North Korean ideology vs American ideology

North Korea operates under a single, pervasive, ongoing illusion (the greatness of its Dear Leader), while Americans need to experience several sharp, colorful, but fleeting illusions every day

The Weird Career of Paul Thomas Anderson

Another December, another hugely anticipated Paul Thomas Anderson uber prestige pic...another evident disappointment. His seventh film, Inherent Vice, has a Rotten Tomatoes score of 72% fresh, his lowest by far, coming in seven points under Punch-Drunk Love, which itself was five points under Magnolia, his third lowest rated. (About Magnolia, quickly: when "ambitious" is one of the nicest things that critics say about your work, that is generally code for this).

Of course, Rotten Tomatoes scores are not at all perfect determinants of film quality, but they are useful indicators, and more often than not capture the overall reception of a film pretty accurately. I find it's always troubling when audience scores are below critics scores, as critics can tend to rationalize themselves into liking a movie that isn't actually very good on its face. The audience, far from being "dumb," is nowadays fairly discerning about their entertainment, and know what they like and why they like it. Inherent Vice has an audience score of 55%. That is shockingly bad.

This process of giddy anticipation followed by the hollow, disappointing thud of reality feels an awful lot like The Master's life-cycle, Anderson's previous film from two years ago. Expectations for that were much higher than for Vice, as The Master was his first film five years after the acclaimed There Will Be Blood.  Now we don't really know what to expect, other than a film likely to be something of a chore to sit through.

Blood came five years after Punch-Drunk, and signaled a definitive break with his earlier, more freewheeling, celebratory style, most notably achieved in Boogie Nights. Punch-Drunk itself marked a break from the ensemble efforts of Boogie Nights and its followup Magnolia, focusing on a single star, Adam Sandler. Blood similarly shows Anderson's fascination with showcasing, and perhaps leaning on, a singular star with whom he is greatly enthralled. Now it's on to Joaquin Phoenix, who Anderson evidently thinks is far and away the best actor in the world. In interviews for Punch-Drunk, Anderson gushes about his admiration for Sandler's comedic gifts, calling him a "great communicator," and their collaboration was his attempt to make a middle of the road, crowd-pleasing Adam Sandler mega-hit comedy.

He felt that he failed in this attempt, wishing that it was a funnier movie with more laughs. He's right--it isn't a laugh out loud Adam Sandler comedy like Happy Gilmore, Billy Madison, or even Big Daddy. But there is something unmistakably compelling about watching Sandler's comedic persona treated by a serious director--the fundamental disjunction in their sensibilities is itself a fruitful, compelling thing to behold. Anderson sincerely wants to tap into Sandler's comedic gifts, to form a cinematic symbiosis with his star's understanding of communication, which at the time were close to their peak--he just doesn't know how to do it.

There Will Be Blood featured a frighteningly lived-in performance from Daniel Day-Lewis, seeming to channel the beating, demonic, selfish heart at the very core of American capitalism. Expectations for The Master were that Philip Seymour Hoffman and Joaquin Phoenix, two actors of nearly similar gifts as Day-Lewis (though without the insanely over-the-top Method dedication), were ready to shed as much light on the suspect nature of American religion as Day-Lewis did on American capitalism. Only, the target was an odd one: Scientology, which is not nearly as pernicious, influential, or interesting as the media seems to want it to be. But we were all more than willing to go with it.

After watching The Master as generously as I could, I still had no idea why Anderson was drawn to the material. What was he trying to say about Scientology? Why was he saying it? Does the film teach us anything new about Scientology that we didn't already know, or at least suspect? Or even more broadly, about the nature of cults and frauds? I don't know who said it, it might have even been on Twitter, but the most accurate review of it I remember was: "The Master has the most acting of any movie this year!" It was meant to laud the two showy lead performances, yes, but also as a not so gentle jab at the unmistakable self-indulgence Anderson was clearly veering into.

The Master seems to me to continue a habit Anderson began long ago in Magnolia--deep, nearly solipsistic immersion in his own world, portraying it with too much fidelity, so that we, not being privy to his own mind and memories, don't have enough associations with the signifiers to register much of anything. I'm thinking especially of all the father-son stuff in Magnolia, which seemed way too personal and more important for Anderson himself to have created as a catharsis than for an audience to appreciate as part of a film.

