Editorials
Repression and Duality of the Self: The Horrors of ‘Black Swan’ [Unveiling The Mind]
Welcome to Unveiling The Mind. This bi-monthly column explores psychological horror and representations of mental illness within the genre.
Coming into my first viewing of Black Swan in 2010, I had no idea what I was about to see. At the time, I knew little of Darren Aronofsky‘s work. I had seen Requiem for a Dream and The Fountain, and while I found myself intrigued with the latter, I wasn’t all that blown away by the former. But Black Swan grabbed my attention.
Much of my taste in horror up until that point involved slashers, monsters, ghosts, and demons; I had seen psychological horror, but my passion for the subgenre had not kicked off yet. It’s fair to say that Black Swan played a big role in guiding me towards that direction, for I was intrigued by the spiraling mental descent of Natalie Portman’s character Nina.
For Black Swan’s 10th anniversary, I present an analysis of Nina’s horrifying journey – how the film establishes her character and the narrative techniques it uses to explore her mind state.
Please note this article will contain spoilers.
A brief synopsis of the film: Nina is a young ballet dancer in an upscale New York City ballet company. At the beginning of the company’s season, it is announced by Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel), the company’s artistic director, that he will be putting on a new rendition of the iconic Swan Lake – where a single female lead will play both the White and Black Swan. One thing leads to another and Nina gets the part, but though being in the spotlight has its perks, she soon comes to discover that the pressure of such a role comes with more struggle than she could have ever imagined.
The core horror of Black Swan comes from that of Nina’s deteriorating mental state; from the pressures put on her by her mother, Thomas, and the role, she strives to let go of the control that weighs her down. Aronofsky goes about displaying Nina’s psyche through scenes of rigorous obsession and hallucinations she endures. Each hardship reflects the struggle she faces to not only master such a grand role, but to also embrace her being and let go of control.
From the start, Nina is framed in an innocent light. Her room is pink with stuffed animals and she has a somewhat child-like relationship with her mother (Barbara Hershey). She doesn’t speak up much and primarily represses strong emotion when it comes to conflict. She is also a tad naïve, which further plays into her innocence. When she goes to initially talk to Thomas for the role of Swan Queen, she puts on nice lipstick and says how she has learned the part. Yet, as she’s talking, Thomas – and the audience for that matter – notice how timid she is.
There’s never an explanation as to why Nina is this way; that said, one may be able to connect the dots when it comes to scenes between her and her mother. The viewer learns that Nina’s mother was once a dancer too, but when she became pregnant with Nina, she gave up her career. In each scene where the two are together, the mother is always domineering. She is either picking Nina’s life apart or overly coddling her. Early in the film the audience is shown a small rash on Nina’s back; this has to do with a nervous tick she has developed where she scratches herself. When the mother finds that the rash has gotten worse, she strips Nina down to her underwear and pulls her into the bathroom to cut her nails. With this level of aggressive parenting, one could understand why Nina has such a tense and shy personality.
But Nina is not entirely pure of heart. Upon walking into the dressing room of the company’s lead star, she pickpockets one of her lipsticks (the one she wears for Thomas). Behind all the sweetness and charm, there is something else there.
This character setup is the foundation for which Aronofsky and the screenwriters use to bombard Nina with conflict. Upon winning the Swan Queen role, her craft and focus are continuously questioned and challenged. Thomas makes a comment about how her movements are too controlled – and as the Black Swan – she needs to move more freely. He makes remarks about the Black Swan being someone who can exude sensuality. Throughout the film, Nina strives to continuously push herself and tap into the Black Swan, yet each effort is short of reaching the evocative spirit of the character.
Now while much of this may come off as a tortured artist sort of narrative, that isn’t what the film is going for. That theme is certainly present, as well as the struggles that young female performers may face when working in entertainment. But a big key theme in Black Swan is repression – a concept the film explores through Nina’s relationships and practice of the Black Swan dance. For as she continues to practice the role, she begins to endure nightmarish hallucinations.
Some inspiration for the film comes in the form of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Double, a narrative that involves a man discovering he has a doppelgänger. In a manner, one could view Swan Lake as a story that involves doubles – given the dynamic between the White and Black Swan counterparts. The doppelgänger concept is one of Black Swan’s biggest story elements.
Through her practice to become the Black Swan, Nina begins to slowly tap into her repressed feelings. The hallucinations she sees of herself – whether dressed in black or acting in some menacing factor – are meant to represent the urges she keeps buried. The desire to be more carefree. A quality she wants to live by but doesn’t express out of fear of losing control. As she puts it to Thomas at one point, she wants to be perfect. So for as much as she wants to be perfect, there is also an itch to let go of that perfection – a clash of desires that does not fare too well for her.
