Continued thoughts on Birdman (and Gravity)

(a follow-up to this post)

More than once while watching Birdman , I felt that Gravity might have been an equally apt title for it. Two meanings of that word fit this film: the lead character Riggan is preoccupied with subject matter that has gravitas and is “grounded” (as opposed to the “lightweight” superheroes-with-wings blockbusters made for summer audiences), hence his staging of a Raymond Carver story that he associates with respectability. And visually and thematically, the film is concerned with the divide between being tethered and feeling liberated. (Is it possible to be both things at once?)

So the opening scene of the main narrative has Riggan in a state of levitation; but after this he spends most of his time in the theatre’s confining backstage spaces, with the camera tracking him at close quarters as if to make sure he won’t suddenly take wing again (and also possibly to keep Riggan’s Icarus-like alter ego away from him!). And the film’s last shot has Sam searching for her dad in his hospital room, seeing the open window, rushing to it in panic…and then doing what any of us would instinctively do in her place: she looks down. (Everyone knows the law of gravity: things/people that fall/jump from high places go only in one direction.) It is only after that, when she doesn’t see what she had feared, that she looks up…and a smile lights up her face.

This is an enigmatic, possibly pretentious, ending, open to interpretation: the way I saw it was that Riggan, having achieved the success he wanted in a sombre medium, has freed himself. He can be a superhero again (if he chooses - Birdman 4 is waiting for him), or he can do whatever else he feels like doing without worrying about expectations. And okay, if you want to be literal-minded and “realist” about it (though I don’t think the film invites us to do this – I’m a little surprised by how many reviewers seem so sure that all the supernatural stuff is happening only in Riggan’s mind), maybe he is dead – because after having achieved creative fulfillment, there’s nowhere else to go. But the basic principle about being liberated still applies.

Incidentally, I was thinking of the connections between Birdman and Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity before I knew that cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki had supervised and executed the spectacular long takes in both films. The films are polar opposites in a way, even though both feature a dizzying series of circular movements and narrative twists that lead up to a moment of truth for the main character. If Birdman’s backstage set creates a mood of claustrophobia – and Riggan is in danger of being hemmed in, of being swallowed up by his own insecurities and the need for other people’s approval – Gravity is about the opposite but equally potent fear, agoraphobia: being adrift in the vast nothingness of space, being bound to, or responsible to, nothing. Both have allegorical endings: but in Birdman, Riggan attains a very agreeable lightness of being and is free to glide away into the ether, while in Gravity Sandra Bullock’s Ryan Stone falls out of space into the water and then staggers back to terra firma. Two characters, two different epiphanies. 

(And am I over-reaching by pointing out that both Riggan and Ryan are in their underwear during their Big Moment? Possibly. But well, as DH Lawrence said, trust the tale.)