I finally, finally got around to watching Birdman. It’s the kind of movie I felt like I really should watch, but at the same time I kept postponing it because, well… it looked artsy.
I know. It’s a dumb reason. Artsy/literary stories are no worse and no better than those of any other genre. Sturgeon’s Revelation applies to it all: 90% of everything is crap.
Still, I must admit that I’ve grown an aversion towards stories that don’t even look like the author/director tried to pack up the theme in something entertaining. If as movie looks bleak and wins an Oscar or a novel is praised and analyzed to bits by college professors, my alarms go of. This probably won’t be for me.
And it’s dumb, because plenty of good stories fall into that category, and there’s a lot I can learn from them. I know this, which is why I eventually convinced myself to watch Birdman, and, of course, it proved all my expectations wrong.
It was suprisingly entertaining. I wouldn’t label it as comedy, but it did have plenty of scenes that made me chuckle. The story wasn’t a high budget action movie, but costumes and what little CGI it needed were all well made and didn’t disrupt the immersion. Most importantly, though, stuff actually happened. The characters actually acted on their problems. Problems which were far from mundane and boring to begin with and which might have had far reaching consequences within the world of the movie if left unadressed. (Yeah, I know, I have absolutely no prejudice against literary/artsy books and movies.)
All in all, Birdman had the elements of an entertaining story while still belonging to that far away world of artsy movies that focus more on theme than plot, where the conflicts never are about saving the world, and where comedy arise mostly from the absurd.
So, yeah, I really enjoyed watching Birdman, and yet. And yet. As the movie ended, I was left with a feeling of, Huh, was that it?
It took me a while to figure out what it was bothering me about the movie, because it had been surprisingly entertaining after all. Oddly enough, it struck me that it was the treatment of the theme that wasn’t working.
So let’s take a look at Birdman and to figure out how and how not to develop a theme.
(If you haven’t guessed, there’s going to be a lot of spoilers)
Birdman tells the story of Riggan, once a commercially succesfull actor who played the lead in the fictive superhero franchise Birdman. He’s betting all the money he has left on stagging a Broadway play, with himself as writer, director, and lead. He wants to obtain another form of success, the prestige that comes from being lauded by critics and approved by the kind of actors he himself holds in high regard.
Said in another way: Riggan’s core belief is that being lauded by critics and actors he respects will fill the hole in his life in a way commercial success couldn’t.
But where some, ehm… artsy stories might devolve into boring monologues (yeah, no prejudice at all) telling us the theme directly, Birdman does what actually works, it uses the setting and/or side characters to provide different views on the theme.
There’s Jake, Riggan’s agent, who (not surprisingly) thinks commercial success is what really matters, since none of these artsy plays would even exists if they didn’t turn a profit.
Then there’s Mike, the hot shot stage actor, adored by Riggan and critics alike. Not surprisingly either, Mike thinks it’s the prestige that really matters.
Sam, Riggan’s daughter, is of the opinion that commercial, prestigious, or otherwise, none of this acting stuff really matters. There are people with bigger and more important problems out in the real world.
And finally, there’s Sylvia, Riggan’s ex-wife, who offers the opinion that Riggan already had what really mattered, a family, but he sacrificed it in some vain hunt for “success”.
Right. We’re all set and done. We have a protagonist with an interesting conflict and cast of side character set up to build on that conflict and highlight the theme through their different opinions. Everything just roles from here to the end, right? Well, not quite.
The plot does move forward, and it is an interesting plot, but it’s also here that the development of the theme starts to falter. To figure out why, we need to look at Riggan’s conflict with all these other characters.
Let’s look at Jake first. His view directly opposes that of Riggan and they’re the first characters to clash. But it doesn’t escalate into a real conflict. Even though Jake’s of a different oppinion than Riggan, he still supports Riggan’s artsy play; he does whatever he can to help it become commercially viable, asking Riggan to be realistic and helping him steer through all the problems. Also, Riggan already had commercial success, he knows what Jake is offering won’t be the solution to his problems.
The Sylvia character is put in very similar position. She has plenty of talks with Riggan throughout the movie, making it clear that he had a family that adored him but that he never appreciated it, and so he lost them. Yet Sylvia keeps showing up and supporting Riggan when he needs her. No conflict arise between the two of them. Their believes never clash.
