A Comparative Approach to The Birds (1963)
The Birds (1963) – Comparative
No Spooky Season on Review Roulette is complete without a foray into a Hitchockian fright, so this week we’re jumping into a film I had been dreading but of course loved because my boy AL ain’t never steered me wrong: The Birds (1963). But, the Review Roulette wheel landed on Comparative for our approach, so I thought, two birds one scone, we’ll do a DOUBLE HITCHCOCK MONSTER MASH [cue air horns byow-byow-byow-byow]. But mainly it’s The Birds.
So, The Birds is largely not about the animal birds which was good because I am already afraid of large gatherings of conspiring birds and I wasn’t too keen on all that. It’s much more about the colloquial birds, i.e. ladies doing lady things, like “broads”, like “get a load of these birds” birds. And that was surprising to me. There are still animal birds and they do do the horror and sometimes comedy (which isn’t supposed to be comedic, I am just depraved), but it’s much more about the ladies and the birds are a manifestation of the ladies’ situations, or at least one lady’s. So really it’s about motherhood, you get me? Probably not, but stick with me.
The Birds is about Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren in her film debut doing an unbelievably marvelous job) who is a wild woman until she’s not. Melanie is a prankster with a wealthy newspaper magnate father in San Francisco. She’s frequently getting herself into trouble with bananas ass schemes, one of which brings her to Bodega Bay 90 miles outside the city. Melanie follows a guy she does not know (Mitch (Rod Taylor)) to his home in Bodega Bay because he gently pranked her for like a minute in a bird shop by letting her think she had the upper hand in their conversation about him buying birds as a gift for his little sister’s birthday. So she gets these two lovebirds and drives them to his place 90 miles away with a note saying “haha bitch, you didn’t know I was crazy as hell” or something, but before she can leave it, she encounters all sorts of helpful people who give her very detailed information about him and his family and his work situation. She learns from a shop clerk that he does indeed have a little sister, and from the teacher she learns her name, Cathy (Veronica Cartwright). Melanie then does something that we can already tell is very out of character because, again, she’s cuckoo bananas: she tears up the note for Mitch and instead leaves one for Cathy. You know, after renting a row boat to cross the bay and break into their house.
As Melanie rows back across the bay, a seagull swoops and strikes her on the head. This is the first instance of a bird attacking, and my reading is that it’s the manifestation of her cuckoo-bananasness fighting against her abnormal act. Throughout the rest of the film, Melanie gets closer to Mitch and Cathy, much to their mother’s dismay. Lydia (Jessica Tandy) has recently lost her husband, Mitch and Cathy’s father, and her grief is read as overprotective parenting, but really she is just afraid of being alone. (Tandy delivers this stunning monologue about her grief that is really the heart of the film, and also, in my opinion, a classic Hitchcock red herring.) As we learn about Lydia’s potential overprotectiveness, we also learn that Melanie did not have a relationship with her own mother who abandoned her family when Melanie was eleven. It’s about motherhood, see?
Or maybe not. I think more than any other Hitchcock, The Birds is kind of a Rorschach test and we might need to be sharing our interpretations with our therapists because some of the reviews I’ve seen about The Birds painted it as a seriously different film from the one I watched. And how wonderful is that? God, what a gift cinema is.
So, anyway, I think this film is about Melanie leaving behind her wild younger life of European travel and urban living in favor of gently giving herself over to a quiet life of domesticity in a small town where she can embrace sides of herself she has been stifling – including maternal instincts – and join a family in which she can comfortably care for her partner and his loved ones, while also being cared for by him and them. The birds attacking are a manifestation of the wildness fighting against her transition into a new stage in her life. Notably, the lovebirds Melanie gifted Cathy never once attack or squawk out of turn, the domestic pair are perfectly happy together as opposed to the wild birds terrorizing the townspeople every time Melanie acts on a maternal instinct (giving Cathy the birds, attending her birthday party so as not to disappoint her, picking her up from school, helping her as she retches, protecting her from the subsequent attacks). The birds are a violent reaction against aging and maturing and inhabiting the role of the woman who hurt her and thrust independence on her when she was far too young to be an adult, launching her into a frantic search for herself when she was finally old enough to enjoy that independence and rebelling when she was herself choosing to give up that independence that had come to define her so fully for most of her life. The birds, specifically the wild birds, don’t want Melanie to grow up.
