Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About The Birds but Wished You'd Never Asked
Alfred Hitchcock hid squirrels in his freezer. Not really. I just made that up. That's not true. But now that's in your head. And that's okay because Hitch did the same thing to his viewers in the Birds. It's no secret that he was a manipulator of audience's expectations and reactions. What you maybe didn't know is to what extreme lengths he went, subliminally and otherwise, to eff with your mind.
This is your brain on Macguffins.
The Birds is his mindfrig masterpiece. Playing off the Hitchcockian formula of over bearing mother versus cool blonde boundary pusher with the male lead caught in the middle Hitchcock decided to turn the formula a bit in the Birds. Here the women are the main characters of the film and the man merely an alpha prop. Not only are the women of the Birds the main subject of the film but so is their biology.
Here's where he goes into Freudville, Crazy County USA. It's not just that the birds in the film represent the conflict of the outsider Hedren upsetting the natural order of things but that the natural order involves a female reproduction narrative. Yes, Sir Alfred made a film about the menstrual cycle and I know this because of an oddly shaped ashtray.
Just what are you suggesting?
Bowls, Ashtrays, Teacups and Bays
Tippi Hedren's Melanie Daniels spends a lengthy amount of time in the film around bowls. We are first introduced to her character in a pet shop in San Francisco. Very much the Hitchcock cool blonde she is assertive, confident and just a bit unbridled. Here is where Rod Taylor's Mitch Brenner meets Miss Daniels and a playful game of who knows more than whom ensues as both characters engage in a conversation about the proper care and handling of love birds. One escapes it's cage as Melanie reaches in for it and her and the shop keeper frantically try to recapture it. It's the first ashtray that the love bird lands in where Mitch covers the escapee with his hat that clues us in to the film's metaphor.
One in the hand equals two in the...
Covering things will become a visual theme coupled with the birds throughout the film. It's this first sequence that captures the meaning of these ashtrays. I'm not going to say what they're shaped like but suggestive seashells take their place in the frame later at Bodega Bay.
How many seashells did she suggestively sell down by the seash... oh, forget it!
Mitch's Mom gets her own metaphorical uterus too. Lydia Brenner lost her husband five years prior and Mitch often visits her as the dutiful son does. After the first full scale bird attack in her living room takes place she attempts to tidy up the mess as she picks up her broken tea cups. Later, when she enters the farmer's house she notices broken tea cups hanging from his hutch and becomes quite disturbed.
That's odd. Farmer Dan never broke a second cup when I made tea.
Hitchcockianites (???) have noted that this is a form of foreshadowing through association to herald that the birds have once again attacked the sanctity of the home. This is true but it's also a bridge to the third appearance of teacups when Melanie brings Mitch's mother tea after her horrific discovery in the farmer's bedroom. Now they are whole and unbroken as Melanie pours tea into the mother's cup placed just over her abdomen while she lay in bed.
My tea brings all the birds to the yard.
The tea cup symbolism is reflected in the rhythms of the rising tides as well. As Hedron's character drives to Bodega Bay we see that the bay is half dry at low tide. Later, when she crosses the bay in her boat the tide has suddenly risen to accommodate her crossing. By the time she attends dinner at Mitch's house the tide has once again receded and we see the bay just once more at the birthday party. Here again it is at low tide and the boardwalk where Melanie first docked her boat is dry. The bay reflects the literal ebb and flow of a woman's cycle as well as the juxtaposition of Melanie's youth and fervor against Lydia's waning energies. But it's at the birthday party that we begin to understand what Hitchcock identifies as the true horror of the film: Knowledge.
Yet another reason to home school
A Birthday with Funny Shaped Balloons...If'n You Think Phalluses is Funny.
Well at least they didn't tie you to a pole
The birthday party is where all the gals share the same space and the third great bird attack occurs. It is a birthday party for Lydia's late comer daughter. The 11 year old Cathy. She is just on the cusp of womanhood and it's time to play games with blindfolds. Annie Hayworth, who once followed Mitch to Bodega Bay and has now resigned herself to the role of schoolmarm and babysitter, organizes the games. Annie spins Cathy round and sends her blindly walking off screen casually stating, "There you go." This is when a bird strafes Cathy. Hitting her head Cathy mistakes it it for a birthday guest and cries, "Hey, no touching!" It's interesting to note that Melanie was first attacked in the bay upon the top of her head and the result was a spot of blood on her fashionable gloves.
Well, Cathy's attack unfolds just as Mitch and Melanie have descended the hill overlooking the bay together in view of the disapproving glances of both Mother and Annie.
