The Unexpected Virtue Of Ignorance By Riggan Thomson

“The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance” is ultimately the headline of the review of Riggan Thomson’s play, published the day after he shoots himself in the face on stage. The audience does not realize that this shooting was real, as well as that Riggan was legitimately injured, and they give Riggan’s performance a standing ovation, in stark contrast to the lukewarm reaction the rest of the play appears to receive. More specifically, the critic who wrote this review believed that Riggan was not especially knowledgeable - or willing to learn, for that matter - about “real” acting, and therefore may have viewed his excellent “performance” as unbound by more complex and/or traditional techniques and methods. In both of these cases, audience members …show more content…
The dialogue from the play and that of the movie often intertwine; for example, when Riggan first meets Mike, and they discuss Mike’s “gift” for learning lines, they are running a scene from the play, with the corresponding personas, but also frequently stop to discuss each other’s performance. In addition to this, it is mentioned during a script run-through that Riggan’s character “shot himself in the mouth, but he screwed that up too.” This appears to be foreshadowing as well as a plot point in the play - Riggan actually shoots himself at the end of the movie, seemingly attempting suicide on stage, but ultimately survives. Moreover, there are countless references to “real-life” actors and situations - after Riggan hits Ralph with a piece of equipment, he and Jake go through a list of potential replacement actors; all of them were unavailable due to their roles in various successful movie franchises, such as X-Men and the Avengers, to the point where Riggan rhetorically asks “they put [Jeremy Renner] in a cape too?” Birdman was apparently filmed on a fairly low budget - which is the reason why there is no real soundtrack for the movie, just drums in the background - so Jake’s frequent fretting about losing money is appropriate on every metanarrative …show more content…
The altercation begins when Riggan smells Sam’s marijuana, and she says that it is “not important.” He essentially accuses her of trying to ruin “[his] chance to do something that finally means something.” She fires back that “[he is] not doing this for the sake of art, [he is] doing this because [he] wants to feel relevant again” and that “there’s a world out there where people fight to be relevant every single day, a place [he ignores].” This argument provides an interesting juxtaposition between their generations - Riggan believes social media is useless, while it seems extremely important to Sam - and provides an alternative perspective on Riggan’s issues. Overall, Riggan seems to be denying the occurrence of change, in a way, due to the fact that he refuses to make use of a tool that could allow him to become more culturally prominent. Ironically, the Birdman figure in his mind seems more uncomfortable with change than he does - perhaps this scene demonstrates Birdman’s more external influence on