Birdman, or The Continuing Search for Moral Heroism

Watching the Oscar-winning film Birdman recently, I realized that I frequently have the experience of being unable or unwilling to go as far as the creators of a film (usually a film; often a book, sometimes an album, etc.) want to go.  I can be with them for the most part, I can be rapt, admiring, but in the end it seems they're always committed to something I instinctively resist.  And I think it's this: they insist upon the postmodern, existentialist premise that vice is inevitable and all-pervasive.

In this they may be right, it's possible that my quibble may only be a question of emphasis.  Indeed, the dynamism of narrative art since mid-century (mid-last-century), could be said to derive from our bifurcated consciousness: everything from I can't go on; I'll go on, to Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.  All that exquisite heartbreak, I admit, is only possible if a man (or woman, of course) has his own wretched concupiscence to battle, if he has to wrest his shards of hope from a comprehensive inner brokenness.

But isn't it possible as well that the establishment of this wretchedness has shaded over into a kind of vernacular orthodoxy, a shibboleth of cool?  Isn't it possible that the need to prove our grubby, nihilist bona fides has begun to imprison us within predictable tropes of profligacy, solipsism, and chaos?  Isn't it possible that we've become incapable of countenancing the prospect of epochal triumph?  That as artists and audiences both, we are absolutely terrified of virtue?

In other writings that nobody reads, and in conversations with no one but my dauntless wife, I've thought of our era as the Age of Moral Exhaustion.  And I've sought a tectonic break from that era, a definitional icon of Moral Heroism, a natural messiah who might, by embodying the heretofore unimaginable thrill and complexity of virtue, liberate us from our compulsion to wallow endlessly in the goo of our anti-heroes' bad decisions.  Thus far, though I like to think the effort itself has been interesting, I have sought in vain.

Which is why I have to point out here (as has an entire spectrum of observers before me), that Birdman is an excellent film.  It is not a criticism of a story to say that it does very, very well that which stories in our day tend to do: to limn the pathos of a confused and unhealthy civilization.

But it is not a film that breaks with our prevailing ethos.  It's resolution and final image is one not of salvation, but of escape.  In Birdman's world, we still can't do the right thing; we can only fly away from the wrong ones.

That's fine, even beautiful.  It just isn't a vision of moral heroism.  So I keep thinking and thinking.  Moral heroism.  What is that?  What could it possibly ever look like?