The 2014 film Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), by the Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu, was nominated for nine Oscars and won four, including the award for Best Picture. In the movie, main character Riggan Thomson performs a debility that places him on the brink between being regarded as mentally ill-suicidal and achieving heroic-superpower stardom. I am using "performance" here in the same sense that sociologist Erving Goffman does in his book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, as part of the day-to-day actions of individuals. And I use the term mental "debility" as opposed to "disability" because it allows for fluctuations in the degree of an individual's deterioration or recovery, and hence admits an adaptability in the individual's performance of self in everyday life.

Once a famous actor in a superhero franchise called Birdman, Riggan is trying to leave behind his old Hollywood identity as the superhero Birdman—a role he'd played 20 years ago—by directing, producing, and acting in his own Broadway adaptation of the Raymond Carver short story "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love." In the process, Riggan sometimes appears to be doing supernatural things in the real world, like Birdman himself. He goes back and forth between embracing and avoiding his Birdman persona, thereby associating his identity as an artistic creator with the mad-genius trope—and a human struggling with mental illness. Actually Riggan rehearses his death multiple times during the movie, fueling his characterization as mentally ill. Iñárritu has him try to commit suicide on stage during his play's opening performance, establishing a direct link between artistic creativity and madness. Riggan shoots himself in the face with a real gun but fails to kill himself—just like the character he is portraying. Theater critic Tabitha Dickinson praises Riggan's overall performance and names him the creator of "super-realism." At the end of the film, while recovering in his hospital room, Riggan says goodbye and "fuck you" to Birdman—who is still following him—and jumps out the window. It is not clear if he falls to his death like an afflicted human or flies away like a superhero.

Director Iñárritu conflates notions of the mad genius, mental illness, and the superhero in his film, exalting the mentally debilitated identity that is popular today in the West among middle and upper-middle classes under our biocapitalist context. Biocapitalism is a system of governance heavily dictated by a tight symbiosis between biopolitics and neoliberalism. 1 The (manufacture of) freedom to choose who one is by what one buys and consumes—including diagnoses of mental illness and prescription psychoactive drugs—is one factor that has yielded this identity category: an afflicted and humane (because it knows suffering), biologically unique human. Birdman reproduces ideas conceiving of mental affliction as an authentic identity category (because it is rooted in the biological body) in which, yes, the person is mentally debilitated but high-functioning, and stigmatized-marginalized but exceptional. In addition, Birdman puts forth the idea of "real art" as being dependent on the grotesque exhibition of mental debility, shedding light on how notions of the real in art reinforce and are shaped by the current biocapitalist notion of what constitutes a real human experience—an idea that I will explore later.

The three out of five stars Amazon reviewers gave to Birdman might reflect the audience drawn by the film's title and poster—viewers expecting at least one superhero or exceptional character. This would not be surprising, since part of the film's marketing strategy targeted that audience. The trailer included the ephemeral explosion and screeching mechanical bird that were present in less than ten seconds of the film. And Birdman actors Edward Norton (The Incredible Hulk, 2008) and Michael Keaton (Batman, 1989, and Batman Returns, 1992) were on a panel at the 2014 New York Comic Con where—though it was established that the film was not part of the genre—Norton said, "The superhero genre is…, you know, kinda part of the debate of the movie." 2 This statement left the movie theater open for those famished for superhero action in another type of film.

In his book Death, Disability, and the Superhero: The Silver Age and Beyond (2014), José Alaniz shows how disabilities were incorporated into the identities of several characters from the Silver Age of comic books (1956–70). However, he says that "the Silver Age superheroes retained their fundamental character as uplifting models for young people; … stories that … affirmed basic social values." 3 He concludes with the idea that greater cultural values reflected in these fictions are detrimental for the disabled.

