Fowl Intentions

           Back in middle school, I had a friend who claimed that his first memory was of being forced to watch Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 horror film The Birds by his parents when he was four-years old.  His story went: he was frolicking in the sand during a rare outing to the beach when, out of the blue, an avian anarchist of a seagull swooped down and stole his hot dog, proceeding to devour it right before his eyes.  Later that night, in an act of desperation, and more than a little questionable parenting, his folks attempted to stop his incessant crying and caterwauling by showing him The Birds.  The movie scared the living shit out of him, but it also shut him up.  Though he could never sit through the film again, and it may or may not have been a deciding factor in his eventually seeing two therapists simultaneously, his parents’ point had been made: “Quit kvetching.  As far as attacks from above go, you got off lucky.”

            Odd as it now seems, I was kind of jealous.  We were 11, and my parents still wouldn’t even let me watch The Birds. He had seen something actually traumatic, and had the emotional scars to prove it.  As far as I was concerned, that was street cred.  Finally getting around to viewing The Birds now, I can’t help but wonder why he didn’t turn out even worse.  The Birds is both a relentlessly tense, borderline misanthropic parable of humanity’s precarious existence in a chaotic, uncertain world, that you don’t enjoy so much as you experience, and a horror film in the truest sense of the term.  In other words, it just might be the worst film you could ever show a four-year old.

            At their core, horror films are only as effective as the primal fears they are able to manipulate in their audience.  Hitchcock knows this and, in The Birds, juxtaposes two of the oldest, and downright scariest, themes of the genre’s lineage: that of the things we trust turning against us, and the fear of the great unknown.  Not only are the merciless, murderous villains of the film those docile winged bipeds we’ve coexisted with for millions of years, they’re sparrows, seagulls and blackbirds (nothing even resembling a bird of prey), and there is absolutely no explanation offered for their sudden change in behavior.  The beginning is horror film motif incarnate (eau d’horror motif), as Melanie leaves the safe confines of the big city and migrates north to the rural, picturesque fantasy world of Bodega Bay, a parallel universe where the laws of nature soon head south.  Leaving to bring Mitch the lovebirds, in this case the ironic harbingers of doom, it’s something out of a monster film like The Blob, the little seed that spreads the cancer that will take over Anytown, USA.  However, unlike standard horror films, this is not a literal contamination but a symbolic one, which is somehow artier.

The birds eventually fall into an unexplainable pattern.  They attack, lose interest and disperse (wash, rinse, repeat), coming and going seemingly on a whim.  It’s Hitchcock’s abstract, absurdist take on the apocalypse — catastrophe without rhyme or reason (albeit with rhythm), without substantial build-up or satisfying denouement; just another unexplainable phenomenon in a world gone mad, a world we were mad to have ever believed sane in the first place.  If anything, the film is a condemnation of human self-importance; an assertion of our species’ inherent fallibility; a cautionary tale about the dangers of assuming we understand anything at all, especially nature and — of course — we ourselves are a part of nature.  The Birds is obsessed with this idea of nature as a vast, unknowable, hugely powerful force of which we are at the mercy.  Lars Von Trier may have dedicated his 2009 piece of eco-terrorist art-house torture porn Antichrist (aka “I Hung Out With Lars And All I Got Was This Stupid Clitoridectomy”) to Andrei Tarkovsky, but it could just as easily be paying tribute to Birds-era Hitchcock.  As that particular film’s self-munching CGI fox so succinctly puts it, “Chaos reigns.”

            There’s also something unsettling about the first two-thirds of The Birds, something that feels off, even though it doesn’t get truly unhinged until the final half-hour.  The San Francisco set-up, maddening in its brevity, features what might just be the most non sequitur “MacGuffin” of Hitchcock’s career. (We get it, Melanie has a propensity for pulling dumb pranks, but that still says nothing about why Mitch wants to sue her.)  The initial bird attacks are too ludicrous to be taken seriously (an issue that is only exacerbated by the now-50-year old special effects involved), and the characters, ranging from downright deplorable to marginally sympathetic, represent the worst traits of city-slickers and bumpkins alike.  Everyone is far too smug, deluded or just plain dumb to not be meant as comical.  Not even the “heroes” — the arrogant, coquettish Melanie, and the equally haughty lawyer, Mitch, who sets the story in motion when he ruffles her feathers — are spared the director’s deadpan vitriol.  This is a casually amoral, gleefully macabre piece of dark comedy disguised as a horror thriller, pitting bad against worse (who’s who, you decide) in an attempt to catch the audience rooting against mankind.

