The Black Swan ending is leaving audiences across the country with many questions about what was real and what wasn’t real in Black Swan. I saw Black Swan recently, and if Mr. Darren Aronofsky’s (Black Swan director) intentions were to leave an ambiguous ending then he certainly succeeded.
The storyline of Black Swan is easy enough; Nina is a ballerina in the New York ballet company that wants to have the lead role in Swan Lake. She gets it and the pressure of the role, her perfectionist tendencies, along with her overbearing, stifling mother who lives vicariously through Nina and all this cumulates into what seems to be a full-blown break with reality.
There is also a rival dancer, Lily that encompasses what Nina sees as the dark side of her personality and a threat to her role in Swan Lake. Add to this the production’s strict and insulting artistic director Thomas and you have the base of the Black Swan story. But that only encompasses the first layer of the Black Swan story.
The rest of the Black Swan experience is all in how you interpret the Black Swan movie. You know throughout Black Swan that Nina is loosing touch with reality. But you can never be sure what is real and what is just in her head at any moment.
For me to understand the Black Swan ending I had to go back to the beginning of the movie. There is an early scene where Nina and the dance company are warming up and Thomas joins them to discuss the new Swan Lake production. In this scene he explains the white swan and the black swan and how the black swan tricks and seduces the prince. This leaves the white swan devastated and she jumps off a cliff killing herself. But then Thomas adds, “But in death, [the white swan] finds freedom.”
I think Nina’s mind felt she was desperately trapped. She was trapped in a world that she had no way out. Her mother gave up dancing to have Nina, and obviously while outwardly proud of her daughter is a bitter, twisted woman who never really danced.
At the same time Nina idolizes Beth the prior prima ballerina, played brilliantly by Winona Ryder, and views her as perfection. But Beth is at the end of her career and is now suicidal and depressed. She steps in front of oncoming traffic and ends up in the hospital where Nina visits her, thus witnessing her deep despondency.
These things drive Nina to realize the deep futility of her quest for perfection. If she dances perfection as she believes Beth did she will eventually end up miserable, or if she doesn’t dance like what happened with her mother, she will end up miserable. Whether she dances or not there is no way out and the only thing that lies ahead is anguish.
So Nina must do what the white swan had to do. In her mind she accepts what Thomas told us at the beginning of the movie, “But in death, finds freedom.” Death is her only freedom.
The Black Swan ending will be interpreted many different ways by many people, which was Mr. Aronofsky’s intention all along. The Black Swan ending is meant to make us think and think hard. Mine is simply one interpretation of the Black Swan ending.
Source:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0947798/
