So, my reading of the film was seemingly correct, even if the timing of the Cuban Missile Crisis was coincidental. That being said, the events of 1962 must have made a significant on Hitchcok, as he returned to that very topic a few years later with "Topaz". I had no idea Hitchcock even made those statments. So, thanks for bringing that to light.
Regardless, I think there must be something deeper Hitchcock had in mind with The Birds that isn't discussed a great deal. I mean, the love birds being the only avian creatures that don't attack has to mean SOMETHING. The "it's the end of the world!" segment in the diner is pretty on the nose, surely. The god-like view of the town of Bodega Bay going up in flames is very suggestive, as well. The end of the film with the ray of sunshine peeking through ominous clouds makes a lot more sense when you look at it through the lens of apocalypse and (maybe, if we're lucky) salvation.
It's the only Hitchcock film that doesn't have any logical explanation for it's events, and almost invites such interpretations. Well, perhaps Hitchcock teases us in "Family Plot" as to whether Blanche has psychic abilities, but that's done so tongue in cheek it's hard to take it seriously. Many of noted in other films Hitchcock's sense of guilt, and transferrance of guilt, which probably does have something to do with his upbringing. However, only a handful of Hitchcock films deal with spiritual themes more directly, such as "I Confess" and "The Wrong Man". Maybe we could call those two plus "The Birds" his "Catholic Trilogy"?
P.S. I'm not Catholic or even particularly a believer of any kind of religion at all, but I know Hitchcock was, so I don't think it's unreasonable to look for hints of it in his work, the rare times he let it peek through. This is I why I got so cross with the poster above and said some things I probably shouldn't have been baited into.
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roger1 (3626)
4 hours ago
(Looking at the thread above me over several years, i have responded both as ecarle and my current name, roger1. Both are the same. I lost ecarle and can't get it back for now.)
Christomacin wrote:
So, my reading of the film was seemingly correct, even if the timing of the Cuban Missile Crisis was coincidental.
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Yes -- correct. Yes--the Cuban Missile Crisis was pretty coincidental -- about 6 months before the release of The Birds, which began filmlng BEFORE the Cuban Missile Crisis.
That said, Hitchcock also referenced a novel that became a 1959 movie called "On the Beach." Even BEFORE the Cuban Missile Crisis made things "real," that FICTIONAL movie put the idea into everybody's minds: "What if the superpower launched their nukes and killed everybody on the planet immediately ...leaving a thousand or so still alive in Australia to die slowly when the fallout reached them." The movie has a REAL doomsday feeling, as the survivors have dinner parties and romances and car races all the time knowing that they ALL (not just one person) have "a few months to live."
"On the Beach" was given simultaneous premieres in America and RUSSIA(showing that the Cold War could thaw) along with other international locales(London, Paris.)
So Hollywood was already trying to make a significant statement on world nuclear dangers as early as 1959. (On the Beach was a flop, BTW -- people didn't want to "enjoy" the thought of their mass death.) .
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roger1 (3626)
3 hours ago
That being said, the events of 1962 must have made a significant on Hitchcock, as he returned to that very topic a few years later with "Topaz".
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Yes..and in between The Birds and Topaz(less the non-political Marnie), Hitchcock took on nuclear issues with Torn Curtain -- in which Paul Newman plays a NUCLEAR scientist working on weapons and anti-weapons. Torn Curtain also took on the very bleak idea of "the Iron Curtain" in East Germany -- "free" persons on one side of a wall, and "oppressed" people on the other side. People were shot trying to climb that wall to the "free" side. Torn Curtain posits Paul Newman and Julie Andrews trapping themselves in the "oppressed side" and escaping (by other means than the wall) to the free side.
So, you could say that The Birds, Torn Curtain, and Topaz were "Hitchcock's nuclear trilogy" and that the director who had taken on World Warr II as a theme in the 30s and 40s, was now taking on the nuclear age in the 60s (plus, unamed Commiunists were the villains in The Man Who Knew Too Much '56 and North by Northwest.)
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I had no idea Hitchcock even made those statements. So, thanks for bringing that to light.
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You are welcome. All my years of obscure reading sometimes pay off. Ha.
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roger1 (3626)
3 hours ago
Regardless, I think there must be something deeper Hitchcock had in mind with The Birds that isn't discussed a great deal.
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Yes, very much so. And...."I have a theory."