[B]ut as Mitchell and Snyder argue, … the narrative prosthesis is a pervasive epistemic frame for relating to disabled people, perhaps none more so than the inscrutably insane, autistic, schizophrenic, mad, other. Anxiety, threat, dread, fear, and prejudice feed into the explanatory mechanisms that construct them as somehow beyond human, beyond mercy, … exacerbating preexisting apprehensions—always to the greater detriment of the physically/cognitively different. 4

According to David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder in their book Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and Dependencies of Discourse (2000), the body of the disabled character has come to serve as a concrete metaphor for a specific type that exists in the work simply to counteract the bodies, minds, and lives of other characters—and readers—regarded as "normal." In other words, disabled characters serve as a narrative prosthesis, becoming symbols of an "individual and social collapse" without regard for the disabled experience or the disabled community per se. 5 In Bodies in Commotion: Disability and Performance, Carrie Sandahl and Philip Auslander identify a series of characters who fulfill diverse functions within the able-bodied and able-minded context: the obsessive avenger, the sweet innocent who acts as a moral barometer for the nondisabled, the overcomer of bodily obstacles, the charity case, the freak, and the monster. 6 While I understand the validity of what these scholars propose, and Alaniz's use of the theory, the distinction between able and disabled is less discrete in recent Western cultural productions. 7 In Birdman, disability is not a compensatory meter used to enforce a corporeal or cognitive normality.

Actually, all four main characters in Birdman perform debilitating mental conditions—conditions that perhaps become fatal, in the case of the protagonist—as part of their day-to-day lives. Mental debility is in fact the norm. More importantly, the debilitating condition of mental illness embodied by the protagonist is what gives him the ability to perform "real art" on stage. Mental illness—made concrete by Riggan's real attempted suicide, with real blood coming out of his destroyed nose—makes his character Eddie not just a character, but a real human. That reality, which is dependent on Riggan's grotesque exhibition of mental debility, is what gives him the praise and validation he is looking for as an actor and artist outside of Hollywood.

One factor in this perception of the real human as enduring and exhibiting some form of mental illness is the long-standing, favorable association between madness and genius: for instance, Plato's theia mania ("divine madness") in Phaedrus 244d-245a and Aristotle's linking of melancholia with genius in Problemata XXX, I, 953a. Over the centuries, similar ideas have been kept alive by various philosophers, scholars, and poets (Marsilio Ficino, Paul Verlaine, and Sigmund Freud, among others). More recently, the terms "neurodivergence" and "mental illness" are preferred over "madness" in association with "genius" (and there is a neoliberal emphasis on "productivity"). Recent TV programs exalting the mad-genius or neurodivergent-genius persona include National Geographic's Genius, Netflix's Mr. Robot, and ABC's The Good Doctor. Online, a cornucopia of memes offer quotes exalting such identities. This one has been attributed to Apple co-founder Steve Jobs: "Here's to the crazy ones. The rebels. The troublemakers. The ones who see things differently. While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do." 8

Riggan Is Mentally Ill

Mental illness is not addressed in Birdman as a biological disorder precisely because Iñárritu promotes the mad-genius trope right from the outset. Other films have explored this trope (e.g., The Truman Show, Black Swan). However, Iñárritu playfully wobbles between creating a character who is a mad-brilliant artist and creating one who is a mentally ill, pathetic has-been. Due to the biocapitalist context in which both the film and the audience exist, a viewer may perceive Riggan as mentally ill, and define such an affliction as a pathology. The fact that Michael Keaton and Riggan have analogous career trajectories 9 adds to the inevitable translocation of Riggan's experience into the current real world, even if the film is continually reminding its audience of the apparatus that constructed it. 10

Riggan is portrayed as mentally ill in many different ways. At the beginning of the film, he thinks that he actually made a light fixture fall on an actor just by imagining it. "I made it happen," he confides to his producer. 11 Riggan also believes he can levitate and move things without touching them. But when another character is part of the same scene, the viewer sees Riggan actually using his hands to push and throw things. At one point Riggan seems to be able to fly from a rooftop to the theater—but then the viewer sees a taxi driver waiting to be paid once Riggan arrives at his destination. Almost all moments of fantasy are truncated by a more validated reality. Thus the viewer can presume that the protagonist is significantly altering his reality, to the point of considering him mentally ill. The viewer can tell that Riggan is conflicted and somewhat depressed: he is being followed and insulted by Birdman (his previous role), who tries to convince him to leave the "shithole" he is in and go back to Hollywood. Birdman tells Riggan, "Oh, you really fucked up this time. You destroy a genius book with that infantile adaptation. Now you're about to destroy what's left of your career. It's pathetic." 12 Riggan tries many times to ignore his "mental formations," but Birdman corrects him: "Stop that shit. I am not a mental formation. I am you, asshole." 13 One could even diagnose Riggan as suffering from multiple personality disorder.