Over time not only does Nina’s rash on her back worsen, but she also starts imagining gruesome wounds. One scene shows her pulling at her finger, as if there is some sort of pain taking place. When she’s in the bathroom later, she sees the finger is somewhat damaged; upon pulling at the skin around the nail, she tears a long strip of flesh from the nail down to her hand. But the wound is not real.
The Nina duplicates serve to taunt her, hinting at something darker that exists within. They work to get under her skin by either appearing in unsettling ways or being part of some lurid fantasy – one example being when Nina comes across a duplicate stripping off her clothes and readying herself to have sex with Thomas. In these moments, Nina panics, running away to catch her breath and find some ground in the real world. There are more violent hallucinations that overtake her as well, with one involving a scene where she watches a former dancer stab herself, for Nina to then run out of the room and find she’s holding a bloody weapon.
As the pressure surrounding the performance builds up, Nina’s grasp on reality weakens. However, the panic shifts into a whole new gear once Lilly (Mila Kunis) becomes a greater presence in her life.
Lilly is a foil to Nina. Unlike Nina, Lilly is more outspoken, takes more of the lead in her social interactions, and has a chill, not give a shit attitude. She gives off a flirtatious vibe that contrasts with Nina’s awkwardness with other men. Lilly is kept at a distance at first; the camera will slip into brief moments of her talking to someone or dancing, but doesn’t give too much attention outside of some glances Nina sends her way.
Eventually the two do connect and Lilly invites Nina out. The two share drinks, Nina does some drugs, and they go dancing. The evening ends with the two returning to Nina’s to make out and Lilly goes down on her (all before Nina sees Lilly transform into another one of her duplicates). It is revealed shortly after that scene that Nina and Lilly did not make out or do anything sexual. Nina then begins to grow suspicious of Lilly, believing that she may be trying to steal the role of Swan Queen. Seeing Lilly practicing for the role with Thomas intensifies her anxieties.
Towards the end of the film, as Nina has become more aggressive with her mother, she undergoes a brief physical transformation, her legs inverting into the shape of swan legs. This transformation is in-line with another hallucination that Nina has been experiencing throughout the film – that of becoming a swan. The rash on her back begins to develop a swan-like flesh around it; overtime, this flesh spreads to other parts of her body. She even finds a small black feather sprouting out of her. These moments of transformation provide hints of what is to come in the film’s final act.
For all the struggle that Nina goes through, the conclusion to Black Swan is somewhat uplifting(?). Though she has been under so much mental and emotional torment, Nina comes to embrace her whole being, her psychological journey coming to a marvelous, heartbreaking finish.
As Nina heads to the company for the opening of Swan Lake, determined to do her best, her head is not in the most stable place. She takes to the stage as the White Swan, giving an excellent performance until, in her state of nervousness, her fellow dancer drops her during the act. She recovers and finishes the segment, but the mistake flushes her with embarrassment. She returns to her dressing room, knowing that the Black Swan portion of the show is about to start, and finds Lilly in her chair. The two fight and Nina stabs her with a shard of glass. This is the final step needed for Nina’s transformation to complete.
Entering the stage as the Black Swan, she gives a dazzling performance. As she dances, her body undergoes a massive transformation; her black dress morphs into a body of black feathers, her arms growing into giant wings. As her dance concludes, the room stands up and roars in applause. She has mastered the Black Swan.
Nina returns to her room and shuts the door, panicking as to what to do about Lilly. Then there’s a knock at the door – and it’s Lilly. Nina checks the bathroom where she thought she left Lilly’s body to find nothing. Upon looking at the broken mirror near her, she realizes that the person she stabbed is herself. And in poetic irony, she takes to the stage for her final part where her character dies. As she stands atop a structure, looking down to the stage and into the crowd, she jumps and embraces the moment. She lies down as the room explodes again with applause. Thomas and all the dancers run over to congratulate her, but then they notice she is gushing blood. As the screen fades to white, the crowd still applauding and those around Nina frantic, she says that the performance was perfect.
From the moment the viewer meets Nina, they know her goal is to be the Swan Queen and give a solid performance – and damn is she astounding. There’s much to find in Black Swan’s conclusion that is tragic; the hell this young woman endured, from the pressures of the role to the people around her who continued to burden her. But against all the odds, she pushes through and achieves her dream. That said, even in her success, I feel Black Swan is more of a grim experience. Nina’s repression of herself is brutal to witness at times. Her desperation to be perfect and to excel at her craft are admirable, but they are also drives that end up devastating her psyche.
Black Swan was one of the first films I ever saw wherein, while creepy visuals were present, the true horror was that of the character’s mind. The story has a consistent rhythm of anxiety; as Nina pushes herself and strives to keep everything together, the viewer is present in worrying for her. Portman’s acting is superb throughout, being a key factor in selling Nina’s declining mental state (as well as providing some chilling moments). In its exploration of duality and repression, Black Swan stands a decade later as a thrilling work of psychological horror.
