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The Birds are the manifestation of the mother’s rage against rivals for her son’s affection
Written July 2005
1963
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Starring: Tippi Hedren, Rod Taylor, Jessica Tandy, Suzanne Pleshette
Hitchcock’s last truly great film, The Birds, is an anomaly in his oeuvre by being based on a supernatural force, rather than the motives and machinations of his characters. And as a supernatural film, it opens itself to interpretation of what the real-world phenomenon is that the birds serve as metaphor for. The question everyone has about this film is: WHY are the birds attacking? Hitchcock, in his book of interviews with François Truffaut, says that he doesn’t believe there IS a reason for the bird attacks. But even if Hitchcock or screenwriter Evan Hunter did not intend to provide a solid reason for the attacks, their work does present a subtext and pattern of dialogue and events that can be interpreted. I believe that a persuasive case can be made that the birds are the manifestation of the mother’s rage at rivals for her son’s affection.
THE FILM:
The main character of the film is Melanie Daniels, played by Tippi Hedren. Melanie is the daughter of a San Francisco newspaper executive and, though it is difficult to see today, is supposed to be a wild international party girl. She is introduced walking across the street to a pet shop. A man’s appreciative whistle is heard offscreen, and when Melanie turns hear head to smile, she sees masses of birds swirling in the distance.
Melanie enters the bird shop, where she has ordered a pair of Mynah birds. She intends to teach them naughty language in order to mortify her "prim and strait-laced" Aunt Tess. While the shopkeeper is in the back, Mitch Brenner [Rod Taylor] walks in and pretends to mistake Melanie for a shop assistant. He says he is looking for lovebirds that are “not too demonstrative, nor too aloof. Just friendly.” Melanie does her best to fake her way through a discussion on the mating and molting habits of birds, releasing a yellow canary [similar to the color of Melanie’s golden hair] into the shop in the process. As Mitch catches it, he says “Back into your gilded cage, Melanie Daniels,” revealing that he knows who Melanie is and of her scandalous past. Taken aback, Melanie decides to play a trick on Mitch in return. She purchases the lovebirds he was looking for and takes them up to his house in Bodega Bay, about an hour North of San Francisco.
When Melanie arrives, she receives a great deal of helpful exposition about the layout of the town. A plot contrivance gets her to the home of Annie Hayworth [Suzanne Pleshette], who has been out working in her garden. “This tilling of the soil can become compulsive,” she says. We will find out later that Annie is a former flame of Mitch’s, but their relationship was destroyed by pressures from Mitch’s mother Lydia. Tilling of the soil is what Adam was charged to do upon being cast out of Eden, by the way. Annie probes Melanie to find out what she’s doing in Bodega Bay, and is rather arch upon realizing that Melanie is the latest pretty young thing to try to win his affection. She notices the birds in the car. Upon being told that they’re lovebirds, she says “I see. Good luck, Miss Daniels.” Melanie’s confident “Thank you,” and toss of the head is priceless.
Melanie takes a small boat across the bay and deposits the birds in the Brenner’s house. Mitch sees the birds, sees her, and drives to the other side of the bay to meet her. As Melanie confidently approaches Mitch in the boat, a seagull dives toward her, cutting her forehead.
Mitch takes Melanie into the local diner, where, after some light flirtation, they meet Mitch’s mother, Lydia. She is made up as an older version of Melanie, with a similar outfit and hairstyle, emphasizing that she could be somewhat interchangeable with the women who want Mitch. Lydia seems very disconcerted by Melanie’s presence, especially upon learning that she has been invited for dinner. Upon learning that Melanie has brought not just any birds, but lovebirds, Lydia’s response, “Oh, I see,” echoing Annie’s reaction, further reinforces the similarities between his suitors.
