Black Swan

• Directed by Darren Aronofsky

• Starring Natalie Portman as Nina Sayers

• Context: A psychological horror film following a ballet dancer’s descent into madness as she prepares for the dual role of Odette/Odile in Swan Lake. The film explores themes of obsession, perfectionism, sexuality, body image, and artistic identity.

Thinking Through Michel Foucault (1926-1984)’s Philosophy on the Art Essence

Black Swan stages the extreme violence of subject formation within the modern aesthetic regime. Through Foucault’s lens, it is not merely a film about madness—it is a meditation on the price of aesthetic normalization, the disciplinary production of the performing body, and the implosion of identity through visibility and surveillance.

Nina Sayers, the protagonist, is not simply a dancer—she is a subject under aesthetic siege. Her world is composed entirely of mirrors, institutions, rehearsals, and gaze. She is subjected to a relentless system of evaluation, training, and internalized expectation, reminiscent of Foucault’s account of the docile body in Discipline and Punish. Her body is no longer hers—it is an object for performance, improvement, and judgment.

The ballet world in Black Swan is presented as a totalizing disciplinary environment. The artistic director, Thomas Leroy, operates as a pastoral sovereign, blending seduction and correction, authority and eroticism. He functions as a confessor, demanding Nina not only master the technical purity of Odette, but “become” the dark, sexual Odile. This demand is Foucauldian in essence—it reflects power’s insistence not merely on compliance, but on confession, on transformation of being.

But Nina cannot confess. She cannot articulate desire. Her sexuality is repressed, infantilized, distorted by the invasive mother-figure and by the institution’s split between “good girl” and “wild girl.” Her inability to navigate these contradictory demands is not pathology—it is the very structure of disciplinary madness. Foucault would argue that Nina’s breakdown is not an aberration—it is the logical outcome of subjectivity built through surveillance, silence, and impossible norms.

Mirrors in the film function as technologies of self-surveillance. Nina is always seen, even when alone. The mirror watches her. Her self-image fractures—literally—as her skin peels, her eyes redden, her reflection moves independently. Foucault’s notion of panopticism is not confined to institutions—it has become internalized, and Nina is its perfect subject: always watching herself fail to be the ideal.

The doubling of Odette and Odile becomes a metaphor for the impossibility of unified subjectivity under aesthetic regimes. Nina is “perfect” as Odette but must “lose control” to become Odile. This demand reveals the central paradox: she must both be in absolute control (technique) and surrender fully (sexuality). Foucault would read this as a production of subjectivity through contradiction, a cruel pedagogy where the body is both elevated and destroyed.

The hallucinations and body horror in the film are not deviations—they are confessions of the aesthetic system’s violence. Nina’s transformation into the black swan, complete with feathers and bleeding toes, is not madness—it is hypervisibility, the moment when the aesthetic regime takes over completely and annihilates the subject.

Her final line—“I was perfect”—is the ultimate Foucauldian irony. Perfection is not self-actualization; it is the moment the subject disappears into the demand. It is truth told through death, confession achieved through collapse.

Black Swan is not a tragedy of madness.

It is a diagram of aesthetic discipline, where identity is produced, split, overexposed, and finally destroyed.

It is not a film about dancing.

It is a film about the horror of being made into art.