The mirror meaning we can draw from this is that the couple is coming from a place of knowledge (Mitch just having discovered that Melanie does not know her mother's whereabouts) as Cathy is wandering blindly into adulthood. Melanie had no mother to guide her into adulthood and Cathy has only surrogates who no longer have a mothering instinct to guide her. Cathy is basically being dumped out of the nest in this scene to meet her fate as a woman. And then the birds attack and start popping the penis shaped balloons.
Okay, so now I'm involving the kids in all of this. No, Hitchcock is. He's the guy who turned Cathy's birthday party into some kind of bizarre fertlilty ceremony. Stop getting angry at me and calling me evil for bringing to light things that you never wanted to see that were always in plain sight. Cover your eyes and protect your innocence if you need to because from here on out it only gets creepier.
I was trying to watch this thing without being noticed, thank you very much!
Mitch is trying to cover something up and he's failing miserably.
Remember the "hat over the bird trick" that Mitch smugly pulls off in the first scene? Well, after the town gets all blowed up from the large scale bird attack Mitch finds his attempts to cover things becoming increasingly more difficult. He attempts to cover Annie Hayworth's eyes after he and Melanie discover her dead body on her own front porch.
You're a little late, dude.
After retrieving Cathy from Annie's house he pulls the car's roof cover to protect the two girls from the increasing mass of birds. By the time they drive home Mitch must nail the entire house shut and pulls the curtains advising everyone to "cover your eyes!" during a bird attack. The love birds in their cage are covered as well and Mitch does everything to block out the impending attack of the birds.
Cathy's room is now impregnable! Okay, yeah. Weird choice of words...
But Melanie creates a leak in the dam of Mitch's forced blindness. As everyone sleeps after a large scale bird attack she hears something upstairs. Ascending the staircase in the dark the audience knows that the Birds are in the top room behind the door. But Melanie can't help herself and enters the room. There is a child's painting on the wall and as Melanie looks up she sees a large hole has been torn into the roof. Aiming her flashlight into the room we see hundreds of birds take flight from on top of a covered bed.
Trigger warning!
As the attack upon Melanie ensues we see that this is Cathy's room. There are dolls on the posted bed and sitting in chairs around the room. During the attack Melanie lets out one small cry and spends the rest of the assault breathing rapidly in short gasps. She is pecked and strafed to the floor. This distinct type of breathing has been featured previously in the film. If you watch Mitch ascend the stairs of the pet shop in the opening moments in the film and turn the volume to 11 you can hear an underscore of women's heavy breathing just inaudible under the pet shop noises.
This is a deliberate subliminal association that Hitchcock inserted into the film so that we subconsciously compare it to the assault on Melanie in Cathy's bedroom. But here the cover has been blown. Remember that both Melanie and Cathy were both first hit in the temple of their brows. Cathy exclaims "Hey, no touching!" and Melanie gets a spot of blood. In the bedroom scene the "head" of the home has been pecked open and the birds have flooded and sullied the innocence of Cathy's room and blown the cover off of something Mitch has been trying to hide from everyone's eyes. Like Eve eating from the tree of knowledge while Adam sleeps Melanie's eyes have been opened to something.
Back off, Hitchcock!
Now bloodied and unconscious Melanie is rescued from the bird rape and brought to the couch downstairs. Now we go one more level up the meta chain. As Mitch bandages Melanie, Cathy stands by to assist Mitch. Melanie then opens her eyes. When she opens them she looks directly into the camera and they widen with a terrifying realization. The camera retracts and her hands fly out as if to fend off the viewer.
"Cover your eyes!", said Mitch...a lot.
Of course the association we make as an audience is that she's just awoken from the bird attack and thinks she's still fending off the assault. We assume as an audience that the POV is of Mitch looking at her face and then backing away to as to not get hit by her hands. But in the frame following this POV shot we see that Mitch and Cathy are not looking at Melanie when this first occurs.
We're not looking, Tippi.
After Mitch turns and tries to hold her wrists and calm her down the POV shot switches back and Melanie turns her stare from the audience back to Mitch. This is Hitchcock's sneaky way of including the audience in on the assault of Melanie.
Audience as voyeur is nothing new to Hitchcock. Rear Window is one long meta trip into director as voyeur with the story on the screen spilling into the narrator's apartment and forcing him out his own window.
This is Hitchcock's fourth wall break- the action of the story suddenly becoming aware of the audience that is watching the action within the frame of the movie. In The Birds Melanie's sudden awareness of the audience - even an awareness of Hitchcock's camera - is what we are to subliminally understand she is experiencing on that Freudian couch. Her eyes have been opened to a larger understanding of the narrative that has been unfurling in front of our own eyes as audience members.