Riggan also misuses drugs, to the point of waking up on a stoop one day. People around him think that he is somewhat disengaged, or that the expression on his face is bizarre. For instance, the taxi driver exclaims, "That fucker is crazy." 14 His producer tells him, "Get that smile off your face. You're freaking me out." 15 And even though suicide is not always an indication of mental illness, today in Western culture it is generally interpreted as a sign of a mental disorder. Riggan attempts suicide (or narrates his attempt) a couple of times: onstage in his play and, as he told his wife, when he walked into the ocean and was stung by jellyfish. He also rehearses or narrates his own death at other times: in the turbulent flight he shared with actor George Clooney, and on a rooftop when he is interrupted by a woman watching from a nearby roof. And while it is not clear, he may actually have committed suicide at the end of the film by jumping off the hospital window.

Riggan Is a Mad-Genius Artist

All of these details show Riggan as mentally ill. But Iñárritu does not just construct him as someone suffering from a neuropathological condition. While embodying his debility, Riggan is also a brilliant creator of "super-realism" in art, as theater critic character Tabitha Dickinson asserts at the film's end. To attach the aura of the mad-genius artist to Riggan, director Iñárritu constructs a character who has left Hollywood and all the money and popularity it brought him. Riggan, according to himself and presumably to academia, is not being bought anymore. He is not mainstream. He is exceptional. What Riggan is creating now is more worthy of admiration, more visceral, more human. He is adapting the work of none other than Raymond Carver, "the most influential writer of American short stories in the second half of the 20th century." 16

Typical of the mad-genius narrative, Riggan does a lousy job as husband and father. He is also reckless, going to extremes to see his work performed and critiqued the way he wants it to be. He risks debt by refinancing his Malibu house in order to get the actor Mike Shiner as a cast member. Because Riggan is obsessed with himself, his theatrical creation, his reception and relevance, and his immortality as an artist, some of his mental illness "symptoms" are linked to his artistic vocation. Due in great part to his obsession with being remembered, he is focused on the end of his life. This is illustrated by the anxiety Riggan demonstrates after learning that George Clooney was on a flight with him and realizing that the other actor would be remembered, but he would not.

Birdman could be Riggan's own recreation of the rest of (and end of) his life while he is dying on the shore from the jellyfish stings, which would explain the dreamlike, uncut cinematographic experience of a life continually seeking to end itself yet still attempting to be remembered in the process. But in reconstructing his death, Riggan decides to kill himself onstage—or rather, Iñárritu decides to carry out Riggan's death on the stage while he is performing his play. The link between artistic creation and mental illness is manifest, thereby propagating the mad-genius trope in the cultural imaginary. Though Riggan chooses not to exist anymore and wants his Broadway play to be what identifies him (not the bird costume), the act of suicide infuses his last artistic deed with significance, shining the spotlight on him. He chooses to freeze that pinnacle moment—or, more accurately, to turn that frozen moment of immediate and deliberate nonexistence into a pinnacle.

Artistic Madness and Suicide

Iñárritu also makes sure to associate Riggan's suicide attempts with a critically acclaimed cultural production, establishing a firm connection between his presumed mental illness and creativity. And the film's jellyfish story mentioned earlier probably references an anecdote of attempted suicide told by British writer Evelyn Waugh. 17 Iñárritu bookends his film with shots of jellyfish on the shore, further imbuing the production with a reference to suicide, or the last thoughts of a depressed and dying artist. On that note, the film's opening quote is one that appears on Raymond Carver's tombstone, wondering about being loved and remembered. The film's shots of the burning airplane/comet may allude to the mythical flaming Icarus falling to his death. Of course, Riggan's attempted suicide on the stage is the most obvious link between artistic madness and suicide. A more disguised allusion is offered by shots of a hallway with the unmistakable hexagonal carpet used in The Shining, the 1980 film in which an aspiring writer loses his mind while trapped in a hotel. And finally, the actor who is performing Macbeth quotes these lines from Act 5:

