Birdman: Or (The Expected Virtue of Forgiveness)

by Kyle Price-Livingston

My favorite film of the year? Birdman. And not because I love Michael Keaton (though I do), or because I love superheroes (though I REALLY do), but because of Sam Thomson (Emma Stone).

Sam is the fiery, brittle daughter of Michael Keaton’s titular hemidemisemi-hero. She is angry, self-destructive and in pain. She is torn between a desire for her absentee father’s attention and a need to punish him for the years of suffering his selfishness has caused her. Riggan Thomson (Keaton) is vaguely aware of this, but can’t quite tear his focus away from himself long enough to help, so instead Sam watches impotently (Ed Norton pun intended) and angrily rolls herself a joint as her dad spirals toward a complete meltdown. And yet Sam gives me hope.

I’m writing this piece on a tiny pocket notepad which has the words “Foxy Lady” emblazoned on the cover along with a neat sketch of a fox. It was by far the coolest notepad available at the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, Arizona. I’m sitting on a cement bench along a nature trail maintained by the facility. I am resisting the urge to poke cacti. I am hoping to see a roadrunner. I am trying and failing to ignore how much I miss weed.

My mother is inside receiving another of her weekly chemo treatments. I am outside because I would much rather be listening to bird song than sitting in a hospital waiting room, and because I’m too angry at my mom to stay in one place for more than a few minutes. It’s not that she did anything specific today, but being at the clinic with her brings up a lot of things I normally try not to think about. Well, I’m thinking about them now, and I’m about to make all of you do the same. Sorry.

My mother and I have seen each other twice in the last 4 months, once in December, a few weeks after her diagnosis, and now this week because my aunt is out of town and somebody needs to drive my mom to the doctors and to her AA meetings. This is the most frequently we have visited in years.

Mom’s inability to drive herself to these things has nothing to do with her cancer. A combination of psychological disorders, drug and alcohol abuse have stripped her of her coordination and of her ability to care for herself. Over the last 2 years she lost her job (subsequently granted disability retirement, thankfully) her car, her pets, her home, and also surrendered control of her finances. It’s actually a testament to her (now decayed) support system that she held on to those things as long as she did.

About a year ago I flew back to the Northeast to help her move the few of her possessions not covered in vomit or animal feces to sunny Phoenix, AZ, where her saintly sister, a psychologist and nurse practitioner, had agreed to take her in and help her get clean. Mom wasn’t thrilled about this plan, but another looming eviction and a sudden hospitalization due to an “accidental” overdose left her without much choice.

The trouble started long before I was born, of course, but I don’t remember being aware of it until I was about 12. I think it was my dad’s concern that first drew my attention to it. Unlike me, Dad was aware of her psychological problems, and of her long tradition of treating them with hard drugs in her youth (crystal meth mostly; young mom didn’t screw around) and booze as an adult (she would later begin to abuse prescription psychiatric medications as well). It’s not as though I hadn’t been to other kids’ houses and seen how their parents acted, I had just always accepted that my mom was…well…kinda weird.

Please don’t think I’m ascribing her weirdness to drug use (kinda the opposite, in fact) but I, in the selfish way kids have, could not comprehend that she even had problems, let alone that she was so miserable in her day-to-day life that she felt there was no recourse but to numb herself insensible. I mean, in my mind, my brother and I were supposed to be the central features in her existence. How could she be miserable with such great kids?

That’s the kind of insidious thought that leads a young mind down a long rabbit hole, ending in the painful conclusion that if she was miserable I must have made her that way, and that I, then, was definitely not as great as I had always assumed.

Realizing you aren’t the world’s foremost genius and artistic talent is part of growing up, I know, but I don’t think you’re immediately supposed to shift your beliefs to the opposite pole. But that’s what happens when your self-image is challenged before you have a fully developed self. My perception of my own value was still very much wrapped up in what I thought she thought of me. This isn’t supposed to be a long piece (hah!) so I’ll spare you the gory details of my formative years, but suffice it to say it took me a long time to untangle my identity from hers. In some ways, I don’t think I’m done with that yet.

