Ignorance is bliss- or so goes the popular adage. The thematic ambiguity of this 2014 Academy award winning movie is a reflection of this universally pithy statement. It is also a swooning, surrealistic – black humor which embodies the exhilarating performance of an ensemble cast that boasts of such talent as Miachel Keaton, playing the evanescing artist, Androgen Thomas who was in the limelight for being cast as the Superhero – Birdman, Ed Norton essaying the role of the method stage actor Mike Shiner, who goes to the extent of firing up a scene by sporting an erection in front of the audience in an attempt to actually have sex with Lesley (Naomi Watts), his real-life girlfriend. On stage. “I pretend just about everywhere else, but I don’t pretend out there,” is what he has to say about the Broadway.
Thomas’s daughter Sam is a former addict, a damsel in distress and shares a strained relationship with her father. She loves to rant about social media relevance and eventually ends up being attracted to the world forsaking Mike Shiner.
Riggan Thomas tries to resurrect his acting career with a passionate Broadway production of Richard Carver’s, ‘What do we talk about, when we talk about love?’ Throughout the screen time and indoor shot ranges, he is found plunging into heated conversation with the mocking and tormenting voice of Birdman who levitates him to perform imaginary heroic feats. His estrangement from his wife, troubled relationship with his girlfriend and daughter adds to his fear of fading into oblivion. His monologues about the deceptive perks and vivaciousness of being a Hollywood actor brings to light the intended euphemism for the fugacious nature of an artiste’ in the Industry. He desired to rise above the rest, above the stage excellence of Mike Shiner and posed a challenge to the most powerful theatre critic that his production remake would be a grand success.
The scene where the egoist Birdman doppelganger follows Thomas in broad daylight, makes him imagine an action sequence where he has been enabled to fly. This scene echoes the super realism of the movie. Perhaps Birdman is an expression of Riggan Thomas’s internal conflicts – failure as an actor, his feeling of being stifled by the recognition of a superhero, his inability to supersede his co-actor and sustain personal relationships. He tries to leave his past behind, leave the identity of ‘Birdman’ behind, but ends up entangled with the dominant and repressive inner voice of Birdman. The director, Alejandro Inarritu, perhaps tries to serve us on a platter, the generic fatuousness of artistic ambition.
The backstory of the characters consists of a riveting spectrum of emotional and interpersonal involvements and conflicts that do not stand long in Riggan’s path of transcending the normalcy and mediocrity of theatre actors. He tries to establish the fact that real artistry resides in being a part of a play or movie which starts to become ‘a miniature version of the deformed self’ of the actor.
The fact that Riggan Thomas struggles to break free from the suffocating and giddying grasp of his alter ego birdman, is enough to breathe truth in the sentence, ‘Popularity is the slutty little cousin of prestige’.
His search for identity accompanies his existential crisis. As he tries to deal with the constant conflict between artistic integrity and celebrity arrogance, he also toys with his world of magical realism, where he has been electrocuted with the superpowers of Birdman.
His hunger to put forth a stellar performance on the opening night of his Broadway show makes him exchange fake bullets for real ones in his gun. He shoots himself in front of the gasping crowd, and in that he “makes a comeback, he makes somethings huge”.
Perhaps he is able to defy Birdman’s words about audience – “they love this shit, they love blood. They love action”. His career is his ‘God’ and when he reunites with his daughter and former wife in his hospital bed after his super realistic stunt f onstage, his life comes to a full circle. His aspiration of rendering a ‘real experience’ for the audience to take back home and his desire – ‘to call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the Earth’, is finally brought to fruition.
The startlingly obscure end of the movie paves the way for a gamut of perspectives. Riggan encounters Birdman for the last time and walks up to the windowsill of the hospital room. His daughter Sam who comes to the room, searches for her father, until she sees the window open, runs over to it, terrified, and as she looks down expecting to see her father below, her gaze slowly moves upward until the final shot of the film— wide-eyed Sam, shocked and smiling, as we assume she is seeing her father flying above.
The screen blacks out and we are left with a plethora of unanswered questions. This is not a dead end but is completely in line with the thematic movement of the internal struggle of this fading passionate actor. We never see Riggan jumping off the window, nor do we see him landing on the pavement to his death or flying like Birdman.
The instances in the film where Riggan is seeing floating mid-air, flying above the city of New York or decimating his dressing room with his fingertips are the scrupulous dwellings of him in his world of contrivance, – blotted with maladies. We are made to come round with the director’s portrayal of the supernaturalism of Riggan’s solitary cosmos.
The opening shot of the film is just as surrealistic as the end. An omnipresent viewer portrays the glaring dichotomy of perspectives. Whether Riggan had died on his hospital bed and his daughter’s vision of him flying, is just a figment of his imagination before his death is plausible as a perspective. Also, assimilation of the preferable idea that he had actually acquired the ability to fly and rises above his dire straits into the sky, is probably what Alejandro tries to establish. This obscure ending adds a lens of eclectic interpretations. He who wished to upgrade his status quo as a celebrity to that of an actor, was unable to renegotiate his position of importance. The relentless single views of scenes and nerve stimulating orchestral swells accompany the movements of Thomas throughout the length of the movie. These make us question whether the sounds actually belong to the play that was to be staged or are just an upsurge of Riggan’s imminent mental breakdown.
The powerful discourse of the narrative of his life makes us reject the psychotics of Riggan’s deranged self. We choose to keep the window of escapade open to the escalating magical realism, theatrical power, exploration of self-doubt and need for artistic appreciation. Curtains are lifted to expose the terrible plight of true artists behind the fame and bedazzling showbiz of Hollywood.
There is the supremacy of dreamlike elements over a grounded post-modernist scenario. The ending to the movie doesn’t offer a perspicacious alternative to this. Therefore, we tend to question what was real in the movie. The unblinking camera and cut-free sequences are the continuum of the satirical wit of the director. The satire on the acting industry leavens the plot with unflagging dark humour and disturbing surrealism.
The incongruous delirium of the washed-up actor Riggan Thomas and his frequent farcical behaviour faces defeat before his presumably triumphant end as an actor. Whether or not the part where he makes the newspaper headlines written by the most revered theatre critic is true, we accept that he is not a mere ‘Hollywood clown in a lycra bird suit.’
His words, “I don’t exist. I am not even here. None of this matters”, are but a façade. He is clothed with the duality of a classical actor as well as the larger than life symbolism of a phoenix, who rose from the ashes of the fag end of his career. What proclaims the undoubted and only reality in the film is the virtue of ignorance – that of the characters to Riggan’s inner struggle to make a mark in the industry, that of the audience to his outcome, and lastly that of Riggan to his own frenzies. Birdman, the alter ego of Riggan who had tyrannized him all along, somehow merges with him in the amorphous end. ‘Flames. Sacrifice. Icarus’ defines him, just as it had defined Birdman. Riggan Thomas is perhaps more than or equal to a larger than life theory of the struggles of passionate actors.
Written by Sambrita Bhattacharyya
Edited by Mehar Bahl
Featured image via Pinterest
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