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.
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
We then see
a droid whose torso is this spinning soccer-type ball with an R2D2 type helmet
on top cruising along or away from something in a hurry. Then we see the inside of a dropship lined
with Storm Troopers in teal lighting readying themselves to deploy, as the
landing ramp lowers and they presumably take the safety’s off of their weapons.
The big payoff
for me, as I assume it was for a lot of people, was seeing the Millennium
Falcon fly again, and not only fly but fly well in an exciting way, similar to
that of the asteroid sequence in Empire. Beautiful stuff really. If there were any chills, thrills and
childhood exhilarating memories surfacing, it was at this moment.
The film is
still in post-production and will be for some time so what we got to see was
pretty good stuff. It’s a teaser so of
course we weren’t going to see much, just enough meat for the internet wolves
to chew on while Abrams finishes his movie.
This also allows for the internet to explode with theories and love or
hate for the film, long before its release and thus lets out some of the built
up air that’s inflating this production.
It’s not going to be perfect and it won’t be as good as The Empire Strikes Back but hopefully in
the end, it will be a fun film that invites us into that world that most of us
grew up on. This is when the therapist
chimes in and says that the past is there for examination while one navigates
the present, the past is not there to be replicated in the present. J.J Abrams, love him or hate him, is going to
make his own movie, but we should at least take solace in the fact that he too was
brought up on Star Wars and wouldn’t
want to ruin that, even for him.
