From red carpet starlight to Oscar preview, from loud exclamations on long shots to Michael Keaton's level performance, "Bird Man" almost has both the honor of art films and commercial films. To tell the dream for the stage artist. Rather than the mise-en-scene of the acclaimed plot, shots, and acting, let's talk about what we're talking about when we're watching a movie.
The Superhero mode is the evolution of American Westerns. The typographical mask design, with the perfect image of power, justice, omnipotence and selfless fearlessness, never tires of appearing in popular films. It is a commercial film. A shrewd investment that will protect you almost forever. From the very beginning, superheroes have been a symbol of mythology within structuralism, individual heroism is perfectly materialized, and the binary opposition between hero and villain is obvious. Consistent with the westerns, the caravan cowboy left his back in the desert after the battle with the farmer. The endings of superheroes are often unfulfilled. They have saved human beings and only have a hidden skill, but they can only get out of the phone booth and return to daily life. In the American spiritual complex, superheroes are gods in cloaks, and in the transition and replacement between people and gods, in a structure that does not break the social order of reality, they achieve a dream-building alliance that supports individualism.
However, starting from Nolan's "Batman: The Dark Knight" (2008) (The Dark Knight), the expression of opposites of the heroes has become complex and varied, and the torture they face is not only the permission and scope of the social system, Or the inner moral standards and emotional values. In the post-9/11 era, this kind of personal anxiety is unprecedented. It is by no means able to be solved by the state machinery. What makes people hopeless is not that the super fighters are getting old, tired, and their mana has declined, but the most direct and naked question: Has this ability ever existed?
This also happens to be the self-talk that keeps repeating in Birdman. Whether Michael Keaton's Birdman is the perfect incarnation in the eyes of the public, or the real self projected in the mirror, the electric light phantom, the moon in the water, until the end of the film, the director did not give an answer. If it is read too much, it will appear distorted. I don't even think it is a deliberate suspense, because questioning is the best answer.
The tug-of-war between the film machine and stage aesthetics is the most brilliant expression in this play. Theater has never been recognized as the granddaddy of cinema, although there are many direct transcriptions of theater in early cinema (Early and Silent Cinema). A "movie" that enters the public eye with a spectacle machine can be a scientific invention by Thomas Alva Edison, or a clown trick by Georges Méliès. Art doesn't matter. Cinema has truly become the seventh art, also because of conscious camera performance, plot construction, and medium switching. But the audience experience brought by the movie is extraordinary. On the one hand, the camera leads the audience. What you see and what you can't see are all edited and directed by the filmmakers. They are prompted and seduced without awareness, which is also one of the charms of the film.
But on the other hand, what filmmakers cannot control is the hindsight of what the audience wants to see and what they don't want to see. Sergei Eisenstein's theory of montage and his Soviet films provide the best example of the empowered audience looking for meaning in the lens. So, what do we see in the long shots of Birdman? The function of the long shot in editing is not to directly participate in the construction of the plot, but to purely reflect the dramatic effect in the shot. This is the director's ambition, or the director's ambition for the audience.
Finally, back to Raymond Carver, who talks so much we don't need to talk about it anymore. This American who is not optimistic enough to write about the unlucky, sparse, drunken, weak and incompetent Americans, these image characteristics that are the opposite of superheroes, are the essence of his life to create, and insist on "Minimalism", cherish words like gold. And what about superheroes? It's a DC product, it can be copied, it can be made with running water, there's nothing to talk about, just buy it.
In structuralism, the role of myth is to play tricks, to reconcile and connect irreconcilable binary oppositions, to regenerate new illusions or beliefs, and to resolve irreconcilable binary oppositions. Man is so powerless before God, especially when your heart is slightly larger than the entire universe. The film's final leap doesn't say whether he fell like a man or reappeared like a god. In fact, when you walk out of the theater and express the excitement brought by the movie to your companions heartily, the satisfaction and pleasure brought by the "movie" has become a modern myth that reconciles reality and fantasy.
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