The Black Swan artistic creative team brings the anorexic lived experience to the screen. Women with a history of bulimia and compulsive overeating identify with part of Nina’s experience, especially the confusion between fantasy and reality. But the person with severe anorexia is described meticulously.

In the film, you see what looks like the fragile and delicate vulnerability of Nina. The film catches the seemingly exquisite spiritual quality of the anorexic woman that is a facade for the dark and powerful destructive elements within her.

Nina, the ballerina in the Black Swan, believes that people who attempt or threaten to interfere with her distorted thinking are dangerous to herself and her goals. She is as merciless with them as she is with herself.

She doesn’t perceive the emotional consequences to others her behavior causes. If she gets a glimmer of pain she causes in others she will justify it to herself by saying she had no choice. And indeed, to her eating-disordered mind, she didn’t have a choice.

For Nina, the obsessed ballerina of the Black Swan, to get help in establishing her healthy process of development she would have to:

In The Black Swan, Nina’s distorted perceptions based on fantasies and limited vision become hallucinations she believes. Brain cells deprived of nutrition do not function normally. Nina believes perceptions that take her deeper into her hallucinations and guide her behavior.

The end of the film shows the extremes of glorified and malignant romanticism based on the unrealistic definition of personal perfection. Nina glorifies meaningless death and destruction.