“The Unexpected Virtue Of Ignorance”
“Koyaanisqatsi” is a Hopi word, translated as “life out of balance”. The 1982 movie of the same name portrays Western civilization caught in an accelerating trajectory towards disaster. The last scene captures the movie’s intention with an image of utter self-destruction. A space-bound rocket—the epitome of American ambition and pride—explodes in a fireball and then plunges, tumbling in slow motion, along a flaming arc back to earth accompanied by the poignant, insistent music of Philip Glass.
Birdman surprisingly opens up with a similar image.[i] We see a large incandescent body slowly careening across the New York sky for long moments—the first appearance of an anomaly breaking in to our ordinary world. At first it looks like a comet, which is portentous enough, but then the flames suggest a huge meteor entering the atmosphere, or even a version of the 2003 Columbia disaster. It, too, does not bode well!
The plot then takes us deep inside the world of acting and the two major art forms of the USA: movies and theatre. There is even a “play within a play” structure reminiscent of Hamlet, in which both plays mirror each other’s theme. In Hamlet the inner play shows the Prince what he must do—a rehearsal for a necessary decision in life! But when he encounters a similar situation for real, as a participant within the larger play, his courage fails him. Although the protagonist in the inner play finally acts decisively (Pyrrhus slaying Priam), Hamlet cannot transport that knowledge of what he must do into action. This dramatic structure is analogous to that of a dream “within” waking life. The dreamer is portrayed as a player in a drama, and yet, upon waking, the dreamer is often unable to convey any of the dream’s truth into relevant action in life. The dream, or in Hamlet’s case, the inner play, could not penetrate the dreamer’s (or Hamlet’s) waking consciousness enough to affect his course of action or inaction in life.
The inner play of Birdman is a dramatized version of Raymond Carver’s short story, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” which links horrible domestic abuse, alcoholism, despair, and violent suicide with love. It also mirrors the outcome of Carver’s own dissipated life in a way that is encapsulated in a poem on his tombstone, displayed as the epigraph to the entire movie:
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.
As the inner play within the movie, it mirrors the disintegration of protagonist Riggan’s life even as he takes one last leap in the name of love, risking everything to direct and star in his first play on Broadway.[ii]
The deeper layers of meaning that are embedded within the screenplay come into focus when we further compare its structure of “a play within a play” with that of Hamlet. Shakespeare has Hamlet direct the inner play while remaining an observer to that play. By watching the play as an observer in the audience, Hamlet hopes to summon up the courage to act in the way he knew he must. However, he fails to enact the image! In contrast, Riggan both directs and acts in the inner play, along with method actor Shiner and two others. There are several moments in the preview rehearsals, and then in the Opening Night, that give us a hint that the psychological distance maintained in Hamlet, which prevents the reality of the inner play from penetrating Hamlet’s (or the audience’s) consciousness, is dangerously breaking down in Birdman.[iii]
During the previews, we see Shiner, the wild method actor, twice shattering the distance between play and audience, disrupting the plot and generating chaos: he breaks with the script on one occasion and attempts to really rape his “wife” on the stage in another. Furthermore, in the last preview performance, just before Ed, the Carver character (Riggan) is due to enter the final suicide scene, Riggan gets locked out of the theatre, has to walk around the building on the streets of New York in his underpants and wig, and is forced to make his entry through the audience. All these violent incursions from the inner play into the larger reality are met with shock, and then applause.
Finally, it’s Opening night and Riggan knows in advance that Tabitha, an influential theatre critic is going to destroy his play, sending him back into artistic oblivion and financial bankruptcy. He decides to kill himself on stage at the ultimate moment when Ed, the Carver character, commits suicide. Riggan only manages instead to shoot his nose off, spraying blood into the audience.
An artistic breakthrough has occurred![iv] Tabitha could not dismiss the performance. Instead she writes a rave review called, “The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance.” This is a reference to Riggan’s complete lack of experience in theatre, and how such ignorance (i.e. not knowing, uncertainty, leaping past traditional forms, improvisation—a point I will get back to) has led to a breakthrough in art. She acknowledges that a new art form has been produced—ultra realism.
Throughout the movie, on a larger scale yet, another breakthrough is threatening: a breakthrough into insanity! Birdman is Riggan’s movie character, the one that made him famous as a screen star. Riggan became identified with Birdman, as did audiences throughout the Western world and beyond. The Birdman character is also a satirical version of the American eagle, ironically standing for everything that the USA triumphantly valorizes at this time.[v]
In the story, there were three movies of Birdman, all successful, and then Riggan’s career was over. Riggan struggles to distance himself from the movie reality of Birdman and to have a real career as an actor. His efforts fail, and through the cracks in his personality, “the play that is Birdman” breaks through and disrupts the larger play that is Riggan’s ordinary world—to the extent that, in the end, Riggan has only one exit—out the hospital window.
We once again see the mysterious meteor arcing across the sky but, equally mysteriously, we see Riggan’s daughter running horrified to the window and then looking up, first in wonder, and then in delight. We are not shown her vision of things but we are left with the question: did a new art form, or way of being happen, out of the wreckage of Riggan’s life, just as it apparently did with Carver, at the end of his life?
What is the nature of the possible inception or new way of being that takes place from deep within chaos, turbulence, disaster, disintegration, and violence, as shown in the movie? While the movie unsparingly portrays the collapse of an American way of being as configured and preserved in the symbol of that great bird of prey, the American eagle, it also suggests, on several scales of self-similarity, that, from within this apocalyptic end, an inception is taking place—one that has the status of an art form, one that has its source in love, as suggested in Carver’s epitaph.
The hidden structure of “Birdman” is a fractal, an invisible strange attractor that is gathering to itself the chaotic disintegration of traditional art forms, shattered lives, and the way of being of an entire culture. This structure is the self-ordering principle that could engender a new form, an art form that is also a new way of being. We do not see this art form yet but one thing is clear. Its emergence will only come by way of death, as so clearly shown in the fateful moment when Riggan sees his alter ego, that soaring, shining star of American pride and ambition, finally bending his knees in humility before the same porcelain god that we each must submit to on a routine basis every day.
We are given a further hint of the quality of this new art form when we see an anomalous breakthrough occur on yet another, larger scale. The background score is played by a jazz drummer who suddenly appears twice within the play, once on the streets of New York where Riggan spontaneously throws some coins to him, and once in a rehearsal room of the Broadway theatre. This nod from Riggan to the jazz drummer whose music underscores the entire movie, suggests a dramatic acknowledgement of the singular importance of improvisation in a time of chaos where tradition and predictability are no longer possible guiding principles into the unknown future.
[i] Birdman (2015)
[ii] Riggan is the movie protagonist, who previously starred as, and becomes identified with, a comic book hero—Birdman.
[iii] Another appearance of the anomaly (fictional reality penetrating into empirical reality).
[iv] An anomalous rupture breaking down the distance between audience and play.
[v] The American eagle in its predatory stance is the symbol that gathers all the current practices of American society and gives meaning and coherence to all its cultural activities.