…
…
…
…
SPOILER ALERT!
When watching an Alfred Hitchcock movie, we have learned to be suspicious of men who have mothers. In Strangers on a Train (1951), Psycho (1960), and Frenzy (1972), they turned out to be psychopaths. But that is true only if the son is a bachelor. In North by Northwest (1959), on the other hand, Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) has been married and divorced twice, thereby establishing a normal sexuality on his part. As a result, the scenes he plays with his mother are harmless, no need for alarm.
And so it is that in The Birds, we wonder about Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor). He does not live with his mother Lydia (Jessica Tandy). Rather, he has an apartment in San Francisco where he works as a defense attorney. But every Saturday, he drives up to Bodega Bay, which is sixty miles away, taking at least an hour and a half to get there, and then spends the entire weekend with his mother, returning on Monday morning. He has been doing this for years.
However, Rod Taylor’s screen persona would seem to preclude any kind of Oedipal attachment to his mother, so we dismiss any thoughts along this line. He says he prefers Bodega Bay to San Francisco, but that could be a rationalization. More likely it is because his mother is emotionally needy, her husband having died four years previously, although she is still raising her daughter Cathy (Veronica Cartwright), who is approaching her eleventh birthday, so it’s not as though she is all alone. This is one Hitchcock movie in which it is primarily the mother, not the son, who is suspect.
There is, however, one sense in which we might wonder about Mitch. He seems to be something of a prude. At the beginning of the movie, he goes to a pet store in San Francisco, where he sees Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren), whom he recognizes as the woman he saw in court one day on account of a practical joke she played, which accidentally resulted in a broken window. This was something he sternly disapproved of. In fact, he says she should have been put in jail. For a broken window. Later, we find out that he also read about her in the tabloids, especially the story which said she jumped into a fountain in Rome naked. He disapproved of that too.
I don’t know. If I met a woman that was rich and beautiful, who had jumped into a fountain in Rome naked, I might want to get to know her. The problem is, I probably wouldn’t have gotten anywhere with her. Women like that prefer men who look like Rod Taylor. Anyway, the story turned out not to be true. But Mitch still disapproves.
To express his disapproval, he pretends that he thinks Melanie is a salesclerk in the pet store, saying he wants to buy some lovebirds for his sister for her birthday. When she finally realizes he knew who she was all the time, she decides to get even, after a fashion, by purchasing the lovebirds for him, and attaching a note telling him the lovebirds might improve his personality. She starts to leave the birds outside his apartment. That’s when a neighbor tells her that Mitch goes up to Bodega Bay every weekend. So, what else can she do but drive up to Bodega Bay with the birds?
I don’t know. That’s a lot of trouble to go to for a man she says is ill-mannered, arrogant, and conceited. If a woman didn’t like me for some reason, I don’t think she would bring me lovebirds. But then, that’s probably because I don’t look like Rod Taylor.
When she arrives in Bodega Bay, she rents a motorboat to cut across the bay to Mitch’s house, or rather, to his mother’s house. Having surreptitiously deposited the birds inside, leaving only a note to Cathy, tearing up the original letter to Mitch, she gets back in the boat. Mitch discovers the birds and sees Melanie crossing the bay. He hops in his car, racing around to reach the dock before she does. Suddenly, a seagull swoops down and hits Melanie in the head, drawing blood.
Is this the first incident involving aggressive behavior on the part of birds? It’s not clear. At the beginning of the movie, Melanie commented to the owner of the pet store about all the seagulls in the air. Later in the movie, Sebastian Sholes (Charles McGraw) comments on some trouble he had with birds earlier, but we are not sure whether this happened before or after Melanie was attacked. In any event, the first attack by a seagull that we witness is on Melanie.
This introduces a feature unique among Hitchcock’s films: it is a monster movie, provided we think of the birds in this movie acting collectively like a monster. A lot of monster movies are science fiction, such as Frankenstein (1931), while in others, the monster has supernatural qualities, such as Dracula (1931). In Film Genre Reader, there is an essay by Margaret Tarratt, entitled “Monsters from the Id.” The thrust of her essay is that many science fiction movies are unconscious expressions of the self. The title, of course, is taken from Forbidden Planet (1956). In that movie, thanks to a technological breakthrough on another planet that allows one to generate physical objects merely by an act of will, Dr. Morbius (Walter Pidgeon) unconsciously produces a monster that threatens visitors to the planet on account of his incestuous feelings toward his daughter Altaira (Anne Francis). When the doctor from the spaceship visiting the planet figures out what is going on, he says to the commanding officer, John Adams (Leslie Nielson), “Monsters, John, monsters from the id.”
