We watched Birdman (Micheal Keaton, the movie that won the Oscar this year) last night. I guess it’s refreshing to see an ex-‘superhero’ be a non-hero, with the flood of Spiderman, Captain America, X-Men and Ironman movies these last few years.
The real Birdman is not a ‘nice’ person – an absent dad; he seems to endlessly trash his room using telekinesis (or was that his imagination?) and rants frequently about his frustrations. His memories of being ‘Birdman’ that can fly around, blurs the lines between what’s real and what’s imagined.
Micheal Keaton’s co-performer in the movie’s stage play, Edward Norton, says at one point ‘The stage is the only place every day where I do not act’. So. Few of us are actors – or are we all? is what I took away from the movie. As Shakespeare famously wrote ‘All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players .. ‘. So who are we really? Is there a different/ real person from the self that interacts with the world every day?