I don’t totally buy into the 12 Step Program. Even at the best of times I am leery of organized religion (or organized anything) and the idea that something as intricate as mastering addiction can be broken up into stages is contrary to the way I think most people work. Our brains just aren’t that tidy. Still, when my mother announced, shortly after her arrival in Arizona, that she was rededicating herself to the AA system, I had to work pretty hard to fight off a glimmer of hope. She’d said this before, after all, and never even earned the 1 month coin.

Were Riggan in Alcoholics Anonymous (or Acclaim Seekers Anonymous or what have you) he’d be somewhere pre-Step 1. He might agree to attend a meeting, might chat with people at the punch bowl, but he wouldn’t share, and he definitely wouldn’t agree that he needs to be there. He, like all addicts, is convinced that if he can just hold out long enough, the universe will rearrange itself to fit his needs, and he’ll get everything he ever wanted or deserved. He doesn’t have a problem, the world has a problem. Unfortunately for Sam, “the world” includes her, whether Riggan would ever admit it or not.

To my surprise, Mom has stuck with the process. She has spent the last 8 months slowly working her way up the ladder, rung by rung, until I actually began to wonder if we might reach Step 9 after all. Step 9 is the amends-making stage, where you apologize to all the people you harmed with your addiction. To be clear, I wasn’t sure if I would be able to forgive her, or even if I wanted to forgive her, but I definitely wanted her to bring us to that bridge, and for me to decide if I wanted to cross it. But that was a long way off. And then she fell.

Last November, seemingly out of nowhere, mom tripped and fractured her left hand. She’d been losing weight over the previous few weeks but that wasn’t uncommon, as her eating habits tend to fluctuate with her depression. The fall itself wasn’t that far outside the norm, either. Mom broke her spine when she was a child and now has fused vertebrae in her lower back. Coordination has never been her strong suit, and drugs and alcohol haven’t helped. Over the last 15 years she’s broken her foot, her ankle, her wrist and her arm along with a host of lesser injuries she hasn’t bothered to mention to me, but which I have seen in her fading scars and bruises. Still, this was her first fall since sobering up, and the injury was pretty severe.

A trip to the hospital yielded blood work with alarming results, and 5 days later we received a diagnosis: Stage 5 pancreatic cancer with metastasis to several other organs. Life expectancy: 1 year with chemo, 6 months without. Mom opted for the chemo, primarily, she says, because she wanted time to work her way up to complete Step 9. I learned all of this in the same conversation. I wish I could tell you what I felt, but I’m pretty sure my brain short circuited for a while there, and I have a hard time remembering it clearly. Sounds healthy, right?

3 weeks later I flew to Phoenix again, ostensibly to do the same thing I’m doing on this trip, but really to give her a chance to have the Step 9 conversation with me. There are a bunch of people on her list, but I was the first person outside of this house to be asked to make the trip, primarily, I think, because Mom thought ours would be the easiest of those talks. In some ways, I was a trial run. A low risk gamble. And that makes me angry. Probably unfairly so.

What is definitely unfair is how angry I am at her for waiting until she’s dying to apologize. It’s unfair because this is not something anyone planned. It’s fucking cancer. It doesn’t give a shit what anybody wants. But I feel like a key facet of Stage 9 has been denied to me. I no longer have a choice about whether or not to tell her I forgive her.

Obviously, forgiveness doesn’t work that way, and I clearly am not yet ready to accept her apology, but I can’t exactly tell her that, can I? And that’s the point. I spent YEARS walking on egg shells around her for fear of upsetting her and setting off a chain reaction of self-destructive behaviors that would then be “my fault” and now I’m finally presented with a situation where she is literally asking me to express all the hurt of the last 20 years and I’m in the exact same boat I’m always in with her. Only more so.

Aside: Don’t worry, Mom won’t read this. She doesn’t read any of my writing. When I was 13 I brought her my first completed short story. She was drunk and depressed and, honest to god, put it down halfway through and told me it was “derivative.” She was probably right, but I haven’t showed her anything since.

I find myself torn, as I always am with her, between trying to make her happy and wanting to make her sad. I want her to feel pain and remorse, but I don’t want her to suffer. The idea that someone might use terminal cancer as a manipulative tool is so disgusting that I can barely bring myself to write it, but I can’t quite force the possibility out of my mind, and that colors our interactions no matter how much I try to ignore it.

So we had the talk. She said the right things. She really did. Her list of offenses was long and detailed, and her regret felt sincere…but it wasn’t enough. I really hoped it would be, but it wasn’t. Still, I did my best to say the right things back. She cried. I cried. We hugged. She moved on to the next person on her list, and I went back to being quietly angry.

