The Birds

Camille Paglia

• Publisher: British Film Institute
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781838719395
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Drawing on Daphne du Maurier's short story and contemporary newspaper reports of bird attacks in California, Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds (1963) featured Tippi Hedren in her first starring role. Camille Paglia's compelling study considers the film's aesthetic, technical and mythical qualities, and analyses its depiction of gender and family relations. A film about anxiety, sexual power and the violence of nature, it is quintessential Hitchcock.
Camille Paglia's foreword to this new edition reflects upon the relationship between Hitchcock and his leading lady Hedren in the light of recent debates about male power, female agency and the #MeToo movement.

‘The Birds’

In his technically most difficult film, The Birds (1963), Alfred Hitchcock directly addresses the theme of destructive, rapacious nature that was always implicit in his fascination with crime. Federico Fellini called the film an ‘apocalyptic poem’.¹ I place The Birds in the main line of British Romanticism, descending from the raw nature-tableaux and sinister femmes fatales of Coleridge. Overwhelmed by the film when I first saw it as an impressionable teenager, I view it as a perverse ode to woman’s sexual glamour, which Hitchcock shows in all its seductive phases, from brittle artifice to melting vulnerability.

Because of his suspense-anthology television show, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, which premiered in 1955 and ran for a decade, Hitchcock existed as a powerful personality apart from his films for my post-war generation in the United States. His lugubrious, British formality, mordant irony (daringly directed against the show’s commercial sponsors), and ghoulish, self-satirizing pranks were an oasis of originality amid the general banality of a culture whose ideal types were Doris Day and Debbie Reynolds. That Psycho (1960), which stunned and terrified us, mirrored the real-life Hitchcock’s macabre genius was easy for us to imagine, since we felt we already knew him.

Aside from a grainy screening of North by Northwest (1959) at a school function, Psycho was my sole experience of Hitchcock the film director before I saw his subsequent release, The Birds, which premiered three years later. Reviews were sharply unkind to its leading lady, Tippi Hedren, a Hitchcock discovery who was making her debut. In retrospect, I see that older viewers were used to a galaxy of established Hitchcock stars like Ingrid Bergman and Grace Kelly, whose sensibility belonged to a slightly earlier era. Because of The Birds and its spellbinding successor, Marnie (1964), both of which I saw in brilliant colour in widescreen commercial theatres, Tippi Hedren was and remains for me the ultimate Hitchcock heroine.

As I watched The Birds again and again on late-night television over the decades, certain key themes emerged for me: captivity and domestication. In this film, as in so many others, Hitchcock finds woman captivating but dangerous. She allures by nature, but she is chief artificer in civilization, a magic fabricator of persona whose very smile is an arc of deception. With profound feeling for architecture, Hitchcock sees the house in historical terms as both safe haven and female trap. Ten thousand years ago, when man the nomad took root in one place, he brought animals with him into human service. But domestication was to be his fate too, as he fell under architecturally reinforced female control. The Birds charts a return of the repressed, a release of primitive forces of sex and appetite that have been subdued but never fully tamed. Because of Hitchcock’s personal engagement with these unsettling themes, the film is worked out in almost fanatical detail, to a degree perhaps unparalleled in his oeuvre. The more microscopically this film is studied, the more it reveals.

The original idea for The Birds came from Daphne du Maurier’s 1952 story of the same name, which had been reprinted in an Alfred Hitchcock Presents anthology. Hitchcock had already based two screenplays on du Maurier novels: Jamaica Inn became a rather stodgy 1939 pirate film that confirmed Hitchcock’s self-confessed lack of ‘feeling’ for period pieces, but he turned Rebecca into a haunting masterpiece, the 1940 melodrama that began his Hollywood period.² Du Maurier’s ‘The Birds’ takes place on the same cold, wind-swept, rocky Cornish coast as Jamaica Inn. Though there is no Gothic manor house, the story’s bleak atmosphere and ferocious weather resemble those of the great Bronte novels, which are the literary ancestors of Rebecca.