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing. 18

Macbeth has abandoned his belief in any value for life and the living. He senses that death is on its way, and he wants it to come. He compares his life to that of an actor who is forgotten once his time on stage is done; his story is passionate but meaningless, told by an idiot. In Birdman, Riggan has just been told by New York Times theater critic Tabitha that she will destroy his play. He knows death is coming his way, and he wants it to come. Later he is described not as an idiot, but close: as unwitty and ignorant.

Myth and the Superhero

Two nods to myth 19 in Birdman are the film's references to both Icarus and the phoenix, the bird of immortality that rises from the ashes. Utilizing the Icarus myth instills a transcendent significance not to Birdman's Hollywood character but to Riggan's human-debilitated self, thereby elevating Riggan's mental debility as a legendary trait. This association is important because, even though both Riggan and Birdman equate the Hollywood character with Icarus, it bestows pathos and mental illness on Riggan's character. To name one example, Riggan mentions "Birdman, like Icarus—" in an interview. He is trying to expand on a Roland Barthes quote brought up by an interviewer: "The cultural work done in the past by gods and epic sagas is now being done by laundry detergent commercials and comic strip characters." 20 But Riggan is not allowed to explain his view. Another interviewer interrupts, asking if he had used pig sperm to rejuvenate his face. This vacuous question, coupled with Riggan's incapacity to respond in a savvy way, renders Riggan extremely pathetic and silences any thoughts about the association between Birdman and the mythological figure.

Still, Birdman voices the association: "Let's go back one more time and show them what we're capable of. We have to end it on our own terms, with a grand gesture. Flames. Sacrifice. Icarus." 21 However, at this point Riggan believes himself to be levitating onto a rooftop, imagining himself as Birdman, with a desire to fly. Hence, in Riggan's embrace of Icarus—who is in turn attached to his superhero character—he displays a mental illness that characterizes him both as a tragic mythological figure and as a debilitated human. Even if Icarus plunges to his death, the mythology confers a sense of transcendence because his story (mythos) has survived from antiquity. Furthermore, the use of the phoenix myth when Riggan dies and simultaneously rises conveys the sense of transcendence to a mentally ill individual only recently identified as an artist because he tried to kill himself on stage. In this sense, the mentally ill identity is awarded profundity and immortality.

Iñárritu also imbues the film with a mythical aura through the use of atemporality. Birdman is experienced more as a boundless ocean or a dream—in which markers of time such as nightfall and sunrise flow into one another—than as a habitual life. We humans have broken the continuity of our existence with the creation of time, but in this case time and life itself are redefined as a continuous movement, not sets of cut images. Time and life are not only continuous but also cyclical. Iñárritu repeatedly alludes to cyclicality, as in Mike's tattoo of a double ouroboros (the snake symbol of infinity), Borges' Labyrinths that Mike holds while tanning, and the shot of the circular hospital vent that opens the last scene. Repeated phrases and scenes within the film also suggest cyclicality. The four characters sitting at the table and drinking, the couple in bed being surprised by Riggan's onstage character Eddie, the rehearsals of the play and of Riggan's death—these repetitions give the impression of an inevitable return to an earlier time. The teleological vision of life is disrupted. Instead, life is perennially performed on and off the stage. The mirror images between the character Laura and the character she plays on stage (both of whom say they are pregnant but then lose the child) and between Riggan and Eddie (both of whom attempt to kill themselves but fail) contribute to creating a story that seems to exist only within its own reflective boundaries. More circularity is seen when Sam, Riggan's daughter, brings the wrong flowers (roses) to her father at the film's beginning but eventually, at the end, brings him the lilacs (once associated with mourning) he wanted. And finally, the jellyfish shots at the beginning and the end of the film suggest that it all began when and where it all ended.