Forbidden Planet is the only example provided by Tarratt in which there is an explicit causal connection between a person’s id and the monster it creates. In the other examples, the manifestations of the monster and its relation to the id is acausal, perhaps a form of synchronicity, if you don’t mind mixing a little Carl Jung in with your Sigmund Freud. For instance, in her discussion of The Thing from Another World (1951), Tarratt argues that the Thing (James Arness) represents the repressed desires of Captain Hendry (Kenneth Tobey), but neither one is the cause of the other.
The Birds is not science fiction, although there is a scientist in the movie, Mrs. Bundy, an ornithologist, who rejects the notion that birds are collectively attacking the citizens of Bodega Bay, but who nevertheless gives us a lot of ominous information about the sheer number of birds in the world. Are the birds under some supernatural influence instead? We never find out. Though Tarratt does not refer to this movie in her essay, yet her arguments would seem to apply here. In some mysterious way, the birds would seem to be a physical expression of Lydia’s id. Just as Morbius was possessive about his daughter Altaira, becoming especially angered by her attraction to Adams, so too is Lydia possessive about her son Mitch, angered by the presence of Melanie. We certainly see the hostility in her eyes when Mitch introduces his mother to Melanie.
Unlike Forbidden Planet, however, where there is a clear causal connection between Morbius’s id and the monster, there is no perfect fit between Lydia’s id and the behavior of the birds, which may be merely analogous, like the relationship between Captain Hendry and the Thing. For example, when Nikki (Margaret Sheridan) playfully ties up Hendry because he was so sexually aggressive on a previous occasion, this corresponds to the rope tied around the block of ice containing the Thing. Hendry manages to get loose, and shortly after, so does the Thing.
That the relationship between the birds and Lydia’s id would seem to be acausal is suggested by the fact that it is only after Melanie has been attacked that Lydia is even aware of Melanie’s presence in Bodega Bay. On the other hand, Morbius is not present when Adams kisses Altaira, which results in her pet tiger attacking Adams. Therefore, Morbius’s id would seem to have gone into action prior to his knowing there was anything going on between his daughter and Adams.
Other parallels suggest themselves. Lydia’s neighbor, Dan Fawcett, is no threat to Lydia, and yet the birds killed him and plucked his eyes out. In Forbidden Planet, the monster sneaks aboard the flying saucer and kills Chief Engineer Quinn, who was not a threat to Morbius. Eventually, the whole town is subjected to an attack from the birds, even though the whole town has done nothing to Lydia. In Forbidden Planet, the id of Morbius kills all the members of the original expedition, of which he was a part, even though their attempt to leave the planet posed no problem for him. Finally, children are attacked on two different occasions, including Lydia’s own daughter Cathy. In Forbidden Planet, the monster even becomes a danger to Altaira, Morbius’s possessive desire for her turning into hate when she threatens to leave. The id is irrational, even to the point of being self-destructive.
Mitch talks Melanie into staying the weekend, so she rents a room from Annie Hayworth (Suzanne Pleshette). It turns out that Annie used to live in San Francisco. She says of Mitch, “I was seeing quite a lot of him.” Then one weekend he invited her up to Bodega Bay to meet Lydia. Somehow, that ended her relationship with Mitch. She tells Melanie that she needn’t worry, that it was over between her and Mitch long ago. Melanie replies that there is nothing between her and Mitch either. Annie shrugs, saying, “Maybe there’s never anything between Mitch and any girl.”
At the end of Psycho, Simon Oakland, in the role of a psychiatrist, explains the behavior of Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins). In so doing, he speaks with an authoritative voice, so we accept everything he says as true. Furthermore, what he says makes sense and is easy to understand. The same cannot be said of Annie. Her personal involvement with Mitch makes what she says suspect, and her explanation of what happened when she met Lydia is hard to follow, not only for us, but for Melanie as well.
She says that Lydia was distant when she spent the weekend at the Brenner house, that her attitude “nearly drove me crazy.” When she returned to San Francisco, she tried to figure out what she had done to displease her. Melanie asks what she had done. Annie replies:
Nothing! I simply existed. So, what was the answer? A jealous woman, right? A clinging, possessive mother? Wrong. With all due respect to Oedipus, I don’t think that was the case at all….
Lydia liked me, you see. That was the strange part of it. In fact, now that I’m no longer a threat, we’re very good friends….
[She was afraid] of any woman who’d give Mitch the only thing Lydia can give him: love.
As a result of meeting Lydia, Annie says her relationship with Mitch soon came to an end.
Melanie has as hard a time following Annie’s reasoning as we do. “Annie,” she says, “that adds up to a jealous, possessive woman.”
To this Annie replies, “No, I don’t think so. She’s not afraid of losing Mitch, you see. She’s only afraid of being abandoned.”
Huh? I don’t know what to make of that distinction. I suppose the former is psychological; the latter, physical. Well, if Mitch were to get married, I doubt if his wife, be it Annie, Melanie, or some other woman, would agree to spending every weekend with her mother-in-law. So, in that physical sense, Lydia would be “abandoned.” As for the psychological assertion that Lydia is not afraid of “losing Mitch,” this might be another way of Annie’s denying an Oedipal relationship.
