Michael Keaton, the washed up actor who played Batman years ago, plays Riggan Thompson, the washed up actor who starred in three Birdman movies when younger and who is now making a comeback attempt on Broadway with a play that he wrote (adapted from a Raymond Carver short story), is directing and starring in. The movie doesn't just imitate art in having an actor play himself - in a role that may earn the washed up actor an Oscar nomination - but it competes with Broadway as "legitimate" theater - taking us behind the scenes as Birdman goes through the paces of putting itself together as a play - giving us the illusion that it is shot in one long scene - that it has the form of a play instead of a movie - it appears seamless, without cut scenes and multiple takes - while noting that the play, unlike the movie, is an unfinished mess that morphs and changes as it limps towards an opening that could be glorious or gloriously ignominious; upsetting the New York prejudice that film stars aren't actors or confirming it beyond a shadow of a doubt.
One of the many nice things that is captured, then, is the manic quality of living on the edge between despair and elation; powered by the twin engines of the wish to show off and the fear of being exposed, that seems to be at the heart of the narcissistic striving that we all, to some extent, engage in. The artist - and in so far as this movie is art, the actors, the director, and the crew are all engaged in an artistic process - living, at least according to this film, on that edge, and as they portray living on that edge (we would have to see the documentary to know if they are), we fear the edge can't be held and that the movie and the play within it will careen off into something self indulgent and distracting or something simply bad (and there are a few moments where it does this) - that it will collapse and not be art, but schlock. But it maintains that if it doesn't live on the edge between greatness and self indulgence - which it does - then it can't be art.
In psychoanalysis, when you present the work that you are doing with a patient to an audience of analysts, there is nothing more denigrating than for another analyst to say than the work that you are doing is not analysis, just as there could be nothing more devastating than for the critic to predict that she will say (as she promises to in one of the penultimate scenes) that the play is not art. Because she threatens to pan the play out of pride - for New York - for Broadway - for the art of serious acting; something that the star-making power of Hollywood corrupts absolutely - at least in her mind; it is not a true criticism of the actor or his art. So he is, in some weird sense, protected from her criticism, but he does not experience this in the movie. What he expresses is anger at her - and fear that her review will ruin him - he says financially, but we know that it is more that he will feel himself to be false and small - and, like the character he plays in the play within the movie, that he will not exist anymore without the play's success, which he believes depends on her to determine.
The irony of the critic's criticism is that no one knows the corrosiveness of becoming the star more than he; he battles with his Birdman persona - the part of himself that is not the role but the Birdman himself - the one who has superpowers - on a daily basis. Indeed, in the wake of the critic's devastating news, he goes on a bender that is followed by a full fledged immersion in the experience of being Birdman - he and we are convinced that he is the superhero. This star turn distracts him from the task at hand - which is not to be Birdman, but to portray someone who, it turns out, is quite vulnerable; not protected by the magic shield of being the star or the superhero. To translate that back into the world of the psychoanalyst - it can be difficult for the analyst who can create analytic magic and perform a true analysis to know that he is not the magician - to know that the magic is occurring in the mind of the analysand - just as the magic of the movie/theater is actually occurring in the mind of the viewer who is watching the film/play, not in the hands of the actor who is calling that experience up.
So, the perfect foil for Riggan is Mike - played with incredible manic zeal by Ed Norton. Mike is Broadway. He lives for the stage. Riggan's superpowers - he can apparently levitate and perform telekinesis - only occur when no one is looking. When people come into the room, it no longer looks like he is directing things to fly into the walls, but that he is throwing them. Mike is the exact opposite - has no power off stage, out of sight of others. He needs to be in front of an audience to express his superpowers - which are considerable - his performance is stunning. Concretely, though, he hasn't been able to get it up with his girlfriend, who also plays his lover in the play within the movie, for months - but does so for the first time when they are on stage and he proposes having sex with her - and attempts it in front of a full house - emerging from beneath the covers with a very apparent erection, as Riggan bursts in finding him in bed, in the play, with Riggan's ex - which leads directly to Riggan's suicide and the end of the play.
