Birdman and Attempting to Live a Life on its Own Terms

by Christopher Barr

 Peace of mind is not the absence of conflict from life, but the ability to cope with it.

“What if pleasure and displeasure were so tied together that whoever wanted to have as much as possible of one must also have as much as possible of the other – that whoever wanted to learn to “jubilate up to the heavens” would also have to be prepared for “depression unto death”?” 

– Friedrich Nietzsche

“I got a chance to do something right.  I gotta take it.”

– Riggan Thomson

Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) is a masterpiece of modern American cinema.  It’s a wonderfully executed black comedy about a washed up actor on a quest to reinvent his career, leaning toward more serious roles.  Riggan Thomson, played flawlessly by actor Michael Keaton, was once famous for acting in a Hollywood blockbuster comic book superhero movie called “Birdman”, and its two sequels.  Riggan left the franchise 20 years ago, refusing to do a fourth Birdman movie and has been residing in actor limbo ever since.  He’s pretty well broke, separated from his wife and has a rebellious daughter who just got out of rehab.  At its core, the film is about family, an exploration into artistry, a commentary on celebrity, the eclipsing ubiquity of current superhero cinematic universe(s), a comment on the vacuous nature of the Hollywood blockbuster and learning to cope with feeling irrelevant in a stardom obsessed society.  The film is about getting past one’s ego, that personal bodyguard hardwired into the minds of people, protecting their little sensitivities from the harsh landscape of the external world.

“Time is the substance from which I am made.  Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.”

– Jorge Luis Borges

The film follows Riggan frantically darting around the stage, labyrinth hallways and corridors of the St. James theatre on Broadway, stopping off in various wardrobe and dressing rooms, arguing with egos, alter-egos and super-egos.  This hyper-real journey within the world of Riggan Thompson is magically composed through one continuous long tracking shot, which in all likelihood is an externalization of his own stream of consciousness.  The narrative plays out like an uninterrupted river flowing through the passageways of the mind, displaying a subjective life while an offbeat infectious jazzy percussion soundtrack echoes through the dimly lit narrow halls.     

Riggan is a man in his early 60’s that just wants to be seen as an actor with credibility and not ‘that guy from that Birdman Trilogy’.  He’s an often inconsiderate and sometimes selfish man desperately in search of meaning in his life.  In order to regain his former glory, respect and validation, and to maintain control over his environment, he has become the director, actor (playing two parts) and writer of an adaptation of Raymond Carver’s short story “What We Talk When We Talk About Love”.  The play, as the title suggests, is a story about love.  Nick, the role Riggan is playing sits around a table at Mel’s house, played by Mike Shiner with Mel’s wife Terri and his character’s wife, Laura.  Over a bottle of gin they discuss various kinds of love, debating over whether one lusts over love or is one able to experience actual love, or in the case of Terri’s ex-husband Ed (the second role played by Riggan), madness and then suicide.  Mel is less of a romantic and believes if a person lost the one they loved to an accident or something, they would grieve and then love again.  The play ends ambiguous, such is the case with Riggan and his fellow cast members, who all want love but not sacrifice.  This area explores the fact that all the characters in the film and in the play are somewhat stubborn, and are thus paralyzed in the matter of love.

“Popularity is the slutty little cousin of prestige, my friend.”

 – Mike Shiner

During a rehearsal scene, a stage light falls from the ceiling hitting the actor playing the part of Mel on the head, forcing Riggan to recast the part.  The actor who is cast is critically acclaimed stage performer Mike Shiner, a pretentious man that loves the glamour and the limelight of the stage, excepting no substitute.  He’s a quirky thespian bound to the stage, imprisoned in fact, but his ego has waylaid the disparity and replaced it with a self-righteous ego-maniac of sorts.  First time Broadway actress Lesley plays the role of Laura and Terri is Nick’s wife.  Together these competing egos, all searching for acceptance and love, attack each other, pulling one another down in order to massage the ego of whoever is doing the pulling.

“You have a choice: either as little displeasure as possible, painlessness in brief … or as much displeasure as possible as the price for growth of an abundance of subtle pleasures and joys that have rarely been relished yet?  If you decide for the former and desire to diminish and lower the level of human pain, you also have to diminish and lower the level of their capacity for joy.”

