Birdman: Ending Explained | Video Essay

What happened at the end of Birdman, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s 2014 Oscar-winning movie? Support ScreenPrism on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=7792695​

Is Michael Keaton’s Riggan really flying, or has he jumped to his death? What did it all mean?

Correction: The current version of the video mislabels the year of Christopher Nolan’s Princeton address. The correct year should be 2015, not 2005.

Works Cited & Consulted:
* Kendrick, Ben. “‘Birdman’ Ending Explained.” ScreenRant, 5 Apr, 2015.
* Chilton, Martin. “Raymond Carver: the Baleful Star of Birdman.” The Telegraph, 6 May 2015.
* “The Real Meaning Behind These Confusing Movie Endings.” Looper.

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Transcript provided by Youtube:

00:03
Riggan’s daughter Sam walks into her dad’s empty hospital room.
00:06
Panicked, she rushes to the open window.
00:09
She looks down, expecting to see that her father has jumped.
00:11
But her eyes don’t see a body.
00:13
She looks up and sees what we assume is her dad, flying as Birdman, up in the air.
00:18
What are we supposed to take from this ending?
00:19
Is Riggan really flying, or has he jumped to his death?
00:22
Are we witnessing fantasy or reality?
00:25
To answer these questions, first let’s go back a bit in the plot.
00:28
Famous for playing the fictional superhero Birdman, actor Riggan worries he’s a washed-up
00:32
hack.
00:33
Just as actor Michael Keaton carries the shadow of Batman,
00:36
Riggan is literally haunted by the ghost of his former character,
00:39
who taunts him for lack of talent and the stupid decision to leave the Birdman franchise.
00:43
“We had it all.
00:44
We gave it away.”
00:46
Meanwhile, Riggan has episodes of believing he possesses Birdman’s true superhero powers.
00:51
Obsessed with proving himself as an actor,
00:53
Riggan funds, directs and stars in a Broadway play
00:56
that adapts Raymond Carver’s short story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.”
01:00
On opening night Riggan decides to replace his prop gun with a real one, and shoots himself
01:05
onstage.
01:06
His “super-realistic” performance garners exceptional acclaim.
01:09
“The [bleep] man of the hour.”
01:11
But Riggan wakes up in his hospital room and realizes that he’s only shot off his nose.
01:15
Birdman appears again.
01:17
Riggan ignores him and climbs onto the window ledge.
01:19
The camera pans away, and that takes us up to when Sam enters.
01:22
So let’s look at the options for what could have happened:
01:26
One — Riggan has jumped and fallen to his death.
01:28
This explanation is objectively plausible,
01:31
if we consider that most people believe it’s impossible for a person to fly.
01:34
But it’s not an emotionally satisfying conclusion.
01:37
To focus on the death of Riggan’s body rejects the magical aspect of the story
01:41
and misses the emotional message Inarritu is sending.
01:43
“My hope was to really get audiences in the point of view of the character
01:50
and relive through his point of view and his mind, put the audience in his shoes.”
01:57
Moreover, we have to account for the fact that Sam doesn’t see his body.
02:00
She really looks around, but her eyes don’t catch anywhere.
02:03
She does see something up in the air.
02:05
Two — this could be explained by hallucinations.
02:08
We could be in Riggan’s point of view, watching Sam,
02:11
and her smile could be his fantasy right before he dies.
02:14
His ultimate desire is for his daughter to see him as his truest, best self.
02:18
Or we could be in Sam’s point of view, and Sam herself could be hallucinating.
02:22
If her father really has died, maybe she’s seeing his “soul,”
02:25
or else she believes her father can fly and doesn’t know he’s dead.
02:28
Still, all these hallucination options discount what we’re seeing in this last shot to a
02:32
degree,
02:33
and it’s unlikely that the filmmaker would choose to end on an image he wanted us to
02:36
dismiss.
02:37
The third explanation is that Riggan actually is flying.
02:39
But — again — most people consider it impossible for a person to fly, at least in our regular
02:43
world.
02:44
So that means that the best true explanation for all we’re seeing here is:
02:47
We’re in a slanted, subjective reality, where Riggan can fly and Sam can see him flying.
02:53
Throughout Birdman, we see elements of magical realism,
