This paper engages with Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of film in order to unpack the images and layers of meaning in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman (2014). In his cinema volumes, Deleuze famously asserts that in films made after the Second World War, the movement-images of classic Hollywood gave way to time-images. In films featuring time-images, time is experienced as duration, in direct presentation, and images themselves vacillate indiscernibly between virtual and actual. This paper holds that Birdman (2014) fits within the schema of the time-image that Deleuze illustrates. In his latest film, Iñárritu deploys time-images to construct a labyrinthine parable about time and love. He does so using a veil of magical realism that maps seamlessly onto Deleuze’s ontological framework, in which the unresolved tension between virtuality and actuality (as different-but-related poles of reality that continuously shift) structures our spatio-temporal existence. Using Deleuze in this way not only helps to shed light on Birdman’s specific antinomies and points of indiscernibility, it also makes it possible to offer an interpretation of the film’s much-contested mysterious ending. Iñárritu has made a film that asks us to re-think what we think we know about time, redemption, and above all, love in its many forms.
About the presenterKatherine Kurtz
Katherine Kurtz received her doctorate in Philosophy at Villanova University in 2021 after defending her dissertation “Deviant Bodies: Toward a Feminist Aesthetics of Monstrosity.” In addition to her love of monsters and horror, she works on the philosophy of art and feminist theory. She is currently traveling through Central and South America.