‘Birdman’ Is ‘Black Swan’ for Boys

This review contains spoilers for both Birdman and Black Swan.

 

Alejandro González Iñárritu’s new film Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) bears striking similarities to Darren Aronofsky’s 2010 film Black Swan, both in the broad strokes—each follow their protagonist’s slipping grip on sanity in the days before a high pressure stage debut—and in a strange number of superficial details—hallucinations of menacing black winged creatures, “surprise” lesbian scenes, and ambiguous suicides at least partially showcased on stage. Of course, these two films differ in many ways, most significantly in tone (Birdman is a black comedy, Black Swan is a chilling psychodrama if not an outright horror movie). It is in these departures that we see the significance of gender in stories about identity, art, and mental illness.

1. Phase of life

 

Birdman‘s Riggan Thomson is a fading movie star, years after playing the title character in a series of superhero blockbusters (casting Michael Keaton in the role deepens the character tenfold). The play at the center of the film is his own adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, which he is also directing and starring in. This vanity project is Riggan’s hope to change his legacy, to transform from the kind of has-been actor who gets attention from tourists to the kind of eternally relevant artist who gets respect from theatre critics.

Where Riggan is in the twilight of his career, Black Swan shows Nina Sayers is at the dawn of hers, as she ascends from the corps to play the Swan Queen in Swan Lake.  Nina’s transformation over the course of the film is partially a metaphor for her belated sexual awakening and maturation from girl to woman. This becoming is the crucial moment in Nina’s life; she will never face Riggan’s struggle to stay relevant. As we see from the prima ballerina Nina replaces, Winona Ryder’s Beth Turner, there is no option to age gracefully. This is why, even as Nina apparently dies at the end of the film, it is “perfect.”

 

2. Perfection vs. Superpowers

It is the pressure to be perfect that pulls Nina apart in Black Swan. Not only the physical rigors and intense competition of professional ballet, but the paradoxical obligations of womanhood as represented through her dual role as the Swan Queen and Black Swan.  But Riggan doesn’t want to be perfect, he wants to be exceptional. His delusions of his superhuman abilities are his way of reassuring himself that his existence is noteworthy, that he matters, that he deserves to be remembered.

Nina hallucinates body horrors and birdlike transformations reminding her of the separation between her human self and the perfection required for her role. Riggan has easily incorporated superhuman abilities into his sense of self. As a man, he is entitled to do so. Nina’s are horrific transformations as she loses her sense of self.

 

3. Rivals

 

Although early marketing for Black Swan played up the “rivalry” between Nina and Mila Kunis’s Lily, Lily is not so important to the plot as she is a character foil for Nina. Lily represents the raw sexuality and effortless grace that Nina’s drive for perfection precludes her from acheiving. Lily is the Natural Beauty, the girl who can eat hamburgers and stay ballerina slim, party all night and still be perky and gorgeous in the morning, who you’ll never see touching up her lipstick but she’ll always have a perfect glossy pout. No matter how hard Nina works, she’ll never best Lily, because she’s less than her just by having to work for it at all.

 

In Birdman, Riggan’s “rival” is a hotshot actor named Mike Shiner (Edward Norton), even though he is known to be difficult to work with. Mike, a rigorous method actor, is the opposite of Lily: his talent comes from his dedication to his craft. And it is Mike’s well-honed skills that make him threatening to Riggan, who landed his career through charisma, good looks, and luck. That’s not the fame Riggan wants. It is the fame of a woman, and he knows he cannot carry it into old age and beyond (see Beth Turner). As a man, Riggan is not only allowed to “work for” his success, he even more respectable for doing so.

Just before opening night, Riggan faces off with theatre critic Tabitha Dickinson (Lindsay Duncan), who resents a movie star for taking up Broadway stage space that could go to a real artist. Riggan throws back the usual barbs against critics labeling art without making it: “None of it costs you anything. You risk nothing.” Putting on the airs of the hardworking artist he knows he is not, Riggan sounds just like someone denying their male privilege played any role in their success. Because achieved greatness is the highest virtue for a man.

 

4. Conclusions (the films’, and mine)

Both Birdman and Black Swan end ambiguously, with their protagonists appearing to die by suicide. In Black Swan, we see Nina’s apparent murder of Lily was not real, and that Nina rather stabbed herself. At that point in the film we’re neck deep in duality symbolism and pretty much all accept Nina attacking herself with a shard of mirror glass is a metaphor for killing the innocent side of herself, especially because girlfriend is one heck of a dancer for a stab victim.  But in the final moments first Lily, then director Thomas and the other dancers also see the wound and the audience is left thinking Nina’s suicide must have been real. Because, as I mentioned before, dying after a brilliant debut performance is actually perfect for Nina, because she has nowhere higher to go from there.

 

 

In Birdman, Riggan first attempts suicide by replacing a prop gun with a loaded pistol on stage. Apparently, he only shoots off his nose (earning him a superhero’s face mask of bandages). Then, after hearing Tabitha gave him a glowing review and finding personal resolution with his estranged ex-wife, his best friend, and his troubled daughter, he leaps from his hospital room window. When his daughter Sam (Emma Stone) returns to his empty hospital room with an open window, we see her horrified realization that her father probably jumped. But when she looks down to the street level, she appears confused. Then she looks up, to the sky, and her face fills with wonderment.  There’s ambiguous hope where Black Swan offers only ambiguous despair. Even in the darkest interpretation, that Riggan actually killed himself on stage and these final scenes aren’t real, we see that Riggan has successfully circumvented his fade to mediocrity. He “wins” in a way that Nina never could.

 

Looking at Birdman and Black Swan as two versions of the same story highlight the immense differences men and women face in life and in art, in expectation and in reality.  It is in large part the significance of gender that makes these two movies that seem to have so much in common ultimately turn out to be quite different.

 

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Robin Hitchcock is an American writer living in Cape Town who cannot fly nor grow feathers.