I can't help but wonder if anyone with
any knowledge of cinema has ever watched The Birds without
comparing it to Psycho. While the movie does seem to remain
in the public consciousness, at least enough to be sporadically
parodied, it also had the shit luck of being made by one of the
greatest filmmakers of the twentieth century three years after he'd
completed his magnum opus. It also doesn't help that the Magnum Opus
was practically put together with barbed wire and spit, as the studio
attempted to punish Hitchcock for not making the movie they wanted
him to make by cutting his budget. The Birds, on the other
hand, has a budget roughly four times higher than Psycho,
but still can't hold a candle to it.
If the movie does exceed Psycho
in any area, it’s in the aesthetics. The movie is unquestionably
beautiful. It creates a fantastical aesthetic in which people in fur
coats and sweaters on hot, sunny days are not even allowed to sweat,
let alone have their beauty tarnished before the evil comes.
As with Psycho, the film opens
with the appearance of a totally different movie. A practical joker
named Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren), and a lawyer named Mitch
Brenner (Rod Taylor) have an encounter in a store that sells pet
birds. He informs her, knowing of her record of criminal pranks,
that she should be in prison. And she, being attracted to him,
decides to track him down and bring him some love birds for his young
sister (Veronica Cartwright).
Part of me does wonder how that film
might have played out. It's unusual today to see a romance that's
not a comedy, so this tone is strange. It obviously doesn't last,
though.
It’s hardly a spoiler at this point
to say that she finds Brenner at his mother's farmhouse, and then an
army of birds attack. I don't mean to imply that there's no build-up
to this event. A few comments are made about the behavior of birds,
and Melanie is injured by one that swoops down and scratches her.
Then, there's an initial attack on birthday party of Mitch’s
sister, and another attack off screen, followed by a lull. Next,
there's an attack on the school, and several other residents at the
bar mention similar occurrences before there's an all-out war.
In my view far too much has been said
about the decision to never explain the Bird's behavior in this film.
For some, that makes this movie scarier. For me, it affects the
movie not one bit. I can say that a scientist running into the house
to explain why this is happening might be a bit distracting, but I
find that an explanation for the birds' behavior is completely
superfluous to the fear elicited by it.
Far more significant is the pattern of
the behavior. Towards the end of the movie the birds stop attacking
and simply rest by the sides of the road, allowing the characters to
escape the farmhouse and head for the city as the final shot. The
earlier, smaller attacks however leave open the possibility that this
is just another lull. And that mere moments after the film ends, the
characters could all be torn apart.
The film is frightening, yes. It feels
almost as if it’s an idyllic still-life that has been disrupted by
terror. It certainly never hits home in the way that Psycho
does. It never feeling as if the characters or places represent the
real world, or even a facsimile of it. However, representing reality
was hardly Hitchcock's intention.
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