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Hitchcock’s The Birds Welcomes Us to the Abyss
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Hitchcock’s The Birds Welcomes Us to the Abyss
Is this the director’s darkest, most unrelenting film?
By Dan Persons
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Published on November 21, 2024
Credit: Universal Pictures
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Credit: Universal Pictures
Let’s begin at the end. Let’s start with Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor)—having resolved to evacuate mother Lydia (Jessica Tandy), sister Cathy (Veronica Cartwright) and newly acquired romantic interest Melanie Daniels (‘Tippi’ Hedren, as her name is presented, with quotation marks, in the opening credits) from the ruins of what was once the small Sonoma town of Bodega Bay—stepping outside of the wreckage of his home to retrieve Melanie’s sports car. He opens his front door to a panorama that is totally blanketed with avians. They perch on the roof; they array themselves along power lines and fences; they form a shifting, feathered carpet across the ground.
He gets to the car (the director, Alfred Hitchcock, has one crow snap at Mitch’s hand to indicate that the birds haven’t abandoned their homicidal intent; they just, at this moment, don’t wanna), and opens the garage doors from within: More birds, left, right, above and below—not to make too much of a point of it, but I love the way Hitch uses the opening of those doors, shot from Mitch’s POV, to establish how bad the situation has become.
Mitch manages to drive to the house, and to get mother, sister, and Melanie—bruised and traumatized into near-catatonia from being trapped in an upstairs bedroom with a flock of fine feathered enemies—into the car. (Cathy begs him to bring her two caged lovebirds with them. “They haven’t harmed anyone,” she says. Yes, yes, child, they’re the good ones.) Getting behind the wheel, Mitch succeeds in piloting those he loves away from the nightmare. But not really—Hitchcock cuts to a shot from the porch of the house, as the car drives off into the distance, showing the birds biding their time, waiting until some intangible signal spurs their next attack.
Fade out.
That’s it. Not even a title crawl for the cast, just a brief glimpse of the Universal logo—redone in striking greyscale—and done.
I was somewhere in my adolescence when I first encountered Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963) on TV. If memory serves, this was my first exposure to Hitchcock, having only been aware of him from his eponymous TV show (which I didn’t watch), a hardbound anthology of stories from Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine that my brother had (which I hadn’t read), promos for his previous film, Psycho (1960), and my acquaintance with the ad campaign for this film (“The Birds is Coming!”—defying physics by being simultaneously grammatical and ungrammatical). With me still emerging from a realm of innocence in which stories had to end with the Wicked Witch being vanquished or the Cat in the Hat putting everything to right through the application of Seussian technology, having a story end on such a grim ellipsis left me more than a little unsettled.
I didn’t know it at the time, but that ending wasn’t prototypical Hitchcock. The master storyteller, and more specifically the Master of Suspense, had by this time honed to a fine art the techniques of taking an audience through a journey of escalating anxiety. But, as I would come to learn by experience, he always seemed to provide a release—much like the overall narrative, every suspense moment needed a beginning, a middle, and an end. It could be good, it could be bad, but eventually the audience needed to be given a way out.
Not so with The Birds. There’d be no Cary Grant climbing into a lower berth with Eva Marie Saint, or Anthony Perkins grinning ominously at the camera, or Jimmy Stewart, freed in the most devastating way of his fear of heights, standing on the ledge of a bell tower. Here, the world was going to end, humanity was doomed, the birds would rule over all. But not yet, not yet. Good night, folks; safe drive home!
There’d be a passage of some fifty years between my first experience with The Birds and my next, done to prep for my participation in a podcast about the film. In the interim, my exposure to the Hitchcock oeuvre had become more fully rounded—not complete, but pretty well filled out. I developed a better understanding of the director, fortified by an intensive read of Hitchcock/Truffaut (I was an NYU film student; they didn’t let you graduate unless you owned a copy of Hitchcock/Truffaut). So returning to The Birds after having been steeped in the likes of North by Northwest (1959), Notorious (1946), and one of my favorites, Shadow of a Doubt (1943—BTW, if you have only one favorite Hitchcock film, you haven’t seen enough Hitchcock films) was a reintroduction to that odd, unsettled feeling, but for completely different reasons.
There’s an overall spareness to The Birds, starting with the story itself: Spoiled, entitled Melanie Daniels has a meet-kinda-cute with dedicated lawyer Mitch Brenner in a pet store. She’s there to pick up a mynah bird (given what we learn about her frivolous history, we can only imagine what kind of vocabulary she’ll instill in the feathered recording unit), he’s looking to purchase a pair of lovebirds as a present for his sister’s birthday. Mitch chides Melanie for her wastrel ways, Melanie becomes instantly smitten with Mitch. With two caged birds in tow, Melanie drives up to the small coastal town of Bodega Bay to surprise the young girl and to court her target. The resident birds of Bodega Bay—sparrows, crows, gulls, etc.—have other plans.
What struck me most prominently in my second watch of The Birds was the sound. Or lack thereof—The Birds has no musical score at all, just ambient noise, the rustle of wings and the shrill screech of bird calls. Hitch is no stranger to dropping the orchestral track when it serves his purpose—most notably, North by Northwest’s crop duster sequence uses the lack of music and the mechanical roar of the biplane to emphasize Cary Grant’s isolation and vulnerability. With The Birds, though, Hitchcock takes it to the next level—there’s no swell of strings or blaring of horns to cue our reactions, just the evidence of our eyes and the sound of winged death, largely electronically generated to give it an otherworldly feel.