Riggan Is a Superhero

Up to now, I have shown how Riggan is portrayed as mentally ill, and as a mad-genius artist imbued with exceptionality. I have demonstrated how the myth deployed has, perhaps inadvertently, given an aura of significance to Riggan's embodiment of mental illness. However, Iñárritu utilizes another kind of cultural production, that of Hollywood blockbusters and the superhero genre, to impart Riggan's character with pathos and create doubt in the minds of the audience regarding his behavior and abilities. The audience sees that Riggan is broke. His wife and daughter feel mostly pity or disgust for him. He is obsessed and reckless about his work, and his rehearsals are a kind of disaster. Still, because of their regard for the mad-genius artist and the intermittent depiction of Riggan as a superhero, film audiences may feel a tiny bit of hope that he will do something extraordinary, in his play and in his life.

At times Riggan appears to levitate, move things at will, fly, and cause explosions. Even if a more valid reality quickly subverts those instances, in the end the viewer chooses to doubt: maybe Riggan actually does have powers, maybe he actually did fly away. By leaving the ending open, Iñárritu indirectly links mental illness not only with creativity and brilliance but also with some form of superpower, further bestowing power onto the performance of debilitating mental conditions.

Performance of Debilitating Conditions

Riggan consciously performs mental illness when he attempts to kill himself on the stage. To emphasize, performing mental debility does not imply that it is a false gesture, or a fake experience. Rather, it allows for the possibility of a spectator who could respond to that debilitated condition and validate the behavior. Physically embodying mental illness exposes the condition and allows the spectator to react to it, identifying and treating the sufferer differently.

Regarding Riggan's performance of mental illness off the stage, there is one scene in which he seems to consciously embody his "mental formations." He is on the rooftop, ready to jump and fly, or to kill himself, when a woman on another rooftop asks him if this is for real or if he is shooting a film. 22 Riggan resorts to saying that it is a film. This admission serves two purposes: on one hand, the estrangement technique discourages the audience from identifying with Riggan's debilitated character. On the other hand, it adds a paradoxical facet to the character. For the first time, Riggan gives the impression of consciously performing mental illness for an audience. In other words, the fact that he admits to another character that he is making a film acknowledges the invisible audience in the movie theater. At the same time, saying it is a film can be interpreted as an act of performing normalcy, or "passing," so that no other character interferes with the grandiose music Riggan can hallucinate at will, or with his magnificent flying—in other words, with Riggan's embodying of the Birdman superhero character. In that sense, embodying Birdman's superhero character is equated with displaying a serious mental illness.

Riggan addresses his "mental formations" at various times and tries to calm himself during those moments of chaos. At one point, he decides to open up to daughter Sam about his frustrations. When she asks Riggan if he thinks he will be ready for the play's opening the next day, this is how he replies:

Yeah, well, I mean. Previews were pretty much a train wreck. … I'm broke. I'm not sleeping, like, you know, at all. And, um, this play is kind of starting to feel like a miniature, deformed version of myself that just keeps following me around and, like, hitting me in the balls with a…, like, a tiny little hammer. I'm sorry, what was the question? 23

He confides to Sam that the play he is adapting and its chaotic rehearsals reflect his state of mind, but she simply answers, "Never mind. … Tonight wasn't bad. It was…, it was weird, but it was kind of cool." 24 This light praise is followed by Riggan's confession of being a bad father: "I was a shitty father, wasn't I?" 25 To this Sam responds, "You were fine." In this exchange, Riggan exposes his psychological debility, thus reconfiguring a more sympathetic-pitiful image of himself in his daughter's mind. When he admits to being a lousy father, he gets a response that isn't great but isn't terrible, either. Riggan is able to consciously embody his current debility to prepare Sam to reevaluate her father's role in her life: her reevaluation is not as severe as at other times when she has scorned her father.

