What is it with back-stories? Every self-respecting superhero seems to need one and preferably the darker the better. The origin of this and the origin of that, why can’t they just be? Who said we needed to head shrink every vigilante who flung on a mask and a cape? What would Freud have given to whisper in their superhuman ears? Did “Birdman” ride that blazing comet to earth, a flaming Phoenix born again to save humanity from itself?
Twenty years ago “Birdman” disappeared from the public eye, hung up his wings and left the superhero business to the Hollywood Franchisers. After 9/11 they needed heroes again to build those towers back into the heavens. They upped the game, brought in reinforcements and saturated the market, dazzling audiences with the beautifully banal. Poor old “Birdman” thought franchises were for fast food tie-ins, not the cultural domination of every child on the face of the planet.
Our feathered freedom fighter worked alone and turned down millions to come out of retirement. Like the Watchmen he bucked the trend and sold us the story we really wanted to hear, what happens to superheroes when they’ve had their day, past their sell-by date? “Birdman’s” saga of fading power and the terror of becoming obsolete in the public eye could be the missing chapter of Marco Mancassola’s critique of American culture, Erotic Lives of the Superheroes.
“Birdman” is anything but erotic. From the first shot he levitates in his underpants. No he’s neurotic, self-obsessed and chaotic. He has more than one alter ego to cover his tracks, a spilt personality with a split personality. Is he Riggan Thomson the Hollywood has-been who starred as “Birdman” in the early 90s? Or is he Michael Keaton the thinking Tim Burton’s Johnny Depp who growled at us in “Batman” over that Prince soundtrack? Could he be the writer/director/actor of a Broadway adaptation of a Raymond Carver play striving for acceptance, fending off his inevitable oblivion for a few months longer?
The odds are stacked against him. He’s surrounded by his greatest foes on all sides. Mike is a preening stage actor, a superior arsehole powered by The Method, “Popularity is the slutty little cousin of prestige.” Mike has a symbiotic relationship with a sharp theatre critic who has the power of life and death in her claws, “I’m going to destroy your play,” she snarls to Riggan. She hates how Hollywood creates, “Cartoons and pornography.”
“Birdman’s” own progeny could be his most lethal opponent. Sam is fresh out of rehab and a million miles of pissed. She is stenciled in alien designs, wards to thwart his powers and propel her own truths like missiles, “You’re doing a play based on a book that was written 60 years ago, for 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.” Did she inherit that gravel in her voice from Batman?
And all the while “Birdman” perches just off screen or hangs in a framed poster too imposing to be hidden, taunting Riggan and Michael of what was and what might have been; “We gave those posers (Insert Fassbender or Downey Jnr) the keys to the kingdom” and detests culture–“people, they love blood. They love action. Not this talky, depressing, philosophical bullshit.” Part of him is right of course when the film invites in the explosions and the helicopters. What film isn’t improved by a fleet of helicopters?
Driving all the madness and narcissism is a superhuman camera that leaps up buildings, squeezes between egos and funnels through corridors like a gorgeous phantom ride. We know from this sweeping lens, like Sam, like H.P. Lovecraft, that we’re all insignificant specs on human history, laughable in the face of the mighty cosmos and one actor’s vanity project will not hold back the tide of the comic book multiverse but it might get him noticed once more to become another brief, insignificant spec on Hollywood history. “Or the Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance” might just earn “Birdman” the self-respect of his own daughter. Or then again…