Birdman is an
interesting experiment, consistently bordering on brilliance, which somehow
makes me loathe Inarritu even more. Five minutes into the film, after a series
of letters spell out a quote, a meteor rushes the earth and Keaton meditates
while floating, I was ready to walk out, convinced that Inarritu had done it
again, but I stayed. That may be a strange way to start, so allow me to crank
it up a bit more: People have been predicting the death of cinema since its
inception; at first, it was a mechanical death: the idea that films were a
novelty which would not survive the next attraction. Once it became obvious
that cinema was here to stay, the metaphorical death notices began. Godard has said
cinema is dead at least a dozen times over the last week, every critic predicts
the end to be near whenever there's some sort of advancement and, more
literally, Agnes Varda depicted M. Cinema laying on his death bed and dying on
his 100th birthday. I guess this is my jumping off point, no pun intended:
Inarritu is not saying anything that Varda didn't say twenty years ago, but
Varda said it; Inarritu was too afraid to do so!
Birdman is, at its
root, a film about the death of cinema, with Inarritu becoming an unwitting
accomplice in the demise. Inarritu uses this film to say "fuck cinema,
fuck cinematic theory, fuck cinematic criticism, fuck cinema!" To begin
with, there is a certain cinematic specificity that is intentionally not
adhered to: within medium specificity, this film places three different media
above the cinema. The first is theatre: the content is theatrical, but so is
the form. Cinema tends to follow a system wherein time is consistent at the
deficit of space. A million shots may place themselves in every corner of a
room, but, in a narrative, the million shots, when placed together, will simply
constitute a million continuous seconds. In this film, with its single "continuous"
take (more artificial than Hitchcock's in Rope),
the space remains consistent with a ludicrously inconsistent temporal effect
resulting from it. Moving from one corner of a room to another will introduce
new characters, a quick tour through the labyrinths of the set leading from day
to night. Space becomes submissive to time, like in the theatre, where a quick
turn of the unmoving stage will create a new day.
Then, the beat poetry turns this play-film into an unusual
musical of sorts, wherein the words are no longer cinematic. As the
percussionist plays off to the side, the words change tone, they go up and
down, high and low, fill silences: the words are no longer of importance, the
cinematic words have, again, become submissive to the beat, to the poetry, to
the sounds of the streets. After all, it is the streets which, supposedly,
create the sound that infests the set and the play-film. The play-film is
ultimately about seeing the best minds of one's generation destroyed by
madness, starving, hysterical, naked. Poetry has, in the past, been
successfully transported to film: Jarman's films were frequently poetic, in
particular War Requiem and Blue. The Song of Lunch managed to actually create a narrative screenplay
out of a poem, but, again, the poem was twisted to fit the body of film, not
the other way around. Another medium swallows up the cinema.
Finally, painting or sculpture invades this already
vulnerable play-poem-film through the "beautiful" cinematography of
Emmanuel Lubezki. One aspect of cinema that all theorists thought to be the
most cinematic was the close-up, the ability to show the face better than
anyone else can. This play-poem-film decides to disprove that by creating
grotesque close-ups that resemble something between the paintings of Egon
Schiele and the distorted sculptures of Evan Penny; one scene in particular
made Emma Stone look like a simulacrum, existing without any indexicality! Inarritu betrays the cinematic form and medium, selling off all
of its benefits to other media, resulting in Birdman, the play-poem-painting-sculpture-film that comes forth
from his experimentation.
Already, Inarritu has created a film that has totally
removed cinema (or at least diminished it) from the final product. He then
spends the rest of the film dismantling the society around cinema. How does he
do this? There are a variety of not-so-subtle moments where this dismantling is
apparent. In one discussion, Roland Barthes is mentioned, but he is laid by the
wayside in favour of "pig semen" and talks of Birdman. Riggan's
mirror has a bit of paper attached to it which reads "a thing is a thing,
not what is said about it", a clear indictment of criticism, in this case
film criticism, perhaps also another stab of Barthes' "Death of the
Author", claiming that a thing is only what it is at conception, at the
insistence of the author, and nothing else: cinematic journalism, cinematic
criticism, cinematic theory, all placed aside, unimportant to Inarritu and his
refusal of cinematism.
