#890: ‘Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)’, dir. Alejandro Iñárritu, 2014.

Film critics are fond of making sweeping statements, and every time they do, they’re immediately met with a barrage of ‘what-abouts’ that render the original statement pointless. So as much as I want to say that Birdman is one of the five best films made in the 2010s, I won’t - not least because I haven’t given any serious thought to what the other four would be. What I will say is that Birdman is a great film, and one that resonated with me far more than many of the other films I’ve seen in the last decade. It’s ambiguous, imaginative and thoughtful, and I genuinely think the Academy got it right in awarding it (and Alejandro G. Iñárritu) Oscars.

Is my interest in this film because I spent most of my university years in the theatre, and gained a familiarity with the best parts of the art, as well as the worst, most pretentious parts? Partly. Is it because Iñárritu developed the film with the idea of having it appear as one long take? Partly, although the list has no shortage of films that were actually filmed that way, and Birdman lets the effectiveness of this technique slide a little in a few moments where it’s impossible for the actors to have moved between locations. Mostly, Birdman resonates with me because it’s about creative anxiety, and about those two little voices that drag you between doing things that are meaningless but make you popular, and trying to do things that are meaningful but which you suspect you won’t ever succeed at.

Riggan Thomson (Michael Keaton) used to be big in movies - about twenty years ago he starred in a trilogy of blockbuster superhero films - but after rejecting that art as too meaningless, he’s turned instead to putting on a Broadway play based on a Raymond Carver short story. When we first meet him, the preview season has just started, and Thomson needs to replace an actor. He immediately thrusts this job onto his producer/lawyer/best friend, Jake (Zach Galifianakis, almost unrecognisable here behind a pair of scholarly glasses), who seems to take an almost masochistic pleasure in solving problems. Riggan’s daughter, Sam (Emma Stone) is wandering around, fresh out of rehab and resentfully acting as her father’s assistant; his girlfriend Laura (Andrea Riseborough) is unsure if she’s pregnant; new Broadway actress Lesley (Naomi Watts) suggests her boyfriend, troublemaker Mike (Edward Norton) as a replacement for the former actor.

There’s not a single weak link in this cast - everyone in the film is at the top of their game - and Iñárritu makes the most of the performances. Working with Emmanuel Lubezki as cinematographer for their first feature collaboration, the director pushes into tightly-framed static shots for the more compelling dialogue sequences. This technique gives the arguments and agreements a greater immediacy simply because we’re tricked into believing as much time has passed for the characters as has for us - which is to say, none at all.

When things go surprisingly wrong for the characters and the play, there’s also nowhere for us to escape: the only thing that ever takes the camera and the audience away from something going wrong is something worse going wrong. At one stage, Riggan is trapped outside the theatre just before his final cue, and with his dressing gown trapped in the door he is forced to take the long way around in his underwear. Bursting in through the audience, after a string of humiliating encounters with autograph-hungry New Yorkers, Riggan gives a cringeworthy performance, gesturing wildly with his fingers until a stage manager gives him the prop gun. Just when we’re expecting to watch the whole embarrassment, Jake is dragged away by a phone call, and we go too. We’re left in the hallway upstairs for one of the few prolonged periods of silence in the film, and then we hear the gunshot, and the applause. It’s a victory - a rare event in Birdman - and we don’t get to watch it.

I’ve been roaming around threatres since I was a kid, and I’ve enjoyed looking at them in the same way Iñárritu does here - from the wings, from the lighting rigs, from the stage. A theatre is a place where things can be made that matter, but they’re also places where it’s easy to get trapped. I’ve been in technical rehearsals that lasted for five hours and in some of the most abysmal public domain school productions. Despite that, I know people who are doing incredible work in the industry. When Jake and Riggan are tossing around ideas for replacement actors, a few names come up: Woody Harrelson; Michael Fassbender; Jeremy Renner. All these actors were doing blockbuster franchise work at the time, and it’s clear that Iñárritu has some thoughts about the relationship between fame and theatre, but these moments also say a lot about what it means to make something that matters. Riggan is upset by the idea that he’ll never succeed at anything beyond the blockbusters he deliberately walked away from, but he’s even more upset by the prospect that those blockbusters mean more in the grand scheme of things than the play he’s working on. He’s surrounded by people who think he’s an egocentric fraud, or those who falsely tell him he’s brilliant, and he’s also haunted, quite literally, by Birdman, too.

In the end, Riggan has to do something stupidly drastic to make theatre that means something. I don’t know if it was intentional, but the glowing review he receives for What We Talk About When We Talk About Love is hackneyed to the point of feeling sarcastic.

In other words, Alejandro Iñárritu doesn’t always get it right. There’s a lesbian subplot that lands with a confused ‘thunk’, the sound you get when you hit a steel barrel and find out it’s empty. Some of the ambiguity of Riggan’s character is a bit grating, too - it’s clear that his ‘superpowers’ aren’t real, as they seem to manifest only in moments of emotional weakness, and are never commented on by others, but the ending of the film only really has an impact if these powers are real, if they’ve actually manifested in the real world.

But oh, what we get instead of certainty in this film more than makes up for it. Because of the ‘one-take’ conceit, Birdman had to be scripted in great detail before filming started, and the precision required to film that means that everyone is on top form at all times. Even with the roving camera, the imagery is perfectly-framed and everything, from the hallucinations to the stagecraft, looks like a vivid dream.

Every now and then, we’re lucky to come across a film that feels like it speaks our language. Not in the broader sense, but in the specifics - a film that knows what we look at, what we say and how we say it. For me, that’s a film about being excited and afraid; a film about making art of different kinds and bring one set of skills to bear on another; a film about time passing and not passing at the same time. Birdman is the film that speaks to me. It’s on Netflix right now, so it’s worth spending two hours with: I hope it speaks phrases in your language too.

Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014) Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu

i have seen birdman. do not yet know how to feel about it. i had a great time. i like it alot. hwubuh

— Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014), directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu.

Birdman (2014) dir. Alejandro G. Iñárritu

“Come on. Stand up! So you’re not a great actor. Who cares? You’re much more than that. You tower over these other theater douchebags. You’re a movie star, man! You’re a global force! Don’t you get it? You spent your life building a bank account and a reputation… and you blew ‘em both. Good for you. Fuck it. We’ll make a comeback. They’re waiting for something huge. Well, give it to them. Shave off that pathetic goatee. Get some surgery! Sixty’s the new thirty, motherfucker. You’re the original. You paved the way for these other clowns. Give the people what they want… old-fashioned apocalyptic porn.” Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014) Directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu

It seems appropriate that Birdman is pigeon toed.

(warning: all phrases with quotes around them are things i dont fully understand.) the last thing is that watchertv is being run through vimeoOTT, the same service dropout uses. interestingly, vimeo was originally started within collegehumor, which means it was later owned by IAC, the "holding company" that sold collegehumour to sam reich and now is a "minority owner" of dropout. Dropout was started before IAC killed collegehumor and sold it to sam, so vimeo and collegehumor and dropout where all closely connected and owned by IAC when dropout began. vimeo was "spun off" of IAC in 2021. i'm very curious if the rates that dropout pays vimeo were effected at all by them both beginning in collegehumor and being owned by the same company, and if those rates changed after 1. collegehumor died and 2. vimeo was spun off.

some long-ass thoughts on watcher and dropout

for the record, i've enjoyed both of their work. i won't talk abt it much in this post, but it's very interesting how people kind of view shane's performative anti-capitalism making their consumption of ghost files a reflection of their own politics. then, a business making a business decision feels much more personal, because an aspect of your morals has just betrayed you. instead of just losing access to media you enjoyed, you just lost a reference point for your identity. Dropout is very mildly more aware of their function in capitalist society when they make anti-capitalist jokes, but the effect is still the same. the concept of supporting small business being an effective political action has obviously fed into, or perhaps came from, consumer culture. there's been a lot of "disappointment" in shane specifically, which is why i bring this up.

this post is a mess and i definitely used some of the wrong words, but i hope it makes some sense.

Watcher and Dropout have been compared alot as of late, of course both being attempted independent subscription based streaming services with a small host of content. dropout is cast as the good guy, the thing that watcher is striving for and failed at. I've seen several people joke about subscribing to dropout instead as a little fuck you to watcher.

A lot of people have genuinely asked what the difference is. Why is watcher bad and dropout good?

The most common answer i've seen is that dropout was pitched as a last effort to save a dying company, instead of the greedy money grab that watchertv feels like. dropout also offers a much larger cast, and many more shows, releasing new episodes monday through friday. Both of these things, however, are only true of dropout as of now.

Dropout was started two years before collegehumor's death, and it was only able to release as many shows as it is now very recently. It also didn't originally advertise itself as a final resort, rather "netflix- but worse!"

It didnt begin as a hail mary for a dying platform, just a new branch of an old one with no ads and more freedom. (Though it was a final resort later.) i think the biggest material difference between the two is that dropout always felt like an addon rather than an ambush paywall. later when it did become an ambush paywall, it felt justified. there was complete clarity over what would be on dropout and what would remain free on youtube.

this clarity was never present in watcher's announcement. I personally don't think watcher was ever planning on removing their free content from youtube, and they just worded it really poorly in their original video, but keeping new episodes behind a paywall is still enough to alienate their fanbase. the concept of them removing everything from youtube has stuck around despite their assurances against it.

the rest of the reasons why watcher went over so poorly is audience trust, yearly context, and marketing.

People had already followed ryan and shane from buzzfeed to watcher, so their trust had been tested before, resulting in them being more loyal, but still. I've seen a lot of people discussing their disappointment with watcher's content compared to buzzfeeds, which, everyone hates change so on and so forth, but most people are pointing specifically to the overproduction and the awkwardness. I had the same expeirence. I specifically remember watching an episode of too many spirits and realizing i was forcing myself to continue. It just felt like lipstick on a pig, hours of animation work on top of an awkward joke. I think there's been frustration with watcher's content building for a long time, and this poorly worded announcement is the straw that broke the camels back. i also don't think there was as much streaming service fatigue back when dropout was started as there is now.

It is entirely possible, given that they were spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on post-production per video, that watcher needs more money to continue. I, as many do, would attribute this to poor financial decisions. However, i think they could've framed watchertv as a last resort for a company that fiscally couldnt continue on youtube and gotten away with it. they still would have gotten some flack for steven's tesla and gold-leaf pizza, but it wouldnt be the total takedown it is now.

Instead, in the video they simply talk about being to big for youtube. No stressing about money. It feels entitled. even in the apology, where they claim that watcher couldn't continue on youtube, the overt focus is not placed on money. Wether this was a decision to try and not sound too whiny and pandering, or it's that they genuinely could continue to work on youtube but want more freedom on watchertv, i'm not sure. either way, it worked out horribly for them.

i have DeArrow which changes youtube thumbnails to random screenshots and user-chosen titles and it makes watchers announcement even funnier

Uni, why so round? :3

Today is weed day, and if you’re looking for ways to celebrate, might I suggest ordering the first book in my comic series about gay millennial teens smoking weed? It’s only $15 and I promise you will like it

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