It’s not that Sam doesn’t want Riggan’s play to succeed. It’s not that she doesn’t want him to be happy. It’s that Riggan continues to put his own desires ahead of his responsibilities as a parent. The thought that he might receive some validation for doing that without demonstrating true remorse is more than she can stand. He’s not actively trying to make her unhappy, he just cannot fathom why he would put her happiness ahead of his. For Sam, the whole thing is yet another in a lifetime of slaps to the face. (Sidenote: A Lifetime of Slaps To the Face should definitely be the title of a 3 Stooges retrospective)

The final scene in the film is…let’s just say it’s analytically problematic. So EITHER Riggan’s suicide attempt is unsuccessful and it fixes his professional life and relationship with his daughter and, oh yeah, his superpowers are real OR he kills himself and what we’re seeing is what happens to him as/after he dies. I’m not going to try to tell you which it is, because I don’t think we’re supposed to be sure.

It’s totally possible that the latter interpretation is correct. If that’s the case, then I take solace in the fact that by the end of the film, Sam is coming into her own as a person, and trying to think about what will actually make her happy. She hasn’t figured it out yet, but she’s moving in that direction.

My preference, though, is for interpretation 1, for a universe in which, confronted with the possibility of losing him forever, Sam is able to accept her father for the deeply flawed (super)human being he is. The pain of the past isn’t forgotten, but she is able to move past it and find happiness in a new chapter of their relationship. I’m not there yet with my mom. I don’t know if I’ll ever be. I don’t know if I’ll be able to look at her empty hospital bed and then stare up into the sky in wonder and joy because her pain is finally at an end, but I hope I can.

Explaining the Ending of “Interstellar”

by Gabriel Valdez

If there’s one thing Interstellar does badly, it’s accessibility. You can slow things down and have characters explain each challenging scientific concept, or you can speed things up and just let the audience experience a film’s craziest moments in a more surreal manner.

Interstellar sometimes sits uncomfortably in the middle, so that if you haven’t watched countless hours of NOVA, read back issues of Scientific American, and written an entire script based around Lee Smolin’s fecund universe theory like some huge nerd (hi!) you might find yourself left a little in the dust. At the same time, there’s enough explanation left in the film that – like a rushed lesson – you fuzzily grasp at the basics while the plot moves on before you fully comprehend it all.

That said, I’ve been a bit disappointed in the critical community’s reaction to Interstellar. While critics have liked it, I’m frustrated that film experts have looked at something many don’t understand and, instead of criticizing Interstellar for rushing the explanations, they’ve simply said Interstellar is wrong or scientifically inaccurate. Because they’re experts in one thing (film), they don’t want to admit that they’re not experts in something else (astrophysics). They worry that lacking a reader’s trust in one area will influence the reader to distrust them in others. (That doesn’t put much faith in their readers.) They seem to forget that the first step to being an expert about anything is to say, “I don’t understand.”

There are plenty of things on which I’m not an expert. I am, at best, a talented layperson when it comes to astrophysics, but that’s enough to explain what Interstellar is doing.

OBVIOUSLY, THE REST OF THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS MAJOR SPOILERS FOR INTERSTELLAR. YOU SHOULD REALLY SEE THE FILM BEFORE READING ON, BECAUSE IT IS A RARE AND INCREDIBLE FILM EXPERIENCE.

Interstellar ends with our pilot, Cooper, falling into a black hole. He doesn’t die, however. Instead, he arrives in a complex built for him to see all of time at once in a fixed place – his daughter’s bedroom. It is built specifically for Cooper to be able to influence the time line of his daughter Murphy. He even says this out loud.

Critics have derided this as scientifically inaccurate because a black hole would tear your body apart before you got to any interior complex built inside of it. I hadn’t known critics were experts on building complexes inside of black holes that allow you to change time itself. Obviously, I’m not taking full advantage of the career.

It stands to reason that, if you can build such a complex specifically for Cooper to use, you can remember to flip the “Don’t tear Cooper apart on the way in” switch.

It’s said time and again in Interstellar that the wormhole is a tool sent from aliens. It turns out to be from future humans, but for the purposes of this next explanation, it doesn’t matter. Point is, it’s a tool. One criticism insists that the wormhole, like the black hole, would tear Cooper’s spaceship apart.