Melanie goes to dinner at the Brenner’s that night and meets Mitch’s sister, Cathy [Veronica Cartwright], who takes an immediate liking to Melanie. Lydia confides her misgivings about Melanie’s partying past to Mitch, who calls her “dear” and “darling,” while brushing her off. It is clear from the look on Lydia’s face that her worries have not been eased. Before Melanie leaves, Cathy invites her to her eleventh birthday party the next day.
Melanie returns to Annie’s house [where she’s staying the night]. They have a conversation in which Anne reveals that she had an affair with Mitch four years before, just after his father died. In response to Melanie’s protestation that there’s nothing between her and Mitch, Annie responds: “Maybe there’s nothing between Mitch and any girl.” They were seeing each other, until he brought her to meet Lydia, whose “attitude nearly drove me crazy… I spent days trying to find out exactly what I'd done to displease her.” And what had she done? “Nothing. I simply existed. …Now that I’m no longer a threat we’re very good friends.” Annie speculates that what Lydia feels isn’t simply possessiveness or jealously, but fear of being abandoned. Melanie articulates what I think happens by the end of the movie, which is that Lydia “would be gaining a daughter.” Annie goes on to tell that even after her relationship with Mitch ended, she moved to Bodega Bay just to be near him. Mitch calls and invites Melanie to the birthday party the next day, while Annie, in a wonderfully framed shot, listens with detached interest. Hanging up the phone, Melanie asks Annie if she should go. Told it’s up to her, she responds “It’s really up to Lydia, isn’t it?” Annie tells her to “never mind Lydia,” and Melanie agrees to disregard what Lydia might think about it, and attend the party. At that moment a gull smashes into the front door.
The next day, at the party, Melanie and Mitch walk alone away from the group. Melanie tells Mitch of her plan to teach dirty words to the Mynah bird she is giving Aunt Tess, and Mitch responds “You need a mother’s care, my child.” This brings an unpleasant memory to Melanie, who tells of being abandoned by her mother at eleven [the same age Cathy is turning on that day], and she hasn’t seen her since. Feeling foolish, she says “I ought to go join the other children.” Near the house, Annie watches them on their way down from their obviously romantic walk. A few seconds later, Lydia comes out of the house and pauses, also watching the couple returning from their walk. Immediately after, seagulls attack the party.
Later that evening, Melanie is planning on returning to Annie’s. Mitch suggests that she stay the night. Lydia freezes upon hearing this invitation, and then sparrows stream into the room through the chimney.
The local sheriff visits after the attack, but is ineffectual. While this is happening, Melanie watches Lydia neurotically gather pieces of broken teacups and try to piece them together. Melanie offers to put Cathy to bed, and suggests that she stay the night, “if it’s all right with Mitch.” Lydia again reacts.
The next morning Lydia drives over a nearby farm, the Fawcett’s. Not hearing a response to her call, she goes inside and notes some broken teacups—and we all know what that means. The wordless sequence in which she explores the house, finds the body, and reacts showcases Hitchcock’s wonderful ability to tell a story entirely visually. On her way back to her house, there is a shot in which it appears that she will run down Mitch and Melanie with her truck.
Later, Melanie brings Lydia tea in her bed. Lydia alternates so suddenly between describing her fear of being abandoned and her worry for Cathy that it becomes apparent that her concern for Cathy is a mask for her fear of abandonment. She says she feels that she lost all of her strength when her husband died, and that she can’t relax or sleep since he’s been dead. She says she lacks her dead husband’s talent for understanding her children, for entering into their world and “becoming part of them.” She says that on certain days she wakes up “and there’s a very good reason for getting out of bed” —until she remembers that her husband is dead.
When Melanie is about to go, Lydia bids her to stay. “I feel as if I don't understand you at all and I want so much to understand. Because my son seems to be very fond of you… and I don't know quite how I feel about it. I don't even know if I like you or not.” Melanie asks “Do you HAVE to like Mitch’s girlfriends? Lydia says she wants to like whatever girl Mitch chooses, but Mitch does exactly what he wants. She then becomes emotional and articulates her fear of being left alone. This immediately reverts back into worry for Cathy. Melanie volunteers to go to the school to check on her. As she’s leaving, Lydia warmly thanks her for the tea.