Right before the last act, Riggan opens up to his ex-wife as well, admitting to hearing a scary but truthful and comforting voice. In a similar way, his wife decides to ignore his comment: "I'm going to pretend I didn't hear that." 26 Then he proceeds to tell her the story of their last anniversary party, when he cheated on her and later attempted to drown himself by walking into the Malibu ocean. "And I tried to drown myself. … The water was full of jellyfish. They were all over me. I had to fight my way out of the water. … I was rolling like a maniac in the sand, crying." 27 At this point, Riggan is reliving his past despair while at the same time rewriting his ex-wife's memory of his past. From now on, she will remember not only that he cheated on her on their anniversary but also that he attempted to kill himself. By rewriting that memory, Riggan reconfigures Sylvia's idea of him in the present. "I love you, and I love Sam," Riggan tells her, which leads her to tell him that she knows, and to kiss him. 28 Consciously embodying a debilitating condition allows the sufferer—Riggan—to gain some control over how he is thought of and treated in the present as well as how he will be remembered after death.

An Ambiguous Ending

In the end, Riggan may have fallen to his death, further confirming his mental illness. Or he may have flown away, confirming his superhero abilities. The viewer is first led to believe that Riggan has died, but then Sam looks up and smiles, replacing the probable suicide with a fantasy. If the viewer decides to interpret the ending as a fantastic one, Riggan is no longer mentally ill; he is so above everyone and everything else that he is not even human. His mental illness and his creative artistry have transformed Riggan's living experience and others' gaze of him. He is now a creature of the skies. But even if the viewer interprets the ending as a tragic one, with Riggan plunging to his death, he has still triumphed. He is not only "the fucking man of the hour," but "a living legend," as his producer told him in the hospital. 29

The film's ending is the only time when fantasy appears to triumph over reality in the presence of characters other than Riggan. This is of particular importance. On the one hand, Iñárritu gives the audience what it desires: the possibility of choosing between a superhero ending or a tragic one. However, the conflation of the two endings further establishes an association between artistic creativity, mental illness, and supernatural abilities. To some extent, Riggan's attempt to "fly" from the hospital window confirms his mental illness and consolidates his remembrance as a mad-genius artist. His implied flying, laughing, and screeching at the end instill a kind of superpower into him, or a state of Übermensch that he did not embody before; for the first time, his vision of the truth is not altered by anyone else's reality on screen. The conflation of both types of endings suggests that, in Riggan's irreversible descent, he is elevated to the skies and becomes able to fly and screech like a raptor. 30 In his own extermination he is able to reach the pinnacle of adoration.

Aside from its ambiguity, the ending of the film is quite ironic. When Riggan removes his "Birdman gauze" in the hospital he doesn't recognize himself in the mirror but notes that Birdman is still following him, defecating by his side. "Bye-bye," Riggan tells him. "And fuck you"—though he actually becomes Birdman at the end of the film. 31 Ironically, Riggan ends up doing just what Birdman has told him to do: fly, ending this becoming artist nonsense with a "grand gesture. Flames. Sacrifice. Icarus." It is also ironic that, though it might seem that Riggan has succumbed to his tyrant alter ego Birdman, 32 his debilitated presentation and decimation of self actually enhance his identification as a mad-genius artist, not a mediocre Hollywood actor in a Lycra bird suit. Subsequently, the academic value of his artistic, non-mainstream production is increased as well.

The ending of the film mimics superhero action movies such as The Amazing Spider-Man (2012), in which actress Emma Stone—Riggan's daughter in Birdman—plays a character who looks out the window in search of not her Birdman father, but her Spider-Man lover. This parallelism is significant. Iñárritu critiques the Hollywood superhero blockbusters that serve as "cultural genocide," 33 while at the same time effectively using the genre to make the viewers of his own film "jump" and "shit their pants," as Birdman exhorts to Riggan while flying low behind him. 34 "Give the people what they want," says Birdman. "Some good, old-fashioned, apocalyptic porn. Birdman: The Phoenix Rises. … You saved people from their boring, miserable lives. You make them jump, laugh, shit their pants." In a sense, even the real act of attempted suicide on stage, with a gun being fired and causing a grotesque display of Riggan's injured face, is analogous to the over-the-top fires and explosions of a superhero action movie.