My theory splits into two parts:
a. Hitchcock wanted "Oscar love" -- to make a film that might finally get him the Best Director Oscar and maybe a Best Picture Oscar again(Rebecca won Best Picture, but he didn't win Best Director for that film. An outrage.) A movie with "serious themes and serious characters" might turn the trick
b. Hitchcock wanted to emulate all those "foreign film art directors" (foreign TO America and Hollywood) like Bergman, Fellini, Kurosawa, Truffaut by making an "art film" which didn't necessarily "tie the plot up perfectly" but remained open ended.
I have some support for the "Oscar based theory" on my side: The man who wrote the screenplay for The Birds, Evan Hunter, said that Hitchcock took him into his office when they first started work on the film and showed him the wall with his five(and only five) Best Director Oscar Nomination plaques: Rebecca, Lifeboat, Spellbound, Rear Window and the most recent, Psycho. "Always a bridesmaid, never a bride," Hitch told Hunter. Perhaps setting the stage for an Oscar-worthy screenplay?
Also, when promoting The Birds, Hitchcock kept dismissing his characters from Psycho (quite wrongly I thought) saying things like this:
"Well, the characters in the second half of Psycho are merely figures. In The Birds, each character has depth and connection to the themes of the story."
Eh, I don't know. I've always like the characters in Psycho better than in The Birds but again -- I feel Hitchcock trying for Oscar here. Its why the characters spend a LOT of time talking about their lives and get hysterical a lot .
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roger1 (3626)
3 hours ago
I mean, the love birds being the only avian creatures that don't attack has to mean SOMETHING.
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Absolutely. I think Hitchcock knew he was going to end The Birds without a REAL conclusion(ie the Army blows all the birds to bits, the end.) So he had to offer "signs of hope" to the audience: the love birds; Kathy's advocacy FOR the love birds; Mitch's acceptance OF the love birds.
And how Lydia accepts Melanie as a "daughter" and Melanie accepts Lydia as a "mother." A HUMAN conclusion there. And indeed 'the ray of sunlight" through the cloudy skies. MAYBE the humans will make it(but maybe they won't -- the nuclear war analogy made clear.)
Keep in mind that script pages and storyboards show that Hitchcock intended The Birds to last about 10 more minutes -- a "car chase" out of Bodega Bay(as the birds rip apart the tarp roof of Melanie's convertible), the birds can't follow. But the family reaches SF and ..The Golden Gate Bridge is covered with birds.
Hitch cut that more for budget reasons that "bummer" reasons....but that surely could have launched "The Birds 2: San Francisco Under Siege."
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roger1 (3626)
3 hours ago
The "it's the end of the world!" segment in the diner is pretty on the nose, surely. The god-like view of the town of Bodega Bay going up in flames is very suggestive, as well. The end of the film with the ray of sunshine peeking through ominous clouds makes a lot more sense when you look at it through the lens of apocalypse and (maybe, if we're lucky) salvation.
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I think all of those elements "work" for the kind of "art film event film" that Hitchcock was trying to make here. The "end of the world" guy is at once comic relief AND a serious spokesman for that point. The God Like View shot is one of the most spectacular shots in all of Hitchocck(and The Birds has more where that came from. And the ray of light.)
Look, a lot of skeptics contend that the birds COULD be defeated: with guns, cannons, TENNIS RACKETS(hey, why not?) hell, maybe nukes.
But they also very well could NOT be defeated. The bird expert lady says it "Why, if they all flocked together, we wouldn't have a chance." Indeed. The birds are willing to DIE (some of them) to fly into electric power stations(at the Brenner house, for instance.) They could take out power plants, cut off food supplies, shut down hospitals, plunge the world into death via starvation and thirst.
The Birds only made about half as much as Psycho. Various reasons -- too long at the beginning, not scary enough -- but also: that ending: unresolved AND bleak for the future.
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roger1 (3626)
3 hours ago
It's the only Hitchcock film that doesn't have any logical explanation for it's events,
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Yep. Hitchcock seemed to invite that debate by "insulting" those who kept asking "why are the birds attacking?" It became almost a way for Hitchcock to review his own movie...and to promote it. Clearly this movie was his "first and only" to sound in non-logical, flat-out fantasy. (He wanted to make a movie called Mary Rose -- which would have been a ghost story -- but Universal shut THAT project down.)
Hitchcock also said somewhere that he felt the TV show "The Twilight Zone" helped allow for him to introduce fantasy into one of HIS films.
