On Birdman, the Death of Cinema and the Cowardice of Inarritu

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.