So the wormhole and black hole are both tools. If both are tools, then it’s safe to assume they’re user friendly. We don’t make hammers and screwdrivers that tear the user into shreds when he hits a nail or turns a screw. It stands to reason that if the black hole is a tool built for Cooper, and it’s on the other side of a wormhole, then the wormhole is a tool put there for Cooper, too.

If both the wormhole and black hole are tools designed to one day be used by Cooper, let’s assume they BOTH have “Don’t tear Cooper apart on the way in” switches. Future humans? Big on toggle settings.

Why build this time-hopping facility inside a black hole? Because, in astrophysics, black holes are the only things that are theoretically capable of inverting time and space. Supposedly, future humans might wander through time as they please, but Cooper’s a modern human. He still can’t – he needs a bit of help.

We see a black hole the same way an ant might see a car – as something that can’t be fully understood with the knowledge at hand. Ants get crushed if they get rolled over by the tire of a car. That doesn’t mean we humans don’t use the car as a tool to get somewhere, and if the ant climbs into the car and hitches a ride elsewhere, it doesn’t mean his journey is scientifically inaccurate.

The whole idea of the ending is that, if time is a dimension, causality can be designed. Just as Cooper floats through time to create the causalities that get him there – knocking books off his daughter’s shelf, writing coordinates in falling dust – the future humans create these tools (wormholes and black holes) as causalities intended for Cooper’s use.

In essence, future humans create causalities that allow Cooper to create causalities.

It’s a bit complicated, but if A leads to B leads to C, and time is as easy to walk through as your living room, then C can lead to B can lead to A without breaking a sweat.

Cooper doesn’t beat the universe with the power of love, as many critics have misunderstood. He is briefly given the tools to create new causes and effects in time itself. These tools are supplied him by a future human race.

Humans have taught dogs to drive cars in controlled situations (sorry about all the car metaphors). The car’s locked at 5 miles an hour in an empty parking lot and sometimes the human has to gesture for the dog to make a correction. Because it’s impossible for dogs to understand how the engine of a car works, however, does not mean the dog is driving that car with the power of love for his owner. They’re using their feet and specially designed pedals and why are we teaching dogs to drive cars again? But the point is, you have an animal using a tool that’s been adapted specifically for that animal to use in a controlled circumstance. That’s all the ending of Interstellar is.

Obviously, director Christopher Nolan wants this to be visually vibrant and metaphorically meaningful, so he doesn’t put Matthew McConaughey in an empty parking lot and have some magical future human energy being going, “No, left! Go left!” The sequence needs to be more intuitive than that, but when boiled down, that’s what’s happening.

The last complaint I’ll address is Cooper being transported back to our solar system at the end of it all. With everything else we’ve seen, I don’t think it’s a stretch that future humans might flip the “transport Cooper back because we’re not sadistic jerks” switch.

(The “transport TARS back because he’s awesome” switch was probably a given when future humans were blueprinting this. I bet it was the first idea they came up with. I can picture them in their future human conference room going, “TARS is going to be OK, right,” before anyone even introduced themselves.)

In brief, future humans build the wormhole and black hole specifically to draw Cooper there so that he can use the tools they’ve retrofitted for him to change his daughter’s time line so that she can save the human race so that there can be future humans who build a wormhole and black hole specifically for…causality, everyone. We might not understand causality that way yet, but dogs driving cars are probably going, “I am a pioneer bravely going into the unknown via the power of magic – look at me!”

Interstellar fits this all together very neatly. Many of the plot holes and scientific inaccuracies some critics complain about just aren’t there. It’s OK to not understand Interstellar fully, because that’s partly the movie’s fault. The blame for that absolutely lies with Nolan wanting to explain a little, but cutting a lot of it out for pacing. And sometimes composer Hans Zimmer couldn’t care less about you hearing the explanation because he’d rather you go deaf to his ridiculously awesome organ music.

There’s a difference, though, between not understanding fully because Interstellar doesn’t always explain things well, and pretending you understand everything perfectly and insisting it’s wrong. Criticize Interstellar for what it fails to do: explain. Don’t criticize it for what it actually does very right, very tightly, and far more bravely than most films would ever try.