snapped and killed her, or she possibly killed herself. Nina couldn’t accept her mother’s death and created this world in which their life went on together in that apartment. Nina was struggling (to say the least) with her sexual nature and was trying to lock herself in childhood. Having to emerge from innocence in order to perform the Black Swan caused her constructed world to come apart.

Also, I think that the rehearsal scene when the pianist leaves and she’s dancing by herself and the lights go out and then she walks in on herself having sex with the director, she’s actually having sex with the director – but since her personality has become fractured, the white swan side of her had continued to rehearse while her black swan side went off and got some, but our point of view in the film is through the eyes of the white swan side throughout most of the film, until the end.

Here’s what I don’t get. If she really stabbed herself at the end, how did she finish the dance without showing blood until she fell?

Thoughts?

[mzteris]

1. interesting . . .

I just saw this movie, too.

I think you may be on to something that the mother is already dead.

I think she sees the other girl having sex with the director, not herself.

Though did she really "see" or experience much of any of it besides the dance. Including the whole nightclub scene. maybe. maybe not.

My question is, did she stab the other dancer in the hospital with the nail file, or imagine that, too?

As for the end, maybe she stabbed herself when she fell.

[KT2000]

2. Had not thought of that

but it makes a much more interesting movie with much more depth.