| Joseph Tin |
The Birds plays at the Heights Theater on Thursday, April 17th, as part of our collaboration on the 2025 Hitchcock Film Festival. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org.
In the October 1966 issue of American Cinematographer, Alfred Hitchcock relates an evening at the matinee to the awful experience of having a nightmare: “When you have a nightmare, it’s awfully vivid if you’re dreaming that you’re being led to the electric chair. Then you’re as happy as can be when you wake up because you’re relieved. It was so vivid.”
The activity of sitting in a darkened movie theater and being hypnotized by the images on the screen is much like the activity of dreaming. Psychologist Carl Jung famously surmised that dreams were sprung up from the deep hidden well of the unconscious mind; dreams were filled with our repressed desires, the shadow—as in the darker sides of ourselves we try to hide—and the collective unconscious full of symbols and archetypes relating back to the Stone Age.
The curious symbol chosen for this film was… the birds! Yes, our singing, fair-feathered friends, the birds, populate this film, along with the archetype for this film—the lovebirds.
Mitch Brenner, a small town boy, seems to know that Melanie Daniels, played by New Ulm, Minnesota native Tippi Hedren, will be at the pet shop at a particular time in the day as so goes her routine. Melanie Daniels the socialite, and her fast-living big city San Francisco life, seems to have become a bit of an accidental local California bay celebrity thanks to the gossip rags, having jumped naked into a Rome fountain one summer. But the place where Mitch comes from is small—small enough that a small piece in the gossip pages makes a big impression on the isolated, insular community. It’s a place where everybody knows everybody’s business, and a creepy fog of silence and secrecy lies over the town. This is a town where the mail never reaches the right place. “There’s a lot of spare time in Bodega Bay,” says the school teacher. It’s as if the whole small town is hiding a guilty secret.
The Birds is pure cinema. It does little explaining. It does little to regurgitate the plot for you. It tells its tale visually without explanation, with camera movement, camera angles, and editing. The dialogue is almost tangential to the plot. It is also a slow moving piece of film, creeping as the peculiar oddities stack up. A seagull knocks Melanie in the head. A bird flies straight into a doorway to its death in the clear light of the full moon. The birds are gathering on the telephone wiring in an uncanny way.
Merriam-Webster defines the word uncanny as “mysterious, beyond one’s powers to know, understand, or explain.” This is where the film starts to play in the world of dreams. In the New York Times review of the film, critic Bosley Crowther describes the structure or movement of plot thusly, “Notice how clear and naturalistic the narrative elements are: a plausible confrontation, beautiful scenery, a literal enactment of a playful intrigue—all very nicely arranged. Then, sneakily, Mr. Hitchcock tweaks us with a tentative touch of the bizarre. The plausible is interrupted by a peculiar avian caprice.”
In the October 1966 issue of American Cinematographer, Alfred Hitchcock said that “When you have a nightmare, it’s awfully vivid if you’re dreaming that you’re being led to the electric chair. Then you’re as happy as can be when you wake up because you’re relieved. It was so vivid.” But then, he continued: “And that’s really the basis of this attempt at realistic photography, to make it look as real as possible because the effects themselves are actually quite bizarre.” The effects are almost creepier in their faux reality. They are, in a way, the supernatural come to life. This is the point where the horror is no longer a dream, but the dream has become a sort of simulated reality.
We see the violent effects of the birds attacking in memorable set pieces and the sheer terror they inspire. The dead body with the gouged out eye. The school children being hunted down by hordes, and hordes of bloody cuts on Melanie’s hands and face. The benign bird turns into an apocalyptic vision as if dreamed up by the theologian St. John. But in the bitter end, the birds proper don’t attack the lovebirds. Instead, the birds watch, and watch, and watch. At any moment, they could strike—but the screen fades to black. The true conclusion is a mystery.
What caused the birds to attack? To terrorize? The film does not say what the secret on the townspeople’s guilty lips was. Is this divine punishment for a crime they are guilty of? The reason things seem so odd in Bodega Bay? In the end, this film is as mesmerizing as a dream that falls into a horrible nightmare. A puzzle box. What did it all mean? What were the townspeople guilty of? What are we, as the audience, guilty of? Humanity even?
There is an old Chinese saying that has the flavor of a curse: “May you be born in interesting times.” And there are times when truth is stranger—more interesting, indeed—than fiction.
The events in The Birds seem apocalyptic not only because our own assessment of our lives may often circle back to the impression that these are, in fact, apocalyptic times we are living in. Such is the strangeness of our modern times. The ending of The Birds, in any case, depends on the truth that is never spoken, the enduring silence of the unsaid.
Maybe the lovebirds made it out okay and lived happily ever after, but only maybe…
Works Cited
Crowther, Bosley. “‘The Birds’: Hitchcock’s Feathered Fiends Are Chilling.” The New York Times, 1 Apr. 1963.
Lightmam, Herb A. “Hitchcock Talks About Lights, Camera, Action.” American Cinematographer, 12 June 2017.
“Uncanny.” Merriam-Webster, Merriam-Webster.
Edited by Olga Tchepikova-Treon