The many weird sexual signifiers of The Master seem similar symptoms of solipsism, of an inability, or unwillingness to get out of his own head. The ultra-creepy masturbation scene, the bizarre naked dancing scene, Joaquin Phoenix's ongoing sexual attraction to the ocean/sand, to name only a few at the top of my mind. Anderson really seems to think that by portraying his own sexual oddness in bluntly unsublimated form he is creating brave, important, capital A Art. This is dangerously close to @GuyInYourMFA territory.

Again, this impulse has been around since Magnolia, but that film at least had the energy of youth, a talented ensemble of dynamic actors, a packed narrative with plenty of other incidents, and the honeymoon afterglow from Boogie Nights in its favor. The Master sees that solipsism take center stage, with little else but the yelling of its two admittedly very game leads.

Of course, since we need to have an American auteur to feel good about, someone to whom we can attach our beliefs in the eternal power of art, and Anderson seems to be the only one around who can fit the bill. Increasingly irrelevant, ridiculous cine-snobs like Richard Brody gushed about the "haunting, utterly inward stillness" of Hoffman and Phoenix's performances. When the chief merit in a very long movie (movies being, you know, a visual medium) is something that only exists inside the actors (who are physicalized extensions of the director's brain), that is not astonishing power--that is emotional autism. Brody actually considers the "opacity" of the film to be a great "achievement." But opacity is not an achievement. It is a failure of communication. Critics like Brody are enabling this autistic streak, which, as youthful energy and the ambition and facility to create interesting ensembles and coherent stories fades, has overtaken just about everything else in Anderson's artistic arsenal.

In reconsidering Anderson's status as an eminent American filmic auteur, one always rubs up against the evident unimpeachable genius of Boogie Nights, which is for Anderson what Pulp Fiction is for Tarantino--an unshakeable bedrock upon which his reputation can rest, no matter what happens.

Looking back on Boogie Nights, it's clear that there is much less there than we have managed to convince ourselves there is. More than anything, I think its sterling reputation rests on the performance of Burt Reynolds, and, secondarily, on the emergent, undeniable star birth of Mark Wahlberg. To a lesser extent, also, nostalgia for Goodfellas, the film that Boogie Nights so clearly wants to be, and just the general joyful exuberance inhering in the best art of the nineties, in a way that doesn't really happen in our more staid, analytic, ironic, compacted age.

Way too much has been said and written about how Pulp Fiction rejuvenated John Travolta, plucking him from irrelevance and setting him back on a dumb track to a lot of these movies for a long time. (Thankfully, that seems to have pretty much ended by now). But Travolta is the worst thing about Pulp Fiction--he has no idea how to play a super cool super dangerous hit man. Just watch how embarrassingly bad he is in this scene, as he says "She's fuckin' OD-ing on me!" about as thinly and un-urgently as possible. Burt Reynolds, on the other hand, is far and away the best thing about Boogie Nights. He's so good it's like he's acting in an entirely different movie, one with real stakes, gravitas, and poignancy.

Maybe Reynolds was just too old to experience a complete career rejuvenation like Travolta, who had the good fortune of sliding into irrelevance at an unusually early age, before Pulp Fiction. And perhaps this was all Reynolds had in him, properly so for something that is so clearly the role of a lifetime. You can't have two roles of a lifetime. His award acceptance speech shows just how deeply similar he is to his character Jack Horner, the gentleman pornographer, always insisting that his porn films have class and integrity. He says those same things about his hope for how Boogie Nights would come out--"we brought some humanity to it [the porn industry], and hopefully some class." Burt Reynolds is Jack Horner, he oozes faded, compromised, but ever resilient, dignity and earnestness. John Travolta was not Vincent Vega, he was just massively visible because of a hugely popular movie, and could be slotted into countless cash-grab action movies and mawkish dramedies immediately after his own rejuvenation.

