the windfire sad tale of the lonely, yet-famous “bird man”
(Gotham Sized Spoilers Ahead)
When we first meet Riggan the bird man, he is levatating in his underwear wondering why his life is so lousy. This is a scene laden with irony. Ultimately it is the question of any demi-god. Why do I have the power to float above the earth but can’t make myself happy. All of this going hand in hand with the question in the quote at the opening credits: And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so?
The demi-god’s desire is “to call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth.” It is the desire we all feel. But a particular desire to flower and burn in the heart of those stars who dance for us on screen and on stage.
And that’s where we watch them, these gentle and crazed narcissists we call actors. Alejandro Gonzales Innaritu does a master’s job of showing us the drive and unction on fire inside of humanity—especially Hollywood—to make sure they never lose an ounce of the hit of morphine that came to their starving souls when first they felt beloved on earth. For fanship, at least the bit with gravity, doesn’t last too long. Our beauty fades, our strengths expire.
Riggan is trying to bottle his essence in one last theatrical push. But for him, it is more than staying power he chases. He feels that “Birdman”, the superhero role he played earlier in life, has wasted his talents, has fed him money he’s long since spent, and has stolen the destiny he earlier had of being a “serious” actor. Now he looks to remedy all this in his final “swan song”. His main problem? The psyche and voice of “Birdman” still alive in his daily brain telling him to return to the elixir through the old path of fighting the villains of earth with feathers on his arm and a beak on his face. Never mind that he is now near 63 years old.
The tragedy, and currently being missed beauty in Riggan’s life, as he reaches out to grab the past and the future, are his very own beauties beside him: His wife whom he’s cheated on, but who is still willing to love his heart if he’ll come back to reality—His daughter who is also aflame with passion, beauty and terror, who fidgets and jades right in front of him for lack of good fatherly attention, and his current girlfriend who appears to have destroyed another would-be child of his all because Riggan can’t slow down from his fevered dream long enough to care for those already in his life, much less another little heart and mouth to feed.
The Movie is a work of raw, powerful talent. Visually unique and vanguard. Bold and teasish in the characters and actors it’s enlisted, and the way they each merrily weave together. It is bold in what it tries. It is naked and untrying to be anything more than what the director snapshots on his portrayal of that land he beholds he and his own camera swimming in.
We love the movie, not because it is in the least bit hopeful or helpful, but because it is masterful and true. It is a mirror (carnivalish though it be) that won’t stop showing us the ego and obsessions in our hearts. It watches us gloriously sink in our own strange waters, unable just like Riggan to walk away from the show, for the audience of our dreams is out there waiting for us.
But it masks the real ugliness of our lives in “Magical Realness”. It never takes us to Riggan’s smashed body down their on the asphalt. It never reveals his brains all scattered on the stage floor. But flies him away instead, to sweetly take memories of his daughter’s gorgeous and teary-eyed head arest on his own fluttering heart, his wife speaking tenderly to him, defending him from the agents and reporters who all want a piece of his fleeting brilliance on earth.
It was a masterpiece, the creature with wings and fury and truth in his bowels. Riggan, Keaton, Birdman, Innaritu. Honesty prevails and bowls us over as we all know exactly what it feels like in some strange way to have your bathrobe stuck in the locking doors of the theatres, right where you stepped out to soothe your frantic soul for a moment with the burning end of a Pall Mall, before you must return to the dramatic performance you are right in the middle of giving. We know what it’s like to abadon our only clothing and shield and walk in our underwear before the jeering masses to get to that place where we hope we still can remember our lines.
We are unmasked, just as Birdman is. We face our critics and ask just as he did that they consider the fragile desperate heart in our chests, how that all we are doing has cost us everything, to think about this before they casually write the review that consigns us to infamy or to the land of the forgotten.
Wow! What a movie. The only one up there deserving Best Picture. And what a joy when Hollywood and the academy get it right. To tell the truth. And not just to create more tales to make themselves and us feel better. But to look in the mirror and to consider our fate. To look not at our dreams which drown and confound us. But to our family’s and friends who whisk behind us as we fly. To grab on to them each before we crash and hit the ground.
That, I think, is the message of this epic tale.
But will we listen?
Or will we try to re-don our own Hero’s outfit? To jump off crazy heights, to pretend we are Icarus without recalling his fate?
