Birdman or (The Artsy-Fartsy Vice of Snobbishness)

I would recommend anyone to see Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance). Director Alejandro Iñárritu is at the top of his craft and pushing Hollywood’s boundaries in ways that few directors today even attempt. It’s engrossing and unforgettable, but it also bugs me.

 

Forget for a moment the gripping drama about a man wrestling with his demons. Forget about the moving personal relationships. Forget about the cluttered labyrinthine and claustrophobic sets. Forget about all that loud, jazzy drumming that is the score. Forget about Michael Keaton’s bold comeback to the limelight. Forget about the intensity of the performances by Ed Norton and Naomi Watts (longtime favorites of mine), and the lovely fragility of Andrea Riseborough (also excellent in Oblivion), and about Emma Stone’s portrayal of a girl with self-destructive tendencies (a performance that won me over). Forget about the surrealism, which jars us and carries us with it when it soars. Forget the poignant exploration of acting in all its torment, and about its accompaniment, a sharp critique of Hollywood and Broadway. Forget the uncanny way the story overlaps the real-life career of its lead actor. Ignore all the signs that Alejandro Iñárritu--whose previous body of work signified as early as 1999 with Amores Perros the arrival of an artist of singular vision--has reached a new pinnacle in his career, making him a master of cinema for all time, nay, eternity. And forget about all those awards, justly won, too many to count, really, with probably a few more hiding around somewhere. Forget all of that for a moment and let me tell you what bugs me about Birdman.

Mainly, it’s snobby.

I enjoyed Birdman when I saw it in the theater, but the recurring insults to superhero movies bothered me. This is no casual slight. It’s a recurring theme, and a timely one given the ubiquity of superhero cinema and television in recent years. This isn’t the post to explain why I think superhero fiction is often richer than a lot of supposedly high art, but the script of Birdman often refers to comic book movies as if they are cheap art for dumb masses, compared to real art by real artists. The scriptwriters appear to fancy themselves the latter and look down their noses at low art, its practitioners and its audiences. And that’s snobby.

Birdman is also hard on critics. In the film, actor Riggan Thomson confronts one in a bar as she works on a review:

 

Fellow actor Mike Shiner is more succinct in his judgement:

“A man becomes a critic when he cannot be an artist, the same way that a man becomes an informer when he cannot be a soldier.”

This is an attack on all critics. They’re all just a bunch of withered souls, creatively impotent, who heap scorn on the beautiful spirits who are actors. Birdman drips with scorn for such as these, but where would the arts be without their penumbra of critique, reviews, interpretation and awards? And what are we lowly viewers--chowing on nachos as we watch the Blu-Ray--but private critics? The way Birdman comes across, one would think that the only ones who count are those who make art, not those who experience the product. But the object of art is also for its subjects, from viewers at home to stuffy critics.

Making matters worse is the way Birdman undercuts its own snobbish claims. The crux of the movie is that Riggan is struggling to be a real artist. He’s putting his life on the line in an artsy Broadway play after years as a washed-up has-been who once struck it big with a couple superhero flicks. We are given to believe such a comeback is nearly impossible, and yet the character is played by an actor who struck it big with a couple superhero flicks (somewhat artsy ones no less) and is making exactly that comeback before our eyes in this very film.

Birdman’s success casts further doubt on its claims. The film often portrays critics, the average viewer and Hollywood as too Philistine to appreciate true art such as Iñárritu’s, and yet all of Iñárritu’s films--from Amores Perros through Birdman have been successful, finding audiences and acclaim. It would be thankless indeed to stick your finger in the eye of those who value you and contribute to your success.

As I write this, however, I realize that while Birdman’s criticism of superhero movies and critics is fairly thoroughgoing, it has many characters and situations that challenge the snobbery of the artsy-fartsy class. In fact, the tension between artists’ visions of grandeur and their feet of clay (the real world where, in the words of Emma Stone’s character, “nobody gives a shit”) is central to the movie’s themes and shows that Iñárritu and others behind Birdman are aware of their own pretension. This multiplicity of viewpoints is part of what makes much of Iñárritu’s work--I think particularly of Babel--so great.