Birdman's mainstream suggestion, epitomized in the working title Birdman: The Phoenix Rises, is illustrated in the actual ending of Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance). At the end of the film, Riggan dies (or attempts to kill himself, at least decisively on stage), but appears to survive and rise to the skies like a phoenix. Birdman's suggestion is not only followed by Riggan when—accompanied by an abrupt, melodic score, as in the rooftop scene—he chooses to fly away from the hospital window but also by Iñárritu, who chooses to end his movie by giving us the illusion of a protagonist who simultaneously dies and rises, a man who in his mad death acquires powers and becomes a raptor, a mythological figure: a fantasy.

The Real Is Grotesque

Critic Tabitha Dickinson at first thinks of Riggan as a "Hollywood clown in a Lycra bird suit." 35 She goes beyond Riggan when she states, "I hate you and everyone you represent. Entitled, selfish, spoiled children. Blissfully untrained, unversed, and unprepared to even attempt real art. Handing each other awards for cartoon and pornography." 36 In contrast, the Broadway theater she critiques shows real art, "something worthwhile." 37 Actor Mike Shiner claims that Hollywood is perpetrating a "cultural genocide," where "a douche bag's born every minute." 38 As a theater actor he says he focuses on performing "real art," an art not tied to popularity or making a surplus of money—as if he and theater were exempt from morbid capitalistic endeavors. "I'm gonna be on that stage earning my living, baring my soul, wrestling with complex human emotions," he says. 39

Tabitha likes Mike Shiner, presumably for performing the "real;" she has never given him a bad review. 40 Mike says that the stage is the only place where he can be real. Everywhere else, he pretends to be somebody else. 41 In other words, the only way he can be real is through the performance of an other—that is, through the process of becoming other. Curiously, he tries to rape his costar Lesley (also his girlfriend) while performing on stage: "Let's really do it. Let's really fuck. It'll be incredible. It'll be so real" 42—an act that may appeal to instinctive, core drives—supposedly devoid of the taint of the Other or the Name of the Father. But to become real, Mike requires an audience—an Other—that can react to and witness his performance. In the first rehearsal, he lashes out at Riggan for switching his gin with water. He says to the audience, when they start to take pictures and record his performance, "Oh, come on, people, don't be so pathetic. Stop looking at the world through your cellphone screens. Have a real experience! Does anybody give a shit about truth other than me?" 43 For Tabitha and Mike, the "real" in art and life is marked by grotesque interactions of (and reactions toward) the performing body. The fleshly body, with its orifices and fluids, should be the ultimate medium of interaction with another body—the spectator's body. That displays the real in art.

According to Tabitha, Riggan actually did accomplish something real on Broadway. In the end she identifies him as someone who "has unwittingly given birth to a new form, which can only be described as super-realism. Blood was spilled both literally and metaphorically by artist and audience alike, real blood. The blood that has been sorely missing from the veins of the American theater." 44 Tabitha praises Riggan Thomson's "real" Broadway debut, merging his life with that of his artistic production. What matters to her is that real blood was poured out on stage, that the stage was gun-shot with grotesque reality.

Other previously discussed aspects of the film also comment on the grotesque—or the contradictory and always-morphing—nature of reality. By grotesque I do not simply mean the "gross naturalism" 45 that gained ground in the late eighteenth century with the rise of biopower. Rather, I adhere to Mikhail Bakhtin's interpretation of "grotesque realism," which reached its summit in Renaissance literature and entailed not only transgression and degradation but also renovation and rebirth. 46 Birdman's dreamlike and circular or atemporal consistencies give the film a mythological aura—evoking the artificial, the fictitious—while simultaneously eliciting the idea of diving into the Real dimensions of the protagonist's unconscious. 47 In fact, the intertwining of the lives of Michael Keaton and his character Riggan Thomson and the symbiotic coexistence of the protagonist's mental debility and his superhero traits soften the boundary between the fictional and non-fictional, or the fabricated and the flesh, shedding light on the seemingly layered yet indivisible nature of what is considered real. Along these same lines, the recurrent display of the theatrical apparatus involved in the creation of the play within the film and the film itself points to the societal dimension of reality. Finally, the display of humans as actors who perform repetitively on and off the stage depicts the real as perennially recreated, refashioned, represented—always mutating, grotesque.

