Hitchcock's The Birds (1963) is an extraordinary film that I do not enjoy watching. Compared to the enormous pleasures afforded by Rear Window, for example, Birds is a colossal downer. In the filmography, The Birds directly follows Psycho. Such a proximity is entirely fitting, as Psycho is among the bleakest of Hitchcock's work. But where Psycho is clear and direct, Birds is abstract and subtle.
II.
By the time of The Birds, the beautiful hot-ice blonde had become a recognizable figure in Hitchcock. Here, that role is taken up by Tippi Hedren, as Melanie Daniels. The film begins with an introduction to Daniels. It is Daniels's desire to deliver a flirtatious lesson, to the handsome Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor), that has Daniels find and follow Brenner to the town of Bodega Bay. Arriving with a cage of "lovebirds" that Brenner noted at their first meeting in a San Francisco bird shop, she rents a motorboat to get to Brenner's lakeside house.
Soon enough, Brenner discovers Melanie's mischief with the delivery of the lovebirds. It is just then, as Melanie seems to be enjoying the effects of her prank from the view of the motorboat, that a gull suddenly dives from the sky and strikes Melanie in the forehead, drawing blood. As the film progresses, there are more bird attacks on humans, building to a lethal ferocity. Criticism on The Birds has suggested all kinds of explanations for these attacks in the film.
My interpretation turns around the character that has led us to Bodega Bay, Melanie Daniels. (A viewer will note that the first human bird-attack in the film is on Melanie. And the last? Also on Daniels.) There's a scene in the film where a hysterical woman accuses Melanie of being "evil", and thus bringing the attacks upon the town by her very presence. But, of course, there's nothing really evil about Daniels at all.
III.
There is an unsettled quality to Daniels, however. And I think this dissonance has to do with Daniels secretly being a neurotic. It's through these hidden eyes of Daniels that Hitchcock portrays the world of The Birds, as the cause and the affect of the depressed. So it is in the film that human beings are shown as being coldly alienated from one another; that even when relationships are formed, they are fated to end in sorrow and regret; that there are the scenes of seemingly arbitrary violence, chaos and death. Similarly goes the apocalyptic thinking that often obsesses the anxious, depressed psyche. Hence, the bird-attacks may also be seen as a metaphor for the irrational, furious attack of neuroses.
Using the terms of neurosis, I ask to unclaim them from their Freudian baggage. Instead, the neuroses I mean refers to those problems of the nerves, of the melancholic temper, that sensitive men and women have grappled with long before Freud's analysis. Not that Melanie Daniels is shown to be especially sensitive in Birds. Her chic exterior is unconvincing though, and suggestively so. The reason for Daniels's neurosis, in any case, may have to do with loneliness. But as in his best work, Hitchcock is indirectly pursuing much bigger game. That game in The Birds has to do with the liebestod appetites of the modern world.
IV.
So it is that near the conclusion of the film, we find Daniels wide awake in the early morning hours, at the house where she and others have taken refuge from the bird-attacks. Suddenly, she hears the sound of bird wings from an upstairs room. As she alone climbs the stairs to investigate, it's as if Melanie is being led up those stairs, right into harm's way. Daniels does survive the final massed bird-attack that follows. But that shouldn't detract from how Hitchcock has orchestrated his picture that Melanie Daniels is first trapped, and then shown compelled by the film's nihilistic logic. There is plenty of compulsion in Hitchcock, and where it takes me here does not allow me to describe The Birds as a film to be enjoyed.