02:55
but up until now, whenever we see Riggan displaying Birdman’s powers,
02:59
the movie disproves what we’ve witnessed with a following scene.
03:01
Almost all episodes of Riggan’s levitation and telekinetic powers are quickly followed
03:06
by alternate scenes that deny what we’ve just witnessed.
03:09
“Hey, hello sir!
03:11
Hello, sir!
03:12
You did not pay me!”
03:15
The ending shows us another use of superpower but with a couple key differences:
03:20
One — we don’t see the power this time.
03:22
We just see Sam’s reaction.
03:23
And two — we don’t get a following scene to disprove or explain.
03:27
We just cut to black.
03:28
These differences signal the leaving behind of objective reality.
03:31
We’re presented with a vision that’s magical.
03:33
We wait for an explanation, but it doesn’t come.
03:36
The crux of magical realism is that surreal elements represent deeper truths about the
03:41
“realistic world.”
03:42
They’re not meant to be reduced to literal, objective explanation.
03:45
“These are all labels.
03:46
You just label everything.”
03:48
Magical realist worlds exist in a slanted universe, adjacent to our world.
03:53
In our objective world, the odds are Riggan has jumped and he’s dead.
03:56
But we’re no longer in that world —
03:58
we’ve entered Sam’s and Riggan’s subjective reality.
04:03
And in this slanted reality, both Sam and Riggan believe that he can fly.
04:07
In objective reality, Riggan is neither dead nor alive, because we’re not there anymore.
04:11
“I don’t exist.”
04:12
The only other unexplained supernatural act we see is the film’s first shot.
04:16
Riggan’s floating above the floor is never explained and is a perfect parallel with the
04:20
final scene.
04:21
Both moments neglect to disprove Riggan’s powers — thus they invite us to believe,
04:25
if we want to.
04:27
When asked, director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu has stated
04:30
that there isn’t one correct way to interpret the ending.
04:33
The director wants us to decide for ourselves.
04:34
But what’s clear is that even if many would say it appears likely that Riggan has jumped
04:38
to his death,
04:39
the buoyant high of Sam’s gaze up at her father imparts a “happy”-feeling ending.
04:44
It sends an emotional urging to the audience —
04:46
like Riggan, we must have faith in our own ability to fly, no matter what others say.
04:51
The film’s distinct cinematography also signals that we’re moving ever deeper
04:55
inside Riggan’s psyche by getting tighter and more claustrophobic.
04:58
The famously long takes, too, create a sense of a mind in overdrive,
05:02
chasing some deep truth via a chaotic flow of nonstop motion.
05:05
We’re leaving behind exterior reality to follow Riggan’s internal obsession with
05:10
the pursuit of artistic greatness.
05:11
“It’s my chance to finally do work that means something.”
05:14
The ending of Birdman actually sends a similar message to another film ending fans love to
05:18
debate: Inception.
05:19
“The way the end of that film worked — Leonardo DiCaprio’s character, Cobb —
05:25
he was off with his kids.
05:26
He was in his own subjective reality.
05:28
I didn’t really care anymore, and that makes the statement that perhaps
05:32
all levels of reality are equally valid.”
05:34
Inarritu is making the same point through Riggan:
05:37
he’s stopped worrying about the “real” truth that he can’t fly, and just got on
05:41
with the flying.
05:42
Birdman opens with the words that are written on Raymond Carver’s tombstone:
05:45
“And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so?
05:48
I did.
05:49
And what did you want?
05:50
To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth.”
05:54
These words, and the title of the story that Riggan adapts, “What We Talk About When We
05:58
Talk About Love,”
05:59
tell us that the actor is seeking love — from his family, from himself, and in his art.
06:04
One of the writers, Alexander Dinelaris, said in an interview
06:08
that the key to the ending is the repaired father-daughter relationship.
06:11
Sam’s final smile is a message that Riggan has achieved his deepest desire,
06:15
“to feel myself beloved on the earth.”
06:18
We truly feel loved when another person sees us as our greatest, true selves.
06:22
Throughout the film, Riggan’s powers are revealed to be fake when an unbeliever catches
06:26
him in the act.
06:27
Sam’s seeing Riggan as a hero makes his powers “real” to him,