In our contemporary Western context, can people envision a realism that is not grotesque? Biocapitalism has altered our conception of what is real and what entails being a real human. Under biocapitalism, "real" means biologically determined, which in turn is associated with diversity, complexity, and the natural—as opposed to the "normal," which connotes—particularly among the educated, middle and upper-middle classes—rigidity, simplicity, and falsity. A real human is one who is enduring some form of ailment. 48 Biocapitalism's propaganda of "living in prognosis" 49 entails commending life as a uniquely afflicted experience. Today's embrace of neurodivergent and mentally ill identities does not stride far away from the superhero category 50 that has ultra-exploded in popularity in recent times. From 2000 to 2017, ten X-Men films—featuring biologically altered individuals—were produced by Hollywood. Countless other movies starring Marvel and DC superheroes are being produced continuously. Even films as recent, satirical, and meta as Deadpool (2016) still link disease ("El cancer") with specific superpowers brought about by genetic mutations that make one basically immortal. The only "severe" setback of Deadpool's character is as superficial as the appearance that he has had a severe case of acne during puberty.

Mental illness and neurodivergence have become an identity choice for an increasing number of people who are economically comfortable and at the same time do not fit into any other identity category marked by a disenfranchised biological trait (e.g., black, LGBTQ, physically disabled). For individuals actively embodying and exhibiting a mentally debilitated identity, like social media personality Amber Smith, 51 even more so than "living in prognosis," which focuses on establishing a power struggle that is imposed from above (the doctor establishes how long you have to live), the person also has the opportunity of living in remission. Living in remission grants the sufferer a temporary recovery to exhibit high-functioning traits while still deploying grotesque occurrences and being part of a stigmatized-marginalized identity category. In this sense, by fostering a rhetoric not of overcoming but of accepted, cherished, and inherent debility, MentalCrips are allowed to be Super within our current biocapitalist framework.

Conclusion

Though Iñárritu may have intended to critique the superhero character and genre more openly than "this talky, depressing, philosophical bullshit," 52 which is how Birdman describes Riggan's theatrical play, the director has actually ended up giving superhero powers to the mentally ill identity. In Birdman, mental illness makes Riggan grand, unique, special, worthy of admiration. Mental illness provides the sufferer with superhero powers: this debilitated individual is not only more prone to creative and artistically significant endeavors, but is actually an artistic genius.

Riggan's embodiment of mental illness, epitomized in his attempted suicide onstage, gives him the esteem he is looking for in the anti-Hollywood, non-mainstream world. For critics such as Tabitha Dickinson, suicide or death on stage is not a cause for alarm. Neither is mental illness a cause for concern. The shot to Riggan's head is interpreted as just a shot, a technique, a method for enhancing the art he is creating. In other words, mental illness is portrayed as a technique that can be performed and will be praised.

At the same time, Tabitha considers this physiological drama of a mentally afflicted actor on the stage to be a performance of the real, or the "super-real." This label implies that Riggan is performing a "real human" on stage. Since the film carries the same title as Tabitha's critique review in The New York Times, Riggan's entire performance—not just in his play, but in the film—can also be labelled as super-real. Riggan is a super-real hero. This is problematic, because for the audience watching the film—even though Iñárritu constantly reminds viewers of the theatrical and filmic apparatus behind it—Riggan is portraying a mentally debilitated self, troubled by his life experiences. In other words, he is suffering from a mental illness, making him on one level a real human though on another level a superhero. This statement equates today's conception of the real human as mentally ill and mental illness as a superhero trait.

Riggan's indirect affiliation with a debilitating condition sealed under the umbrella of mental illness makes the character more readily appealing not only within artistic and academic circles (in and out of the film), due to his alteration of the mainstream superhero iconography, but also within today's biocapitalist context in general, since it celebrates obsessive hard work and productivity while coping with a mental debility or "mental formations." One could say he is extremely high-functioning, right up until he ascends-descends into immortality. Riggan is an artistic genius who simultaneously acquires mythical and earthly dimensions precisely because he exhibits a grotesque account of his vulnerability as a mentally afflicted individual.