Birdman and His Mother

The film Birdman: The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance, made in 2014, takes the viewer on a wild ride on the edge of mania and psychotic depression through its central character, Riggan Thomson, who is struggling with his identity. On the one hand, he is trying to establish himself as a serious stage performer and director to combat the identity assigned to him by the public and the press as a movie star who played a super hero, Birdman. We see him in the late rehearsals, previews and opening of a Broadway play he has written based on a Raymond Carver short story. But Thomson, himself, identifies with the Birdman. We see him levitating and moving objects at a distance, proofs of either his magical powers or his delusional state. When he stands at the edge of the roof of a tall building, we do not know if he (and we with him) will jump off out of despair or leap off into manic flight.

Here I want to focus on the clues the film gives us to understand Riggan’s unconscious motives, starting with the “play within a play,” or in this case within a film. Leon Balter, in a 2006 paper in the Psychoanalytic Quarterly, demonstrates that like a dream within a dream, a play within a play can give direct expression to a central disturbing idea while disguising it as a bit of fiction. Birdman 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. In the final version we see, on the play’s official opening night, he uses real bullets.

The refrain, “I don’t exist, none of this matters,” is not only repeated three times as we see performance after performance. It is also echoed elsewhere in the film, when Riggan’s daughter, Sam, tells him 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.”

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 as

they are making love in a motel room. Pointing a gun threateningly, he says,

The play within a play tells us the desperation comes from seeking a love that isn’t there. Eddie, Riggan, doesn’t exist because he is not important to the woman whose love he seeks.

In an earlier part of the play, Eddie’s former lover describes him 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, whom 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.”

Rage and Despair

Through these bits and pieces scattered amidst the riot of the film, we are given hints of an existential despair and rage 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 metaphorical but concrete image of the importance of that mirroring, of the gaze between infant and 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 in the film through Riggan’s attempt to redeem himself with the play. To be someone 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 woman, 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 attention 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 beaklike nose, subtly blending him with the Birdman of his fantasy life. We see him, left alone in his hospital room, opening the window and stepping out, not to be seen by us again. As the film ends, his daughter 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 in the face of a mother whose approving gaze can only be won through self-annihilation.

Editor’s Note:
This article is an elaboration of one of the themes from a paper by the author on Birdman that was published in the Spring 2015 issue of the PANY Bulletin.