Birdy (1984)

I expected Birdy to be the kind of movie I used to watch as a kid on late nights in front of the VCR; nostalgic & low-key movies about coming-of-age and how political & personal innocence went to hell for a boy or a girl in Mississippi at the time of the Vietnam war. It had some resemblance with that, true, but this is actually a film that challenges the notion that there is a state of the world we have to accept if we are to be eligible as full-blown "grown-ups". Al (a young Nicolas Cage) is a boy who takes an interest in the things that young boys are expected to take an interest in; fast cars, adventures, girls. He meets a strange young man who has a passion for birds. They become friends. Close friends. The story is told in flashbacks. Al was injured in the Vietnam war. Birdy, his friend, is locked up in a mental institution. That is where Al finds him, perching in bird-like position, refusing or unable to talk, becoming-bird.

That my thoughts were driven towards Deleuze & his conception of the subversive schizoid, human and animal and anything else at the same time, might actually not be such an over-interpretation as it first may seem. A psycho-analytic reading of Birdy - or a schizoanalytic one - is actually quite tempting in this case. Birdy is not going along with conventional life. He slips out of bourgeois fantasies about heterosexual love and family life. His parents and friends disapprove of the changes he undergoes.  

Birdy is, in some sense, a film that shows compulsory heterosexuality in a light that is far from flattering. Birdy sits in his room, fiddling with his birds. His mom clamps into the room and tells him that a girl wants him to be her partner on the school ball. Defiantly, he says yes. He dances with her without much enthusiasm only to escape from the whole thing, greeting his janitor father who cleans a hallway ("those boys can't hold liquor"). The next frame is the classical, obligatory All-American mist & cars & romantic darkness. Doris and Birdy sit in a car. Doris knows that Birdy is not really interested in her, and she wants to thank him. Throwing off her bra, she suggests he can to her, "whatever he wants". But he doesn't.

The major theme of Birdy is fantasy and how that is related to escape. Birdy is not repressing his (almost erotic) fascination with birds. To the horror of the close ones, he lives his fantasy instead of, as they would have it, snapping out of the fantasy world. The beautiful thing with Birdy is that it allows for a very different image of what it may mean to be at odds with normal, suburban life. At first, I was worried that the bird allegory would lean too heavily on the F-word. And maybe it did, and maybe I should say that is too cheap. But for some reason, I won't. There was too much going on here for there to be a simple, propulsive idea of "freedom". Freedom from what, to what? The answers within the films are not easy

That this is a film that proves to be subversive even to the 21st century audience is suggested by a very strange reaction on film boards. When somebody asks why this film is labeled "gay interest", people responded very aggressively; "Al & Birdy were not gay! They were close friends! Brothers!" One of the things that make Birdy a special film is that it does nothing to live up to the ideas of what male friendship/love is supposed to be like.

Birdy is not a flawless film, but the more I think about it, the more I like it. But there is one feature of this movie that is absolutely unacceptable. The music. P-E-T-E-R G-A-B-R-I-E-L.