Of the three films that make up the Diabolical Trinity of classic religious horror films—Rosemary’s Baby (1968), The Exorcist (1973), and The Omen (1976)—The Omen is the most purely entertaining.
While Rosemary’s Baby digs into the societal shifts of the 60s and The Exorcist explores spiritual tensions between faith and doubt in an ever-shifting world, The Omen seems most interested in just telling a thrilling story. It achieves this by blending two major trends of the 1970s, the devil movie and the paranoid thriller, into one crackling adventure yarn. In the process, The Omen has sparked fear and curiosity about what could happen in the “end times” if such events are to occur.
After seeing The Exorcist, producer Harvey Bernhard contacted writer David Seltzer and said something along the lines of, “Hey, write me one of those.” Seltzer, having never read the Bible, thought it would be an interesting challenge, so, according to various interviews, he read the Bible and several commentaries in search of a story. Then he stumbled upon a passage in the book of Revelation, the image of a great Beast rising out of the sea, that sparked his imagination. In the commentaries, he found that the sea represented politics in some interpretations of the text, and he began building his story on that foundation.
Seltzer has told this story often, and I am inclined to believe him. However, from there, much of the theological-sounding lore of The Omen was created purely by Seltzer. Many of the ideas surrounding The Antichrist in the film appear to be drawn much more from the pop-eschatology sensation of the 1970s, The Late Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsay, than any Biblical source.
Lindsay’s book was the bestselling nonfiction book of the 1970s and re-popularized views of the “last days” that had been dying along with fundamentalism for decades, namely Dispensationalism, Millennialism, and the Pre-Tribulation Rapture. In dispensationalism, history is broken into several epochs of time (or dispensations) that culminate in the return of Christ and his thousand-year (millennial) reign.
Before this return, a seven-year Tribulation will occur in which the Antichrist comes to power and persecutes all who oppose him, culminating in a battle between the forces of good and evil at the valley of Megiddo, usually called Armageddon. Of course, in this worldview, the true believers in Jesus will be lifted out, or raptured, before all this takes place. Since the publication and popularity of The Late Great Planet Earth, this has been the prominent belief in Evangelical and Fundamentalist Christian circles, though Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and mainline Protestant denominations largely reject it.
Lindsay also did something unique that had not been the case even in dispensationalist circles before him—he posited that the creation of the modern state of Israel in 1948 started the countdown to Armageddon. Fans of the film will immediately realize where Seltzer ran with this idea in the first line of the poem created for the movie: “When the Jews return to Zion…”
Damien Thorn and the Creation of Horror’s “Innocent Villain”
Seltzer’s next inspiration focused on the idea of the Antichrist as a child, what he would call the film’s “innocent villain.” In watching The Omen, it is readily apparent that Damien Thorn (Harvey Stephens) does not really do anything evil beyond a bit of normal kid mischief. Even the moment in which Damien knocks Kathy Thorn (Lee Remick) over a second-floor railing can be read as an accident orchestrated by Damien’s diabolically connected nanny, Mrs. Baylock (Billie Whitelaw). The film takes this idea of the innocent villain a step further by casting Gregory Peck, best known for playing arguably the greatest father in film history, Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), as Damien’s earthly father, an element that greatly satisfied Seltzer.
The New Testament itself says very little about the Antichrist and certainly nothing about his childhood. In fact, the word antichrist is used twice (1 John 2:18 and 2 John 7 for the curious) and refers to groups of people, not a particular person. There is also a passage in 2 Thessalonians 2:1-12 in which the writer (usually attributed to Paul) discusses “The Man of Lawlessness” who will “exalt himself over everything that is called God” and “proclaim himself to be God.”
Then there is the Beast of Revelation chapter 13 with “seven heads and ten horns” that Seltzer latched onto, which has been interpreted in a multitude of ways over the centuries. Powerful people throughout history, from Charlemagne, various Popes during the Protestant Reformation era, Napoleon and Hitler, to modern politicians, including Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Vladimir Putin, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump, have all had the label placed on them by various circles. Even religious leaders like Billy Graham have not escaped being called the Antichrist.
Lindsay and modern dispensationalists are certain the Antichrist will be a 21st-century individual as they are equally certain that the Rapture, Tribulation, and return of Christ are imminent, likely within their lifetime. Many scholars and theologians, however, interpret these passages as symbolic representations of the Roman Empire and the first-century Caesars who persecuted, tortured, and murdered Christians and Jews who refused to submit to Imperial rule and worship them as gods. For example, that the Beast from the sea in Revelation has seven heads is symbolic of the famous seven mountains of Rome, with the 10 horns referring to rulers and magistrates of the Empire.
