Birdman, or The Virtue of Ignorance

As fate so often plays out, a chain of completely random choices concerning what movie to see turned into an absolute feast for my mind. A different movie was actually planned; a typical Hollywood action/drama, but obstacles of timing and potential crowd had me looking elsewhere, which lead me to an arthouse movie playing at the Belcourt titled “Birdman”, and as it turned out was precisely what this mind secretly longing for, unvarnished contemplation. Long before the closing credits began scrolling, I felt emotionally bludgeoned after witnessing the gritty portrayal of the protagonist and his attempt to outrun or somehow outmaneuver the personal demons on his trail.

Right from the beginning, before getting even fifteen minutes into the movie, I was blown away by the method of filming, because at many points, the story felt as if it were one long scene that continued on regardless of the staging. For instance, instead of a scene being filmed with different cameras placed to capture each actor, separately, then edited together to create a coherent conversation, this movie was mostly filmed with a mobile camera that moved around the actors while the scene unfolded, which created an intimacy that was palatable. The effect was that I felt present with them on stage. The actors were acting, but I felt like a member of the film crew there with the actors. And when a scene ended, it didn’t actually end because the mobile camera simply following the actors as they walked away, down the hallway or up a flight of stairs toward the next scene. It was an incredible experience watching scenes unfold this way.

The story itself centered on an aging actor, Riggan Thompson, whose fame was built years earlier playing “Birdman”, a superhero in a string of blockbuster movies. Now, stepping into the twilight of his career, he decides to write, direct and star in his first Broadway play. It was quite an ambitious plan but was plainly an attempt to reclaim the relevance that his career had lost. Not only did he want to remind the public that he still existed, but to also show them there was more to him than a man in a Bird suit. There is also a poignant slice of irony with casting Michael Keeton in the lead role since he has also battled for  relevance as an actor, certainly over the past twenty years, even playing a superhero himself years ago as Batman.

Throughout the film, we are constantly aware of a voice speaking to Riggan, guiding him through a maze of emotional landmines. Then as the pressure began mounting to get his play ready for opening night, with everything in his personal and professional life beginning to escape his control, that voice becomes more emphatic. That’s when we learn the voice is his alter-ego, Birdman, Riggan’s constant reminder of himself as a famous movie star, and it belittles anyone who attempts to marginalize that version of his identity, even Riggan himself.

In a particularly poignant scene, after a deflating altercation with another actor, Riggan storms up to his dressing room and explodes in frustration, smashing everything within sight, wrestling in a vain attempt to silence that voice, which only prompts his Birdman alter-ego to turn up the heat.

Riggan: Breathing in, I am calm. Breathing out, I ignore my mental formations. This is a mental formation. This is a mental form—

Birdman: Stop that shit. I am not a mental formation. I am “you”, asshole.

Riggan: Leave me alone.

Birdman: You were a movie star, remember? Pretentious, but happy.

Riggan:  I was not happy.

Birdman: Ignorant but charming. Now you are a tiny bitter little shit.

Riggan: Shut up! Stop whining! I was miserable!

Birdman: Yeah. But fake miserable. Hollywood miserable. What are you trying to prove? Huh? That you’re an artist? You’re not.

Riggan: Fuck you!

Birdman: Fuck you, coward! And fuck those critics that made you quit. Our franchise grossed billions worldwide

Riggan: And billions of flies eat shit every day! So what? Does that make it good? And I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but that was 1992! Look at me! I’m fucking disappearing! I’m the answer to a fucking trivial pursuit question. What part of that don’t you get? You’re fucking dead.

Birdman: We are not dead. We’re—

Riggan: Stop saying ‘we’! There is no ‘we’. I am not you. I’m Riggan fucking Thomson.

Birdman: No. You’re Birdman. Because without me, all that’s left is “you”. A sad, selfish, mediocre actor, grasping–It’s always ‘we’ brother.

Flag that, because it is fundamental to unlocking this entire drama; Riggan’s alter-ego, Birdman, has been the only adhesive holding his identity together and is beginning to understand that to the public, and perhaps even to himself, he has become irretrievably tied to a version of himself that no longer existed. His ambition to produce his own “Broadway Play” can therefore be seen as nothing more than his belated attempt to introduce an axe into that relationship.

Truth be told, I believe we can all relate to Riggan’s struggle here, the attempt to shed our old, outdated persona and write a new chapter, or in his case, a new finale into his storyline. It’s a familiar theme, of course, but the power of a well-done redemption story is not in the anticipation of the warm and fuzzy ending as much as the depth and anguish in their struggle to overcome them. If there is no struggle, there is no story.

