Birdman is our Citizen Kane, in many respects a groundbreaking film about an aging box office superhero (Keaton) who desperately wants to create something of merit, something artistic, something real. In place of Dickensian Bildungsroman we find Borgesian mirroring, a mirroring of a mirroring of a perpetual present miraculously sustained by a seemingly never-ending long take. The single shot is an illusion, part of the film’s leveling of reality culture and the Real itself. Birdman’s self-reflexivity and hypermediacy continually remind us that we are watching a performance within a performance. We wind our way through the St. James’s narrow corridors and cramped dressing rooms up to its boundless rooftop alongside the remarkable Keaton, Norton, Galifianakis, Watts, and Stone in ostensible real-time. The reflexivity is indeed impressive since it forbids the effect of scripted reality (e.g., promotion of subjectivity, masking of social totality, and verisimilitude) even as we are there on stage learning the lines or confronting ourselves on social media. This reality, fetishized and commodified, is the “reality” that Keaton and his play admonish. In other words, Birdman’s strategy is to give its audience a privileged position next to its characters and inside its narrative as that narrative unfolds while simultaneously refusing the privilege of absolute knowledge of events—that is Birdman’s singular achievement. Birdman carries out the critique by questioning the thing-in-itself, the Kantian noumena paraphrased on Keaton’s dressing room mirror, “A thing is a thing, not what is said of a thing.” In the end, we have no choice but to follow Stone’s wondrous, wondering gaze out Keaton’s hospital window where we find that her father has succumbed to the scripted real, a simultaneous death of author, actor, consumer, and viewer, a generative and hopeful destruction to be sure.