Next up is Mike, and at first glance he might offer something more to the theme. He’s in a different position than Riggan, already being a critically acclaimed actor, and the two of them do argue, fist fight even. But it still doesn’t help develop the theme, highlight it, sure, but not develop it.
Their conflict isn’t a result of them disagreeing, because they don’t. Riggan, for some reason, tries to defend his career choices to Mike even though he’s very open in every other scene about thinking that critical acclaim is more important than commercial success. And their fist fight is a result of Mike stealing Riggan’s spot in the news, which is only loosely related to the main plot and theme.
Later, a critic named Tabitha is introduced, and together with Mike she does build on some of the foundation of the theme by showing how absurd Riggan’s hunt for critics’ approval is. The entire success of the show depends on her’s, one person’s, opinion, and she has already decided to trash it before she has even seen it. And she loves everything Mike does, even as we’re shown how far out he really is, how terrible a person he is. But all this happens at the very end.
Tabitha and Mike do help develop the plot, but not nearly as much as they could have. It’s not until the last scene including Tabitha that she has any real impact on Riggan and his core belief, and the two have had very little interaction until then.
The problem here is that none of these characters, aside from Mike and Tabitha at the very end, ever really challenges Riggan’s core belief. There’s no gradual progress where his interactions with the rest of the movie’s casts leads to conflicts which, scene-by-scene, chips away at his idea of critical acclaim being all important. Riggan holds fast to that belief right until the moment Tabitha reveals she’s going to destroy him and his dream no matter if the play turns out to be good or not.
Until then, the movie had been about the hardship Riggan puts himself through to chase this dream, his reasons for doing so, and how absurd a dream really is. But there was very little nuance in the way the movie views the theme, no conflicts to show whether Riggan is right to chase this dream absurd as it is, or there’s some bigger truth he need to realize.
The movie went from being interesting and entertaining but only having progress in form of the plot, not development in the theme until suddenly, BANG, Riggan finally sees how absurd and meaningless it all is and is set free by the revelation.
But wait a minute, how about Sam? She’s the one who’s belief turns out to be right (in that Riggan ends up sharing her belief). Well, Sam is both the best and the worst of the characters when it comes to developing the theme.
Sam does challenge Riggan’s belief. They do have a direct confrontation that is tied directly to the theme. But that thread isn’t picked up again anywhere in the story. It becomes completely irrelevant to the rest of plot, so there’s no real connection from this scene to the climax and the end which try to hammer home the theme. That, and having Sam state her opinion directly is “telling” rather than “showing” what her view is, which makes this the one jarring scene in the movie.
Instead of being a key part of the plot and part of the continuing process of Sam grinding away on Riggan until he realizes that she’s wrong, it becomes a one-off scene. Instead of being shown how their opinions differs, we’re being told very directly in the dialogue. It becomes little better than just having Riggan do a monologue about the theme.
What we end up with is a two-fold problem. Firstly, most of the side characters help highlight what the theme is, but because they don’t come into conflict with Riggan, because they don’t challenge his belief, they’re not working on developing the plot.
Secondly, the characters who do challenge Riggan’s belief, Tabitha and Sam, do so momentarily. There’s no gradual change, no constant conflict. So when Riggan’s opinion do change in the end, it feels abrupt and incoherent.
It seems many people were confused about the ending of Birdman, but I honestly don’t think it’s because of the deliberate ambiguity about whether Riggan commits suicide or is set free from all his worries and flies away. That part of the ending is very clearly shown to be purposely ambiguous.
The real problem, I think, is that the buildup to that ending simply isn’t in the movie, so the ending looses all its meaning.
I hope you found my dissection of Birdman useful. Again, I want to emphasize that I really enjoyed this movie. It was entertaining, and I loved how it added a meta level to it’s story by having Riggan be played by Michael Keaton who once played Batman, Jake be played by Jake Galifianakis who’s had huge commercial success with the Hangover movies, and Mike be played by Edwad Norton who has a bit of a reputation for being difficult to work with himself.
Still, I don’t think the movie worked on every level, and it serves well as an example of how to develop a theme by doing so half-heartedly.
Toby Backman 