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Gender Stereotypes In Black Swan

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Black Swan isn’t your typical ballet movie where the girl gets the main lead. It is an incredibly macabre tale about the dangers of perfectionism and distorted body image. It also has cases of obsessive-compulsive disorder, dissociative identity disorder, eating disorder, delusional disorder. The main girl Nina, struggles with her dual role as the White Swan and the black swan. She is not as young as the other girls, so she learns how to fake movements that have meaning since she has been dancing for multiple years. Her innocent, child-like personality makes her a perfect white swan; however, she has trouble getting into the character of the white swan’s dark and seductive counterpart. Nina’s life is consumed by her occupation: professional …show more content…

After that Nina starts hallucinating, seeing her face on other dancers and on Lily’s. She starts to struggle and embodies her conflict and attraction onto her understudy Lily. She continues to be plagued by distressing delusions including an imagined sexual encounter with her arch-nemesis Lily. Then she had a vivid hallucination of Leroy and Lily having sex the night of the opening show. The night of the opening show, Nina finds Lily in her dressing room as the Black Swan, where Lily is claiming she wants to take over the performance. They end up having a violent showdown in which Nina ends up stabbing the Black Swan. However, the Black Swan was just an illusion and Nina end up stabbing herself. In her opening night performance, she envisions transforming into the Black Swan where she eventually develops webbed feet, bird-like legs and sprouts feathers and wings and eventually dies from her wounds after the standing ovation from the audience. Overall, this film gave a fine interpretation of someone suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder, dissociative identity disorder, and eating disorder. It showed a comprehensive range of symptoms for psychosis, especially in the form of hallucinations and delusions. In addition, it had substantive character development. Nina’s feeling of not being perfect drove her over the edge to the point of her

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