Coming at the tail end of Hitchcock’s long streak of near-flawless films, The Birds finds the director at his most self-assured, further honing his trademark filmmaking technique.  There’s the unsettling voyeurism and implication of the viewer he used so well in Psycho, the emphasis on suspense over surprise, the gallows humor, the lethal presence with which he imbues the mundane (staircases haven’t seemed so threatening since The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari).  Confident in its hold on the viewer, the film takes the liberty of moving at a languorous pace that draws attention to its fluid, precise camera movement and meticulous sound design that eschews any real soundtrack in favor of a sparse, spare collection of claustrophobic sound effects.  Even before the birds actually arrive, they’re there, a constant chattering and flapping that is forced into the viewer’s head, building the nest in which the birds will live for the rest of the film.  Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann tweak almost every sound in the opening scenes until it resembles the birds somehow.  Driving to Bodega Bay, every twist and turn in the road brings a high-pitched screech from Melanie’s tires, an ominous prediction of the birds’ perverse banshee shriek.

But the most “Hitchcock” element of The Birds might just be how deftly it lures you in before unceremoniously pulling the rug out from under you.  The film is a slow burn.  What begins as a relatively straightforward psychological thriller turns weirder and weirder, as Hitchcock anticipates what the audience wants and constantly does the opposite.  By the time that awkward, self-conscious moment comes around, when it becomes apparent that any heroism you’re hoping for, and subconsciously expecting, isn’t going to happen, it’s too late to turn the film off.  Hitchcock’s vision reaches its absurdist heights after the birds attack the school, while Melanie is at the diner trying to convince the locals that something is indeed up with the town’s feathered population.  The only person who listens to her is the (drunk) bible-spouting Irishman at the bar.  Everyone else is either too stupid (the waiter) or arrogant (the elderly ornithologist), to pay any attention.  The tension builds, more contemptible eccentrics arriving every second, until the whole thing literally explodes.  It would appear that Hitchcock views humanity as little more than a long line of lemmings following each other off a cliff.

The fact that a film this pessimistic, gory and anarchic could be released in mainstream theaters in 1963 is a small miracle in and of itself.  Tippi Hedren’s real-life stage fright is palpable in every action sequence, lending a veritable snuff quality to the film, and The Birds takes its motif of role reversals to exploitative heights. Time and time again Melanie is forced into “cages” (cars and phone booths — her glass menageries) by the birds, or filmed as being behind metal grates or fences (as she is at the post office).  Mitch even says to her, in the very first scene, “Back in your gilded cage, Melanie Daniels,” a snide jab at her wealth and, most likely, femininity.  Critics are so keen to apply interpretive models to The Birds in order to unearth some kind of deeper meaning.  The models are political (environmentalist, feminist, etc.) or psychoanalytic (everyone is so convinced those birds must represent some oppressive part of the human psyche), but I feel that one doesn’t need to read so deeply to render an effective critique of what is essentially a two-hour excursion into existential dread.  The Birds’ genius lies in its frustrating obliqueness.  There is no explanation offered for the attack, there is only the outcome: the surprisingly effete and despondently hopeless human response.

The most disturbing scene occurs in the final quarter of the film when, after the birds have finally revealed their hand, Melanie and Mitch join a small congregation of Bodega Bay survivors hiding in the town diner.  One particular woman, a once-concerned, but now-hysterical, mother of two, turns to Melanie and pitifully implores, “Why are they doing this?  They said when you got here the whole thing started…. Who are you?  What are you?  Where did you come from?  I think you’re the cause of all this… I think you’re evil.”  The genius of the moment is that this particular segment is shot from Melanie’s point-of-view, so the woman’s histrionics are directed right at the camera and, by extension, the audience.  This jarring destruction of the fourth wall deflowers you as a viewer, solidifying your role as not just innocent bystander, but very guilty partner-in-crime.  It’s a semi-sadistic cinematic trick, and I know a few people who would call Hitchcock a misanthrope (if not a far worse epithet) and storm out of the theater right then and there.  And they might even be right to do so if it weren’t for the scene that immediately follows, in which our heroes choose tending to their friend’s corpse over seeking blind vengeance against the birds who are the cause of all this carnage (some of whom are a literal stone’s throw away).  It’s an affirmation of natural human goodness and compassion, a much-needed morale booster, a suggestion that maybe humanity doesn’t deserve to die after all, in a horror film that otherwise makes a point of being disconcertingly ambivalent on the subject.