Personallly, I liked the way The Birds aligned the bird attacks with STORMS (add in hurricanes) which build up and unleash -- with lulls in between. It suggested that these "homicidal maniac birds' at least followed the rules of WEATHER, and this gave the humans chances to escape -- just like one evacuates before a hurricane.
Later, in the 70's, Hitchocck was asked about the "disaster movie craze"(Airport, The Poseidon Adventure, Earthquake, The Towering Inferno.) Hitchcock said, "I already made one of those. The Birds. It showed, as these films do, that your personal problems suddenly don't matter when life-or-death disaster strikes."(paraphrased.)
And: Universal OFFERED Earthquake to Hitchcock (not with that script, he would.)
-- Well, perhaps Hitchcock teases us in "Family Plot" as to whether Blanche has psychic abilities, but that's done so tongue in cheek it's hard to take it seriously.
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Yes...AND...the posters for Family Plot said "You must see it twice" and there was a reason, if you went looking:
When William Devane is carrying the drugged and unconscious Blanche out of his garage and up to his secret cell, Devane dubbed a line over the shot(Devane's back is to us as he walks):
"C'mon, Fran. Let's go get another diamond for our chandelier."
So...Blanche COULD have heard that line and hence...she's not psychic, and that's why she winks at the end (as well as winking the entire Hitchocck carerer into glorious history.)
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roger1 (3626)
3 hours ago
Many of noted in other films Hitchcock's sense of guilt, and transferrance of guilt, which probably does have something to do with his upbringing. However, only a handful of Hitchcock films deal with spiritual themes more directly, such as "I Confess" and "The Wrong Man".
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Ah -- I Confess(1952) and The Wrong Man (1956)...two bleak and humorless black and white films threading through Hitchcock's "magnificently entertaining 1950's (most of which were in color.)
Hitchcock CLEARLY wanted to take up issues of his jCatholic faith in those two movies -- AND of the faith of his main characters (Monty Clift and Henry Fonda respectively -- two SERIOUS actors) under the most crushing of pressures. (Both men are the WRONG men, facing prison terms.) I find both films very inspiring -- uplift grows out of massively depressing situations . I don't know much about Catholicism myself but those two films surely imparted a sense of the pain and torment one must undergo to come out the other side.
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Maybe we could call those two plus "The Birds" his "Catholic Trilogy"?
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Certainly! That's the thing about Hitchocck. You can organize and re-organize DIFFERENT trilogies among all of them.
For instance, Psycho, The Birds, and Marnie are "The Mother trilogy" (even as there is a mother in North by Northwest right before Psycho, but with less angst and power. than the three mothers to follow in film.)
And The 39 Steps, Saboteur, and North by Northwest are "the Wrong Man Spy trilogy."
Etc.
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roger1 (3626)
3 hours ago
P.S. I'm not Catholic or even particularly a believer of any kind of religion at all, but I know Hitchcock was,
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Yes, he was. He spoke of his Catholicism many a time, and I think he attended Mass regularly in Beverly Hills(back when more movie people did that.) I have also read a magazine essay he wrote in the thirties where he professed his STRONG belief that "God exists." Of course, in the thirties there wasn't much room NOT to say that in public.
I think the Catholcism is attended -- for "entertainment" purposes -- some very brutal murders and outcomes even for "good" people (the Psycho victims, the Birds victims, Gromek in Torn Curtain.)
In The Wrong Man, Henry Fonda prays to God and God pretty much saves him on the spot -- the "right man" appears and is arrested. In Frenzy, Barbara Leigh Hunt SAYS a prayer(a Psalm) as she is being raped in her office by a maniac and...he strangles her immediately after the rape. As someone wrote "sometimes prayer works, sometimes it doesn't." But even the rape-strangling victim relied on prayer to bring her comfort and to see her out of tis world and into...the next? The void?
Serious guy, that Hitchcock!
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roger1 (3626)
3 hours ago
I don't think it's unreasonable to look for hints of it in his work, the rare times he let it peek through.
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Yes. I'd say it more than "peeks" in I Confess and The Wrong Man(both of which were NOT commercal hits.) But its certainly there in the bell tower at the end of Vertigo(nun included), and in the themes of The Birds, and Brenda's prayer in Frenzy.
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This is I why I got so cross with the poster above and said some things I probably shouldn't have been baited into.
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Eh, I wouldn't worry about that. They say what they say. You say what you say. I say what I say.
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