The black swan is a movie about a girl who discovers her other side through dancing. She is born and raised by an overprotective mother who wants to live her dream through her daughter. Nina, the main character, is a ballerina in a leading company. She is to battle with the new girl from San Francisco, Lily, for the lead role in playing as both the black and the white swan. Nina is originally the collected girl whose mother has protected from all the happenings of the world. However, the tragedy strikes when she turns evil in an effort to win the role, and prove to Thomas that she is worthy of the lead role. However, what has been trapped inside her for a long time comes out, and the girl becomes a woman. She is, however, portrayed as a psychologically damaged person. The evil in her is reverberated in her hallucinations, most of the time. The horror is examined in her psychiatric fits, for instance, when she imagines herself in the shoes of her former boss of the company. She pierces herself in the nail while screaming, “I am nothing.” The horror in the film is portrayed through Nina’s imaginations, which makes it difficult to depict on whether the tragedy is presented through her mind or whether some of the things are real. Most of the time, Nina is hallucinating. In the club, she tells Tom a story about a girl whose princess was turned into a swine, and he ended up choosing another woman as his queen. The exact thing happens in the end. However, Nina finds her true self and can act the role of the two characters, by establishing a distinction between the white and the black swan at the end of the movie.
The tragedy in the movie is, therefore, depicted through the struggles that Nina goes through to win the lead role in the movie. According to Aristotle, tragedy must draw fear and sympathy for the audience. The hero must transit from a stage of happiness into one where they are miserable, and their struggles are felt to be realistic (Barnes, Jonathan, 134). Nina is not a hero in the movie, and her character is not portrayed to have been happy at the beginning. The audience does feel horrific pity in her journey to self-gratification. Aristotle would argue that the struggles exist in her mind, and are not realistic to have caused the movie to be termed as a tragic one (Bushnell, Rebecca, 49). It is difficult to separate the mind from the actions that happen in the movie. Outside the hallucinations, nana is the kind of person she always is. In her imaginations, she sees things that are not in existence. For instance, she says to her mother,” Lily is picking me up”, but her mother finds nobody at the door when she opens it. Aristotle would not look at Nina as a heroine, based on her qualities. According to him, a tragedy occurs when there is a hero who represents good qualities. The qualities portrayed by Nina are of a disturbed girl who needs psychiatric help.
The role played by Nina’s mother could be that of a bad character in the movie, depending on how one views the mental state of Nina. Her mother is a controlling person who wants to live every part in her daughter’s life. Until she met Lily, Nina only had a relationship with her mother. She had horrifying portraits of her in her bedroom. The movie shows sexual exploitation from her mother, even though it is not quite transparent on the type of the relationship between the two. Nina’s sexual dilemma could be stemmed from possible abuse from her mother. When she was going to bed, her mother asks her,” are you ready for me?” which makes one wonder whether it is real or part of Nina’s usual mental tours. The tragedy in the film is shaped by the sexual dilemma the main character undergoes. The presence of Lily finally permits her to let her mother go and experience something new for the first time. In the bedroom, she shuts out her mother to concentrate on Lily’s fantasies, which depicts the beginning of her growth. She tells her, “get out and leave me alone,” which signifies her ensued independence.
Based on these, Hegel would look at these as a perfect tragedy because of the ethical issues presented. According to him, a tragedy is not composed of good and evil. The characters have ethical struggles that could be within themselves (Williams, Raymond, and Pamela McCallum, 54). They struggle with their ethical issues and those presented by the authorities around them. In addition, he embraces the reconciliatory note that is to form a tragedy and opposes Aristotle’s way of thinking. For him, this film would be considered a tragedy because of ethical struggles represented. In addition, the character manages to reconcile her two parts, and act each one of them independently. The two sides represent the two natures of Nina. The heroic deed is when she manages to separate the two sides and dance in the independence of each of the characters. Hegel would be of the opinion that the ending is both tragic and heroic.
Because of the drugs that contributed to her weird imaginations, many people have argued that the mental state of Nina could have been self-induced. The lifestyle she led makes it hard for the audience to take a plight in her tragedy. There is a scene that shows her in pink, which represents the god character in the white swan. She then imagines the opposite of that with her dressed in black in a dark alley. The scene is then followed by violent outbursts. The character is confusing, and one cannot decide whether to pity or hate her for her bad character. She is in pain, obviously, but also enjoys a long stretch of her fantasies. The audience could choose to blame her mother as the source of the tragedies. However, picking the mother as a bad character in the tragedy may also be a mistake. Her mother may have acted that way to protect Nina from herself. From the start, she has an overbearing nature can be seen as a mother who understands her daughter’s problems, or one who does not have a life and wants to live it through her daughter.
According to Nietzsche, tragedies are represented by the tensions between two opposing characters. The two characters are represented in the Apollonian and Dionysian characters. The apollonian is the character that has been detached for most of their lives through a high amount of restraint. The latter is a way in which characters are in good terms with each other. In his opinion, both of these characters exist together and are involved in an interdependency relationship (Silk, Michael S, Fredrick and Joseph, 294). In this light, he would acknowledge the tragedy in the movie through the two sides of Nina. The two have to have a relationship together, in which one character does not exist without the other. The two characters, therefore, have to exist to bring out the tragedy in the movie.
Works cited
Barnes, Jonathan. Aristotle: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford [ea. Oxford Univ. Press, 2000. Print.
Bushnell, Rebecca W. A Companion to Tragedy. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub, 2005. Internet resource.
Silk, Michael S, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Joseph P. Stern. Nietzsche on Tragedy. Cambridge [u.a.: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999. Print.
Williams, Raymond, and Pamela McCallum. Modern Tragedy. Peterborough, Ont: Broadview, 2006. Print.
