Even though there is obviously no one correct answer, I think we are supposed to wonder if/suspect that Nina stabbed Beth for the reasons Astral Rejection detailed above. We already know that we can’t trust what we’re seeing on the screen and the hand washing seemed very Lady Macbeth like.
One of my favorite details in the movie was the scene where Nina enters her mother’s room the first time, looking for her mom. The eyes on one of the paintings are moving, but there is no close-up shot of it and you can miss it easily if you weren’t looking at that section of the screen. It’s one of those “Did I just see that?” scenes. It might have been nice if there were more subtle crazy details like that to unbalance the viewer instead of something completely over the top, like when Nina enters her mom’s room at the end and all the paintings are going nuts.
Well, one thing about the movie I think is pretty successful is the fact that even though it’s told entirely from Nina’s POV, nevertheless, reality breaks through to the audience. We can tell exactly how she’s wrong about Lily, we can see alot about her mom that she can’t (or that’s not central to her attention), and so on.
But that scene didn’t have this quality.
That’s why I said the whole scene was hallucinated as far as I could tell.
Add to that the fact that I can’t see how she could realistically have been involved in any way with a scene like that yet still be able to exit the hospital without anyone chasing her down.
We also saw the film yesterday and thought it was really, really good.
One comment about Lily - I thought she really was perfectly cast as the good/evil friend. BTW, she was on That 70’s Show and I constantly confuse her with the girl who was on The OC - they both look and act strikingly similar.
My only nitpick was that some of the cinematography was a bit shaky and there were a few cuts that were a bit choppy. Maybe that was the intended technique, but I thought it disturbed the flow of an otherwise beautiful film.
I just saw this last night and loved it. Some random thoughts I had after reading this thread:
I’m sure Nina didn’t stab Beth. Nina came to the hospital and saw the destroyed body Beth had and it scared her. The vision of Beth stabbing herself is, I think, a reflection of how Beth appears to Nina as her future manifest.
Also I think Nina wasn’t a virgin as I’ve heard others suggest. I think she hasn’t even thought about a relationship since she got a position in the company, but her masturbation scene doesn’t imply that she’s sexually inexperienced.
This is the best movie I’ve seen in a long time. I could go on and on but I’m at work and besides, you’ve all said so many of the things I’m thinking.
One thing I must say is that I was so disturbed after watching this; *I *felt freakin’ psychotic! I remember before I saw “Requiem for a Dream” everyone warned that it’s a downer that will stay with one for hours, and it did. This didn’t depress me like that did but the uneasiness lasted until I was able to find on-line discussions and kind of get it out of my system.
Obviously, not everyone is as enamored. As I was walking out a woman was walking next to me and went on a full rant about her hatred of the film. I’m not kidding when I say her hatred burned with the heat of a thousan suns. Weird thing was, her main complaint was that “nothing happened in the whole film”. Huh? If she’d mentioned the graphic displays of sexuality I might have gotten it (I like 'em myself but I could see where they might be too much) or if she said it was too confusing. But “nothing” happened? Does not compute. . .
I saw The Black Swan yesterday, and have mixed feelings about it. Some of it was very good, but it didn’t quite seem to come together. A number of scenes seemed intentionally goofy or campy, but for no obvious reason. I kept thinking of An American Werewolf in London, another movie where a character struggles with a dark transformation, and how the horror/comedy blend worked for me there but not here.
One complaint I had that I don’t think anyone else has brought up is that I thought the movie would have been better off without the brief “Nina’s legs bend into swan legs!” and “Nina’s neck stretches into a swan’s neck!” CGI scenes. I understood that these were building up to a scene where Nina would semi-transform into a black swan, but they were stupid looking and unnecessary since we already had the more effective and realistic scenes involving the scratches on Nina’s shoulders, bumps on her skin, and stuck together/webbed toes.
Still, even where I felt The Black Swan didn’t work, I have to give it credit for trying to do something interesting. That’s more than a lot of movies manage.
I figured this might be the right thread for this questions rather than starting a new thread: can anyone clue me in as to the approximate number of puke scenes in the movie?
I’ve heard there is one at the beginning—I ask because I am not too keen on these and we’re thnking of going to see it after dinner tomorrow night. I can probably tolerate one scene if it is not too graphic visually/auditorily but if there are more than that–not too sure about it.
