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.