The 13 Days of Halloween: Day 1
13. The Birds, dir. Alfred Hitchcock
The one constant in Alfred Hitchcock’s universe is arbitrary horror. Innocent people find themselves wrongfully accused, pursued by sinister forces, embroiled suddenly in obsession or murder, slain at the hands of a madman in whose path only chance put them. In 1963, Hitchcock chose to make the obvious subtext of his films the subject of one. He made a movie in which all of humanity finds itself wrongfully accused, attacked, hunted, tortured at the hands of irrational, implacable evil. That movie was The Birds.
Some filmmakers, after dancing around certain themes for years, finally make a movie that says so much, so completely, about their worldview, that they serve as summations of that filmmaker’s entire ouevre. They may still make movies afterwards, but they’ve said what they have to say. I can think of three such cases off the top of my head: Francis Ford Coppola with Apocalypse Now, Woody Allen with Crimes & Misdemeanors, and The Master with this film, a purer distillation of his belief that the world was an unpredictably and viciously horrific place even than Psycho.
It’s a film of extraordinary cruelty. It’s no coincidence that the actress who played its protagonist, Tippi Hedren, was more abused and injured in the course of its filming than any other of Hitch’s blonde ingenues–taking a face full of shattered glass during the filming of the phone booth sequence; getting cut on the eyelids and actually having a nervous breakdown during the attic attack, one that shut down filming for several days (only the second time such a thing happened in Hitchcock’s entire career). Hitchcock appeared to be channeling some of the same maliciousness present in the film he was making.
It’s also no coincidence that we see children receiving the bulk of the abuse within the film. A birthday party and a schoolhouse are both attacked by the inexplicably maddened birds, and Hitchock’s camera lingers on the kids as they run, cry, fall to the ground helpless against the attacks. Even the most “innocent” among us are guilty in this irrational cosmology.
We viewers do not escape the indictment handed down by the Master either. Twice characters stare directly into the camera, offering a frantic, terrified j’accuse. “Who are you? What are you? Why have you come here?” says the panicking mother in the diner after the gas station attack–says the mother, directly to us. “I think you’re the cause of all this. I think you’re evil! Evil!” Melanie, the character she’s “really” talking to, slaps her, and we’re grateful, but later even Melanie turns on us, staring at us with horrified eyes and slapping us away, mistaking (mistaking?) us for her attackers. Elsewhere, eyeglasses are shattered, eyes themselves pecked out. We see, and we are punished for the crime of seeing.
But depite the visual violence, despite even the magesterial images of horror Hitchcock deploys one after another–Dan Fawcett’s fate, the jungle gym, the still-like shots of Melanie’s slackjawed trace of the fire’s progress, the bird’s eye view of the burning gas station, the claustrophobic phone booth, the stunning appearance of horses thundering through the attack, the sunlit panorama of the bird-conquered world–it’s sound that makes this film so horrific. The result of a unique collaboration between longtime Hitchcock composer Bernard Herrman and German electronic musicians Remi Gassman and Oskar Sala, the electronically-generated bird cries woven throughout the film play the same role here that Rob Bottin’s visual effects played in The Thing–they provide an almost ecstatic elucidation of the occulted meaning of the films. I wrote at length about sound in The Birds in a close-reading essay for a class in college, which you can download as a PDF here. Hitchcock, like Kubrick, is a filmmaker who does nothing by accident, so it’s amazing how rewarding close reading can be. From the opening credits to Jessica Tandy’s famous “silent scream” to the climactic attacks to the final image, Hitchcock used sound to show us that something has gone very, very wrong. That’s the sound of horror.
Forty years after it was made, The Birds can still make even a jaded gorehound like me sit there, mouth agape, saying “My God.” Hitchcock was the master, and this was his masterpiece.