Riggan’s daughter Sam walks into her dad’s empty hospital room.
Panicked, she rushes to the open window.
She looks down, expecting to see that her father has jumped.
But her eyes don’t see a body.
She looks up and sees what we assume is her dad, flying as Birdman, up in the air.
What are we supposed to take from this ending?
Is Riggan really flying, or has he jumped to his death?
Are we witnessing fantasy or reality?
To answer these questions, first let’s go back a bit in the plot.
Famous for playing the fictional superhero Birdman, actor Riggan worries he’s a washed-up
hack.
Just as actor Michael Keaton carries the shadow of Batman,
Riggan is literally haunted by the ghost of his former character,
who taunts him for lack of talent and the stupid decision to leave the Birdman franchise.
"We had it all.
We gave it away."
Meanwhile, Riggan has episodes of believing he possesses Birdman’s true superhero powers.
Obsessed with proving himself as an actor,
Riggan funds, directs and stars in a Broadway play
that adapts Raymond Carver's short story "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love."
On opening night Riggan decides to replace his prop gun with a real one, and shoots himself
onstage.
His “super-realistic” performance garners exceptional acclaim.
"The [bleep] man of the hour."
But Riggan wakes up in his hospital room and realizes that he’s only shot off his nose.
Birdman appears again.
Riggan ignores him and climbs onto the window ledge.
The camera pans away, and that takes us up to when Sam enters.
So let’s look at the options for what could have happened:
One -- Riggan has jumped and fallen to his death.
This explanation is objectively plausible,
if we consider that most people believe it’s impossible for a person to fly.
But it’s not an emotionally satisfying conclusion.
To focus on the death of Riggan’s body rejects the magical aspect of the story
and misses the emotional message Inarritu is sending.
"My hope was to really get audiences in the point of view of the character
and relive through his point of view and his mind, put the audience in his shoes."
Moreover, we have to account for the fact that Sam doesn’t see his body.
She really looks around, but her eyes don’t catch anywhere.
She does see something up in the air.
Two -- this could be explained by hallucinations.
We could be in Riggan’s point of view, watching Sam,
and her smile could be his fantasy right before he dies.
His ultimate desire is for his daughter to see him as his truest, best self.
Or we could be in Sam’s point of view, and Sam herself could be hallucinating.
If her father really has died, maybe she’s seeing his “soul,”
or else she believes her father can fly and doesn’t know he’s dead.
Still, all these hallucination options discount what we’re seeing in this last shot to a
degree,
and it’s unlikely that the filmmaker would choose to end on an image he wanted us to
dismiss.
The third explanation is that Riggan actually is flying.
But -- again -- most people consider it impossible for a person to fly, at least in our regular
world.
So that means that the best true explanation for all we’re seeing here is:
We’re in a slanted, subjective reality, where Riggan can fly and Sam can see him flying.
Throughout Birdman, we see elements of magical realism,
but up until now, whenever we see Riggan displaying Birdman’s powers,
the movie disproves what we’ve witnessed with a following scene.
Almost all episodes of Riggan’s levitation and telekinetic powers are quickly followed
by alternate scenes that deny what we’ve just witnessed.
"Hey, hello sir!
Hello, sir!
You did not pay me!"
The ending shows us another use of superpower but with a couple key differences:
One -- we don’t see the power this time.
We just see Sam’s reaction.
And two -- we don’t get a following scene to disprove or explain.
We just cut to black.
These differences signal the leaving behind of objective reality.
We’re presented with a vision that’s magical.
We wait for an explanation, but it doesn’t come.
The crux of magical realism is that surreal elements represent deeper truths about the
“realistic world.”
They’re not meant to be reduced to literal, objective explanation.
"These are all labels.
You just label everything."
Magical realist worlds exist in a slanted universe, adjacent to our world.
In our objective world, the odds are Riggan has jumped and he’s dead.
But we’re no longer in that world --
we’ve entered Sam’s and Riggan’s subjective reality.
And in this slanted reality, both Sam and Riggan believe that he can fly.
In objective reality, Riggan is neither dead nor alive, because we’re not there anymore.
"I don't exist."
The only other unexplained supernatural act we see is the film’s first shot.
Riggan’s floating above the floor is never explained and is a perfect parallel with the
final scene.
Both moments neglect to disprove Riggan’s powers -- thus they invite us to believe,
if we want to.
When asked, director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu has stated
that there isn’t one correct way to interpret the ending.
The director wants us to decide for ourselves.
But what’s clear is that even if many would say it appears likely that Riggan has jumped
to his death,
the buoyant high of Sam’s gaze up at her father imparts a “happy”-feeling ending.
It sends an emotional urging to the audience --
like Riggan, we must have faith in our own ability to fly, no matter what others say.
