SPOILERS IMMINENT. If you haven’t yet seen Birdman, this post contains large and frequent spoilers. Consider this your only warning.

Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) is a masterpiece in visual story telling. The director Alejandro González Iñárritu (yes, I had to spellcheck that one) made a bold decision to film almost the entire movie as one continuous shot through clever editing, camera trickery, and what I can only imagine to be black magic done beautifully by Oscar winning Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki. It was a choice that received a great deal of push back from very important people but in this case, the ends justified the means. It created a fly-on-the-wall effect around the intimate geography of the setting that really felt like the day-to-day running of a poorly organised Broadway production. Mr. Alejandro justified this creative decision quite simply through a ‘there are no cuts in real life’ mentality and left it at that. Each of the characters in Birdman are highly complex individuals, all with their own reasons for why they are there and how they behave; they are real people.

Well, most of them are real people. Riggan Thomson is an out-of-work actor whose biggest (read: only) contribution to society has been donning the mantle of the titular ‘Birdman’ in a short lived movie franchise. He is far from normal. His self-absorption permeates throughout the film as he slowly loses his sanity to his former alter-ego. Whilst the rest of the cast have real connections with each other when the ever-moving camera tracks their conversations through the backstage of the St James Theatre, Riggan is slowly coming to terms with his own failed existence when the shot falls on him. Yes, he too acts and reacts with other human beings in a believable way, but only he (and us, the audience) can see his decrepit ego break through once he is alone with ‘Birdman’.

The film opens with Riggan in his underwear, levitating in his dressing room. It’s jarring, to say the least. Without context, are we to assume the actor who played Birdman actually is an alter-ego for the titular character, carrying out these feats of superhuman ability?

Much like Patrick Bateman in American Psycho, Riggan Thomson is an unreliable narrator. As the audience watch his cocktail of egotism and self-loathing froth over into a dark concoction of lunacy, all of his actions have to be taken as fact from the start, because there is no one else to tell us otherwise. Just Riggan and the bird-themed superhero that lives in his skull.

It’s only the rare moments, when one of the supporting cast gets to observe Riggan’s behaviour, that the audience can assume the role of a third party; watching the destruction from a safe distance, without being manipulated by Riggan’s bias. Looking back at the film’s intro, would Riggan have been levitating in that room if another actor was present to objectively analyse his actions as we -the audience- were?

These lapses of sanity that Riggan goes through are punctuated by these encounters as a means of distancing the audience from his behaviour. Not once is Riggan’s behaviour ever condoned or encouraged (his ex-wife flat-out turns a blind eye when he tells her there is a voice in his head telling him what to do). This is changed however in the final few moments of Birdman’s rather unpredictable ending. When Riggan’s daughter, Sam, finally responds to (what we assume) was just another of Riggan’s fantasies, the facade of his erratic lunacy is unveiled and the audience is now unsure whether these delusions were real or not. So how does this impact the rest of the film, after spending the whole two hours setting the precedent that this man is nuts and shouldn’t be trusted to tell a story?

Birdman was left as open ended as it was to bring discussion to that question. We may never know for sure whether any of the events throughout the film were real or not, as we only have Riggan to take us through the journey of his corrupted psyche. Who is to say that Sam’s final reaction (terror being substituted for pure relief; a smile turned to the sky) was not, in itself, a figment of Riggan’s rather proactive imagination? It’s only in those final moments where the audience is ripped away from the narrator’s journey and left behind, that the audience starts to question the world that they are left in.

Because Birdman is a tale revolving around Riggan’s own construct (his play), it is hard for the audience to fathom this world he has created without him being in it. His escapades into the absurd are just that; absurd. Without the rest of the cast to keep him in check, this is just one man’s breakdown as he spends his existence quite happily revelling in his delusions and reminiscing of his glory days as Birdman takes over his life. Without the motivation of a play to pull off and people to please, Riggan doesn’t have a goal to set himself, regardless of how high that goal might seem. For a person like Riggan –as malformed and deranged as his mind is- to function in a society without a purpose, would be a Herculean task for him. When he does achieve the validation he desperately craves, where does he go from there?

It’s interesting to note that Sam is one of the few cast members who has genuine concern for her dad’s welfare. Everyone else is out for themselves (because Broadway). So when she does indulge in Riggan’s dark twisted fantasy, is she finally happy for him, whatever his fate might have been?