The Birds

"The Birds"

Alfred Hitchcock, 1963

Note: I'm taking a course on Hitchcock, and every Wednesday we have a screening of one of his films. Then we write our thoughts in a "journal," which we turn in the next day. This is one such journal. There are spoilers.

I first saw The Birds (1963) over ten years ago, on a VHS tape and a small screen. Even at that age I was blown away by the sheer spectacle of it all. But what I remembered most clearly from that initial viewing was the haunting image of the dead farmer, his eyes gouged out and his body riddled with bite marks. It struck an even more powerful chord with me this time around. I think that it is such a powerful scene because it deals with the notion that normal things that we take for granted can turn against us; at first, the birds are harmless, but for absolutely “no reason,” they suddenly turn into flesh-eating monsters.

The way that Hitchcock constructs the scene is brilliant. It begins with a long take of the mother slowly walking down the hallway, followed by brief point-of-view shots of the room – in total disarray and covered with streaks of blood – finally culminating in a trio of shots that jumps closer and closer into the corpse's mutilated face. In that brief moment, the mother's shock and terror becomes our own. It bears some similarity to the tracking shot on Charlie's hand in Shadow of a Doubt, when both Uncle Charlie and we realize the importance of the ring on her finger.

To be honest, I think that the setup of The Birds is weak; the connection between Mitch and Lydia is sketchy at best. But the film is really about tension, and in that regard it is a masterpiece. First, there is the actual tension that develops within the utterly bizarre love, um, quadrilateral between Mitch, Lydia, the mother, and Annie. We don't really understand what happened in these characters' pasts, but given the amount of animosity between the characters – most of which is unspoken; it is instead depicted through a number of glares, and the way that Hitchcock positions his characters within the frame – would we really want to find out?

Second, the actual bird attacks are masterfully conceived and executed. Every time a character was attacked, be it a child or a random stranger, I was shocked. I'm not really sure why those attacks were so powerful – I'm surprised that some viewers in the class laughed at many of these moments – but I can posit a guess. In the sequences within the house, we get the sense that our protagonists, led by Mitch, who is an ostensibly strong figure, are completely powerless. I think that Robin Wood sums it up perfectly when he describes the sequence as such: “The home-as-refuge becomes home-as-cage.” The Birds is so unsettling because of this very inversion of everyday life. Our protagonists are powerless, their home turns into a prison, and their fates are left up in the air.

Rating: 9

Second Viewing: 12/3/08, on DVD - IMDb