aka Cage at War Part Two: Vietnam Punched Me in The Face
In many ways Birdy is a perfect companion to Racing with the Moon: two childhood friends return from war, injured and disillusioned. One (Birdy, played by Matthew Modine) is locked in a psychiatric ward, refusing to speak since returning from the jungle. The other (Cage's character, Al) brought in to try to rouse Birdy from his stupor, has bandages covering half his face and suffers nightmares about the shell explosion that put them there. Grim scenes from the hospital contrast with flashbacks of their happy exploits as "crazy Philly kids" in which they tooled around their neighborhood, playing baseball and scoring with chicks at the boardwalk. Their innocence and eagerness to go off to war-- as seen in Racing with the Moon-- are rued as foolish here: "We didn't know what we were getting into with this John Wayne shit...boy, were we dumb."
Yet Birdy's fairly standard wounded-vets-recall-their-innocent-childhood plot is nearly completely overshadowed by a far less common story: man-determined-to-fly-gradually-comes-to-believe-he-is-a-bird-and-falls-in-love-with-his-pet-canary.
Birdy's obsession begins innocuously enough, with a plan to raise and sell carrier pigeons. To help him collect the pigeons he recruits Al, whose initial enthusiasm fades when he is forced to don a feathered suit ("I look stupid!" "Not to a bird, Al") and climb atop a precarious roof. Soon enough Birdy slips, and ends up hanging on the edge with one hand, looking at the vertiginous drop below, and quietly laughing. Sensing as well as anyone that this is a harbinger of madness, Al redoubles his efforts to reach Birdy, but he is too far away. Not worried, Birdy declares his intention to drop onto the pile of hay below, causing Al to exclaim incredulously "You're going to jump?" only to be told, for the first of many times, "No, Al. I'm going to fly."
His attempts to fly become more serious as he builds a set of man-sized wings, although hardly more scientific: his engineering skills are put in serious doubt when he declares that flying is "mostly a matter of confidence" and that all you need is to "believe the air has substance and will hold you up," a philosophy of flight reminiscent of Douglas Adams, who famously declared flying to be a matter of throwing yourself at the ground and missing. When the wings fail ("I don't know what happened" he says, mystified, "I was going real good then I just fell out of the sky") he takes a different approach: he will fly by becoming a bird.
He keeps several canaries in an aviary in his room and he spends hours communing with them, to the increasing alienation of Al. When he buys a new one, he and Al have the following conversation, which pretty well sums up the entire movie:
Al: What are you going to name him?
Birdy: I don't know. I don't speak canary yet.
Al: Yet?
Birdy (to canary): eep! eep! eep!
Al: Fuck. This is getting weird.
Poor Al doesn't know the half of it-- Birdy has taken to sleeping naked in his aviary and having erotic dreams about his female canary Perta. In a voiceover to the audience, Birdy describes a dream in which "Perta waits...cups herself to receive me...I hover, then lower myself into her. Perta and I become one. I see through her eyes, fly on her wings. I am no longer alone." Having earlier in the film dismissed female breasts as "overgrown mammary glands" (prompting Al to deliver a heartfelt speech extolling the wonders of tits) he spurns his prom date's advances in favor of a night spent stroking and kissing Perta, as the camera traces a birds-eye-view flight path through the town. When Birdy decides to tell Al about this breakthrough, saying jubilantly "Last night I flew!" Al is naturally skeptical, and when Birdy insists "When I fly I AM a bird," Al reacts with hostility and storms away. Next we see him, he is wearing an army uniform and walking down the street as Birdy watches from the window.
Back in the present day of the movie, Al is alternately apologetic to Birdy ("I shouldn't have left you") and angry, trying to provoke a reaction through insults: "You don't hop like a bird, you don't really sit like one, and you sure as hell can't fly like one." But for scene after scene Birdy remains unmoving, perched naked on his bedpost staring at the window or curled up under the sink. Cage does an impressive job of carrying these scenes, showing Al's tender care for his friend, his desperation to help him, and his anger and depression over his own injuries.
When Al is not talking to Birdy, he is developing an increasingly belligerent relationship to the hospital staff, especially Birdy's doctor, who begins dropping veiled threats that he will lock Al up as well. After a particularly intense war flashback, it looks like he may get his wish: Al cries to Birdy "You're right, we should just hide out and not talk to anyone and every now and then go crazy and spit and throw shit at them." But this, at last, gets a response-- Birdy looks up and says lucidly "Al, sometimes you're so full of shit." Al is thrilled and asks, "How come you decided to talk?" to which Birdy shrugs, "I don't know, it just happened." But when the doctor comes in it won't "just happen" again, and faced with an unbelieving medical establishment Al has no choice but to push the doctor against the wall and punch out the two orderlies who follow. He drags Birdy up the stairs as more staff pursue them, and they end up on the roof where Al can barricade the door. But the roof is a dangerous place to bring Birdy, and as soon as Al looks up, Birdy is poised on the precipice, arms flapping and outstretched. Al runs towards him but it's too late-- Birdy jumps! Al rushes to the roof's edge and looks down to see...Birdy, standing on an adjoining roof perhaps ten feet lower. Birdy looks up at Al, smiles, and says innocently, "What?" as the wacky beats of La Bamba kick up and the credits roll.
As one might expect, this ending is somewhat controversial; there is healthy IMDb debate over whether Birdy jumping to his extremely foreshadowed death would have been fitting or boringly predictable. But it's not simply that Birdy doesn't die that makes it odd: everything from after he first speaks seems lifted from a parallel universe where Birdy is less a meditation on the nature of madness and identity and more a wacky sitcom called My Feathered Friend, where Al and Birdy having to escape a mental institution is just another weekly adventure, where Birdy's insouciant "What?" is the catchphrase equivalent of Urkel saying "Did I do that?" after knocking an elaborate five-tiered cake onto Laura's prom dress. I would argue that Al was a bit premature, and it's not until Birdy starts talking when things really get fucking weird.
Weird as it may be, though, the Cage fan can find comfort in certain traditions upheld: the lower-class family background (Al refers to his father derisively as "that fucking garbageman"), the face-centric violence (we learn that shortly after Al arrived in Saigon he was disciplined for striking his superior officer, breaking his nose and knocking out 4 of his teeth) and the gratuitous toplessness. As one IMDb comment put it, under the subject "Cage Lifting Weights":
I was thinking he looked pretty scrawny in this movie until the scene where he had his shirt off and he was lifting weights, then I was like wow! Those abs were FINE! But he sure had bad teeth back then.
And if you think Cage's shiny chest and bulging arm muscles are on fine display here, you will love the next film, in which he is a professional sculler whose endless supply of slow-motion training montages give the camera plenty to ogle. Stay tuned and stay caged!
EXTRAS
Read all about it! Birdy is based on a novel that sounds even weirder than the movie.
Like movies where dudes totally do it with animals? Check out Passion in the Desert, aka Birdy with leopards: watch clips here!
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