And it’s in those struggles, somewhere in the dimly lit rooms of our secret selves, where the air is often paralyzingly thick from our own self-regard, there is a battle being constantly waged between the superhero version we imagine of ourselves, and the reality that we suspect is the more accurate portrait. And I believe that psychological battle is ultimately what this movie boils down to. It is a brutally honest view into Riggan’s struggle for relevance, and the esteem he wanted others to regard him. With Riggan’s grip on his ego faltering, we are essentially dropped into his private war room, so to speak, where the hard work is done. There he attempts to plot a course through all the landmines that lay before him.

We all know that room, no one is exempt. Riggan initially imagined that his play would lead to a shower of new found respect and admiration, his “yellow brick road” lined with munchkins singing his praises, but with each new obstacle he is confronted with the agonizing realization that his ‘Oz’ moment was slipping away, revealing a gauntlet of self-belittling terrors to wade through.

It is in that framing that I want to present an incredibly powerful scene, one that effectively begins a domino effect that exposes his desperation. In this scene, Riggan is trying to explain to Sam, his grown daughter (Emma Stone) how important the play is to him, but is confronted instead with a level of brute honesty that he surely wasn’t expecting.

Riggan: It’s important to me! Alright? Maybe not to you, or your cynical playmates whose sole ambition is to end up going viral and who, by the way, will only be remembered as the generation that finally stopped talking to one another. But to me… To me… This is– God. This is my career; this is my chance to do some work that actually means something.

Sam: Means something to who? You had a career before the third comic book movie, before people began to forget who was inside the bird costume. You’re doing a play based on a book that was written 60 years ago, for a thousand rich, old white people whose only real concern is gonna be where they go to have their cake and coffee when it’s over. Nobody gives a shit but you. And let’s face it, Dad, it’s not for the sake of art. It’s because you just want to feel relevant again. Well, there’s a whole world out there where people fight to be relevant every day. And you act like it doesn’t even exist! Things are happening in a place that you willfully ignore, a place that has already forgotten you. I mean who are you? You hate bloggers. You make fun of twitter. You don’t even have a Facebook page. You’re the one who doesn’t exist. You’re doing this because you’re scared to death, like the rest of us, that you don’t matter. And you know what? You’re right. You don’t. It’s not important. You’re not important. Get used to it.

Damn…. what a brutal smack down for an ego to be confronted with, certainly to one already teetering, and at that particular juncture in the movie, it initiates Riggan’s downward spiral. After that kick to the crotch, there is no recovery for him, and the next few scenes only affirms that suspicion. With opening night at hand, with a packed theater, his long-awaited date with reality is finally at hand.

I will stop there and refrain from describing any further scenes, because the movie deserves to be seen and interpreted on its own terms. But yet, there is something about it that won’t allow me move on….and that is its second title.

The main title “Birdman” we all get, of course, but the secondary title, “or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance” continued to circle back, demanding an explanation. It just didn’t make sense to me. I chewed on it for weeks and eventually dropped it because I simply could not find any traction to solving the riddle. But then I happened to re-watch the scene with his daughter mentioned above, and some clarity finally came into a sharper focus.

The “ignorance” referred to is Riggan himself, in a fashion. After that visceral rebuke from his daughter, it occurred to me that Riggan was simply ignorant to his own ignorance. Because he was so wrapped up in his own ego and the self-importance he placed on the success of his play, it never dawned on him just how marginal he had already become.

To my eye, that is the key to understanding its cunningly deceptive second title, because Riggan’s “ignorance” was truly a virtue to him. It was a blind spot that allowed him to reimagine a bold new career move and fueled his desire to reinvent himself. Had he been aware of his true irrelevance with the public, as his daughter so bluntly pointed out, he would have never risked exposing himself so publicly. The fear of giving the public such an unobstructed view into his shortcomings would have kept him silent, docile, and likely very bitter. The cynical, self-preserving alter-ego of Birdman would have taken over, and with it, would have become the dominant version that Riggan would cling to for relevance. And therein lies the true virtue of his ignorance. It allowed him the necessary room to reinvent himself, to attempt something beyond his ‘Birdman’ alter-ego, which indeed was a virtue.

An Afterthought

Not long after believing I had solved the question of the second title, I found myself thinking of Sam’s view of the world once again; that Riggan’s play didn’t matter, that he didn’t matter, that we ourselves, as walking, talking egos, don’t matter…. and suddenly the question got a bit uncomfortable. Of course, framed purely within that scene with her father, Sam was right to push back against his hubris, but I still found her unvarnished assertion to our irrelevance impossible to ignore.

I was reminded of moments I experienced while working at Ford Credit a number of years ago and traveling to Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Las Vegas, and many other major and minor cities, and the single take away that often stood out to me was the sheer number of people everywhere I went. Every city was busting at the seams with traffic clogging its highways, airports crowded with travelers, office buildings staffed to the brim. With each trip, I witnessed an ocean of people all carrying on with their individual lives in near complete isolation to one another. And it was like that everywhere I went.

