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One by one, the crows are landing in the schoolyard with a view of the Bodega Bay. They seem spellbound with the nursery rhyme chanted by the kids or attracted by the green glow of Tippi Hedren’s matching skirt and jacket. Or, perhaps, they are lured by the overbearing smell of her lit cigarette. By the time she turns her head, the children have already started using the climbing frame and are swarmed with crows. “‘She combs her hair but once a year,'” sing the children who are totally unaware of what is going on inside their classroom. “Nickety-nackety now, now, now!”
Actually, I am totally clueless as to why the birds are brought forth and why they suddenly turn aggressive. And it looks like no one else knows either. “I don’t know why,” says a frantic Melanie Daniels (Hedren). “Wish I could say,” blurts a bewildered Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor). Confusion is rampant, and everyone is frayed and ready to burst out. Here is a film that leaves you with no answers and no way out. All order is lost from beginning to end.
This story, which is based on a Daphne du Maurier short story, narrates the story of sophisticated woman who absolutely loses control in a rustic ocean town. Daniels flies all the way to Bodega Bay to prank a wise ass lawyer only to have a stupid seagull mess with her perfectly styled hair. Before long, however, the seagulls have already disrupted many. They aggressively hit window panes, peck at doors, while town’s drunkard quotes Ezekiel while rambling around in a bar, “It’s the end of the world,” he exclaims.
Many critics try to figure out the meaning of The Birds, and most focus on the hysterical woman who relates the assaults to Daniels’ arrival. (“I think you’re the cause of all of this”). This suggests that the birds experience violence as a form of sex and fierce synaptic hormonal activity which pulls the sleepy town of Bodega Bay into a together frenzy.
In another light, they could be seen as a tantrum. After all, the first act of the movie is an unpleasant accumulation of (sexual and social) experimental tension, which is, a game of performed gazes and mischievous dodges. Heavily guarded, incredibly cut off from their feelings, gamey. It’s, well… something has to give. The moment where Daniels’s hair is getting knocked over her eyes is when the mask begins to go off as the pressure cooker bursts. The moment the birdcage is opened, the birds start singing. Only in this particular case, they scream rather than sing.
The Birds is often viewed as the most significant of the last Alfred Hitchcock films in his catalog (it was filmed in 1963 when his reputation was at the highest). But could it also be the most important thesis on Alfred Hitchcock? The one that is the most simple and self assured, where it has distilled all themes that have preoccupied him ever since he set the lodger creeping to his upstairs room? The more I watch it, the more I find the daringness of its theme astounding even for the genius at his peak. It’s the way in which Hitchcock fuses shrill B-movie theatrics with chilling arthouse sophistication that sets him apart. I admire the calculated elegance of his shot composition, the economical brilliance of Evan Hunter’s dialogue and a particularity of setting that is so me that I feel like I have been there, standing on that jetty and taking the walk around the headland.
For all that, what stands out to me the most about The Birds is not impressed upon the viewer but rather what is omitted. By the time he was 63, Hitchcock felt secure enough to do away with the grinding gears of narrative logic. MacGuffins in the form of wine bottles filled with iron ore was what beautiful, bruised Notorious had for its plot. Even Psycho, with its insurrectionist electrifying nature, felt the need to use a psychiatrist to explain Norman Bates to the audience. But The Birds floats free. There is no motor propulsion, no music to tether it, and nothing to support it apart from that up draft of sensual atmosphere and existential dread. I remember that he did worry over how to wrap things up, and I remember that he did a lot. In the end, he replaced the scripted final scene with an open ending, which was the perfect closing image that suspends the world in the balance and leaves its mysteries all intact.
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