Hitchcock’s luminous, muted technicolor in The Birds, like the eerie sunlight of the San Francisco street scenes of Vertigo (1958), turns fright and anxiety into strange beauty. Du Maurier’s hard-scrabble story, in contrast, seems to have been conceived in harsh black and white: her protagonist is a veteran on a disability pension struggling to support his farm family with part-time work, ‘hedging, thatching, repairs’.³ There may be an echo here of D.H. Lawrence’s ‘The Fox’, with its lesbian homesteaders battling the punishing northern elements. Du Maurier’s gruff, proletarian Nat Hocken – who in Hitchcock’s version would be transformed into the brash, worldly San Francisco lawyer, Mitchell Brenner – is a painfully isolated consciousness. He alone seems to read the sign language of the birds as they mass: he is as attuned to nature’s disturbances as an ancient Druid. The screenplay, written with Hitchcock’s usual active collaboration, transfers Hocken’s special antagonistic relationship with the birds to a woman who does not exist in du Maurier’s story – Melanie Daniels, ‘a wealthy, shallow playgirl’ (in Hitchcock’s words) whose flirtatious games end in her own traumatic humiliation.⁴ The screenplay also curiously adds a clinging, manipulative, widowed mother, a theme based on Hitchcock’s own early family experience that obsessively runs through his work. Neither sexual intrigue nor Freudian family romance plays any part in du Maurier’s stripped-down original conception.

Du Maurier’s ‘The Birds’ may have been suggested by the German air strikes that raked southern England during World War II and that seemed to portend the fall of western civilization. Boarding up his farmhouse windows against the birds, Hocken recalls the ‘air raids’ on Plymouth and the ‘black-out boards’ he made for his mother’s house there.⁵ Hitchcock picked up the war analogy: of his heroine in The Birds becoming stronger through adversity, he said, ‘It’s like the people in London, during the wartime air raids.’⁶ He said the major bird attack at the Brenner house was based on his experience of the London blitz, which had imperilled his own mother: ‘The bombs are falling, and the guns are going like hell all over the place. You don’t know where to go. … You’re caught! You’re trapped!’⁷

But nature proves more tyrannous than man. In du Maurier’s story, as in the film, the birds invade a child’s bedroom with a great ‘beating of wings’, and a valiant male must go to the rescue, braving ‘little stabbing beaks sharp as pointed forks’ that draw blood from his hands.⁸ In du Maurier’s story, the distant city of London, identified with frivolity and political impotence, is horribly overwhelmed by the birds – a motif Hitchcock considered but rejected: he ‘toyed with’ ending the film with a shot of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge ‘covered in birds’ but decided instead to show the beleaguered family and their guest edging down the driveway past hordes of birds perched on roofs and wires.⁹ The dawn rays seem to promise deliverance, something which is missing from du Maurier’s finale, where the birds are heard relentlessly, unstoppably splintering the doors.

Both the story and the film keep the reason for the bird attacks mysterious. Du Maurier weaves in agonizingly sporadic BBC reports declaring a ‘National Emergency’ and speculating that an Arctic air stream has forced the birds south. But Hocken, the man of the country, has immediately perceived the breach in ‘nature’s law’ that normally keeps different bird species from flocking together. The screenplay powerfully shifts this chilling detail to a much later position, where it arouses the scepticism of an elderly woman ornithologist, one of a panoply of vivid cameo characters invented to flesh out the film. Hocken certainly sees malice, concluding after London radio transmissions have ceased that ‘many millions of years of memory’ stored in the birds’ ‘little brains’ have produced ‘this instinct to destroy mankind’.¹⁰ Du Maurier’s tale, unlike Hitchcock’s, ends in intimations of catastrophe as sweeping as the carnage wrought by Poe’s Red Death.

Birds were already present as a sub-theme in Hitchcock’s work. In Blackmail (1929), his first sound picture, shrill chirping from a bird cage hanging above the heroine’s bed gets louder and louder, expressing her sense of entrapment. A bird shop is a nest of conspiracy in Sabotage (1936), which climaxes in the delivery of a pair of birds. In The Lady Vanishes (1938), birds escape from a crate in a boxcar. In To Catch a Thief (1955), Cary Grant sits on a bus between Hitchcock himself and a woman with two green finches fighting in a cage. In Vertigo, Kim Novak, posing as Madeleine Elster (‘magpie’ in German), wears a sharp-beaked gold bird pin on her suit. Birds loom large in Psycho (although they did not appear in the original novel on which the film was based): its heroine, Marion, is a Crane from Phoenix, and her murderer, Norman Bates, collects stuffed birds. Cold chicken is eaten in To Catch a Thief, and gourmet quail is cooked in Frenzy (1972). Fashion parades in Hitchcock often look like feather-flashing bird runs, from the mannequin strut in The Lodger (1927) to the garish Louis XV ball in To Catch a Thief.¹¹ At his Jesuit school, the young Hitchcock (who ‘did not like eggs’ as an adult) ‘loved to steal the eggs’ from the henhouse and pelt the priests’ windows, claiming, ‘It looks like the birds have been flying overhead.’¹²