Even to draw a tighter circle and stick strictly to my own family for my ego’s comfort is a perilous position to hold. Just looking back to my nearest ancestors, for instance, I know virtually nothing about my grandparents, other than vague, ever receding memories of their final years. To their parents, my great grandparents, I know nothing of them, certainly nothing of their daily lives and experiences. Were they descent people, were they indulgent or harsh to their children, to their neighbors? I have no idea. I don’t even know their names. Which clearly suggests that in three generations, I will occupy the same void for my future relatives. It’s all a humbling form of math for an ego to wrestle with.

To frame this in something close to philosophical terms, Nihilism is the term suggested by that math, which was promoted as the closing argument for all philosophical reasoning. It hit the ground in the early 20^th century, not long after Nietzsche had killed God. That is an over-simplification, of course, but it is true that Nietzsche took a flame-thrower to notion that morality was in any way an objective, universal truth, something true across all cultures and societies, and he certainly refused to accept any moral principle on faith, regardless of the reverence it may be enshrined, effectively killing all the Gods.

At a base level, nihilism is the belief that life has no intrinsic meaning, nor is there a purpose to all the drama we endure, and to a point that is certainly correct once we strip away imaginary father-figures. Of course, most people of faith believe that without a God-given morality to instruct us, society will fall apart, just as Dimitri stated in Dostoyevsky’s masterpiece, “The Brothers Karamazov”, “if there is no God, then all is permitted.” Though that is a painfully misguided notion, it is nonetheless a legitimate concern to the masses who make up our various societies. After all, they’ve had a few thousand years of doctrinal propaganda to rest their weary heads on.

Yet as with any polemic, nihilism was destined to face its natural foe, which in this case was the emergence of existentialism. I think of the two as twins separated at birth, because the two actually began from the same ‘blank slate’ that Nietzsche proposed, that there is no God and no objective morality, so where to go from there. From that bleak starting point, nihilists offered very little in the way of a roadmap to escape the labyrinth of our insignificance, and only offered an acceptance of the brute fact. But the Existentialist had an apt response…accepting the brute facts, but nonetheless  promoted our “potential” as human agents as the necessary means to reject their nihilistic gloom.

The bottom line is that nihilism looks ‘out’ at a world that has no meaning to derive its conclusion, while existentialism look ‘inward’ as the necessary starting point, putting its money on each individuals potential to discover meaning from their own experience; the hero’s journey, in other words.

And it’s there that I am reminded of a poignant paragraph from “Henderson, The Rain King”, my favorite book and written by Nobel Prize winner Saul Bellow, which wonderfully captures my own reply to the nihilistic point of view. The quote is spoken by King Dahfu, as he describes to Henderson, in his uniquely African dialect, why he is so excited about the future.

“Sungo (Henderson), listen painstakingly and I will tell you what I have a strong conviction about. The career of our species is evidence that one imagination after another grows literal. Not dreams. Not mere dreams. I say not mere dreams because they have a way of growing actual…..I say not mere dreams. No, birds flew, harpies flew, angles flew, Daedalus and son flew. And so here, it is no longer dreaming and story, for literally there is flying. You flew here, into Africa.  All human accomplishments have the same origin. Imagination is a force of nature. Is this not enough to make a person full of ecstasy? Imagination, Imagination, Imagination. It converts to actual. It sustains, it alters, it redeems……. what Homosapiens imagines, he may slowly convert himself to.

With that framing, I want to add an additional voice to my point here, which I consider the proper bookend to Bellow’s thought. Within their context, the words below are the most sobering lines ever written regarding this battle, and comes directly from its “front lines.” These words come from Victor Frankl, whose observations as a Nazi death camp prisoner plants the defining flag to this whole debate.

“We who lived in the concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, (the freedom) to choose one’s own way.”

With that, perhaps you see, as I do, that what we’re left with is a choice, essentially; a mandate, if you will, to confront the apparent lack of meaning that the non-religious are told to accept. As King Dahfu suggested, “imagination”, not in the service of fantasy, but to imagine new paths for our potential to explore…… the path out of the labyrinth, but it can only be accomplished by not blinking at the challenge presented.

For whatever purpose we choose to make of it, we have each been written into the passion play, and each have the same choice; to live it inspired…. or not. In the war against nihilism, private battles can indeed be won.

So, to circle back to the movie for a moment, my ultimate takeaway is that if we wish to fully assume the identity of our best self and want others to see value there, as Riggan’s character was clearly attempting to do, we also assume the responsibility of validating it. And that is where the hard work begins.