Part of me can't help thinking that Reynolds exerted a decisive influence on the making of the film. After all, Anderson, though a wunderkind, was only 27 when he made Boogie Nights, and Burt Reynolds exudes such authority and effortless wisdom as seen-it-all film director Jack Horner, I can't imagine him totally turning that off when the cameras stopped. I could be totally wrong about all of this, but I feel like he must've acted like a co-director in his scenes, and he's in most scenes in the movie. Maybe that's why Boogie Nights is so much better than all his other movies (though it's still not nearly as good as its reputation)--there was someone there exerting a checking directorial influence.

Wahlberg is great as well, which is good, because he's just about the only other character who is on screen long enough to do anything interesting. The vaunted Boogie Nights ensemble is more like a recurring series of cameos than real roles, as one after another these bright, shiny faces strut into a room and the scene, or their part in the scene, ends twenty seconds later. It's a three hour movie where only a couple key scenes last longer than a minute or two. The reason the drug deal shootout with Alfred Molina is so memorable and impactful is because it's probably the longest scene in the movie, and it's barely five minutes long itself.

But Wahlberg's effectiveness in the role is deceptive, as he is far more convincing as a sweet, innocent young guy than the supremely confident, universe shattering cocksman he becomes. Wahlberg seems insecure in the role, shaking off his Marky Mark baggage, and that works, because Eddie Adams, or "Dirk Diggler," is insecure, knowing deep down that he is just a dolt who lucked into a freakishly huge penis. Wahlberg seems very much to be playing at being an actor, which mirrors and informs how his character Eddie Adams is playing at being the star "Dirk Diggler."

This almost embarrassing mirroring of real life that was certainly intentional in casting Reynolds, debatably in the casting of Wahlberg, is powerfully present in the tone of the movie as a whole. Indeed, if there is genius in Boogie Nights, it is in how eerily closely the tone of the film mirrors the superficiality of its many characters.

In Dirk Diggler's world, you meet someone at a party and he becomes your best friend and you become his, because you're both chill, rad, fun guys with awesome cocks who are great at banging babes and doing coke. The film itself as a whole takes on that unearned intimacy of its characters. Anderson seems drawn to that fake world because of how deeply entrenched shallowness is in its culture--everyone is kept an arm's (or penis's) length away, no one really opens up, everything is great and super and fun and cool because to act otherwise would be to court reflection, and their lives are too miserable to withstand any tiny fraction of self-analysis. Anderson treats the audience the way that his characters treat each other, and it is not a pleasant feeling.

Of course, a director has no obligation at all to make the audience feel pleasant--doing the opposite is often a nobler, truer aim. It's just that Anderson seems a bit too comfortable doing this, and that tone has continued in his later, more solipsistic work. In The Master, I felt like I was inside him and totally alien to him all at once. He really wants to communicate, but seems incapable of doing so, yet his inability to communicate is praised as high art. Such is the confused, desperate state of American cinema.

So what of Inherent Vice? I actually think it's his best movie, by far. Boogie Nights is juvenile, though inspired, and Punch Drunk Love was purposefully trifling. This was his first movie that combined the inspiration and lightness of his early period with the heft and consequentialness of his later films. It's the movie that his whole career was leading toward, and is a promising sign.

Book Review: "Who Owns The Future?" by Jaron Lanier

In his second book, Who Owns the Future?, pioneering virtual reality researcher turned philosopher of the digital economy Jaron Lanier attempts a tricky maneuver: urging us into both a more purely capitalist direction, while also encouraging us to be far more humanistic. It may strike leftists as too acquiescent to the exponential stranglehold that capital has over human potential, and it may strike rightists as excessively concerned with spreading financial security to a wide base. But that's the strength of the book--it is revolutionary, but modestly so, in a way that might actually apply to the rapidly approaching digitized future.

Spreading human dignity to more people by becoming collectively more capitalist than we already are is at first glance a strange idea, but Lanier makes the case quite convincingly. Capitalism, digitization, and human dignity need not be thought of as incompatible. Who Owns the Future? is a unique blend of clearheaded realism about digitization's exponential narrowing effect on our economy, with a decidedly hopeful and far from dystopian tone.

In 2014, we spend countless hours contributing to the hive mind and the general pool of content through Facebook posts, tweets, upvoting/generating reddit content, uploading YouTube videos, Yelping, reviewing Uber drivers, running fan sites, message boards, movie review blogs, and a thousand other ways. All of this is done for free, because that is how it started out--people simply jumping on the internet and doing things.

