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The contrast between Lily's and Nina's character is not about "fixing" anything. Yes, going out with Lily did not help Nina. I'm not arguing that going out with Lily was a good thing for Nina to do, or that it should help Nina in some way. You are completely missing my point. Throughout the entire movie, you are beaten over the head with the differences between these two girls. Nina is mentally unstable and on a quest for perfection. Lily doesn't care about perfection, is hedonistic, but comes out looking more mentally balanced in the end. Nina ends up stabbing herself, Lily doesn't. Lily congratulates Nina on her excellent performance in the end and isn't psychotic. The connection between insanity and a quest for perfection is made because both of these elements are present in Nina's character. The connection between "balance" and mental stability is made because both of these elements are meshed together in Lily's character. These two characters foil each other: you get compromise and mental stability, or a quest for perfection and insanity. That's part of what's going on with this movie. But the other part of what's going on is that her quest for perfection is linked to her mental illness. The more she struggles to be perfect, the greater her mental illness. I do see a problem with showing this futile quest for perfection as the main characters struggle. In the Romantic Manifesto, Rand writes: "Since a rational man’s ambition is unlimited, since his pursuit and achievement of values is a lifelong process—and the higher the values, the harder the struggle—he needs a moment, an hour or some period of time in which he can experience the sense of his completed task, the sense of living in a universe where his values have been successfully achieved. It is like a moment of rest, a moment to gain fuel to move farther. Art gives him that fuel; the pleasure of contemplating the objectified reality of one’s own sense of life is the pleasure of feeling what it would be like to live in one’s ideal world." What kind of man wants to see a film or a work of art where the plot revolves around a futile quest for perfection undertaken by a crazy person? Who wants to see a film that connects perfectionism to insanity, and compromise to mental health?