After Psycho, Hitchcock had planned to make Marnie, which continues Psycho’s themes of female theft and mental illness but normalises them with a happy romantic ending. Alas, Grace Kelly’s interest in returning to film in Marnie’s rather scandalous lead role would eventually be overruled by the grey men of the Monaco bureaucracy. In April of 1960, as he mulled over future projects, Hitchcock saw a newspaper report of an incident in the Southern California town of La Jolla, where a thousand birds flew down a chimney and ravaged the inside of a house.¹³ This reminded him of the Daphne du Maurier story, which he had under option but did not think could be developed into a full-scale movie. A year later, however, a far bigger incident in Northern California seized his attention. ‘Seabird Invasion Hits Coastal Homes’, screamed the headline of the August 18, 1961 Santa Cruz Sentinel. Thousands of ‘sooty shearwaters, fresh from a feast of anchovies’, had flown in from Monterey Bay overnight and smashed into fog-bound coastal areas near Santa Cruz. The gulls, migrating from New Zealand and South America in flocks numbering in the ‘millions’, crashed into cars and buildings, broke television aerials and streetlamps, and tried to enter houses when the residents ran out to investigate the noise at 3.0 a.m. – promptly retreating when the birds flew toward the beams of their flashlights.

The California incident that inspired Hitchcock

Hitchcock reacted so quickly to this event, which was covered by reporters from nearby San Francisco, that his name appeared in the initial report in the Santa Cruz newspaper, which ends: ‘A phone call came to The Sentinel from mystery producer Alfred Hitchcock from Hollywood, requesting that a Sentinel be sent to him. He has a home in the Santa Cruz mountains.’ While the two California incidents were clearly accidental, caused by the birds losing direction and heading for heat in one case and coastal lights in the other, malicious attacks by birds were not unknown. Early the next year, for example, on the same day that one Los Angeles paper reported that, ‘after several days’ delay caused by hard, cold, continuous and gloomy rain’, shooting had begun on Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds in Bodega Bay in Northern California, another city paper described how a red-tailed hawk that had attacked small children in Victoria Park had been shot down by local police.¹⁴

The small town of Bodega Bay, located on the Sonoma coast north of San Francisco, had come to Hitchcock’s attention when he filmed Shadow of a Doubt (1943) two decades earlier in nearby Santa Rosa. Why was it named after a grocery store (‘bodega’ in Mexican Spanish), I used to puzzle as I watched The Birds? And did the quaint, murky, labyrinthine general store that provides the town’s first interior shots have anything to do with the fact that Hitchcock’s dictatorial father (who allegedly made the police lock his five-year-old son in a jail cell) had been a greengrocer?¹⁵ As a regional place name, ‘Bodega’ commemorates the last of the Spanish discoverers in California, Francisco Juan de la Bodega y Cuadro, a Castilian-born captain whose flag ship entered the bay in 1775. His name had been bestowed on an ancestor whom the King of Spain had made overseer of the royal treasure-house (‘bodega’ once meant ‘vault’ or ‘wine cellar’). The warehouses built by later settlers along the bay were also called ‘bodegas’. Hitchcock’s use of the peculiarly unforgettable name Bodega Bay has poetic resonance: as a metaphor, ‘Bodega Bay’, evoking both nature and culture, stands for all of human life.

Hitchcock approached The Birds with the documentary naturalism that is the necessary first term of Surrealism – the modernist style to which his work properly belongs and whose pioneers he explicitly acknowledged.¹⁶ He told François Truffaut: ‘I had every inhabitant of Bodega Bay – man, woman, and child – photographed for the costume department. The restaurant is an exact copy of the one up there.’ The interior of Dan Fawcett’s farmhouse is ‘an exact replica’ of one near Bodega Bay, and ‘even the scenery of the m...