What was the weird relationship between Nina and her mom in Black Swan ?

I don’t think there was anything sexual; just a codependent/competition vibe between them. Imagine those pageant moms, or moms who didn’t fulfill their dreams, and how much they project on their daughters.there was a stifling, suffocating element in the way the mom treated Nina, and of course Nina suffered by being sexually arrested at a young age.

@ladymia69‘s interpretation is close to mine. It was the complete subjugation of the mom’s life to Nina’s; when Nina rejected her mother, her mother had no life left.

Maybe it’s just my perverted mind then lol.. What about the part where Nina’s mom says “You ready for me”? Ready for what ?

@ladymia69 – What do you mean sexually arrested at a small age ?

Sorry for going off topic and not answering this accordingly, but I’m really curious, is this a good movie? Would you guys recommend it? I keep seeing it at the vid place and am curious, but I always pass over it. :/

@Symbeline Mila eats Natalie’s carpet. Rent it.

I thought there was a definite sexual undertone to the relationship. I’m not saying they had sex, just… you know. That finger lick was there for a reason.

@Symbeline – I loved it !! It’s a good movie, from my opinion. Natalie got best actress for it :) It’s a really artistic movie.

@atomicmonkey – My thoughts exactly… The finger lick was kinda weird, suggesting something else.

@atomicmonkey Agreed, there was an underlying sexual tone to every relationship that was portrayed. But I don’t think conscious incest was what Aronofsky was going for. Perhaps since Nina had no other human she was close to, her mom was the only one who her sexuality could’ve been mingled with, so to speak.

@EtherRoom I mean that sexually, she was arrested…meaning she stopped consciously developing sexually due to her anti-social nature and her unnaturally tight relationship with Mommy (and no father figure…funny, they never did mention what happened with the dad, did they?). Sexually speaking, she was about 10 years old mentally. When the teacher began hitting on her, that latent sexuality began to surface, but if that hadn’t happened, who knows how long she would’ve repressed her sex drive. (I am speaking as if she were a real person here.)

@Symbeline It was my favorite “Sexually repressed ballerina who slowly descends into madness and finds out why you shouldn’t steal from Winona Ryder” movie ever.
That genre was getting a bit same/same. Definitely recommend it.

Some points in the film like when Nina’s mom tells her to take off her shirt when they’re sitting down in the living room…. and how her mom always takes her clothing off for her… and another time when her mom accidently hurts her when she’s clipping Nina’s finger nails, and she kisses her hand…

@ladymia69 – That makes a lot of sense !

I doubt there’s any sexual relationship with the mother or there was even one. Nina seemed pretty damn innocent to me and for there to be some sexual desire between the mother and her is just out of the blue and me thinks, necessarily absent. I doubt the directors even thought about that. I mean, my mom does some pretty gross things like that too. Once I was at the NAVY meeting and my mom went with me and there was food. We sat down and she stood up to get some food. when she was eating the food, I swear, how she ate that strawberry traumatized me. I made the 0-o eyes to her and I’m like “WTF?! What are you trying to do? Do you know where you even are?!” I literally told her that was probably one of the worst embarrassing moments of my life. I don’t think she meant it sexually way either, but just how it looked. Maybe the director just wanted it to be a “sexy” scene or whatever.
The mother taking Nina’s clothes off and doing whatever represents the innocence of Nina, I guess, like a mother taking the clothes off of their baby. She is spoiled and the mother overdamnprotective. That’s all. That’s their relationship. It so seems to me, anyway.

@cyn – Good answer

The relationship between Nina and her mother reminded me of the one between Thelma-mother/Jessie-daughter in ‘Night, Mother. Interestingly enough, both daughters die at the end, but for different reasons. I think the relationship represents an intense enmeshment—the mother doesn’t know where she begins and the daughter ends, and vice versa. It’s a very deep psychological dependence where one person doesn’t know how to exist without the other so any form of distancing from either party feels like a rejection at the soul/cellular level, as if their rejection equals death. When any distance is felt, there’s an act of hyperextending to get the balance back in place. I saw that between Nina and her mother—and the clothes removing/finger licking part made me feel more as if they were being represented as one person—as if they were so enmeshed that Nina was innocently licking her own fingers more than her mother’s. When Nina goes into the room and sees all the self-portraits—she rips them down. Is she ripping down her mother’s self-portraits, or her own? Whose emotions are whose?
This parallels with Nina enmeshing with Lily, to the point where she doesn’t know who lived or who died—again whose emotions/bodies are whose.
Then at the end, after Nina abandons her mother at home, we next see her mother sitting in the audience, as if nothing bad had happened- enthralled with Nina’s dance. I find it interesting that we never get to see what happens to Nina’s mother.

Well, I’m convinced. Weekend rental plan.

@Symbeline – It’s a very good movie, very interesting, enjoy :)

Thanks. :)

Extremely overprotective, insane mother.