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

It was first...

[halfmoon-mollie.livejournal.com]

a short story by Daphne de Maurier. AS I remember, Sir Alfred took a few (many!) liberties with the story when turning it into a screenplay.

[oakmouse]

I've always likened The Birds to Suddenly, Last Summer. (The play version of the latter much more than the film.) The truth is more surreal and horrible than the surface appearance, and it all has strong echoes of the weird nightmare half-worlds of Cornell Woolrich.

[sovay]

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.

This entirely inclines me to see it.

from a reading I remember it goes something like....

[shullie.livejournal.com]

The horrow of 'other', of the Maternal, the Montrous feminine...pointing out that even good girls end up/revert back to their natural state of 'other', the monstrous, the man eating female...

they are like the birds, although pretty to look at they eventually will return to the devourours and killers that they instintivley/really

you can't ever trust a woman...she'll peck you to death and eat you all up!! lol

or something like that... I'll have to have look back at some of the essays I have on it..

[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.