06:31
regardless of what any outside observer might see.
06:34
Inarritu has also revealed that the film’s original ending cut to Johnny Depp
06:38
with his Pirates of the Carribean character Captain Sparrow,
06:41
suggesting some kind of infinite loop of actors tortured by their superhero franchise characters.
06:46
Inarritu has said he found that cut ending inferior.
06:49
Still, the implication of a repetitive loop could introduce the idea
06:53
that here Sam has taken on her father’s hallucination of Birdman.
06:57
Despite their disagreements, Sam is like her father, with her bird tattoos and her capacity
07:01
for extreme behavior.
07:02
Her smile indicates a shared subjective reality, an understanding, with her father.
07:06
She could now be haunted by Birdman — perhaps, like Riggan,
07:08
she’ll be driven by Birdman’s goading to chase after some great artistic ambition.
07:13
More broadly, the idea of a loop represents how the artist continues to struggle with
07:17
balancing the pursuit of un-self-conscious art and the pressure to succeed commercially.
07:25
“This play to battle the impression that you’re a washed up superhero…”
07:28
“No, absolutely not.”
07:29
In a world where art and celebrity go hand in hand, art gets consumed in our culture
07:34
of personality.
07:35
But, the movie suggests, the nagging inferiority and self-doubt,
07:38
“I can’t do this anymore, Jake.”
07:40
the commercial selling out,
07:41
“Give the people what they want.”
07:42
the pretentious chasing after accolades —
07:44
“The only thing that matters is what she writes about this in 500 words.”
07:48
“That’s, uh, Tabitha Dickinson.”
07:49
“Yes.”
07:50
all these uglier aspects of the business are just part of the cycle the artist must persevere
07:54
through.
07:55
The film’s subtitle, The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance,
07:58
is also the headline of the stand-out review Riggan receives from New York’s harshest
08:03
critic.
08:04
Virtuous ignorance represents the artist finally trusting his vision
08:07
and not worrying what others consider real or possible.
08:10
Dinelaris said about the ending, “If you can silence the voice of mediocrity, then
08:14
what is possible?”
08:15
Creative people must drown out the voices pressuring them to conform to mainstream expectations.
08:20
In short, we must learn how to ignore what people think of us.
08:23
Now that Riggan has stopped trying to please both audiences and critics, he’s achieved
08:27
the impossible.
08:28
He’s flying for real.
08:30
If we think of ignorance as a childish disposition that doesn’t know any better,
08:34
and knowledge as the grown-up state we enter as we understand worldly expectations,
08:38
we might equate virtuous ignorance with faith.
08:41
Faith requires us to forget what we know.
08:43
Instead, we trust — even in things we know to be impossible.
08:46
The Birdman character displays a dual personality,
08:49
as both a hero Riggan aspires to be
08:51
“You save people from their boring, miserable lives.”
08:54
and an absurd, taunting ghost that tears Riggan down.
08:57
“You’re about to destroy what’s left of your career.”
09:00
Riggan’s desire to have Birdman’s powers signals his ambition is to merge with a real
09:04
magical self —
09:05
the heights he wants to reach.
09:07
Yet this ambition has turned on Riggan and is corrupting him from within,
09:10
because he hasn’t yet devoted himself with real courage to his dreams.
09:14
“You are lame, Riggan.”
09:16
The cartoonish Birdman is the nagging voice of mediocrity that haunts all artists,
09:20
a grotesque mirror of their shortcomings, telling them that they’re not good enough.
09:24
“We handed these poseurs the keys to the kingdom.”
09:27
The only way to escape that voice is to embrace the real hero within.
09:31
We must stop chasing other’s approval, stop needing them to validate our own reality.
09:36
“[Blepp] who cares?]
09:38
In the end, whether he is dead or alive, Riggan has achieved his dream.
09:41
In his daughter’s eyes, and his own, Riggan has become a real hero.
09:50
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09:51
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09:55
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09:57
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10:00
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10:04
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