Just saw it on Sew Year’s Eve! I absolutely LOVED this film and I think it’s Aronofsky’s best. I think that some of the questions are answered somewhat easily. Pardon my run on.
Nina doesn’t really know how to think and react for herself. She can only express herself through dance. She is beautiful, graceful and pathetic. Zero personality. So for some of the unresolved questions, I think they’re easily answered:
Thomas tells her before the show that she must forget the little girl she really is because “she’s her only enemy.” He tells her to get rid of that. When she “kills” Lily in the dressing room, this is the epitome of her assumed relationship with Lily, Thomas, and her mother. She really stabs herself finally understanding that SHE really is her own enemy. The Lily she hates and is blaming for her self consciousness is simply herself.
If you remember, after she stabs Lily and campily drags Lily’s dying body in the back of the dressing room, she actually, for the first real time, holds it together all by herself. She acknowledges what she did, but drags Lily in the back and goes back onstage to perform. Fantastically, in fact.
For cinematic leeway, we’ll ignore the gaping wound in a white dress that should’ve been noticed by anyone in the audience or onstage. Hey, these wannabe prima donnas all the way from Beth to Thomas To Mother to Nina can’t be noticed: they’re too into themselves.
As far as all the campy feelings some of you got from the special effects, dragging Lily’s body, especially her growing the black feathers-- this is her hallucinating. Like I mentioned, Nina is painfully unaware. She can’t have a boyfriend, stand up to anyone, and her hallucinations and dreams are all that’s real. Whenever something looked “campy” or ridiculous, I thought it was obvious that Nina was going Woodstock again.
Especially when the paintings started to talk.
I liked the comments referencing the characters too. I also agree that Beth was the real life Von Rothbart to Nina. Beth was not stabbing her cheeks with a nail file, but Nina was imagining this only to provoke her fantasy.
And here’s another point: Although Nina never points fingers and blames anyone directly, she is told to “live” this role. So maybe she needs a real Von Rothbart, a real Black Swan and a real reluctant, yet flock of followers reluctantly naming her Queen. Beth and Lil are like Von Rothbart, Thomas and Mommy representing a prince or a decent and different path and Nina as her own Odette, silently accusing her peeps of cursing her into her own swan and death being her true path of freedom. Thomas describes this about Odette in “Swan Lake” at the cast meeting in the beginning.
And yes, the Mila/Natalie scene was OOOOOO! LOVED it, of course. But what MY question is about that is why doesn’t Nina just listen to a cute, fellow contemporary in ballet and just “relax” and “let loose”? When Nina gets honest advice, she runs and runs and runs.
I’ll also add that Nina’s hallucinations seem to run here, there and everywhere. Arts competitors can really be brutal, but I think that whenever we heard background comments like, “bitch”, “awful” and when “WHORE” was written in the mirror, it didn’t really happen. That’s just Nina and her unfed brain.
Shit, dancers, just get fat. If you ate pizza instead of air for lunch, Nina might actually smile. 