Ego It is a puzzle, dizzying.
Riggan says "You can't see this thing, because you don't have a lable." in the satire of the clichéd critic. It seems that the word "self" is more suitable for this description. What is the ego? Is it because he didn't understand it, Riggan needed to try his best to prove that he was an actor in his middle age, and he needed to constantly summarize himself through labels like "hero" and newspaper headlines.
Every character in the film, every one of us faces the question: What is the self? What to take to determine what kind of self? How do we deal with this change that is used to identify the self?
Option 1: Existence is Existence (Self Persuasion)
Mike is the existential solution, he says to Sam "I pretend just on every place else, but not out there(on stage)." As long as he is on stage, he is himself. He also said, "I won't have any problems on stage". This is the most direct and rude solution (but after a lot of struggle, I also feel that this solution also requires wisdom, especially for people who like 'crazy'), where no matter what I am thinking, no matter what I do Everything is real, it's all me. This method does not require external feedback, and is not limited to my own role. The only limitation is the "scenario" (at least in the film), and I can choose to firmly approve it in my heart. But when someone "disrespects" my truth, I get very angry (see Mike's anger at Riggan when he replaced the prop geneva with water in the first preview). But offstage, in interviews, there is little psychological barrier to making Riggan's experience his own.
Option 2: Recognized by others to exist (label method)
This is actually the solution of most people, including the protagonist Riggan, including the actress Lesley, who dreamed of performing on Broadway since childhood, with a certain goal that means gaining a certain status and recognition. Actors who have performed on Broadway", actors are social symbols, and Broadway is a social symbol. In our life, it is like "I graduated from Peking University" and "My company went public". In the social system, some options/labels have been set up to "concentrate more people's approval". To achieve such a goal, we can "self-realize" and fulfill our higher expectations for "self".
If Riggan encounters a "self" crisis in middle age, it means that the label "traffic" can no longer satisfy the need for self-recognition after obtaining the label, and at the same time, the label "Hollywood star" and "celebrity" given by the more explicit social recognition It gradually disappeared, and "I'm nothing" reappeared. At this time, the label of "I am an excellent actor" related to personal ability becomes a new need. Here, my ability, my performance, is defined as "I".
Later, Riggan gets it, and at the end of the film he seems to be relieved of it, not ecstatic, and stop saying "This is my career. This is my chance to finally do some work that is mean something. ." but "His dad was just a three-day red guy" (roughly remember it). He began to hope that he would be there when his daughter was born, and that the three of them would accompany each other.
This is probably in line with our life experience, striving for something, and suddenly it feels less important when it is about to be obtained or already obtained. This is another time when you don't recognize the label you are about to get to be able to identify yourself, or do you give up using the label and look at yourself through the eyes of others?
Actually, I won't talk about the third option, and everyone wants to know what the third option I am talking about is. But I thought about it carefully. If I said it seriously, I really didn't quite understand what the third option was. Like the discussion of "self" that was absent in this article, it was a proposition that I didn't understand yet. (Genes, education, experiences, memories, dreams, what is the self, where do you live?)
Then I'll stop being silly.
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