Birdman in my opinion is the best crash course to cinematography. What i want to do here is something different than usual. Im gonna provide my theory as to the meaning behind birdman.
Heavy spoilers ahead. If you haven’t seen the movie go squawk away and watch it
From this point onwards of you haven’t watched the movie you will probably so lost you're gonna have a lousy finale that answers no questions.
So those that have seen the movie probably got pretty weirded out. Riggan has telepathy? He's Birdman? Is the long shot just stylistic flair? He flew away in the last scene? He shot himself? What? Yes my lad. I too was lost for along time (i thought about this movie for about 3 months so yes).
My general theory is that everything that happens in the movie is through how Riggan imagines his life. Its his thought. His imagination. Its his imagination combined with the real world. Like a kid who imagines two monsters fighting on top of buildings when he's on the road. Buildings from reality, monsters not so much. We see evidence of this like when he “flies” back to his studio we see him levitating and blowing up cars but ultimately we see a taxi driver chase him asking him to pay so we know he actually got there by the cab.
Ok, but what does this all mean?
Riggan, is a self centred person. He wants to be the star, he thinks of himself. That’s why we don't always get POV shots as if we were on a gopro. We get shots of his face, his expressions. That’s because at that moment he’s not thinking about what he’s doing but rather how he looks when he is doing something. Like when you’re walking down the street with a kind of flair you’re thinking about how cool you look and think about how others are looking at you. The long shot adds to this because this is how we see the world we don’t have cuts in our view of the world, we open our eyes and boom it's a long shot 24/7. This makes you think about how absolutely self centred he is at times. When he is scolding his daughter for taking drugs he is thinking about if he looks stern and serious instead of if his daughter is listening. This also makes you realise that Riggan isn’t as good as actor as he says he is. I mean the movie reinforces this a couple times, but when actors act they aren’t supposed to be them they are 100% their character. They don’t think about if they look angry they just are. (Just like how in the movie Edward Norton’s character has ed off stage but can get erect on stage cuz he is 100% just another character) This not so good acting makes you realise maybe Riggan was not meant to succeed and adds to tragedy because we know he just can’t make it.
What about all the Birdman stuff? As I said it’s all in his head. And have you noticed when we see Birdman it's always Riggan in the foreground and Birdman at the back? This is because Riggan is thinking about how he is facing his inner demon. So what does Birdman symbolise? To answer this we have to dissect what Riggan’s personality is like and what he wants to be. Riggan wants to be prominent and important. Just like how his daughter (Emma Stone) says he wants to be important and is afraid to be unimportant and forgotten. Riggan wants to be creative and new. Besides creating an entire production himself, the experimental nature of the play he produced is repeated many times, and he refused to do Birdman 4 because then it’s nothing new. Riggan wants to have power. This is basically the whole movie as things spins out of control and destroys him. So what is Birdman? Birdman is what he wants to be. Birdman was groundbreaking and new-experimental, Birdman can destroy buildings-powerful, and most importantly,Birdman is never forgotten.
Now what the hell was going on with that ending? To understand this one must carefully analyse the opening scenes. One, we have a quote before the movie starts “And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so? I did. And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth.” Then we cut to him talking to his daughter. No. No we don’t people forget. We first see two burning streaks crashing to earth. Like a bird. Falling from the heavens. Then we have him fighting with his daughter saying that they don’t have the flowers he wanted. And then during the table read we hear that the character, who is a big failure (who is clearly a mirror of Riggan), “screwed up shooting himself in the mouth”.
Then in the end Boom. He shot himself in the face. The audience claps. The critic, who hates him, walks out. Then we get our very first cut in the entire movie. We cut to the same falling bird, now closer to the ground. A band, some jellyfish, some cosplayers, the stage setting, then boom the ceiling of a hospital. We get to see his wife, who he has had a strained relationship, waiting for him there. His best friend (Galifianakis) is happy for the first time. On tv we see that people all over the country are lighting candles for him. He gets a great review that says he is revolutionary. His daughter visits him, hugs him and gets him the flowers that he wanted. He goes to the toilet, sees he has a new nose because he “shot himself in the nose”. He look like Birdman. He jumps out the window. His daughter comes back and she looks down first, then up, as if her father flew up.
What? I know. Here’s my take.
He is dead. He is in heaven, or the place where he wants to be. He has all the things he wanted. Attention, family, love. But it's just impossible. No way there are vigils all over the country, he’s a washed up actor. No way he got a good review, the critic hates him. The lots of cuts is his life flashing before his eyes. That’s why there is a cut. But this is what he wanted. But then Inarritu also leaves it open and hanging. Did he really fail to kill himself? No. This is just an idea planted in Riggan’s head, that he imagined happened. Did the audience clap? Since it came before the cut? Yes. Riggan succeeded. He just gave up too early and barely got to see the fruits of it. He got what he wanted from this life. He was beloved.
The main rebuttal i have to this theory is that there were some scenes where Riggan was not there to witness, so it’s not in his head. THEY DIDN’T HAPPEN. ALL IMAGINED. This is proven by the two scenes Mike Shiner (Edward Norton) has with Riggan's daughter. When Riggan was jealous of Mike, the latter courted his daughter and got close to her. Later when he was on better terms with Mike, he imagined Mike saying praises about him to his daughter. This is something the real Mike just would not suddenly do. Inarritu masks this by showing a complex character but the genius of Inarritu wouldn’t leave plot thread like that loose and unresolved. Unless Riggan doesn’t care about it anymore and stops imagining it.
So what’s the moral of Birdman? I think the faintest lesson i got was that the pursuit of dreams is tough, if you abandon everything else and then give up before realising it, that is when you are a true failure. You don’t fail when shit hits the fan. You fail when you don’t try to dodge the shit. But that’s a personal lesson. I don’t think Inarritu meant for a lesson. This is a story about a man. Not a theme or an idea. A man whose life is just a mess and has the perfect downward spiral.
And it’s perfect.
HA! IT FITS DOESN’T IT. I THINK I FOUND IT. I THINK I UNDERSTOOD BIRDMAN!
P.s. about the hidden cuts in the movie, i think they are a visual metaphor too. In the first 45 minutes you can barely point out where Inarritu cuts to make it seem like a long shot. After that he uses some painfully amateurish obvious ones, getting more obvious as it progresses. Not because he’s a bad director halfway through the movie but because the low quality cuts show the deterioration of Riggan’s mind.
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