by Herbert H. Stein
In the spirit of full disclosure, I must tell you that I may have a particularly subjective view of the film, Birdman, as I set about commenting on it to you. Obviously, all examinations of film have some subjectivity assumed, but in this case I seem to be outside the mainstream. I say it because I was totally baffled to learn that the film is widely considered to be a comedy. It is described as such in reviews and, as if to codify the point, it was nominated for a Golden Globe award for comedy.
I did not experience it as a comedy at all. I found myself in rapt attention in a continual state of tension, anxiety, anticipation, even worry over what would happen next. When it was over, I texted that I had just seen it and didn’t know if I loved it or hated it.
Much later, as I was writing this discussion, I recalled that this had happened to me once before, many years ago, with the film, Dr. Strangelove. As a young man who had grown up with the fear of a nuclear attack, reinforced by television warnings and duck and cover exercises in school replete with instructions about leaving to go home after the nuclear attack we had somehow survived, the comedy of a madman directing the launching of weapons and of an accident that resulted in the destruction of the world did not strike me as funny. I learned then that humor often plays upon an edge of anxiety, relieving us if it remains within bounds we can tolerate, but only feeding on our fear if it comes too close to being real. The difference between my reac- tion to Birdman and my reaction to Strange- love is that even as I was watching Strangelove, I could see the intended humor. With Birdman I cannot to this moment see what in it was intended as humor.
That difficulty may have to do with my training and profession. Birdman thrusts us, the viewers, into a mind that is struggling with psychosis, violence and suicidality. The character is Riggan Thomson, an actor turned director who has written and is directing a serious drama based upon a short story by Raymond Carver which is about to go into previews on Broadway. He is trying to resurrect his career and his image with this play after his movie career has typecast him as a cartoonish super-hero, Birdman.
But the problem for the film, as for me, is that he is also struggling internally with this identity issue. From the outset, we hear him arguing with a voice presumably coming from within himself, the voice, we gradually learn, of his alter ego, Birdman. What is more, we see that at times he appears to believe that he has Birdman’s special powers, particularly the powers of telekinesis and flight. That, along with a heightened irritability and tension, strongly suggests that he is in a manic state and is moving in and out of psychotic thinking. As a clinician, it’s hard for me to laugh at his illness, particularly since his mania is fraught with so much tension, rage, anxiety and depression. I could easily see him as a patient, like some I’ve seen, who is on the verge not only of falling into complete psychosis, but also of violence and potential suicide. That alone would have me on the edge of my seat and holding it tightly as the plot advances and we see Riggan standing at the edge of a roof of a building, seemingly ready to jump.
We do not experience Riggan’s struggle with psychosis from the outside, with sympathy and concern for a fellow human being. The film thrusts us into his mind. It does not pres- ent his psychotic thinking in the third person. In fact, as the film opens, we see a man hover- ing above the ground—not a man who thinks he is hovering above the ground—his back to us, naked except for his jockey shorts, cross legged, back straight, in quiet contemplation in what we will soon learn is his dressing room. And, we are not told that he is hearing a voice, we hear the voice, the first words spo- ken in the film, a gravelly voice coming from the screen, saying, “How did we end up here? This place is a fucking dump. Smells like balls. We don’t belong in this shithole.”1
We soon see Riggan’s telekinetic power. Sitting in his dressing room, he makes a motion with his hand sending an object from his dressing table flying across the room, smashing against the wall. At one point, the voice says, “They have no idea.”
Sure, we can make the assumption that this is Riggan’s fantasy. But we are in a movie the- ater, a place where people can fly, where they can have superhuman powers. It gives us just enough ambiguity to create that kernel of uncertainty about what is real, an uncertainty that must infect the mind of someone like Riggan, struggling on the edge of psychosis. Adding to that sense of uncertainty are “coincidences” that feed the psychosis. There is a strong suggestion that through his telekinesis, Riggan can unleash a dangerous rage. We see him in a rehearsal in which four people are seated around a kitchen table, engaged in a dialogue which is a rough reproduction of the main scene in Carver’s story. He is frustrated by the poor acting of the other man in the scene, Ralph, something which has been brewing. Riggan looks up at a heavy piece of machinery, which moments later comes crashing down on the actor’s head, leaving him unconscious and bleeding. In the excited aftermath, Riggan makes a comment that it wasn’t an accident, and talks about the man’s terrible acting and the fact that his incapacitation (we later see him crippled) is a good thing for the play.
