Within Black Swan Bulimia, Self Harm, OCD, sexual repression, psychosis and schizophrenia is featured. The protagonist battles with hallucinations which gradually leads to her death. Black Swan plays on the well known children story and manipulates it into something sinister. Black Swan explores the mentality of Nina who battles to achieve her dream of becoming the star of the show in an upcoming ballet show. She aims to play the role of the white swan and the black swan but in doing so causes her to become obsessed with the alter ego black swan. Within Black Swan, the swans symbolise how society expects women to act and her dance instructor is a microcosm of how harrowing society can be. The death of Nina was brought forth due to her mental illness she endured due to the constant abuse of herself and how tough her instructor was on her. Nina in the beginning is a symbol of the white swan as she is pure and innocent, this gradually changes through sexual exploration and drug use. From beginning to end the main structure of the film aims to turn her purity to something sinister and tarnished. It is ironic as at the ultimate section of the film, Nina is the black swan both physically and mentally. Nina suffers from a wide variety of mental health issues such as Schizophrenia, Eating Disorders and hallucinations. The film explores each of these mental health issues to show the ways in which society can be individuals biggest problem, when Nina finally conforms and becomes the black swan and kills herself it is the end of her social torment and her mental illness. In some ways Black Swan can be considered verisimilitude in the ways it is a smaller scale of how society can be and how mental illnesses can happen to any individual. The fact Nina is in a career where weight is an issue is realistic for audiences to relate to, despite the transformation into a swan being somewhat of a fairy tale. Nina experiences a break from a reality due to the social pressures she has on her, she enters psychosis which subsequently sends her mind in a spiral of hallucinations that were damaging. She visually transitions to her alter ego who ultimately ends up killing herself and harming her co-star. I wanted to create a similar ending, where the alter ego triumphs,
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| Hallucinating |
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| Psychotic |
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| Nina switches between her alter ego |
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| Her alter ego presents itself physically via the colour change in her eyes |
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