 Starring: Tippi Hedren, Rod Taylor, Jessica Tandy, Veronica Cartwright
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Year Of Release: 1963
Plot: San Francisco playgirl Melanie Daniels meets lawyer Mitch Brenner in a pet shop, and despite their initially uneasy encounter, she decides to travel to his home in Bodega Bay to deliver two lovebirds for his sister’s birthday. Shortly after arriving, she is attacked by a seagull, which is just the prelude to a series of bird attacks that get increasingly deadly. |
In many ways, The Birds is quite a strange film. If someone told you about it and you’d never heard of Alfred Hitchcock, the idea of everything from sparrows to crows suddenly deciding they wanted to kill people for no apparent reason would undoubtedly sound stupid. It’s probably for this reason that a planned remake has been put on hold, as you wouldn’t have thought the concept would have worked the first time, let alone for another go-around.
The question though is why does Hitchcock’s film work, despite its peculiar premise? Part of it is down to some immensely impressive filmmaking and an increasingly tense atmosphere, but even so, there must be something more to the film that allows us to swallow its odd set-up.
The first and most obvious answer is that it taps into some primal fears. We like to think we know how the world works, and when familiar things suddenly become unfamiliar, it can be very unsettling. Many of the best horror films use this idea, whether it’s a safe looking house suddenly being filled with odd happenings and possible supernatural forces, such as in the recent Paranormal Activity, a day trip to the beach turning deadly in Jaws, or taking a shower leaving you exposed and ready to be stabbed to death, such as in Psycho.
In The Birds, it is something as simple as the winged animals themselves, which are constantly around us, but which we rarely think about. They are part of the background of our lives, but at the same time, the fact that we don’t think about birds much makes them slightly unknown. They seem to live their lives by our sides, but completely separate to us, and it is partly this that makes The Birds so creepy. The sudden realisation that something so familiar and seemingly innocuous has the power to render us helpless – or kill us – works powerfully on the subconscious.
And it’s not just birds, as the film uses them as a symbol for the whole of nature. Humans generally like to feel as if they have dominion and control over nature, but the movie suggests that this is only because nature let us feel that way most of the time. It plays into age-old fears from a time when we weren’t just the hunter (not that most of us are that anymore, really), but also the hunted, and when our lives seemed to be lived at the whim of unpredictable nature.
While The Birds is undoubtedly a film about nature turning on us, the fear of the familiar becoming unfamiliar and people getting trapped in a situation that seems to have no logic (various characters spend a lot of time discussing why the animals are attacking, while never coming to a definite conclusion), it’s difficult not to wonder whether actually there’s something more going on under the surface.
The Birds is not just a movie about animals attacking, it’s also about a young woman in the very early stages of a new relationship with a man, Mitch, and the awkward relationship she has with his mother, Lydia. In fact you could remove the bird attacks completely, and you’d still have a short but passable family melodrama. This familial drama could purely be a ruse to get us into the story, in the same way that the opening 25 minutes of Psycho – which Hitchcock made directly before The Birds – makes it seem like it’s a film about a woman stealing money from her boss and running away with it, before she’s murdered and the film becomes about her killer.
However I suspect there’s more to it than that in The Birds. Hitchcock never explicitly said what he thought the film was about, other than the idea of nature turning on us, and that we should view it vaguely allegorically, while not saying explicitly what the allegory was.
Could the bird attacks actually be a visual representation of what’s going on psychologically between Melanie, her potential new boyfriend and his mother? I’m not suggesting that one causes the other, but that maybe we should view the melodrama and the bird attacks as being symbolically linked – the birds are external nature, while the familial story deals with the complexities of human nature.
Lydia is a cold, controlling woman, who’s never gotten over the death of her husband, and seems to view her son as his replacement, even though she doesn’t think he’s as good. The subconscious, destructive oedipal implications roil under the surface of the story, with the arrival of Melanie throwing Lydia into a state of confusion. She doesn’t know how to take this woman’s presence in her life, and is torn between a desire to hate her for trying to take her son away from her, and to try to like her for his sake. Things are further confused by the fact that Lydia’s teenage daughter (who I’d never realised until now was played by Veronica Cartwright, of Alien fame) immediately takes to Melanie, and starts treating her like a new mother.
Is this just a story to keep us interested between bird attacks, or are we meant to see one as being related to the other? I suspect we are. The attacks don’t start until Melanie arrives in Bodega Bay, and then come in waves, with the animals present but docile and then suddenly going in for the attack. This pattern certainly adds to the irrigational and unpredictable nature of the situation, but are we also meant to see it as relating to Lydia’s impulses to both embrace and repel Melanie? It’s not a direct relationship certainly. Lydia doesn’t get angry and then birds attack, but even the way the characters in the family talk suggests an oddly dream-like state, which makes it sound like there’s a psychological element that we ought to take into account.
In order to see why we should view the animals in The Birds as being symbolically more important than just being winged killers, it’s worth going back to Psycho, which is another Hitchcock film full of bird references, from the name of the main character being Marion Crane to her living in Phoenix. However more important is the fact that Norman Bates is a taxidermist and obsessed with stuffing birds, which fill his back office at the motel. They leer down at him from the walls, and it’s telling that Marion’s first reaction to them is fear.