We witness the suicide scene three times - once after the erection, again the next night after Riggan gets locked out of the theater with only his underwear on, has to run through Times Square to enter the theater from the lobby and do the scene as he walks down the aisle - and on opening night, when he knows that the Times critic is going to crucify him. Each iteration becomes more real as we see the convergence of the player and the role.
We learn more about Riggan in part by seeing the interactions between he and Sam, his daughter, played by Emma Stone. Sam's mother divorced Riggan over one of his many infidelities - yet she remains connected to him and cares about him. She also cares that Sam connects with her father in ways that Sam never has. So Sam is working as Riggan's assistant on the play. And she has a scene with Riggan where she points out the double edged nature of fame. She begins with a task that she learned in rehab - she shows him a roll of toilet paper with pen marks for each thousand years and the last sheet contains all of human history. So what Riggan does, she maintains, will be of little consequence. On the other hand, she points out, he is so antediluvian that he does not have a twitter account nor even a Facebook account; he is too outmoded to be a star. So, even though on the grand scale Riggan can't do anything that will matter, he is also incapable on the scale that she, and he, know and measure. (Of course Riggan's underwear clad romp through Times Square will be you-tubed and trend and be reported in the news, showing that there is some play left in the old boy). Later in the film, almost to underscore that he is not the guy - that Mike is the guy - she takes up with Mike after Mike's girlfriend dumps him, in part over the sex on stage incident (fear not for the girlfriend, she takes up with Riggan's girlfriend, the fourth actor in the play within the movie - everybody sleeps with everybody in this film...) and now we have another iteration of Mike being in bed with someone that Riggan would have love him. The tragic element is that Riggan can't quite see that the love he so desperately desires will come more easily if he actually sees and appreciates the person his daughter is becoming, as Mike does, rather than to focus on making himself the person she will desire.
The play is a tragedy, but would Hollywood tolerate that in a movie about itself and its ambitions? Can the analyst accept his own limitations? In one of the taped analyses that I review as part of my research, the analyst is older. He is confronting his own mortality. And this leads him to focus on his superpowers instead of the experience of the patient. Weirdly, despite knowing that the analyst was not doing analysis, we rated his work quite highly. Why? I think there are many reasons - perhaps including our own wishes to avoid identifying with the aging analyst - but I think the dominant reason is that he was practiced enough to engage, technically, in the analysis. He was following the rules. But the music wasn't happening. I fear that this film disappoints because it does not confront the malignant nature of this kind of narcissism - this self love that occludes making real connections. Or maybe it succeeds in showing us how we live in a culture - whether that is the culture of Hollywood or the microculture - in my case the psychoanalytic subculture - that promises us superpowers if we dedicate ourselves to the terrible master that each of our particular cultures can become.
Hollywood has long told us - since at least Citizen Kane - that the star is immortal - and that the tragic wound - the remembered happy world that our ambition and the ambitions that others have for us has dragged us from - makes us appealing characters. Orson Welles, though, had the courage to face the idea that all of his talent - all of his charisma - all of his magic does not allow him to change the fundamental parameters - and that these very gifts are also despotic and demanding tyrants who will, sometimes even despite our best efforts, destroy our efforts to be human as we are lured into being superhuman. What this film articulates, perhaps better even than Kane, is the way in which the adoration of the other - whether an individual, a critic, or an audience - is so necessary to maintain self cohesion. That the essence of narcissism, even in its most difficult forms, is not the armor that it provides, but the vulnerability to annihilation, an annihilation that none of us - actor, analyst or Indian chief, can avoid. This movie's answer to the dilemma is to keep working on the armor. I think it is more difficult, more humbling, but also more likely to bear fruit to deal with the universe as it is - and to live with rather than deny the resulting vulnerability to annihilation that we do, in fact, inevitably face.
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