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The Birds
Camille Paglia
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The Birds
Camille Paglia
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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.
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âThe Birdsâ
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 âapocalyptic poemâ.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 womanâs 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 showâs 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 Hitchcockâs 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 Hitchcockâs 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 Maurierâs 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 Hitchcockâs self-confessed lack of âfeelingâ for period pieces, but he turned Rebecca into a haunting masterpiece, the 1940 melodrama that began his Hollywood period.2 Du Maurierâs âThe Birdsâ takes place on the same cold, wind-swept, rocky Cornish coast as Jamaica Inn. Though there is no Gothic manor house, the storyâs bleak atmosphere and ferocious weather resemble those of the great Bronte novels, which are the literary ancestors of Rebecca.
Hitchcockâs 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 Maurierâs 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, âhedging, thatching, repairsâ.3 There may be an echo here of D.H. Lawrenceâs âThe Foxâ, with its lesbian homesteaders battling the punishing northern elements. Du Maurierâs gruff, proletarian Nat Hocken â who in Hitchcockâs version would be transformed into the brash, worldly San Francisco lawyer, Mitchell Brenner â is a painfully isolated consciousness. He alone seems to read the sign language of the birds as they mass: he is as attuned to natureâs disturbances as an ancient Druid. The screenplay, written with Hitchcockâs usual active collaboration, transfers Hockenâs special antagonistic relationship with the birds to a woman who does not exist in du Maurierâs story â Melanie Daniels, âa wealthy, shallow playgirlâ (in Hitchcockâs 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 Hitchcockâs own early family experience that obsessively runs through his work. Neither sexual intrigue nor Freudian family romance plays any part in du Maurierâs stripped-down original conception.
Du Maurierâs âThe Birdsâ 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 âair raidsâ on Plymouth and the âblack-out boardsâ he made for his motherâs house there.5 Hitchcock picked up the war analogy: of his heroine in The Birds becoming stronger through adversity, he said, âItâs like the people in London, during the wartime air raids.â6 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: âThe bombs are falling, and the guns are going like hell all over the place. You donât know where to go. ⊠Youâre caught! Youâre trapped!â7
But nature proves more tyrannous than man. In du Maurierâs story, as in the film, the birds invade a childâs bedroom with a great âbeating of wingsâ, and a valiant male must go to the rescue, braving âlittle stabbing beaks sharp as pointed forksâ that draw blood from his hands.8 In du Maurierâs story, the distant city of London, identified with frivolity and political impotence, is horribly overwhelmed by the birds â a motif Hitchcock considered but rejected: he âtoyed withâ ending the film with a shot of San Franciscoâs Golden Gate Bridge âcovered in birdsâ 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 Maurierâs 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 âNational Emergencyâ 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 ânatureâs lawâ 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 âmany millions of years of memoryâ stored in the birdsâ âlittle brainsâ have produced âthis instinct to destroy mankindâ.10 Du Maurierâs tale, unlike Hitchcockâs, ends in intimations of catastrophe as sweeping as the carnage wrought by Poeâs Red Death.
Birds were already present as a sub-theme in Hitchcockâs work. In Blackmail (1929), his first sound picture, shrill chirping from a bird cage hanging above the heroineâs 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 (âmagpieâ 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 âdid not like eggsâ as an adult) âloved to steal the eggsâ from the henhouse and pelt the priestsâ windows, claiming, âIt looks like the birds have been flying overhead.â12
After Psycho, Hitchcock had planned to make Marnie, which continues Psychoâs themes of female theft and mental illness but normalises them with a happy romantic ending. Alas, Grace Kellyâs interest in returning to film in Marnieâs 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. âSeabird Invasion Hits Coastal Homesâ, screamed the headline of the August 18, 1961 Santa Cruz Sentinel. Thousands of âsooty shearwaters, fresh from a feast of anchoviesâ, 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 âmillionsâ, 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. â 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: âA 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.â 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, âafter several daysâ delay caused by hard, cold, continuous and gloomy rainâ, shooting had begun on Alfred Hitchcockâs 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 Hitchcockâs attention when he filmed Shadow of a Doubt (1943) two decades earlier in nearby Santa Rosa. Why was it named after a grocery store (âbodegaâ in Mexican Spanish), I used to puzzle as I watched The Birds? And did the quaint, murky, labyrinthine general store that provides the townâs first interior shots have anything to do with the fact that Hitchcockâs 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, âBodegaâ 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 (âbodegaâ once meant âvaultâ or âwine cellarâ). The warehouses built by later settlers along the bay were also called âbodegasâ. Hitchcockâs use of the peculiarly unforgettable name Bodega Bay has poetic resonance: as a metaphor, âBodega Bayâ, 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 â the modernist style to which his work properly belongs and whose pioneers he explicitly acknowledged.16 He told François Truffaut: âI had every inhabitant of Bodega Bay â man, woman, and child â photographed for the costume department. The restaurant is an exact copy of the one up there.â The interior of Dan Fawcettâs farmhouse is âan exact replicaâ of one near Bodega Bay, and âeven the scenery of the m...