As the context that this free content was delivered into grew more sophisticated, however, tremendous profits started being derived from it. Lanier asks why the people giving information that is combed through for huge value by a small cadre of firms he dubs Siren Servers haven't partaken of the massive upswing in value taking place online. The familiar saying underlying Web culture is that information and content "want to be free"--Lanier suggests that, while this may be true, the human beings from which that information and content originate should look not want to work for free. This brazenly sane idea is Lanier's concept of "humanistic information economics."

The base of digital value is as vast as the population is, yet the actual money is filtered through the Siren Servers, leaving the real creators of value out in the cold. Lanier asks us to reconceive of what kind of behavior merits monetary compensation. Why should only the firms that have figured out how to sell the value offered in staggering volumes by the masses have all the money, while unemployment and underemployment grow, the labor force shrinks, and hopelessness pervades? We need to reconceive of what value is, as the traditional economy is so obviously devoid of it, while the new economy has such an obscene overabundance of it, the overwhelming majority of which is divorced from monetization.

We have enabled advertisers to specialize their outreach to us in ways that Don Draper could only dream about. Lanier's book is filled with galling examples of how Siren Servers like Facebook and advertising technology are being leveraged to tailor consumer experiences directly to you, like "differential pricing." This is the practice of algorithms based on information obtained about you through your Facebook activity that will allow firms to judge how much you are capable and willing to spend on an item. Someone else, buying the exact same item online but whose digital footprint indicates that they are less inclined and capable of paying more, will be charged less.

The current economic outlook is that the dignity resulting from having money should go only to those cunning enough to be successful predators, leeching off the digital information offered by the public. The masses are merely low level actors providing ever increasing opportunities to be exploited.

The humanism in Lanier's thesis is that people who share information that could come only from them, even if it is unsolicited, are contributing to the overall pool of value, and should be compensated. Money should not only accrue to those who find ways to exploit, but to those who create of their own volition on their own time.

Lanier's concrete suggestion for how humanistic information economics would actually work hinges on the idea of two-way linking, deriving from pioneering but insufficiently influential technologist Ted Nelson. A direct path would always be present between an originator of even the most trifling bit of content and a firm that utilizes it for a potentially monetizable practice.

This would also require a reconception of how money accrues to people. The way we spend money, dribs and drabs throughout the day and the week, with occasional big purchases every few months or so, would also be how money comes in to us. For each bit of content or information we offer online that is used to make ad tech algorithms more robust, we would receive a micropayment.

Value should not be viewed as it is traditionally, in terms of great big spurts, but rather in the steady, accretive way that take place every day. In his great book The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil conceives of a human being, and by extension a modern city filled with people, as a machine with countless parts constantly in motion generating an incredible amount of energy: "A man going about his business all day long expends far more muscular energy than an athlete who lifts a huge weight once a day. This has been proved physiologically, and so the social sum total of everybody's little everyday efforts, especially when added together, doubtless releases far more energy into the world than do rare heroic feats. This total even makes the single heroic feat look positively miniscule, like a grain of sand on a mountaintop with a megalomaniacal sense of its own importance." This is how energy, value, and force are really generated, so it's about time we use our amazing new technology to monetarily honor that fact, rather than praising the Siren Servers that, in the nascent days of digital economics, figured out how to siphon value. The work of offering valuable information that tech spy companies make billions from should be treated as the source of wealth that it is. We need to evolve past our culture that lauds and fetishizes self-aggrandizing, heroic, ambitious billionaires, since the value and power they are capable of pales in comparison to the little bits of energy generated by each and every person throughout the day.

More of our activity should be monetized, not less, which is both an admission that commerce is the soul of our society, and an appeal to offer chances for being paid to far more people than now. This is the unique blend of capitalism with leftist populism in Lanier's thinking.

The core of this process is in rethinking the meaning of 'rights.' As of now, civil rights, our rights simply as humans qua humans, are what we mostly mean when we think of rights. This was more appropriate in earlier phases of socioeconomic development, before the current phase of neoliberal capitalism, in which people have limited value simply for being people, and more as vectors through which money can be generated.