As if to further emphasize Riggan’s powers, he and his attorney and co- producer talk about finding a new actor for the play when Riggan suggests that the door may open at that moment and such an actor will step in. That doesn’t happen, exactly, but one of the actresses comes in just then and tells them that a well known stage actor, Mike Shiner, is available to take the role.
Add to that a manic quality that infects the entire film. It starts with the soundtrack, marked by steady, although slightly uneven drum beats. At a couple of points we actually see the drummer as Riggan walks past him on the street or even in the hallways of the theater.
Events quickly get out of control, driven in part by other characters, particularly the new actor, Mike Shiner, who replaces Ralph. He creates a diversion in the first preview in front of an audience, complaining in the middle of the kitchen scene that the gin in his glass is watered down and that the entire set is phony. Mike starts throwing things, bringing the entire set down in a crash. In a later scene in which he is supposed to be under sheets making love to a woman, he proposes that they really make love and develops an erection, bringing laughter from the audience moments later. His extreme form of method acting gives increasing tension to the production.
There is Riggan’s daughter, Sam, recently out of drug rehab, who sits on the edge of a balcony overlooking the street and plays truth or dare with Mike, at one point acting out his dare to lean over and spit on the head of someone down below. Their flirtation adds another level of excitement and tension as they kiss and embrace above the set while her father and others are rehearsing.
Riggan and Mike get into a wrestling match in between performances. Riggan is accidentally locked out of the theater in his under- wear during a performance and enters the theater practically naked to assume his role in the final scene of the play while the audience watches in bewilderment. All to the intermittent beat of the drum.
And through all this, we go through highs and lows, rages and suicidal behavior, with Riggan. In a later scene, which seems a mix of reality and fantasy, he stands at the edge of a roof of a building while a worried young man tries to ease him down from the edge. Suddenly, he does jump off, but instead of falling to his death, he flies down the street, seemingly moving from depression to mania. At times we see him flying, at times we look down through his eyes. Perhaps more gullible than the average viewer, I was momentarily confused, unsure if the film was suddenly bursting into fantasy or depicting his fantasy, and, if so, was he actually hurtling towards the ground? This double focus is momentarily resolved when we see him landing in front of the theater and walking in and then see a cab driver chasing after him, demanding his fare. At least for the moment, we have a structure, a reality. He has been imagining himself flying, but was actually in a cab headed to the theater. For that moment, we are watching his delusion from a safe distance.
But that resolution is temporary, and not totally reassuring. The play within the play ends in a scene in which Riggan’s character points a gun at his head and fires. In the last version of that scene, we see him fire a live bullet at his head, with real blood spurting as he falls, only to see him awaken in a hospital bed in what appears to be a happy ending. Left alone in the room by friends and family (the psychiatrist in me was going crazy at the incompetence of leaving a suicidal man alone in a hospital room with an open window), he calmly goes out the window. Moments later, we see his daughter look out the window with concern, only to smile as she looks upward, presumably seeing her father hovering above. Through the ambiguity of perspective along with the multiple events and special effects, Birdman does not merely allow us to witness a man in a mental crisis, but puts us inside his head. As we watch the film, we are thrown into a state of uncertainty about the film’s reality and in effect of our own at that moment. We are as close as we can be through art to experiencing ourselves moving in and out of psychosis, with a strong awareness of at times exhilaration, agitation and a sense that we might be driven to something cataclysmic.
What are we to make of all this?2
The film takes us through certain key scenes in Riggan’s play in rehearsals, previews with live audiences, and the play’s official opening on Broadway. The final scene, in which Riggan’s character, Eddie, enters a motel room to confront his former girlfriend and her new lover, is repeated three times in the film. With each repetition, we hear Riggan say, “I don’t exist. I’m not even here. I don’t exist. None of this matters,” before putting a gun to his head and pulling the trigger.
Grinstein (1956) and Balter (2006) have shown that like a dream within a dream (Freud, 1900), a play within a play can give direct expression to a central disturbing idea while disguising it as a bit of fiction. In this case, we have not only the repetition to support that, but also earlier dialogue from the film in which Riggan’s sense of unimportance and non-existence is affirmed by another character in the film, his daughter, Sam. She tells him that his play is aimed at “a thousand rich, old white people whose only real concern is gonna be where they go to have their cake and coffee when it’s over,” and finishes, “You’re the one who doesn’t exist. You’re doing this because you’re scared to death, like the rest of us, that you don’t matter. And you know what? You’re right. You don’t. It’s not important. You’re not important. Get used to it.” (my italics)
Sam announces not simply that Riggan is “scared to death … that you don’t matter,” but says that in this he is “like the rest of us,” implicitly including “us,” the audience. We also feel the desperate fear that we don’t mat- ter. It helps explain the continual turning to fantasy, delusion, throughout the film to regain a sense of importance.