Melanie arrives at the school, and waits outside in the justly famous sequence of the massing crows. The birds attack the children as they run away from the school. This is followed by the also-famous sequence in the diner, in which various perspectives on the bird’s behavior are aired, including one that says birds are dirty, messy animals and should be killed. A mother at the diner protests that the talk of bird attacks is scaring her children. This is followed by the brilliant attack on the diner and gas station. In the Truffaut book, Hitchcock says that in placing Melanie in the phone booth, he wanted to give the effect of her being a bird trapped in a cage. When the attack is over, Mitch and Melanie venture inside. The survivors, huddled inside, are made up entirely of women [save one male child]. The mother of the children addresses Melanie: “They said when you got here, the whole thing started…. I think you're the cause of all this. I think you're evil.”
During the same attack, Annie was killed protecting Cathy. Mitch, Melanie and Cathy return to the Brenner home. At one point, Lydia demands to know what Mitch thinks they should do, and when he can’t supply a satisfactory answer, she bursts out: “You don’t know! You don’t know! If only your father were here…” She then catches herself and apologizes. After a time, another attack occurs, this time with barely any birds seen at all, just the sound of them all around the house. After the attack has ended, Hitchcock brilliantly indicates that the birds have gotten into a room upstairs by shooting the characters in a hard up angle, emphasizing the space above them.
Later, when everyone else is asleep, Melanie ventures upstairs and explores a closed room. She is attacked by the birds. Note that this time the birds do not make any cries, the only sound heard is the flutter of their wings. Melanie is rescued and taken downstairs, but is now nearly catatonic. Mitch says that she requires medical treatment and that they must leave.
A radio report states that “Bodega Bay seems to be the center [of the attacks].” The massed birds outside the house are now calm. Mitch and Lydia help Melanie to the car. In the last bit of dialogue, Cathy asks: “Can I bring the lovebirds? They haven’t harmed anyone.” In the car, Melanie lays her head on Lydia’s shoulder, squeezes her arm, and gazes vulnerably up at her. Feeling this, Lydia smiles down on her and affectionately nuzzles her forehead. The car drives unhindered through the masses of birds.
DISCUSSION:
The first clue is the title. “Birds” is a British slang term for women, and that seems to be what this movie is all about. The first scene in the bird shop sets up the flirtation between Mitch and Melanie, establishes Melanie’s character as a brash, confident modern woman, and draws the connection between the two of them and the birds. It also gives a hint of Melanie’s problems with maternal mother figures with her wish to give prim and straitlaced Aunt Tess the trash-talking Mynah birds.
The fact that Melanie sees a swirling mass of birds in San Francisco at the very beginning of the film has been argued to discredit the theory that the birds are the manifestation of rage directed specifically at Melanie, as she has not yet met Lydia yet. I think the explanation is a mundane one: Hitchcock, also in the Truffaut book, says that he felt pressure to include the presence of birds early in the film, in order to stave off his audience’s growing impatience to get to the bird attacks that they had come to see. Since, at the very end of the film, the radio report says that the attacks are centered in Bodega Bay, we can assume that what she’s seeing is just an unrelated bunch of birds.
The scene in which Melanie fist meets Lydia in the diner is interesting, as it portrays the three women [Melanie, Lydia, and Annie] as somewhat interchangeable. First, Lydia’s appearance almost exactly mirrors Melanie’s, except that she is in grey while Melanie is in gold—both of their outfits matching their hair color. Lydia also replicates Annie’s reaction to the lovebirds: “Oh I see.” This emphasizes Lydia’s fear that she can be replaced and thus left alone; if all the women are the same, Lydia isn’t necessarily needed. What sets Melanie apart is her confidence, specifically that she can manipulate men at her will. Lydia is hard-pressed to compete with that, and Annie won’t even try.
