The Birds

[poliphilo]

It's the story of a quest. Only with gender reversal. A woman is the questor and a man the prize.  To achieve the prize she must cross water, form an alliance with the dark girl who is Rose Red to her Rose White and defeat the gorgon mother who has turned earlier suitors to stone. The birds are the creatures of the wounded mother's fear and rage.

Is that what Hitchcock really intended? Did he know he was filling his film with archetypes? Hard to say. My guess is he didn't want to know.  Better to let the unconscious do its work unquestioned-  you get better results that way.   An opening that is pure romantic comedy- with the stars doing passable imitations of Cary Grant and Grace Kelly- only gradually slopes to nightmare. On the surface The Birds is a straighforward disaster movie- in the genre of Jaws or Attack of the Killer Bees- and its success on this level- as light entertainment- disguises its other identity as mythic dream- perverse, fetishistic, uncanny- containing some of the strangest images ever committed to film.

But what does the ending mean? The heroine, bloodied in her quest, her head bandaged, her mind unhinged, is helped out to the car by mother and son. She squeezes the mother's arm. The pressure is returned.  So who exactly has won?  The car moves off down a winding road through a moonlit landscape covered in birds, birds, birds, as far as the eye can see...

Comments

[senordildo.livejournal.com]

Very interesting commentary--now I'm tempted to rewatch the film. I can't say that my first viewing was a positive one. I also can't help being wary of discussing films and characters in mythic terms, because a lot of the time it's because the characters are too dull to discuss as individuals, and the narrative is too boring for allegory, even if the visuals sizzle. I don't have much interest in seeing characters who stand in for archetypes because they can't stand up as themselves. And my memory of the Birds is that its leads were dull actors having equally dull interactions with other humans. It's only the birds who have any life. I sometimes think that the film would have been better off if it had no central characters at all, but instead, somewhat like Eisenstein's October, had tried capturing a swathe of humanity in crisis. I have to also admit that I think Hitchcock has gone from being underrated to overrated.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

You've got a point about the actors. I kept thinking how much more entertaining it would have been if the leads had been played by Cary Grant and Grace Kelly.

But in my reading the most important character is the mother- played by Jessica Tandy- and she's frighteningly good.

Over-rated? Perhaps. I understand he's very fashionable right now in academe and the film schools.