It's this constant reference to eyes being covered and opened through out the film coupled with breaking windows and covered shades that brings our attention as audience members to what Hitchcock wants us to read as subtext to his film. The Birds represent multiple conflicts within the film both seen and hidden. When we make those connections as an audience we have a breakthrough moment of realization that can either be viewed as enlightening or evil. This is the conflict of the Birds. Once we accept the underlying sexual tensions of Hitchcock's narrative do we accept it's truth or proceed to cover our eyes? Can we after knowing what we know proceed in willful blindness? Hitchcock addresses this issue thrice in the film.
So where is this all going?
Mitch is willfully blind as are all the men in The Bird's
One of the strongest Birds' visuals are the black eye sockets of the farmer. Earlier in the film Mitch's mother Lydia, wanting to speak to their neighbor about the chicken feed he uses, has walked into the farmer's bedroom and sees something truly horrifying. Every blind is open, all the glass shattered and dead birds are strewn all about the farmer's room. Then we see who just got his eyes plucked out last night.
That's the last time I stay up late watching Skinemax
Of course Annie Hayward brought up the Oedipal nature of the narrative and one can't help but associate the pecked out eye sockets of the farmer to the greek tragic hero's actions. Annie had earlier pointed out the compulsive nature of tilling in the soil as she smudges dirt across her cheek and reaches for a much needed cigarette. This dovetails to Hitch's double entendre on what makes someone go blind if they spend too much time alone in the bedroom. Those black eyes are seen twice more. Mitch's binocular ogling of Melanie mirrors those blackened eyes as does the dead father's portrait.
Ahh, they look so alike.
The men in town as a group are also short sighted and have no answers or solutions to the Bird attacks as they generally fumble about in drunken ineptitude. It is the women who seem attune to the ebb and flow of the Bird attacks. Mrs. Bundy is a local ornithologist who rationally lays out what might be causing disturbances among the birds. On the opposite spectrum sitting at the end of the bar we see the Bible quoting town drunk declaring "it's the end of the world" as he sways on his stool. Both figures offer polar opposite solutions to the bird attacks. Only near the end of the film does Mitch finally note: "Seems like a pattern, doesn't it? They strike, then disappear and start massing again.". Ewww! We liked you better when you were blind, Mitch.
I'm in a glass case of emotion!
Three girls in one
It's best to think of the film as having 3 main characters; all of them interchangeable with each other. Cathy is the innocent woman who has yet to gain the knowledge of womanhood and lacks a true guide into this realm. Melanie, having lost her mother when she was young seems to lack boundaries and simply steamrolls her way into Mitch's tightly controlled world. A reflection of this is her home invasion scene where she leaves the love birds as a surprise and stops in 3 spaces in the house where 3 main bird attacks will later occur. The mother is the ebbing of the biological clock. She fears losing Mitch and feels she cannot properly protect Cathy. Each figure stands in as a surrogate to the other at some point in the film and the audience experiences a cross pollination of disturbing associations that leaves the viewer as complicit in some sort of taboo family secret.
Mirror, mirror on the wall...
Once seen and realized we can't un-see it. In other words we can't put the fruit back on the tree nor close Pandora's box. We can either read between the phone lines or just keep the blinds drawn. The Bird's ending sequence offers no real resolution in this matter. They have massed all around the Brenner home but simply sit and watch. In one of the most tense scenes in cinema the Brenner's and Melanie, now fully accepted into Lydia's care as a daughter, slowly walk out the front door to the garage. Everywhere are perched birds. The new family unit is helpless and vulnerable. They manage to drive away under the surveillance of thousands of birds. It seems the natural order is starting to realign. The moon is full and yep... the water's back in the bay.
Menstrual synchrony has been achieved!
I think they just stopped by to check out my salami
Interesting side notes
Veronica Cartwright - the actress who played Cathy- has been repeatedly cast in roles where she had to see awful things. One wonders if she had simply had proper xenomorph reproductive education if the whole John Hurt chest burst incident on LV 426 could've been avoided.
Drinking Game! Every time someone in The Birds mentions a phone, talks on a phone or a phone and/or phone line fills the screen just drink. Keep a list of what you drink for the EMT.
Silence of the Lambs is often compared to Hitchcock's Psycho. Cross dressing serial killers, cadavers in the basement and Marion Crane and Clarice Starling both have bird names. But it's Starling's constant state of being ogled by men through out the film that mirrors the male gaze of the men in Bodega Bay. Also, Starling cannot see the Buffalo Bill Killer when he is right in front of her and must clamor in blindness before shooting him and subsequently shattering a basement window thus letting in the light. Buffalo Bill's night goggles mirror Mitch's binoculars.