Feathered mayhem in full flight
on November 11, 2008
in misc
Planty on an early morning in November. On the ground whitened by the first frost, a flock of crows raking rustling leaves with their claws in search of food. Like menacing black blots on the ochre carpet. Far too many of them, scary they look. A sudden urge to watch Hitchcock in the evening.
What exactly is “The Birds”, one of the oddest of his films that makes a compulsive viewing now and again?
“The Birds” opens in San Francisco with a brief flirtation in a pet shop between Melanie, a beautiful but spoiled urbanite, and a handsome lawyer, Mitch Brenner. Intrigued by his patronising manner, she follows him up to the coast to Bodega Bay, where he lives with his widowed mother, Lydia, and younger sister, taking with her two caged lovebirds as an ironic gift.
But nature, implacable in its needs and demands, has no time for irony, as the film makes clear. Melanie is attacked by a savage seagull when she approaches Lydia’s house, the first blow in a vicious struggle. The conflict soon engulfs the whole town, as thousands of enraged birds attack every human in sight. In the end Lydia seems victorious, and the film closes with an almost catatonic Melanie being carried from Bodega Bay among the strangely silent birds.
Hitchcock never explains why the birds launched their assault. Are they part of his vision of the universe where an idyll can turn any moment into hell purely by accident? Or, do they represent the exploited nature, finally taking its own back on ruthless humans? Or, perhaps, the attacks are an external display of the mother’s repressed sexual frenzy, a hysterical outburst that jumps space, time and the species barrier in a way that all great mythologies would have understood?
Curiously, Hitchcock disliked birds, and kept away from them during the filming. However, the birds had their revenge. Released at the end of the filming, fifty crows refused to leave the studio and roosted in a tree near Hitchcock’s house, soiling his car with their droppings until the tree was at last cut down.