When we are speaking of a man in an Oedipal relationship with his mother, we think in sexual terms, as rightly we should, even if the desire is repressed. In a similar way, we understood that Morbius had a repressed sexual desire for Altaira. But maternal jealously can be a different thing from that. When a mother wants to retain possession of her son, viewing with hostility any woman her son might become interested in, we need not assume there is any kind of sexual desire for him on her part. She probably does not want her son for sexual purposes, not even in a repressed sense, but only to preserve a feeling of security and protection, or simply companionship.
Maybe. As I said, I really don’t understand what Annie is talking about, and that’s the best I can do to make sense of it. Anyway, Melanie asks, “What about Mitch? Didn’t he have anything to say about this?”
Annie makes excuses for Mitch, something about what he had to go through with Lydia after his father died, and not wanting to go through it all over again. So, it’s not enough that Mitch has spent every weekend with his mother for the last four years, he can’t even have a girlfriend? Perhaps this explains his disapproval of Melanie’s behavior at the beginning of the movie. Having been forced to repress his own sexual desires to keep from upsetting his mother, he naturally resents what he takes to be Melanie’s free-spirited sexuality. I’d really start having doubts about Mitch at this point, suspecting him of being a momma’s boy, if it weren’t for the fact that he looks like Rod Taylor.
Finally, Melanie asks what we have all been wondering about. Given that it is all over between Annie and Mitch, what is she doing here in Bodega Bay? Annie admits she wants to be near Mitch. I don’t know about you, but I’d call that stalking.
As the movie progresses, the bird attacks increase. In a scene at the Tides Restaurant, as Melanie tries to tell how the children were attacked by birds at the school where Annie teaches, a woman becomes upset with her story because it is frightening her two young children. Then the birds start attacking again. Melanie ends up hiding in a phonebooth, from which Mitch eventually rescues her and brings her back inside the Tides Restaurant.
Although I watched this movie again before writing this review, I also availed myself of an online script to help me remember who said what when. I soon learned that there are many differences between the script and the movie. One in particular stands out. Given my thesis that the behavior of the birds is either the effect or the correlate of Lydia’s id, precipitated by Melanie’s arrival, I looked for the scene where the woman with the two children accuses Melanie of being the cause of it all. But I could not find it in the script. I checked several other online scripts with the same result. All I could find was the woman asking of the birds, “Why are they doing it?” The script says the woman is screaming at Mrs. Bundy, the ornithologist, who mutters some weak explanation for what is happening.
But in the movie, when Mitch and Melanie come back inside the restaurant, everyone starts looking at Melanie with accusatory eyes. The woman does not address Mrs. Bundy, who seems visibly shaken by what has just happened. Instead, she angrily approaches Melanie with the following words:
Why are they doing this? Why are they doing this? They said when you got here the whole thing started. Who are you? What are you? Where did you come from? I think you’re the cause of all this. I think you’re evil. Evil!
Melanie slaps the woman to shut her up.
We hear nothing from Mrs. Bundy, contrary to what is indicated in the script. In other words, not even a weak scientific explanation is attempted. Rather, the movie has the woman with the children suggest a supernatural explanation, that Melanie is a witch.
My guess is that Hitchcock wanted to establish that Melanie’s presence in Bodega Bay is what started it all, that it was not just a coincidence, and he added this scene after the script had been written to make that clear. Of course, if anyone is a witch, it is Lydia, whose id has manifested itself through the birds.
Finally, the birds kill Annie. Although, as Annie noted above, Lydia had ceased to regard her as a threat, Lydia’s id, aroused by the presence of Melanie, probably became hostile to Annie once more, with lethal consequence.
Mitch and Melanie return to his mother’s house, where they begin boarding things up, preparing for the next attack, which is quite terrifying for a while, but then subsides. Melanie makes the mistake of going into attic because she heard something. The roof, it turns out, had been torn open by the birds, and she is attacked. She fights them off and then faints.
At this point, there is another major difference between the movie and the script. In the script, after Mitch rescues Melanie from the attic, she recovers and, though having been physically injured by the birds, yet she is perfectly all right mentally. They decide to leave for San Francisco in Melanie’s convertible, but the birds attack them as they are driving down the road, even tearing open the roof of the car. But finally, they get away.
The movie is quite different. Mitch rescues Melanie, but she has had a complete mental collapse, almost catatonic. The birds having done their work, destroying Melanie’s mind, she is no longer a threat to Lydia. Lydia even comforts Melanie, as one would a small child.
They decide to leave the house and head for San Francisco. The birds do not attack when they try to leave, but silently watch them go. Lydia’s id has become quiescent.