Well, that’s mostly true. There is one bit of music, and in an ironic twist on North by Northwest, it happens in a similarly iconic set piece, as Melanie waits for Cathy outside her schoolhouse. As the children sing a doggerel song—“Risselty-Rosselty,” about a man and his less-than-perfect wife—Melanie sits on a bench and smokes a cigarette, unaware of the flock of crows assembling on the jungle gym behind her. The cyclical, compulsive inanity of the lyrics—“Risselty-rosselty, hey Johnny Dosselty,/Nickety-nackety, retrical quality(?),/Willickey-wallackey, now, now, now”—serves as a perfect backdrop to the increasingly dire situation, which Hitchcock emphasizes by visually isolating Melanie and the crows in separate shots, only revealing the imposing mass of birds at the end of the sequence, as Melanie turns around. (If only modern-day filmmakers would take advantage of the technique, avoiding the situation where you can see the victim being sneaked up on, and are tempted to scream at the screen, “Hey, dummy, look behind you, there’s an axe murderer!”)
The question that haunts me is what purpose does this starkness serve? Hitchcock is frequently branded a technical filmmaker, more interested in how he can play with the process of narrative filmmaking than how that process can inform a human story. That’s not completely inaccurate—he’s toyed with film techniques before, confining Lifeboat (1944) to the titular watercraft and presenting Rope (1948) in the form a single take (actually 10 long shots creating the illusion of an unbroken take). And his frequent declarations that the creative process for him stops at the storyboard, and that actors should be treated like cattle (Martin Landau, for one, told me in an interview that that was nowhere near the case while filming North by Northwest) certainly suggest a lack of interest in connecting the mechanics to any emotions beyond fear and suspense.
But then how to explain that a good bulk of The Birds is taken up with character interactions? In his discussion with Francois Truffaut, Hitchcock characterizes these moments as issues of pacing, giving the audience some respite as the horrors escalate. But anyone can see that these interludes are more than pointless time-wasters. The scene in the diner as townspeople and passers-through debate what kind of catastrophe has befallen them serves as a grim portrait of people struggling to comprehend the incomprehensible. And more pertinently, the interactions between the four main characters are some of the best moments of the film, particularly two scenes, one between Melanie and the schoolteacher Annie (Suzanne Pleshette) and another between Melanie and Lydia. Hitchcock may publicly poo-poo drama, but it still clearly means something to him.
And it’s in those scenes between Melanie, Lydia, and Annie that I get an inkling of Hitchcock’s motivation in leaning into this unsparing starkness. Here we have three women, all in their own, distinct orbits around Mitch (okay, The Birds not only fails the Bechdel Test, it’s being held back a grade). Melanie is seeking to escape her public persona as entitled jet-setter, and sees Mitch, with his forthright rectitude, as a step-up from the superficial crowd she’s been running with. Annie admits to having a brief fling with Mitch, one that ended amicably, but it’s clear she’s still nursing feelings for the man, and harbors some jealousy—not especially toxic, fortunately—toward Melanie. Lydia is in a similar situation, fearing Melanie will take Mitch away from her. (Clinging mothers, another Hitchcock specialty.)
There’s a lot of pain and loneliness to go around there. Melanie masks it with a cheeky sense of entitlement, Annie squares her shoulders and tries to be an adult, Lydia tries to subtly drive a needle into Mitch’s growing feelings toward Melanie. But they are nowhere near exorcising the ache, and Hitch does not seem inclined to help them, stranding them without a soundtrack to explicate their feelings and plunging them into a world where nature is in out-and-out rebellion.
The Birds is nowhere near a feminist treatise. It is uncommonly despairing, though, even for a Hitchcock film. There’s no hope presented at the end, and the director refuses to provide us with the comforting filmic trimmings that would reassure us it’s only a movie. As Hitch refuses to tie a bow on the narrative, so he denies us a resolution to any of the women’s emotional arcs. By the end, Annie is dead—in a further, auteurial cruelty, Mitch, without Melanie’s coaxing, would have just left her lying prostrate in front of her house—and Melanie herself is little more than an ambulatory corpse. Only Lydia emerges relatively unscathed because, well, Hitchcock and mothers, I guess.
Alfred Hitchcock was a notorious practical joker, and the audience wasn’t immune to his scabrous sense of humor. He drastically altered the plot of the novel that Vertigo (1958) was based on by revealing a character’s true identity earlier than intended, and killed off Psycho’s (1960) above-the-title star halfway through the film.
With The Birds, he seems to want to take an audience’s expectations of what entertainment is and throw it in their faces. Midway through the film, as the birds unleash a full-bore attack on Bodega Bay, Melanie gets trapped in a phone booth. She watches as carnage unfolds all around her, unable to help. If Rear Window served as an indictment of the voyeuristic nature of moviegoing, this moment condemns spectators’ desire for grisly thrills. We watch the world go to hell, and are powerless to do anything about it. The Birds isolates us in this world of terror, and exposes us to our own vulnerability.
A half-century from my first viewing, The Birds has become one of my favorite Hitchcock films. I admire its experimental nature, and the relentlessness of its dark vision. How about you? Does Hitchcock’s break from tradition impress you, or leave you cold? Is there another Hitchcock film that left an indelible mark on you? We’ve got a comments section below for your thoughts. Let’s be friendly and cordial, though—the birds are watching, and judging.[end-mark]
The post Hitchcock’s <i>The Birds</i> Welcomes Us to the Abyss appeared first on Reactor.
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