– Friedrich Nietzsche

During the public rehearsal of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Mike Shiner, whose obsessed with his method acting approach to the material, ends up taking a fit, disrupting the rehearsal and causing Riggan to spiral into a feeling of self-doubt and fear about what he’s attempting to accomplish.  He begins second guessing himself, his own talent, his relationships with his cast, crew and daughter, causing him to ask the most pressing question on his mind; will they, the audience, love him again?  His daughter Sam has the following to say to him on the matter of his worth: 

“That means something to who?  You had a career, dad, before the third comic book movie, before people started to forget who was inside that bird costume.  You are doing a play based on a book that was written 60 years ago for a thousand rich old white people whose only real concern is going to be where they have their cake and coffee when it’s over.  Nobody gives a shit but you!  And let’s face it, dad, you are not doing this for the sake of art.  You are doing this because you want to feel relevant again.  Well guess what?  There is an entire world out there where people fight to be relevant every single day and you act like it doesn’t exist.  This is happening in a place that you ignore, a place that, by the way, has already forgotten about you.  I mean, who the fuck are you?  You hate bloggers.  You mock Twitter.  You don’t even have a Facebook page.  You’re the one who doesn’t exist.  You’re doing this because you’re scared to death, like the rest of us, that you don’t matter and, you know what, you’re right.  You don’t!  It’s not important, okay?  You’re not important!  Get used to it.”

The film is a mirror being held up for the audience to see themselves, where they become the author, they write the story themselves in the level of their own minds.  Philosopher Roland Barthes saw the reader of the work as the one responsible for its meaning, not the author, thereby freeing the author from attempting to control the meaning and/or interpretation of his or her work after it was handed into the publisher.  This film is playing with this same form of Derridean Deconstruction of sorts, where the center becomes marginal and the marginal becomes center, where the protagonist steps aside from the limelight and inserts the audience into his place.

“The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination.  Yet this destination cannot any longer be personal: the reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted… Classic criticism has never paid any attention to the reader; for it, the writer is the only person in literature…we know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.” 

- Roland Barthes

Riggan throughout the film, battles it out with his own ego that is in the form of a Jungian Shadow.  This Birdman figure, like in the Darren Aronofsky film Black Swan, is his dark side.  Riggan, during these private fights with himself is able to telekinetically move objects with his mind and smash them against walls.  Here we see Riggan’s own consciousness manifest itself in the external world.  To all those around him as in life, these super powers actually only exist at the level of the brain, but the point here is that it feels real.  The mind makes it feel real because as a subjective thinking person, that is all one has to interact with the world outside of their purview of it.

Birdman is a story about redemption and recognition; it’s about the difference between power, popularity, and prestige.  We must learn to transform our mind if we want inner peace, “The show must go on” is where the narrative of the film leaves off, indicating philosopher Kierkegaard’s ‘Leap of Faith’, less in the religious sense, focusing more on the spiritual journey one must take in order to avoid falling into an existential crisis.  Like the symbolic flower in a vase, it’s about recognizing the pervasive assignment of meaning that hinges on every word and label written or spoken, and how those meanings are more often than not, relative to the individual speaking them and not to actual reality.  It’s about recognizing that what’s confusing about life is simply a series of language games.

“To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow.

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death.  Out, out, brief candle!

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more.  It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.”

-         William Shakespeare, Macbeth

Riggan’s choice is to either get swallowed by the existential bleakness that consumed Macbeth or become more than what he thinks people assume he is.  Inner peace is about accepting what is, it’s about accepting your ego’s voice and rejecting it, which in the end, Riggan had to do in order to be free to live his life without self-loathing.  Riggan ended up understanding that the only person he could change was himself, and realizing this allowed him in the ending moments of the film to do it.  Riggan moved away from trying to control everything and everyone in his world because the outer world never changes, peace comes from making changes inside oneself.  The inner peace that Riggan finally achieved allowed him to be loved and to feel a sense of serenity that, in the beginning he clearly sought as he levitated beside the head of the Buddha on his window sill.  This “The Unbearable Likeness of Being” suggests that Riggan is to live his life as it is and not how others perceive it to be. 

“Laments of an Icarus”

The paramours of courtesans

Are well and satisfied, content.

But as for me my limbs are rent

Because I clasped the clouds as mine.

I owe it to the peerless stars

Which flame in the remotest sky

That I see only with spent eyes

Remembered suns I knew before.

In vain I had at heart to find

The center and the end of space.

Beneath some burning, unknown gaze

I feel my very wings unpinned.

And, burned because I beauty loved,

I shall not know the highest bliss,

And give my name to the abyss

Which waits to claim me as its own.”

- Charles Baudelaire