My reading really centers Melanie as the “cause” of the birds, but there are for sure other ways to read it, one popular one being that Lydia’s love for her son and overprotective nature is manifested in the bird attacks each time Melanie slinks closer to Mitch by way of caring for Cathy. I really find that a much more negative reading and I disagree that either Melanie or Lydia is vying for maternal control over the family. I think that idea really undercuts Lydia’s beautiful monologue, suggests that Mitch is more important in the story than he is, and casts Melanie as manipulative rather than actually caring about Cathy’s emotions. Again though, it’s a Rorschach test and if that’s what you see, that’s between you, God, and your psychologist. Or, you and Mr. Hitchcock himself whose last Hollywood film before The Birds was released three years earlier: Psycho (1960).
I’m a little surprised I haven’t written about Psycho before because I like that movie a lot. It’s not my top Hitchcock, but what a classic. Psycho is also about mother issues, but like, it’s important to stress they’re more about severe mental illness than about a helicopter parent. Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) is deeply mentally ill and there is some blame placed on his mom in that movie, but (spoiler) she’s not in the movie at all, so we really only know that he too is cuckoo bananas but not in a sweet prankster way, more in a “dress up as his dead mother who he for sure killed and keeps in his house so ‘she’ can kill women he’s attracted to because ‘she’ is overprotective and not because he has severely fucked up developmental issues” way. Which are not the same.
And I don’t think it’s fair to see Psycho and The Birds and be like “these are both Hitchcock films about overprotective mothers” because WHERE did you even get that? Lydia is definitely concerned but she’s not getting in the way of Mitch’s relationship in any way more than some questioning about whether he knows what he’s doing. The only suggestion she is overprotective – and that he is susceptible to it – comes from his jaded (but kind) ex. As with Norman, the mother figure is not getting in the way of anything in the film as we see it, only in secondhand information relayed to us. All the speculation about the mothers being at fault is, potentially, projection. Again, get that therapist on the horn and just talk about Hitchcock films for a bit, it might help loosen some Freudian strings.
I understand why someone might see The Birds and immediately put it in conversation with Psycho, I clearly am as well, but I think that comparison only works in contrast, resisting the urge to find similarities between the films. The most significant contrast for me, for instance, is that Psycho relents and explains the psychosis. We have closure to the film that suggests how you should think about Norman with a psychologist explaining his condition in a very contemporary way, removing the need for the audience to speculate about his motives and reasoning. If you left the cinema before that final scene, you’d be like “wowee what the ass was up with that guy and what does it say about me that I was kinda into it?” or something, and that would be probably not great to release a film about a man doing heinous crimes against other people inexplicably and in inexplicable ways. The final scene makes it clear that this was abnormal behavior for a human.
The Birds doesn’t have that problem. Inexplicable attacks in inexplicable ways is fine for birds because it already feels abnormal and incomprehensibly supernatural. Norman is a murderer, we have those. Birds aren’t naturally monsters; they don’t naturally terrorize towns, attack children regularly, and swarm into homes to peck peoples’ eyes out, so we don’t need a clarifying warning to birds to not become them or humans not to take inspiration from them. So without a clarifying scene explaining what happened and why, no rationale for the bird attacks, it becomes that Rorschach test for you in the audience to project onto. And I think that’s pretty rad and a good, disturbing use of art.
Or maybe I’m just moved by restarting therapy earlier this week. Who knows? What I do know is that Hitchcock was a damn fine filmmaker who definitely could’ve used some therapy himself, as could we all.
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