The first four attacks are explicitly tied to Mitch and Melanie’s relationship, and three of them directly follow upon content revolving around going against Lydia’s wishes. The first attack, as Melanie is about to meet Mitch on the pier, cementing their flirtation; the second, just after Melanie decides to ignore Lydia’s wishes and attend the party; the third, just after Lydia sees Mitch and Melanie returning from their romantic walk; and the fourth being the sparrow attack after Mitch suggests that Melanie spend the night. Since each of these attacks occurs immediately after displeasing Lydia, it is easy to conclude that the attacks are in some way an expression of Lydia’s rage brought on by Melanie making progress with Mitch.
So, why do the attacks become more generalized after this point? What happens in between is that Melanie brings Lydia tea in bed, and by the time that they’re done, Lydia has begun to like Melanie. She listens to Lydia’s concerns about Cathy, her feeling of having lost her strength, her wish to like Mitch’s girlfriends, and finally, Lydia opens up about her fear of being abandoned… which is fairly remarkable, considering her general antipathy toward Melanie. This is the beginning of the process that completes itself by the end of the movie, which is, as Melanie puts it, “she would be gaining a daughter.” The two important points of this conversation are that Melanie offers to go check on Cathy, taking Lydia’s fears seriously and seeking to ally them, and also that Melanie asks if it’s so important for Lydia to like Mitch’s girlfriends. We don’t know conclusively from the film, but one would guess that the possibility of not liking one of Mitch’s girlfriends, while still accepting that Mitch likes her, has never occurred to Lydia.
At the same time that Lydia begins to have these conflicted feelings for Melanie, the attacks become more generalized and frenzied. The idea of forces created by psychic energy attacking indiscriminately and even harming the originator of the psychic force isn’t so unheard of; it also occurs in Forbidden Planet and Carrie. It is clear, from the abrupt subject transitions in Lydia’s talk with Melanie over tea—from her feelings of powerlessness and fear of being abandoned to her worry for Cathy—that these subjects are unconsciously connected in her head. The scene in the diner after the attack on the gas station further elucidates the idea that the attacks center on Melanie herself as the mother observes that the attacks started when Melanie arrived in town, and that Melanie is the cause of them. If you buy the idea that the attacks are the manifestation of Lydia’s rage against her, the woman is right. And it’s true—the attacks did start when Melanie arrived.
Later that night, back at the Brenner house, it is easy to notice that Melanie has fallen into the mother role with Cathy, holding her close and attending carefully to her, while Lydia herself just sits down helplessly by the piano, watching. The attack that occurs soon after, in which we barely see any birds, could be seen as serving our subtext, in that the characters are cowering in fear from sounds alone—no immediate physical threat. In the Truffaut book, Hitchcock directly states that he shot this scene to emphasize that the characters are cowering from nothing. It may be overinterpretation to believe that this supports the idea that the bird attacks emanate from psychological forces in the character’s minds, but it also doesn’t disprove it.
Melanie’s attack in the upstairs bedroom is what mentally breaks her. The confidence she exuded toward the beginning of the film is completely stripped from her, and she becomes like a child that needs to be taken care of. Her squeezing of Lydia’s arm, and smiling up toward her, shows Lydia that Melanie is no longer a threat, and in fact now needs Lydia to take care of her. Lydia smiles at this, and nuzzles Melanie’s head like an affectionate parent—she has “gained a daughter,” as Melanie said, and the threat of being abandoned for Melanie is now significantly reduced.
We know that there was another bird attack written into the original script as the car drives away, so the attacks are not over, but, based only on the film itself, one could guess that now that Lydia’s rage has been allayed, the birds are present, asserting their power, but placid and not attacking.
The last line of the film, “Can I bring the lovebirds? They haven’t harmed anyone” reminds us that for all the sparring and manipulation Mitch and Melanie have practiced on each other, in the end they were the innocent and bewildered victims of a phenomenon they unknowingly caused.
