*WARNING* - This blog post contains minor spoilers for the movie Birdman, so if you haven't watched it yet and don't want to be spoiled, stop reading now.
I had forgotten how art could surprise me. Maybe because I had gotten out of the habit of being open to surprise. My first surprising revelation whilst watching Birdman, was how much I enjoyed the very unsubtle dig at the Superhero franchise machine. After all, I am myself a recent convert to these bombastic, ludicrously flashy triumphs of style over substance that are The Superhero Movie. I sat and watched all three Iron Man movies over a weekend recently whilst getting over an illness and found myself transfixed yet unable to understand why. They are, after all, for want of a better phrase: vapid nonsense and yet I still can't quite put my finger on why I like watching them. Maybe it's because, as Joseph Campbell points out, they speak to us on an inner level, raising the promise of our own potential and the superhero that lies in all of us.
In the movie Birdman, Michael Keaton is a washed up actor whose career up until the point we discover him, has been defined by playing a superhero called Birdman on the big screen. Resisting the calls for a fourth installment of the superhero franchise, he instead puts his literal heart and soul into a Broadway adaptation of a Raymond Carver short story - something that has never been attempted on stage before.
We see throughout the movie Keaton's character (Riggan Thomson) struggle with the voice of his superhero alter ego who lambasts him for attempting to make something credibly artistic. Then it came to me with cohesion and clarity. In making this delightful, jauntily downbeat movie the creative people involved were not trying to mock the Superhero franchise machine at all. They were, in fact, raising some valid and interesting questions about these movies in the process and the journey:
Why are they not taken seriously as 'art'? If they were, then Riggan wouldn't feel so unfulfilled as an actor and be driven to prove himself as a serious artist by trying to woo the Broadway inner circle of critics and theatre goers. Or, maybe, that is not the real reason he is producing the play at all. At certain points throughout the movie he references a note left to him on a cocktail napkin by Raymond Carver which the author wrote after coming to see him in a school play. He cites it as inspiration and is mocked for it by Mike Shiner (Edward Norton); the golden boy of Broadway whose method acting skills Riggan sees as the answer to how he can get the play to be taken more seriously. Shiner points out that Carver left the note on a cocktail napkin so he was probably drunk. But we know this isn't the truth anyway when it comes to his real motivation for the play.
The truth lies in the moments of magic realism littered throughout the movie which build in intensity until Riggan reaches a point where he realises that he doesn't have to prove himself to anybody. These wonderful moments of fantasy where his Birdman persona speaks through him and he finds himself performing telekinetic tricks show us, elegantly how easy it is to let the myth of who you think you are become the dominant aspect of your personality and, ultimately, yourself. Myths are a part of us. They are part of our journey of life but they do not make us whole or even determine our deeper, abstract nature. They can hold a mirror to our innermost thoughts, feelings and fears which in Riggan's case causes him to rebel against and reject the myth of his Birdman persona. He rejects it because he knows Birdman does not define him. For years he had believed that the myth of Birdman had become so dominant, so powerful that he had come to believe that it defined who he was. But, in a moment of clarity where he realises he is artistically free to pursue his true desires he knows that this belief was a false manifestation of his ego. We see him meditate in an early scene of the movie (whilst also levitating, in a scene which reminded me of The Fountain) and his progression as a character and person allows him to see that the myth of Birdman's power and influence was really the shadow side of his swollen ego.
I don't want to discuss the ending of the movie in great detail as I believe it should be left as open to interpretation as the director clearly intended it to be. However, I have seen some interesting comments from observers who have suggested that much of the movie is in fact Riggan's dream as he lies on the beach recovering from a failed suicide attempt he references in a discussion with his ex-wife near the end of the movie. Whilst I do not agree with or adhere to this notion, it is an interesting one and does hold some credibility as there are some moments of magic realism in the film which could simply be seen as dream montages - the scene where is trying to find his way back into the theatre dressed only in his underpants, the flying sequence as he returns to the theatre after threatening to throw himself from a building; these are two such examples and characterised by some stunning cinematography which allows us to see several possibilities as Riggan's fantasy flows with beauty and fluidity into the world of the present and the painful.
Birdman is a movie which I believe warrants more than one viewing. It is rich with subtext, multiple layers of narrative space and its main character is burdened with the pain of cognitive dissonance. Yet it is not a depressing or downbeat movie to watch. In many ways its ending is full of joy, hope and liberation and it left this particular viewer touched at how its main characters journey had taken him through one which had started out being full of magic realism and mythical despair to ending with one that was touched with an abiding sense of magical realisation.