Then, Riggan's identity comes into question. Riggan is an
original who no longer has work, portrayed by Michael Keaton, the original
cinematic Batman who no longer has work. The similarities between the concepts
of a Batman and a Birdman do not need to be discussed, as they are plainly
obvious. The film (the play-poem-painting-sculpture-film) takes place near
Times Square, in order to allow Riggan to constantly run into the intellectual
property of other filmmaking studios. The screen is frequently filled with the
images of transformers, superheroes and other mass-produced, entirely sellable
beings from popular blockbusters that have come since the last Batman/Birdman
film was made (1992) and Keaton/Riggan's career ended. The television is
showing Robert Downey Jr., whose career flourished after taking on a superhero
role, following in the footsteps of Keaton, with Riggan no longer a well-hidden
metaphor. With Batman the property of others and Birdman all anyone can talk
about, Keaton/Riggan is stuck in this endless loop, one which, unless this
Inarritu play-poem-painting-sculpture-film succeeds, he will never be able to
leave.
So, why is any of this important? Because, in one final
"insult" to cinema, Inarritu has personified cinema in Batman! Cinema
is often personified as someone with dignity, someone who feeds and cares for
us viewers, someone who would make a good parental figure. Inarritu portrays
cinema as Batman, the same old crap before said crap was old! Cinema is
portrayed as the first step in its own destruction. Inarritu made this film as
yet another cry of "cinema is dead and you have killed it; long live the
cinema". That is, of course, the first problem with anyone complaining
about the death of cinema: the implication or insistence that it was someone
else and not them. If cinema really is dead or dying, Inarritu and his tired
antics are at least partially responsible; it's strange that one of the most
exciting films about the cinematic condition came from someone so boring!
There's also the fact that he decries modern cinema by making a superhero film,
but that is too blatant and obvious to necessitate discussion here. In Varda's
film, M. Cinema was laying in his death bed: Cinema was dying. Here, cinema is
senile, cinema is demented, cinema is slowly but surely losing his mind. The
world has abandoned him and he doesn't realize it. That is a bold stance:
cinema as lunatic rather than cinema as diseased, afflicted by unnamed
disorders. Of course, he (referring to cinema) does everything he can to stay
relevant. He writes in superpowers for himself, he flies, he has visual
effects, he writes in a hot lesbian scene and he even shoots everything in one long take (again, extremely
artificial). None of this is enough, though: the world is changing and cinema
is being replaced by new media, by cell phone cameras, by youtube, by giant
electronic billboards and by its original enemies, television and theatre.
Cinema cannot continue and he is dying!
So, the death of cinema: not a particularly novel concept,
but always a brave concept to follow. What is wrong with the direction? Why
loathe Inarritu? Because he is a coward!
This film is about the death of cinema: either cinema lives or he dies. There
is one answer: is cinema salvageable or is he laying dead in a gutter
somewhere? Inarritu spends the entirety of the third act, in his magic realist
mode, throwing Birdman off roofs, putting bullets in him, having him jump out
windows and yet, he continues to live: certainly, this is a continuation of the
artifice present in the whole film, but for once, I demanded an answer.
Cinema/Riggan/Keaton/Birdman/Batman threw himself off of a
balcony in a state of delusion, clearly in the real world due to the
interference of others, but then he flew, he flew across the city, ending
up...getting out of a cab, back in reality. He shot himself in the head with a
gun in the real world (well, on a stage in the real world) and ended up blowing
off his nose and living with zero actual neural damage. Finally, he throws
himself out of the window (it is pretty obvious at this point that cinema's
disorder may be suicidal tendencies) and the result is left up in the air. This
is, no questions about it, an act of cowardice. This is a film that takes place
in the real world, Cinema/Riggan/Keaton/Birdman/Batman a product of his
surroundings, driven mad by the inadequacies of life. If his daughter sees him
fly (or whatever that ending was supposed to signify), the whole film results
in the work of a man who went out of his way to deconstruct cinema, bring it to
its knees and run away screaming as soon as the cinema began to bleed. The
cowardice may have resulted in something brilliant: perhaps the daughter of
cinema, whatever she may be, has come to lead us on a new direction, but this
cowardice is still unforgivable! Birdman
ends up becoming the story of a doom-predicting prophet who ran home at the
first sound of a trumpet.