The film’s distinct cinematography also signals that we’re moving ever deeper
inside Riggan’s psyche by getting tighter and more claustrophobic.
The famously long takes, too, create a sense of a mind in overdrive,
chasing some deep truth via a chaotic flow of nonstop motion.
We’re leaving behind exterior reality to follow Riggan’s internal obsession with
the pursuit of artistic greatness.
"It's my chance to finally do work that means something."
The ending of Birdman actually sends a similar message to another film ending fans love to
debate: Inception.
"The way the end of that film worked -- Leonardo DiCaprio's character, Cobb --
he was off with his kids.
He was in his own subjective reality.
I didn't really care anymore, and that makes the statement that perhaps
all levels of reality are equally valid."
Inarritu is making the same point through Riggan:
he’s stopped worrying about the “real” truth that he can’t fly, and just got on
with the flying.
Birdman opens with the words that are written on Raymond Carver’s tombstone:
"And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth."
These words, and the title of the story that Riggan adapts, "What We Talk About When We
Talk About Love,”
tell us that the actor is seeking love -- from his family, from himself, and in his art.
One of the writers, Alexander Dinelaris, said in an interview
that the key to the ending is the repaired father-daughter relationship.
Sam’s final smile is a message that Riggan has achieved his deepest desire,
“to feel myself beloved on the earth.”
We truly feel loved when another person sees us as our greatest, true selves.
Throughout the film, Riggan’s powers are revealed to be fake when an unbeliever catches
him in the act.
Sam’s seeing Riggan as a hero makes his powers “real” to him,
regardless of what any outside observer might see.
Inarritu has also revealed that the film’s original ending cut to Johnny Depp
with his Pirates of the Carribean character Captain Sparrow,
suggesting some kind of infinite loop of actors tortured by their superhero franchise characters.
Inarritu has said he found that cut ending inferior.
Still, the implication of a repetitive loop could introduce the idea
that here Sam has taken on her father’s hallucination of Birdman.
Despite their disagreements, Sam is like her father, with her bird tattoos and her capacity
for extreme behavior.
Her smile indicates a shared subjective reality, an understanding, with her father.
She could now be haunted by Birdman -- perhaps, like Riggan,
she’ll be driven by Birdman’s goading to chase after some great artistic ambition.
More broadly, the idea of a loop represents how the artist continues to struggle with
balancing the pursuit of un-self-conscious art and the pressure to succeed commercially.
"This play to battle the impression that you're a washed up superhero..."
"No, absolutely not."
In a world where art and celebrity go hand in hand, art gets consumed in our culture
of personality.
But, the movie suggests, the nagging inferiority and self-doubt,
"I can't do this anymore, Jake."
the commercial selling out,
"Give the people what they want."
the pretentious chasing after accolades --
"The only thing that matters is what she writes about this in 500 words."
"That's, uh, Tabitha Dickinson."
"Yes."
all these uglier aspects of the business are just part of the cycle the artist must persevere
through.
The film’s subtitle, The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance,
is also the headline of the stand-out review Riggan receives from New York’s harshest
critic.
Virtuous ignorance represents the artist finally trusting his vision
and not worrying what others consider real or possible.
Dinelaris said about the ending, “If you can silence the voice of mediocrity, then
what is possible?”
Creative people must drown out the voices pressuring them to conform to mainstream expectations.
In short, we must learn how to ignore what people think of us.
Now that Riggan has stopped trying to please both audiences and critics, he’s achieved
the impossible.
He’s flying for real.
If we think of ignorance as a childish disposition that doesn’t know any better,
and knowledge as the grown-up state we enter as we understand worldly expectations,
we might equate virtuous ignorance with faith.
Faith requires us to forget what we know.
Instead, we trust -- even in things we know to be impossible.
The Birdman character displays a dual personality,
as both a hero Riggan aspires to be
"You save people from their boring, miserable lives."
and an absurd, taunting ghost that tears Riggan down.
"You're about to destroy what's left of your career."
Riggan’s desire to have Birdman’s powers signals his ambition is to merge with a real
magical self --
the heights he wants to reach.
Yet this ambition has turned on Riggan and is corrupting him from within,
because he hasn’t yet devoted himself with real courage to his dreams.
"You are lame, Riggan."
The cartoonish Birdman is the nagging voice of mediocrity that haunts all artists,
a grotesque mirror of their shortcomings, telling them that they’re not good enough.
"We handed these poseurs the keys to the kingdom."
The only way to escape that voice is to embrace the real hero within.
We must stop chasing other’s approval, stop needing them to validate our own reality.
"[Blepp] who cares?]
In the end, whether he is dead or alive, Riggan has achieved his dream.
In his daughter’s eyes, and his own, Riggan has become a real hero.
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