I feel your pain. The one at the beginning doesn’t show anything and isn’t particulalrly graphic, soundwise. Sometime later there is a scene where you do see a fairly close shot, complete with the er, liquids, going into the toilet but it’s brief and comes on the heels of a fast paced, exciting scene. I’m pretty sensitive to pukey scenes myself and these would not deter me from watching this again. Don’t know how to describe it except for some reason, possibly the context in which it occurs or maybe being so rapt by everything else, it barely registered for me.
Someone please correct me if I’ve gotten it wrong. This movie fucked with me so bad I wouldn’t be surprised if I’m misremembering.
This is consistent with my memory. In the first scene you just see Natalie Portman’s feet under the stall door, and it’s really only obvious that she’s puking because she’s facing the toilet. In the later scene I believe you do see her head over the toilet, but I don’t even remember seeing liquids (or solids!) in the bowl. There may have been one other scene like the first one, where it’s shot from outside the stall, but I’m not certain.
Anyway, I think the movie was pretty restrained when it came to the vomiting scenes. It wasn’t played like some gross-out comedy, and I don’t remember there even being much in the way of retching noises. We pretty much just see/hear enough to know that Portman’s character Nina is bulimic.
Incidentally, one interpretation I can see for the ending is that Nina had a bulimia-related heart attack.
I think WHORE was really written there, and while it’s certainly plausible that it was scrawled by the other dancer who Nina had just cruelly mindfucked – “Congratulations! (on me getting the part you covet…PSYCH!)” – I think Nina herself wrote it in a delusional fugue state triggered by the self-loathing from having just committed that cruel mindfuck. Sort of the psychotic break version of cutting.
It was even better than that. I did notice the eyes moving and thought it was cheesy, but what made the hair on the back of my neck stand up was that the mirror right behind her was reflecting an image of her that wasn’t in sync.
I saw it on DVD, so as soon as that happened I rewound and verified that I actually saw what I thought I saw. There was no acknowledgement of it or any other mirror weirdness for a fair amount of time after that, so I found it extremely effective. The best part was that the reflection wasn’t doing anything creepy or weird, it just wasn’t in sync.
If anyone has the screener and wants to check it out, it’s at 24 minutes.
I, too, am a person who needs to be beaten with a symbolism bat to take notice, so I took the movie at literal value.
However, my opinion is that she didn’t actually get the part of the Swan Queen. Tomas/Tomal/Whatever-his-name-was told her, “…I gave the part to Veronica.” Everything after that was a psychotic break.
But I have an open mind to other theories, and I’m grateful to see them here. Gotta admit, I’m kinda ignorant of symbolism most of the time but I enjoy seeing the light when someone feels like shining it.
I also thought Nina probably wrote on the mirror herself, especially since it seemed to be the same color of lipstick that she stole from the Winona Ryder character’s dressing room. But I don’t think she would have felt particularly guilty about telling the other dancer “Congratulations”, because at the time she genuinely believed Veronica had gotten the role. Thomas had told her that himself. But since he’d changed his mind only after kissing her, Nina may have feared that she got the role for reasons unrelated to her dancing ability and expressed this fear (and sexual guilt) by unconsciously calling herself a whore.
Since we know our main character is seeing things that aren’t there this is a plausible interpretation, but I don’t think it makes for a very interesting movie if everything after that point is entirely Nina’s delusion. If none of it is real, there’s no point at all and no reason to care what happens.
I still think her social awkwardness feeds her craziness, and shouldn’t be dismissed as a driving motivation. But I do like your reasoning about the WHORE much better.
Don’t take this as my personal criticism of the movie, because I enjoyed it a lot and liked this aspect of it, but just playing Devil’s Advocate… It was a very intense non-stop movie for how few notable non-trivial events exogenous to Nina actually occurred. I can’t think of many psychological thrillers where so little happens outside the person’s mind or where it’s so obvious through the movie that it’s not really happening.
For instance, this movie was literally about a ballet company practicing for and performing a new show. But if that was all, it’d be a documentary not a movie. So what else “happened” within the movie’s reality? Well Beth walked into traffic and Nina stabbed herself with a mirror, both of which were violent and real. Almost everything else in the movie happened largely or entirely within Nina’s mind, which from a certain point of view means it didn’t really happen.
To me, it made for a really interesting and watchable movie. But I can understand the perspective that “nothing happened”.
Or to put it another way, imagine if we saw the story from a random emotionally stable ballerina’s point of view. From her point of view it was a business as usual production and nothing really happened except that everyone discovered the lead stabbed herself in the last 2 minutes of the movie.
I don`t know if this is even worth posting because I’m not suggesting anybody should apply such a standard to any movie, but it’s my hunch that it’s along the lines of what the woman you overheard hating on it was thinking.