Black Swan Body Image Essay

Body image, the way individuals view their physical appearance, persuaded by their own perceptions or other individuals’ observations, plays a huge role in our present day society. Body image is an essential part of every individual's life. Therefore, it is crucial to have a healthy and positive self-body image. Because we are faced with many obstacles throughout our lives, it is often difficult and sometimes impossible to repair an individual’s broken idea of body image. Our society often holds unrealistic and impossible goals for all individuals to reach, especially women in the 21st century. These ideas may be influenced by our families, friends, role models, or peers. As a woman, one may face the harsh and dehumanizing pressures from our
In Aronofsky’s Black Swan, the main character Nina struggles with her own body image. Throughout the film, the viewer is able to see first hand the obstacles Nina faces with her obsession of becoming ‘perfect’. Much like the initial focus for this paper, Nina encounters influences from individuals in her life on the ideas of perfection and body image. She is also confronted with various individual pressures such as sexuality and the male gaze, the second focus for this paper’s discussion. With the external and internal stresses on her ideas of body image, Nina quickly begins taking harmful measures to reach ‘perfection’. These harmful measures or consequences of poor body image, the third point of consideration, play a huge part in Nina’s life. Unfortunately, this obsession and Nina’s body image dissatisfaction essentially leads to her insanity and death (Black Swan, 2011). Aronofsky’s representation of a woman’s battle with body image and the ideas of perfection in our 21st-century society begins to bring an awareness to the true significance it plays within individual’s lives. He is able to express to the viewers how our society is affected by body image through the experiences Nina