Of course there’s the simple logic that Norman’s love of stuffing and mounting dead birds just gives a hint that he has a peculiar fascination with death, which of course comes back when it’s revealed he’s a serial killer and has stuffed his own mother. However the film also suggests that psychologically, for Norman birds and women are subconsciously linked.
He tells Marion that she “eats like a bird”, before adding, “No, not really. Anyway, I hear the expression 'eats like a bird'. It's really a falsity. Because birds really eat a tremendous lot. But I don't really know anything about birds. My hobby is stuffing things. You know - taxidermy.” It’s a statement that he could make just as easily about women, and shows how even in his hobbies his life is ruled by something he doesn’t really understand.
It is the first hint of his problems with women, and that his stuffing of dead birds is almost a misdirected way for him to deal with his problems. With taxidermy he feels he can control things, and create a world that’s safe, simple and to his liking, where the birds/women do only what he wants them to – exactly as he’s tried to do by stuffing his dead mother, even if it hasn’t worked. He even says at one point that he thinks his stuffed birds look better now than they did when they were alive. In his real life, things are far more complex, with his relationship to females being overwhelmed by both conscious and subconscious impulses, so that, for example, the guilt he feels over his sexual feelings for Marion, ends up with him becoming his mother persona and killing her. He tries to deal with the situation (in his insanity he thinks his mother is still alive and killed Marion), but he can’t control real life like he can his dead birds.
Even with his stuffed animals, even though he views them as things of beauty that he has created and has control over, there is still an ominous feeling of threat, particularly from a hawk and an owl that are high up on the wall, and come to represent the ever watching eye of Norman’s mother.
The relationship between birds and Norman’s view of women is underlined when Norman says to Marion that despite his mother having been locked up in an asylum, “Oh, but she's harmless. She's as harmless as one of those stuffed birds.” Of course we later realise this is because she’s dead and he’s stuffed her, but it also shows how in Norman’s subconscious mind, birds and women are linked together. This then comes back in the final moments of the movie, when Norman has been taken over by his mother persona and she says, “They'll put him away now, as I should have years ago. He was always bad, and in the end he intended to tell them I killed those girls and that man. As if I could do anything but just sit and stare, like one of his stuffed birds.”
Birds are undoubtedly symbolically important in Psycho, with Hitchcock using the fact that for thousands of years they’ve been said to represent the human soul, and that for some psychologists, their presence in dreams represents the full range of natural human behaviour beyond just our conscious mind.
If we come back to The Birds, it’s more than possible than Hitchcock was again using the idea of birds symbolically representing the human soul and behaviour, so that the story of the irrational feelings of a controlling mother being threatened by a new woman possibly taking her son away from her, is mirrored in the theme of a whole host of different species of birds attacking and killing people. It’s certainly not a direct metaphor, but Hitchcock himself expressed his admiration for the surrealist movement, and acknowledged how he liked to use dream logic in his films, using it to create worlds where things seem to be linked, often subconsciously, and mean more than they do on the surface, while a logical understanding of them is always just beyond reach. It seems this is what he was doing in The Birds, creating a link between the human and animal stories, while never being completely clear or tying things up neatly.
There’s one particular moment in The Birds that makes me think this is what’s going on, which is when Melanie takes shelter from a particularly vicious bird attack in a restaurant. Other people are already hiding there too, and as soon as she walks in, all eyes turn to Melanie and look at her accusingly. Then a mother, clutching her child, comes up to Melanie and starts screaming at her, “Why are they doing this? Why are they doing this? They said when you got here the whole thing started. Who are you? What are you? Where did you come from! I think you're evil. Evil!”
The woman is looking for some reason behind what’s happening, but it’s probably not a coincidence that Hitchcock explicitly made her a mother who’s instinctively trying to protect her child, and who in her fear irrationally starts screaming at this new woman and blaming her for what’s going on. Like Lydia, the mother’s feelings aren’t logical, but they’re strong, primal and she doesn’t know what to do with them, so she ends up lashing out. While this is going on, outside the birds are alternating between periods of calm and vicious attack.
The suggestion is that it’s not just external nature that’s suddenly dangerous and something to be afraid of, but that we should also be wary of our own primal, subconscious human nature as well. We like to feel that we’ve got our more primitive instincts under the control of our rational minds, but they still lurk within us, ready to emerge for reasons we often find difficult to logically understand. Like the birds, these animalistic reactions are with us all the time, and we don’t think about them much, but there’s always the danger that suddenly they might erupt – as with Lydia’s conflicted oedipal feelings over Melanie’s presence.
Maybe I am reading way too much into The Birds, and it is just a film about some animals getting angry and killing people, but I suspect that Hitchcock meant a lot more than that. While we should definitely take it as a story of nature turning on humanity, it seems he also wanted to make it a film where the outside events symbolically commented on the internal melodrama and the psychology of the characters, and that it’s not just the nature outside in the world that can be dangerous, but our own ancient human nature as well. Whether I’ve got it right or not, The Birds is undoubtedly a fascinating film with a lot of things flying around under the surface, and all sorts of symbolic images and ideas that go far beyond what I have time to talk about here.
TIM ISAAC
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