With Bird People, are we to stipulate that the two main characters in the film, who merely run into each other in passing while at an airport hotel, prefer and out of body experience than to animate the flesh and blood they were born with? What can explain the magical fancy the film pivots on as it draws its curtains, when the female French maid spends an evening flying around as a sparrow enjoying Paris as much as she can? This is the ultimate task to ask: why does turning into a bird matter according to what leads into the magical evening?

What did lead into it was nothing short of the acclaim of the Last Man. Women cannot be blamed for being shipwrecked by males who so effortlessly can cut and run. It is astounding to see what is laid witness to the successes of industrialization, as moral standards are no longer necessary in order to clothe and feed oneself. On a whim, obligations and duty, something the nobility of old cherished to possess and cherished the challenge of its imposition, are discarded like unwanted cheap samples at a grocers. In an instant, the man who leads us most of the way in the film abandons his accountability to his company, to his wife, to his children, but above all, the obligation to posterity. It is all encompassed with his inconsideration to his business partners and children. How can anyone possibly respect such a pitiful thing that complains about his life on downed pillows and three thousand thread count Egyptian cotton while he dines with a bottle of nice wine? The trouble with capitalism is that such cretins are allowed to breed and incidentally make noxious to the surround environment and culture the lack of will to live. He is so alienated from fight or flight that he can, like a juvenile turn down, what he has caused to be responsible for. This, as I remark elsewhere, is the reverberation of Adam in Eden, disabled to taking ownership of the consequences of his actions – and this is the type of man who cannot handle Paradise until he does.

And yet this is what left-wing liberalism is defined as: the freedom from consequences. To even besmirch the discourse with the acknowledgment that with free will comes responsibility, that there indeed exists with good and evil quality to being human, is to impose standards, to erect what was once known as civilization – a burden, a chore, an oppression onto the meek subject who cannot handle the existence of a rationality to his being that must find itself consistent with a necessarily higher order. It is to alienate the subject from his form, an abject degeneration of his true self to paraphrase Marx. That is, to serve a higher order that is not created by the self is to be enslaved. The man in Bird People is the iconography of idolatry that still has a beating pulse despite all these years of the reign of the idea of God on Earth.

What again does he speak to with the poor French girl? Surely she has no sensation of oppression despite being gridlocked to an hourly job picking up other people’s crap? Is the bird a release from her meager existence? Both clamor for freedom then, in true leftist fashion. This is a thoroughly Marxist film then, as it exhibits the desire for a release, an escape, from reality which dominates like a master the subject who feels like a slave. Working is oppression, though such an absurd conclusion never emanates in the mind of the Marxist as it is so self-effacing.

To be fair, the film does not need to be an advocate of Marx to judge the subjective feeling of enslavement by two Rich world Westerners who are so completely alienated from their ancestors struggle it is the definition of absurd.

Grade: B