So because of this, commercial rights need to become as ubiquitous and vocally defended as civil rights, indeed perhaps more so. Commerce is the soul of capitalism, and having dignity in a capitalistic system requires comprehensively detailed commercial rights for each and every citizen. Each aspect of a person's life is fodder for generating revenue by some ad tech company, so a person should be protected and compensated for every instance of this happening. Lanier excels at giving examples of this: "If you are tracked while you walk around town, and that helps a government become aware that pedestrian safety could be improved with better signage, you'd get a micropayment for having contributed valuable data" (317).

Lanier shies away from critiquing ideology, or the ways that such obvious points remain obscured and villainized. He doesn't comment on how, instead of distributing funds to those who in piecemeal ways help tech giants build their fortunes, we celebrate the mere fact that genius elite technologists have so many billions of dollars. "Yay, Mark Zuckerberg was a billionaire before he was thirty! He did it by selling the information contributed for free by people who use his website! How great! People are rich! Yahoo!"

A humanistic information economy requires that human beings view themselves and their situation, their lot, clearly--but as recent political history demonstrates with such crippling force, ideology has become thicker and more pervasive than ever, with no sign of dissipating. Ideology is anything that dissuades us from seeing ourselves as valuable, so a humanistic information economy has little chance of winning the day. We have pretty much already conclusively decided that we don't care about ourselves, each other, or the concept of humanity. We have more important things to worry about, evidently. Lanier doesn't get into how ideology obscures our own best interests from us, making us perversely love the chains that keep us controlled and exploited. He really does his best to objectively analyze the troubling trends in the digital economy, and to offer solutions.

In his second book, he shows all the signs of maturing as a thinker that you would want. His first book, You Are Not A Gadget, while great, was more focused on individual cases of how specific internet tendencies were narrowing the realm of freedom, expressivity, and creative potential. This book, while still filled with specific, concrete examples to build its case, exhibits more comfort with big picture thinking, which is a welcome sign.

He has gotten over some moderately unfortunate writerly tics, like his tendency to congratulate his and his cohort's accomplishments, creativity, and genius. While understandably very proud of his own biography, Lanier at times can seem like he's showing off, sometimes about his genius, but more often about how cool him and his pioneering Silicon Valley milieu were, in ways that today's up and comers just can't fathom. There are only so many sentences starting with "My friends in Silicon Valley..." you can read before you start to roll your eyes.

The book does seem longer than it needs to be, at 367 pages, the last eighty or so of which devolve into a hodgepodge of related thought fragments. This latter part of the book is very much Lanier throwing ideas out into the world, for us to benefit from, yes, but it also seems like he is trying to sharpen his own grasp of his admittedly compelling thesis. Much of these later sections read like notes, but in fairness he is first and foremost a computer scientist, and for one of those, he is a great writer.

The many good ideas in this book, I fear, will have little impact on the course of history. The reason is that, for a book appealing to our sentimentality over the notion of human dignity, it is too even tempered. Being human is not a condition amenable to moderate appeals--to be reached, a human being needs rhetorical appeals. Lanier is far too polished, intelligent, and scientific to fill his books with rhetorical appeals.

The problem is that drumming up renewed collective feeling for our shared humanity can best, and perhaps only, be achieved through stirring rhetoric. The fact that such a modest proposition as advocating a more humanistic economy is presented with as much diplomatic caution as Lanier exhibits throughout the book is evidence that we may already be too far gone--humanism may already be too passe.

Birdman: Or, the Unexpected Allure of the Status Quo

I resisted seeing Birdman, or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance for a while, nearly two months, and I see most of these buzzy prestige movies their opening weekend. I've long had a minority opinion that director Alejandro Iñárritu was one of the most overrated people in Hollywood. This piece over at The Dissolve does a nice job of articulating the visceral distaste I felt for his films, since 21 Grams: "...everything-is-connected dramas that used violence as an organizing theme." Yes yes yes. Is there anything worse than a self-serious everything-is-connected drama, which pivots around violence? They're all just Vantage Point. Crash is Vantage Point for the emotionally autistic and secretly racist. Iñárritu's own Babel? So Vantage Point, but Vantage Point as Syriana. So, boring Vantage Point. Just admit when you're Vantage Point. It's okay to be Vantage Point sometimes. Really. (Not really).

