I had the opportunity to see Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963) a Sunday or two back on the big screen.  I love how these classic flicks get rereleased on their anniversaries, as there’s something different about seeing them in theaters as opposed to television.

In this case, the main difference is settling in with a massive tub of popcorn and a liter of Diet Pepsi.  The Birds works on the small screen just as well, I think, but it was still super cool seeing this oddball in such a setting.

One thing I did not realize about The Birds is that it lacks a traditional soundtrack.  The “soundtrack” such as it is, consists of electronic recordings of various birdcalls, layered together in a form of early musical synthesizer.  The early 1960s was an incredible period of experimentation with blended electronic musical samples, as the seminal Pet Sounds by The Beach Boys would demonstrate just three years later.  That album didn’t sample birdcalls (as far as I can remember), but it did see Brian Wilson tinkering with blends of unusual instruments and chord voicings that were examples of synthesizing analog sounds electronically.

The Birds was cutting-edge in this regard.  There’s no sweeping string orchestrations, or even stabbing ones, like in Psycho (1960).  It adds to the naturalistic terror of the film, as the only “music” is the squawking and chattering of the lethal, titular birds.

As for the film itself, it’s always hard to watch these classics and not get caught up in how different America is sixty years later.  Two-story bird stores in downtown San Francisco?  Preposterous!

Getting past the fact that we’re looking at a world that was familiar just a short while ago, and now seems almost alien, The Birds is a great slow burn.  The first half of the film doesn’t even feature a significant bird attack.  Hitchcock introduces us to Melanie Daniels, a bit of a wild socialite and media heiress who catches feelings for a San Francisco lawyer, Mitch Brenner, after he thot patrols her in the aforementioned two-story bird store.  Most of this portion of the film involves Daniels tracking Brenner to Bodega Bay, a sleep fishing village in northern California, where she hatches (no pun intended) a convoluted plan to deliver two lovebirds to Mike’s kid sister, Cathy.

It’s on her way back across the bay that the first bird attack starts—a seagull swoops down and scratches Daniels across the forehead.  It’s an ominous prelude to what the audience knows is coming, but it’s probably another twenty minutes or so before we see any more bird mayhem, when a mass of birds attack children at Cathy’s birthday party.  That night, sparrows attack the Brenner family by entering the home through the chimney; the following morning, a local farmer is found dead with his eyes plucked out.

The tension escalates from there.  Children at school flee a murder (mwahahaha!) of crows.  Birds attack the town, and in the ensuing panic, a gas station explodes.

At no point is there an explanation for why the birds are doing what they do.  There is a great scene during and immediately before the big attack on the town, in which an old crone—herself sporting a quite birdlike appearance—explains that birds don’t flock with different species, and that birds of different species don’t coordinate attacks.  Unlike modern films, in which the local ornithologist would take a blood sample and discover some chilling virus that explains exactly why the birds are going crazy, The Birds does the opposite—it tells why what we’re witnessing could never happen.  But it’s happening, and there’s never an explanation offered.  The old lady vaguely references that humans have been at war with birds due to our impact on the environment, but even that is not fleshed out in any meaningful way.  It’s the closest thing to an explanation, and it’s really no explanation at all.

I found this vagueness incredibly refreshing, especially in a film that is sixty-years old!  The terror of The Birds is that there is no logical explanation.  There’s no tidy cause that is pointed to, which would then allow the characters to say, “Ah, ha!  If we stop doing x, the bird will stop attacking!”  Films now would have an entire scene explaining—in patronizing detail—how the birds are part of some failed experiment or the like, or mutated from fossil fuels, or something like that, and Melanie Daniels would blow up an oil rig with a rocket launcher or something.

The Birds is the total opposite.  Melanie Daniels is nearly killed by a bedroom full of birds.  The Brenner family and Daniels slip away slowly and quietly in the family car at the end of the film, birds everywhere around them.  There’s no resolution—do the birds stop?  does Melanie survive?  do Melanie and Mitch get it on?—just news reports of similar attacks in neighboring towns, with the implication that Bodega Bay is the epicenter of the activity, which is rather contained.

Going back to the scene with the ornithologist:  there’s something of a critique of modern science here.  There seems to be a subtle suggestion that we put so much faith in our attempts to categorize and understand Nature, when we ultimately still have very little understanding of something so vast, so primal, so animal.  Indeed, we lack even a spiritual understanding of it.  Modernity promised we would conquer Nature and bend it to our whims and wills, but instead, we’ve just grown more separated from it.

I’ll admit that might be a stretch, but there are certainly some environmental themes in the flick.  I mean, how could there not be in a movie about birds attacking people?

There’s also an interesting love triangle between Melanie, Mitch, and the local schoolteacher, Annie Hayworth.  There is clearly a past between Annie and Mitch, though it’s never mentioned, and the film heavily suggests that Annie is living as something as a hot spinster, isolated in this little town, in which young, eligible bachelors are hard to find.  Indeed, she moved to the town to be closer to Mitch.  Annie’s character possesses a certain resigned-but-contented melancholy, and she is certainly one of the more interesting characters in the film.

Regardless, this classic holds up.  Indeed, it might be my first time seeing the entire thing in one go.  It’s not the best Hitchcock film, but that’s like saying it’s not the best Ferrari.  A Ferrari is still a Ferrari, and a Hitchcock film is still a Hitchcock film.  They don’t come in bad.