And great Birdman is. At its best, it is film-making at its finest--so its Academy Award for Best Picture is well-deserved. But it still bugs me, because at its worst, it’s myopic and snobby. In saying so, I suppose I’m just another critic, but this critic refuses to take that label as a dirty word.

 

Religion and Atheism Abound in Bollywood's PK

 

When the alien known as PK arrives on Earth, the first thing that happens is a man in the desert steals his device for phoning home, leaving him stranded. Hearing that god is the answer to all troubles, PK goes on a search for god. He encounters the people and practices of many faiths and makes friends and enemies along the way.

So goes the plot of the 2014 Bollywood hit film PK, which turns out to be--at least on one level--a surprising statement of atheism from an industry known for strict conventions and from a country known for religious conservatism.

 

(Sorry, this trailer is in Hindi, but you can find a trailer and the movie in English on iTunes.)

 

The plot hearkens back to any number of stories in which an extraterrestrial comes to Earth and, baffled by our curious Earthling ways, teaches us about ourselves and reveals new ways of being. I think of Robert Heinlein’s most influential novel Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), in which Valentine Michael Smith, a human being raised by Martians, encounters terrestrial estrangement and teaches us to grok love. And consider David Bowie’s classic album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972), in which a rock-and-roller serves as the conduit for messages from alien beings to humanity five years before the world is to end due to human excess.

With its critique of religion, PK is more in the vein of Heinlein. The titular alien’s encounters with con men as well as believers rarely end well, for the religious always seem to be concerned with decidedly unholy concerns: power, money and exceptionalism. Their methods are also questionable: blind faith, trickery and violence. These aspects of religion are familiar to all of us, whether through reports of Islamist terror in the daily news or through passing the collection plate each Sunday in church. In PK’s words:

“The god you made up is just like you: petty, takes bribes, makes false promises, readily meets the rich, keeps the poor waiting, thrives on flattery, makes you live in fear [. . .] The god you believe in, abolish him.“

On the surface, PK’s message is that old distinction between religion versus spirituality. Its proponents assert the superiority of vague spirituality and decry stuffy religious dogma while almost always subscribing to the traditional superstitions that make up the latter. This position sounds genial, open-minded and subversive, which is why people like it, but actually it subverts nothing, which is, I suspect, why the makers of PK chose it as the superficial message of their film. They could appear to criticize organized religion and avoid offending the masses while on another level also advancing . . .

. . . atheism.

The film makes several arguments against religion that are regularly employed by atheists in debates against Christian apologists--such as how the truth claims of competing religions contradict each other--but the key argument in the film appears during a standoff on national television between PK and the guru Tapasvi. The guru adopts a typical apology for religion:

“What do you want, huh? A world without God? Do you have any clue how people suffer? No food to eat, no place to live, no friend to talk to . . .  People kill themselves, slit their wrists, jump off buildings . . .  Why? Because they have no hope. If bowing before God, smearing holy ash, and wearing amulets gives them hope to live, then who are you to snatch away that hope? And if you snatch away their God, how will you fill that void?”

PK’s answer is oddly indirect--and even endorses Enlightenment-style Deism--but viewers are sure to think of a more direct response to the guru’s challenge. Throughout the film, we have watched PK suffer, and it was real people, often strangers, who gave him food and shelter and became his friends. He himself at one point gives the only money he has to a poor man who needs it to pay for a meal on his wife’s birthday. The film is bursting with religion, but not once does it depict any supernatural event large or small--not so much as a holy glow or miraculous chance turn of events. Instead, what it shows is human goodness without the need for gods or their self-proclaimed mediators on Earth.

In other words, secular humanism.

This is one answer to which many like myself have turned in response to the death of God. As a life stance, it has the benefit of being an observable practice with tangible results. People can help people, and indeed they often do--no god necessary. Why is it that the religious must do good in the name of God instead of just doing good?

I’ve watched very little Bollywood and I only watched PK because most of the other offerings on board a long flight didn’t look interesting, but it turned out to be laugh-out-loud funny, romantic and thought-provoking. PK criticizes religion and shows that real acts of human kindness can fill the void left by an imaginary god’s disappearance.