Luckily, Birdman is not a bundle of interlocking stories, but nearly the exact opposite. It's a series of very long takes, edited as minimally as possible. It's Iñárritu's best film by a mile. For a film filled with bravura monologues to play so seamlessly is a truly impressive feat of editing and directing--some of the highest achievements the art form has ever seen, in terms of getting actorly energy on the screen in all its unfiltered glory.

The film's concept, which, like everything else about the film, has been nearly universally praised, to me seems in the same ballpark of stupid as Kevin Smith's pot-fueled idea that turned into the instantly forgotten Tusk: let's take a fairly washed up Michael Keaton, who used to be Batman before superhero movies were the cinematic sine qua non, and cast him as a fairly washed up actor who used to play a superhero called Birdman. Cool!

Keaton's "character" Riggan Thomson (is Riggan an actual name?) self-finances a Broadway engagement of his own adaptation of the Raymond Carver short story "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" (so that's where that awful phrase comes from!). He's trying to prove to himself and the world that His Integrity As An Artist was worth abandoning the lucrative, famous life of superhero movie stardom. So he produces the Carver adaptation, because, as he tells Edward Norton's "character" Mike Shiner at a bar, Carver attended one of his high school plays and wrote him a note thanking him for giving an honest performance. He's reconnecting, in the only way he knows how, with the foundation of his artistic integrity, which he pissed away all those years starring in the artistically bankrupt but financially massive Birdman movies.

Shiner is visibly disappointed and disgusted that such a shallow, superficial, sentimental impetus is driving Riggan to produce the play. It's a great moment. Shiner, a wildly, recklessly committed artist, is rightly disgusted that his director and co-star is putting the show on so directly for his own self-assurance and ironing out of his self-doubts. Art should be about taking chances and discovering new things, new expressions, new sensations, new subtleties. Riggan is trying to reconnect to a time in his life when he had integrity, and calling it art.

There are some other really perceptive, sharp digs at the meaninglessness of artistic preciousness throughout the film, perhaps most notably Emma Stone's long, angrily righteous, piercing assassination of her father's entire character. After he catches his recovering drug addict daughter Sam (Emma Stone) smoking weed, he chastises her and says he doesn't need this distraction right now, because he has a play to put on and all that. This sets her off, as she rightly makes it abundantly clear that he is the only person the play is important to, and the audience is filled with old, rich, white people who at best vaguely remember who Raymond Carver was, and are using the theater going experience that night mainly to have something to discuss over coffee and pie afterwards. This monologue alone should put Stone in the running for a Best Supporting Actress nomination (although she is an absolute grease-fire in all her scenes). There's a lot of schizophrenia going on here. For every time the film verges into A Love Letter To Art territory, someone smacks it down viciously to earth.

The best thing about the film is seeing Edward Norton really let loose in a way he hasn't since the late nineties and early oughties. Since The 25th Hour in 2002, he's been stuck in something of self-parody, and at best in neutral. After years of roles in a big superhero film, a big spy action franchise, cop dramas, minor roles in the Wes Anderson repertory, and limp greatest hits parodies, it's great to see that he's still a shockingly fluid and compelling actor. Keaton is great too, probably better than he's ever been, but Norton has the better part.

After having a row with a New York Times theatre critic who promises to trash his play and condemns his and his Hollywood ilk's incursion into legitimate theater, Riggan reaches a particularly low point (which is saying something in a film that is little more than the charting of a man's nearly complete unraveling). He finds solace in the one thing that he really has: he is motherfucking Birdman! He could call the studio any time and say he wanted to be in the third Birdman sequel, and he'd get a fat paycheck, booked on all the late night talk shows, and the good times would roll again. He hallucinates that he is in fact actually Birdman, flying around everywhere with a dramatic heroic score crashing all around him. In reality, he was just humming along to the music in his head while a cab took him back to the theater.