But this is all really of no matter to Seltzer and the story of The Omen. Instead of being concerned with any historical or theological accuracy, he instead built his own lore, which sends Robert Thorn and photographer Keith Jennings (David Warner) on a globetrotting investigation into the nature of the Antichrist and how to stop him. Some of this lore includes the child being born of a jackal, the reaction of animals, the protective cult that arises around Damien, the daggers of Megiddo, and maybe most interesting of all, the peculiar flaws in Jennings’s photographs that presage the ways certain individuals will die.
All these aspects are where the paranoid thrillers come in, as films like Blow Up (1966), Z (1969), The Conversation (1974), The Parallax View (1974), 3 Days of the Condor (1975), and All the President’s Men (1976) were all the rage at the time. Especially in the wake of the Watergate scandal, the idea of journalists (like Jennings) as ordinary heroes who could bring down the powerful, nefarious forces in the world was exactly what audiences craved. And what greater hidden evil force was there than the Devil? This is also why the device of the daggers of Megiddo is so important to a movie like this. If Damien is indeed the Antichrist, there must be a way to stop him, though in the Biblical text, the only power capable of destroying the Devil is God Himself.
The Mark of the Beast, 666, and the Film’s Most Famous Religious Symbolism
The piece of lore created for the movie with the most solid Biblical grounding is the Mark of the Beast. Revelation describes a mark on the forehead or hand of those who worship the Beast and his image. Again, this is symbolic language differentiating those who belong to the power of the Roman Empire and those who belong to Christ, who have the Mark of the Lamb. In Seltzer’s hands, the mark is very literal, a birthmark that is borne by not only the Antichrist but all his followers, meaning they are marked from before birth as belonging to Satan, and there is no escaping it. This is all rather distressing to the priest Father Brennan (Patrick Troughton), who betrays his mark by warning Thorn about Damien and pays the price by memorably being impaled by a spire that falls from a church steeple after being struck by lightning.
Why is the mark three sixes? Again, this is drawn from a passage in Revelation that states that the Beast can be identified by calculating his number. In Biblical scholarship, this is believed to be the sum of the name of a man transferred into Hebrew numerology, a practice in which each Hebrew letter also represents a number. Using this method, the number of the name Caesar Nero, which many believe to be the most logical choice, is six hundred sixty-six. In the film and elsewhere, this number is changed to three individual sixes. According to the film, this represents the Diabolical Trinity (a designation also unique to the film) made up of Satan, the Antichrist, and the False Prophet. That Damien carries this unique birthmark under his hair convinces Robert that the child is the Antichrist, and it’s up to him to destroy him.
Part of what makes The Omen great is its ambiguity. Damien could be the Antichrist, or he could be at the center of a series of coincidences. Director Richard Donner stated in interviews that he believed Robert Thorn had gone insane by the end of the film, which, to Donner, is the only explanation for why Thorn would attempt to kill an innocent child. However, that enigmatic smile in the final shot suggests that Damien does embody a spirit of great evil. The sequels, however, all but erase this ambiguity.
In audiences, The Omen sparked a renewed interest in the concept of the Antichrist and the dispensationalist interpretation of the end times that continues to echo throughout the last five decades. Around the time of the film’s release, even Elvis Presley was photographed brandishing a paperback copy of Seltzer’s novelization. Dispensationalist authors like Hal Lindsay, Tim LaHaye, and John Hagee have made millions publishing books and giving lectures about the Antichrist and the end of the world.
The Legacy of The Omen, 50 Years Later
Though A Thief in the Night (1972) preceded The Omen in initial release, it gained quite a resurgence (along with the ability to create three sequels) in the wake of the popularity of The Omen and went on to scar the psyches of Evangelical children for decades. Hal Lindsay was also able to release a film version of The Late Great Planet Earth in 1978, complete with narration and a brief onscreen appearance from Orson Welles.
In the 1990s, the Left Behind series became a cultural phenomenon, spawning twelve books in the core series, a YA spinoff series, video games, and a movie series (2000-2005) starring Kirk Cameron. A bigger studio adaptation of the first book was released in 2014, starring Nicolas Cage. 20th Century Fox and The Omen got in on the renewed “end-of-the-world” vigor by releasing a remake of the original film on June 6, 2006. The franchise was revived once again in 2024 with The First Omen, which explores ideas of the Antichrist and the motivations of those in power in our current religious, social, and political context.
But despite all the sequels, spinoffs, rip-offs, remakes, and “end times” money grabs of the last 50 years, the original version of The Omen remains untouchable. Its greatest strength is that it seeks, first and foremost, to entertain. And it does so admirably.
After half a century, its influence can be felt in horror, the culture at large, and even in various faith circles. It is a testament to the power of story and film that, consciously or unconsciously, fans of The Omen and those who have never seen it alike are, to this very day, marked by the Beast.
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