I'll throw this up---simply because I had such a weird take on the film:
The Drama Queen
This season, Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman) is moving onto the next stage of her artistic development and ballet career. Although technically flawless, she's not emotionally engaging and her ascension in the ranks may end here unless she surmounts this obstacle (this is higher than her ballet dancer mother ever got)
Dance is her entire life and she has few interests outside of it. She's essentially a virginal momma's boy (can you say that?) The night she's named prima ballerina doesn't the artistic director---for homework no less, ask her to go home and rub one out?
The intrigue? How does a young artist manufacture the representation of emotional states like great love or the heart breaking loss without having ever experienced either?
By simply becoming emotional---by deliberately inducing psychic turmoil. The early moments of the film has the camera literally pulling up within inches of the back of her head---seriously restricting the POV to her eyes and her mind only.
In a nutshell, everything was a subjective internal representation and had nothing to do with objective reality---which may have been totally indifferent if not innocuous. In this world, someone dashing down a hallway without a glance sideways becomes a deliberate snub. Assigning an understudy becomes a Machiavellian plot to get rid of her, etc, etc.
So ... SPOILERS!
WARNING: "Black Swan" spoilers below
She doesn't die in the end, but merely imagines her death in keeping with character. I thought the appearance of her doppelganger or the horripilating swan flesh are not signs of madness, but simply transformation scenes of her "getting" her character.
The next step in her artistic growth is learning how to turn this process off and on at will---to become a truly great performer. In addition to the being a great example of unreliable narrator "Black swan" is to the artistic triumph film (although wickedly told as a dark psychological thriller) to what "Rudy" or "Rocky" are to the sports drama.
She doesn't die in the end, but merely imagines her death in keeping with character. I thought the appearance of her doppelganger or the horripilating swan flesh are not signs of madness, but simply transformation scenes of her "getting" her character.
The next step in her artistic growth is learning how to turn this process off and on at will---to become a truly great performer. In addition to the being a great example of unreliable narrator "Black swan" is to the artistic triumph film (although wickedly told as a dark psychological thriller) to what "Rudy" or "Rocky" are to the sports drama.