The Split in the Mirror
There is a scene early in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s 『Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)』 where Riggan Thomson, played by Michael Keaton, stares into a dressing room mirror. Behind him, we hear that voice. Deep, gravelly, mocking. It belongs to Birdman, the superhero character that made him famous decades ago. The voice tells Riggan he is wasting his time with this Broadway play, this desperate grasp at legitimacy. “We don’t belong here,” it growls. And Riggan, middle-aged and exhausted, cannot quite disagree.
This is the tension the film hands us from its opening moments: the self we present versus the self we cannot escape. Riggan wants to be seen as a serious artist, a man of substance and craft. But the world remembers only the cape, the feathers, the box office numbers. His own mind betrays him constantly, dragging him back to that simpler identity when he was loved without having to prove anything at all.
We know this split. Perhaps not with superhero franchises trailing behind us, but with our own versions of roles we outgrew yet cannot shed. The straight-A student who peaked in high school. The dependable friend who became so reliable that no one thinks to ask how they’re actually doing. The parent who realizes their children see only “Mom” or “Dad,” never the complicated person underneath. We build these identities like houses, and then one day we discover we forgot to include a door.
The camera in 『Birdman』 never seems to cut. It floats through hallways and across streets, following characters in what appears to be one continuous take. This technique does something strange to us as viewers. We cannot look away. We cannot find relief in a scene change. We are trapped in real time with Riggan’s anxiety, his hope, his humiliation. It mirrors the way our minds work when we are caught between who we were and who we are trying to become. There is no escape from the unfolding present.
So we begin here, with this duality. The mask and the face. The performance and the person. The question that haunts the corridors of that Broadway theater is the same one that follows us through ordinary life: when we strip away the roles others have assigned us, is there anyone left underneath?
Between Applause and Silence
Photo by Riggan’s daughter Sam, freshly out of rehab, tells him something brutal during one of their confrontations. She says he confuses love with admiration. This lands with the weight of a verdict. Because isn’t that confusion at the heart of so much of what we do? We chase metrics that can be counted. Followers, likes, ticket sales, performance reviews. These numbers promise to tell us we matter. But they cannot tell us we are loved.
The film places Riggan against Mike Shiner, a younger actor played by Edward Norton. Mike is everything Riggan fears and envies. He is talented without trying, authentic to the point of sabotage, and utterly unconcerned with being liked. On stage, Mike is electric. Off stage, he is unbearable. But there is something almost holy about his commitment to the work itself, divorced from what it might bring him. He doesn’t need the play to prove anything. He simply needs to be inside it.
Watching these two circle each other, we see competing philosophies of existence. Riggan believes reinvention requires external validation. He needs the critics to bless him, the audience to rise to their feet, the cultural gatekeepers to declare him legitimate at last. Mike seems to believe the work is the point, full stop. Whether the world approves is irrelevant.
Neither approach is entirely right. Mike’s purity comes with a cruelty, a willingness to sacrifice others on the altar of his process. Riggan’s hunger for approval makes him vulnerable in ways that are both painful and deeply human. Most of us live somewhere between these poles. We want to do meaningful work. We also want that work to be seen and valued. The question is which desire we let drive.
There is a moment when Riggan walks through Times Square in his underwear, locked out of the theater, forced to navigate the crowds in humiliation. Tourists take photos. He becomes another spectacle in a city of spectacles. And something shifts. In that exposure, that complete stripping away of dignity and control, he is more present than he has been in years. The mask has slipped off, and he is just a man, ridiculous and alive.
Perhaps reinvention does not begin with building a new self, but with surviving the exposure of having no self at all.This is the paradox the film keeps circling. Riggan wants to prove he is more than Birdman. But the proving itself is another kind of performance. Every time he reaches for legitimacy, he moves further from the simple truth of being someone who creates because they must.
Ghosts Across Centuries
Photo by The struggle Iñárritu captures is not new. It wears different costumes in different eras, but the shape remains familiar.
Consider the aging samurai in Kurosawa’s films, their code rendered obsolete by changing times. Or the fading Hollywood star in 『Sunset Boulevard』, trapped in a mansion of memories while the industry forgets her name. Or the painters who abandoned commercial success for movements that wouldn’t be understood for decades. The tension between recognition and integrity has shadowed artists and ordinary people alike for as long as both have existed.
What changes is the amplification. In Riggan’s world, and in ours, the volume of outside voices has grown deafening. Social media transforms every moment into a potential performance. We curate ourselves for audiences we cannot see. The Birdman voice that torments Riggan has multiplied into a chorus of notifications, comparison traps, and algorithmic judgment. We are all method acting in our own lives now, sometimes forgetting when the scene ends.
Yet the ancient Greeks wrestled with similar questions of persona, which literally meant the mask actors wore on stage. To have a persona was to have a public face, a character for the world. They understood that the mask was necessary for communication, for role-playing in the drama of civic life. But they also knew the danger of forgetting it was a mask at all.
Generations inherit this puzzle. The young rebel against the identities their parents built, only to construct equally rigid ones of their own. Parents watch their children’s struggles and see echoes of battles they thought they had resolved. Sam tells Riggan he never truly saw her. Riggan cannot hear this because he has barely learned to see himself. The failures cascade forward and backward through time, not because we are doomed to repeat them, but because the questions at their core resist easy answers.
Who are we when no one is watching? Does it matter? If a tree falls in a forest with no audience, did it even exist?
What Remains When the Curtain Falls
Photo by The ending of 『Birdman』 has been debated since the film’s release. Riggan, after a shocking act on stage that blurs the line between performance and reality, wakes in a hospital bed. His face is bandaged. The play has become a sensation. And in the final shot, his daughter looks out the window and then up, her expression shifting to something like wonder.
We do not see what she sees. This ambiguity is a gift. Because the point was never whether Riggan flies or falls. The point is that his story, like ours, resists neat conclusions. We do not shed our old selves in a single dramatic gesture. We carry them with us, those voices and masks and abandoned versions. They become part of the weave.
The contrast we began with, mask versus face, performance versus truth, does not resolve into one side winning. It transforms into something more honest. We are always both. The roles we play and the raw nerve beneath them coexist, sometimes peacefully, sometimes at war. The work is not to destroy the mask but to choose when to wear it, to remember that we are the ones who put it on.
Riggan wanted proof that he mattered beyond Birdman. What he received instead was the experience of mattering, however briefly, however imperfectly. To his daughter. To the actors who shared the stage. To himself, in those rare moments when the voice quieted and he was simply present in his own skin.
Maybe that is all any of us can hope for. Not the permanent shedding of our old identities, but occasional glimpses of the person underneath. Seconds when we stop performing long enough to feel the strange miracle of still being here, still uncertain, still reaching.
The voice never fully goes away. But sometimes, if we’re lucky, we learn to talk back.