That is the closest thing to a villain in the film--the safety and security of the Birdman character itself. Riggan spends the film, other than that brief moment of embrace, running away from it. He hides in the trappings of a Serious Artist, using it to shield himself from the incessant chirping voice of Birdman in his head. Near the end of the film, Riggan confesses to his ex that, at the peak of his Birdman fame and fortune, he tried to drown himself in the ocean. He failed because he had unwittingly waded into a thicket of jellyfish, causing him to run ashore and roll around until the horrible monsters detached. The only thing keeping him from killing himself was the belief that he was really a great artist, so he took his shot and proved it to the world.

The final scene of the play within the film ends in Riggan's character shooting himself, saying over and over that he feels invisible, that he doesn't exist, then kapow. I read this as a barb against actors--Riggan chose this play because, as an actor, he only really exists if he is seen by others--they have no integrity of their own.

At the end of Birdman, Riggan replaces his prop gun with a real one, fully loaded. We don't really know why, other than a continuation of his suicidal past and his increasingly obvious psychotic break. He shoots his nose off but survives, and there are a few minutes tacked on where we see him in a hospital bed with a new nose, his daughter telling him how his failed suicide went viral and made him a huge star. He even got a glowing review, whose title gives the film its cringey, @GuyInYourMFA-esque subtitle, from the prickly critic, praising him for unwittingly creating a new artistic style by deforming himself live on stage--super realism! Riggan's producer Jake (Zach Galifianakis) tells him how the show will run in Paris and London. He is at once virally popular, critically acclaimed, and the inventor of a new art form. He achieved all his lofty goals.

Problem--this is not a repeatable art form. He can't keep blowing his nose off night after night, from New York to Europe. Just like Birdman is not a repeatable cinematic direction--Keaton can't keep commenting on his fraught real life experience with superhero films, and Iñárritu can't keep commenting on how Real Filmmaking is better than profit driven acting. Super-realism is a one time deal.

I suppose you could be charitable and say that Iñárritu's super-realism is akin to a Happening type of message--telling us to create something really eventful that will shake things up as much as Birdman has shaken up the Hollywood Oscar race in 2014, and Keaton's career.

When his family and friends leave him alone in his hospital room, Riggan goes to the window and steps out onto the ledge, to try to fly. At this point, I thought he had plummeted to his death, like how his earlier flying hallucination was in reality just him freaking out in the back of a cab. That would have been amazing--it would have been the best ending to a movie I've seen in years, and made me unequivocally love Birdman.

But that's not what happened. Sam comes back in the hospital room, crosses to the window, and looks out, and down...there's a look of horror on her face, which is good...maybe she saw his dead body on the sidewalk below! Oh wait...she's looking up...and smiling in disbelief!?

Oh no. He's actually flying.

The message? Through art, anything is possible. If you follow your artistic convictions, you will soar. Soar! Committing yourself whole hog to art is not a delusive, selfish, arrogant way to live at all--it is not a function of capitalist ideology, forcing your hopes and dreams into a self-aggrandizing, inner-directed imaginary world at all--rather, it is the seed bed from which all possibilities may spring! It is a glorious and supreme human achievement to inhabit a fantasy world, hooray huzzah! Strength through narcissism! Glory and salvation through selfishness!

The villain of the piece is the aspect of Riggan's personality that drives him to take shelter under the lucrative, fame-bringing wings of the Birdman franchise; the hero of the piece is Riggan's heroic impulse to pursue the limits of honest, authentic art. But both are flights from reality--one is just better paid, while the other is more creatively fulfilling. Neither has anything to do with making the world less insane, violent, and hopeless.

Just as super-realism is no salvation, since it could happen only that once, impassioned commitment to artistic exploration is no salvation, as it distances you from the world in which you really live, requiring endless escapes, lest your feet actually touch the ground and you lose your mind. The world does not need so much art, even well-made art like this. It needs logic. Logic can change things. Art needs a solid status quo in which to incubate. Praising art is praising the status quo.

In its own way, this is more shameless and effective capitalist propaganda than anything Michael Bay ever made. Art is no shelter and no levee against the systematical dehumanization of neoliberal capitalism--it is a force field that we erect around ourselves to provide ourselves temporary oases of sanity and purpose in an intentionally exploitative, vicious world. Praising and loving and worshiping art is little more than loving one's chains.