Hitchcock's Greatest Masterpiece

Rating: 10/10 (19 February 2008)

Considered a major disappointment when it was first released, The Birds is Alfred Hitchcock's most ambitious, most audacious, and most astonishing achievement. Some biographers have said that Hitchcock was jealous of the new European directors who were dazzling all the critics, and this movie was his bid for bigger "artistic" recognition. Unfortunately, audiences dismissed it as a slow-moving horror movie with few thrills, fewer explanations, and no real ending. (It was one of the first movies to end without the words "The End.") Even to this day, critics have failed to comprehend its complexities, preferring to hail the more simplistic, easier-to-analyze Vertigo as Hitchcock's masterpiece. Francois Truffaut, however, appreciated the craftsmanship of The Birds in his book of interviews with Hitchcock. Robin Wood also attempted to dissect the movie, but ultimately wrote it off as an exploration of the irrational, emphasizing the precarious nature of life. Finally, thank god, literary commando/critic Camille Paglia gave this underrated classic the kind of rigorous, insightful treatment it so richly deserves in her BFI Film Classics guide, The Birds. I recommend it to all Hitchcock fans and movie lovers. Hopefully, it will inspire closer inspection and further commentary. Here are my two cents
The Birds is a true visionary epic, right up there with 2001: A Space Odyssey, 8 1/2, The Seventh Seal, Nashville, Taxi Driver, and Magnolia. Like those thought-provoking masterpieces, it requires repeat viewings to appreciate all the levels of meaning, the philosophical richness, the psychological nuances, and the bold cinematic originality. There's more than meets the eye here (or pecks the eye, to be precise). It's a romantic comedy that mutates into an all-out horror movie, a raging battle of the sexes waged in a symbolic war between nature and civilization. It's the revenge of female power, the breakdown of male logic, the apocalypse of the subconscious. It's a bedroom farce with beaks and feathers and claws, a gleefully sadistic attack on mother and child, Madonna and whore, hunters and gathers, hearth and home. And it's so much fun to watch!
Here are just a few ways to "read" The Birds:
* The attacks are literally nature's revenge. A local fisherman describes the bird's strange behavior and offers logical explanations. Mrs. MacGruder, the "bird lady" in the diner, paints a grim picture of what would happen if birds decide to wage war against humans. You can read the movie literally as an ecological disaster movie. But that's just a "McGuffin," (what Hitchcock would describe as a meaningless plot device.)
* The attacks are metaphorically nature's revenge. On a deeper level, The Birds graphically illustrates a complete inversion of predatory-prey relationships, thrown disastrously out of balance by the women's pursuit of the man. The hunter is now the hunted, which, according to social norms, is not "the natural order" of things. By inverting nature's laws, all of civilization is at risk: traditional families, innocent children, and all of society. When Melanie is finally reduced to the level of a passive child in a mother's armssubjugated to the back seat of her sports car while the man takes his "rightful place" at the wheelthe bird attacks stop.
* The birds are symbols of female power. The attacks (via beautiful "harmless" creatures) are physical manifestations of the all-too-human "harpies" in Mitch's life: the sexual predator Melanie, the cold possessive mother Lydia, the clinging little sister who forces him to be a father figure, and Annie, the spurned lover who won't go away. They literally swarm around Mitch, surreptitiously pecking at each other, sublimating their desires, jealousies, and rage. These buried emotions don't just go away, of course; they find expression in the bird attacks. And no one is safenot the children, not the "hen-pecked" farmer next door, not the representative citizens trapped in a family restaurant. In the final scene, when the survivors are about to drive away, Mitch's little sister asks, "Can I bring my lovebirds? They haven't hurt anybody." But she's wrong. In The Birds, love destroys all. Love, and the female subconsciousuncaged at last.
* It's the end of the world. For some inexplicable reason, nature and fate have turned against us. Reason and rationality have failed us. Our survival, in the end, depends upon our ability to navigate a hostile world swarming with unforeseen dangersin this case, drive a sports car through an endless "sea" of harmless-looking birds. Birds that, at any moment, might swoop down and destroy us. (You can bet that that flimsy convertible roof of Melanie's car won't save them from the apocalypse.) Still, a ray of light shines through the stormy clouds in the distance. A ray of hope? It's hard to say.
You can also interpret the film as a Biblical prophesy, a Freudian nightmare, a battle of Jungian archetypes, or an old-fashioned monster movie without a traditional monster. However you slice it, The Birds is an endlessly fascinating, immensely entertaining, and intellectually challenging epic of the imagination.
I know I'm in the minority here, but I think it's Hitchcock's Best. Movie. Ever.
(And I haven't even mentioned the terrific acting, visual effects, costumes, editing, or Bernard Herman's brilliant sound design.)