And whence comes this fear? We go back to the scene, to the dialogue just before Riggan expresses his existential hopelessness. He is a woman’s former lover, Eddie, barging in upon the woman he still loves and her current lover, who are making love in a motel room. Pointing a gun threateningly, he says, “What’s wrong with me? Why do I end up having to beg people to love me?”
Leslie: Ed. Eddie. Please… Give me the gun. Just look at me. I was drowning. I was not capable of—You deserve to be loved. You do.
Riggan: I just wanted to be what you want- ed. Now I spend every fucking minute praying to be someone else. Someone I’m not. Anyone…
Mike: Put down the gun, Ed. She just doesn’t love you anymore.
Riggan: You don’t, do you? Leslie: No. Riggan: And you never will… Leslie: I’m sorry.
Riggan: I don’t exist. I’m not even here. I don’t exist. None of this matters.
The play within a play tells us that the desperation comes from seeking a love that isn’t there. In an earlier part of the play, Leslie’s character describes Eddie as being possessed by a passionate, violent love.
“Okay, well, he did beat me up one night. He dragged me around the living room by my ankles, yelling “I love you, I love you, bitch.”
This, too, is reinforced elsewhere in the film, in dialogue between Riggan and his ex-wife, Sylvia, who we come to see he still loves. In answer to his question, “Why did we break up?” she tells him. “You threw a kitchen knife at me… and one hour later you were telling me how much you loved me.” She adds, “Just because I didn’t like that ridiculous comedy you did with Goldie Hawn didn’t mean I did not love you. But that’s what you always do. You confuse love with admiration.”
Through these bits and pieces scattered amidst the riot of the film, we are given hints of an existential despair based upon a basic sense of futility at getting love and admiration (mirroring?) from the one person from whom we need it. The play within a play even gives us a fleeting hint of the importance of the infant’s gaze upon the mother.
Riggan (playing a different role here) delivers a monologue about an elderly couple badly injured in an auto accident, lying in the hospital in body casts.
“The husband was depressed. Even when I told him his wife was gonna pull through, he was still depressed. So, I got up to his mouth hole and asked him, and he told me it was because he couldn’t see her through the eye holes. Can you imagine? I’m telling you, the man’s heart was breaking because he couldn’t turn his goddamn head and see his goddamn wife.”
This need to win the love and approval of an unaffirming, indifferent mother is expressed directly in the film. Riggan’s attempt to redeem himself through the play, to be some- one other than a cartoon character, to be someone, comes down to his winning the approval of the New York Times theater critic, Tabitha. She is seen in a Broadway bar, a cold, imperious figure who admires the method actor, Mike Shiner, who is devoted to the theater, but despises Riggan, the Hollywood actor. She tells him that there is nothing he can do, that she will kill his play. She is clearly the embodiment of the unattainable mother whose love and admiration are so desperately needed.
In the end, Riggan wins her admiration, if not her love, by shooting himself on stage. In the sequel to his on stage suicide attempt, he hears her approving review of his act of heroic realism under the title, “The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance,” the alternate title for the film. Only self destruction can get the atten- tion of such a mother.
And what of the ending? We see Riggan shoot himself and we seemingly lose consciousness with him, the screen melting into confused frozen images, only to awaken to a “reality” in which he has seemingly survived. But in his survival, he has shot off his nose and had it replaced with a more beak-like nose, subtly blending him with the Birdman of his fantasy life. We see him, left alone in his hospital room (by a totally irresponsible hospi- tal staff and administration), opening the window and stepping out, not to be seen by us again. As the film ends, his daughter, Sam reenters the room, looks out the window, first glancing down—we half expect a look of horror on her face, but no—she finally glances upward and smiles, suggesting that she sees her father hovering above, with all the power of the Birdman. Ultimately, the film gives us a delusional fantasy as the only alternative to existential despair and self-annihilation. No, I was not laughing.
Balter, Leon (2006) Nested ideation and the problem of reality: dreams and works of art in works of art. Psychoanalytic Quarterly 75:405- 445.
Freud, S. (1900) The Interpretation of Dreams. S.E.
Grinstein, Alexander (1956)The dramatic device: a play within a play. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 4:49-52.
- Dialogue from the film is taken either directly from the audio or from the screenplay published online.
- I want to be clear that I am not suggesting that the formulation offered for this film is an explanation of the underlying causes or dynamics of bipolar disorder.
Published originally in the PANY Bulletin, Spring, 2015.