“What is wrong with me? Why do I have to end up begging people to love me? I just wanted to be what you wanted. Now I spend every f**king minute praying to be someone else. Someone I’m not.”



It’s amazing how that could be said by the actor, and the actor playing the actor.



Birdman is a movie with amazing performances, amazing direction, fantastic camerawork, and a script that is incredibly layered, bearing a fantastic story with memorable characters and sharp black humour, and an even deeper layer that burrows into our mind, using the entire fourth wall to solidify its themes in our head.



It is no coincidence that the one Birdman movie Riggan Thomson never made was the fourth one.



The minute Birdman name drops real actors of today, from Robert Downey Jr. to Justin Bieber, the movie takes an enormous risk - one of eventually becoming dated. Ten, twenty, fifty years down the line, is anyone really going to understand the zingers made towards these personalities or their roles? That being said, the movie does reference more than one time period, making it more of a crazy auteur’s look at Hollywood as it stands, and as it once stood.



The most obvious one, of course, is Michael Keaton as a washed up actor, once famous for playing a costumed flight-themed superhero, trying to make it big in a passion project. (For those who don’t get the reference, Michael Keaton was once Batman). The movie goes far beyond, though, with Edward Norton, infamous for being a method actor difficult to work with, playing a a method actor difficult to work with; Naomi Watts referencing her Mulholland Drive role as a young actress making it big for the first time; and so much more. The grey coat and ridiculous goatee could be taken as a parallel to Breaking Bad, with a self absorbed man ruining his relationship with everyone during his attempt to be taken seriously at the one thing he can do. Even the climax of the film could be taken as a reference to Cowboy Bebop, of all things.



Past the cheekiness, there’s a clear show of contrast between a lot of themes. For starters, the usage of modern buzzwords like “viral”, and the representation of Facebook, YouTube and Twitter all look very stereotypically dated, as if they’re being viewed from the perspective of a old fart. Which, in an unexpected stroke of genius, is exactly what is being done. Emma Stone’s character calls her father irrelevant in today’s world, and that says a lot about how the old generation views itself, and by extension, how our protagonist feels. The original, reduced to a spectator, sees pretenders and posers from the new generation attempt to do what they had already done once. This is why he has to prove himself relevant, somehow. He can’t fade into obscurity.



Another use of contrast in themes is shown through the style of the movie itself. A parallel is drawn between theatre and cinema, and as we know, theatre actors don’t have the luxury of short takes or the option of a retry, and cinema actors earn nothing unless they pander to the masses. The fridge can’t have real food, you see, but cinema needs to, with all its close up shots requiring more effort to convince the audience about its sets, and the performances of its actors being subject to close scrutiny. Of course, the theatre can’t have the spectacle cinema has, with all its CGI and large-scale super-realism. With these themes running through the movie, the arbitrary usage of stylish shots suddenly make sense, since they’re marrying the concepts behind the art of theatre, characteristically having long scenes and heightened emotion, with the art of film, having its own method of bombast.



The best thing about the way these themes are presented, though, is that it’s all subtext, and only becomes clear in your head once you leave the theatre. Despite having the ability to hammer its point into our head, it dedicates itself to telling the story, keeping these themes submerged, yet managing to subliminally drive them into our skull.



There’s a scene where the creators seem to be talking directly to the critics, the professionals as well as the amateurs, that while they may claim that art is dying, their own articles are becoming increasingly verbose, loquacious and empty, relying on labels to fit their opinions into. Well, if I had to tell you what I thought of this movie without any labels, I’d just tell you about how I felt as I left the theater, dazed, a stupid smile on my face, and a reminder in my head about why I love movies so much.

