The Birds
Tippi Hedren plays Melanie Daniels, who is the heiress to a San Francisco newspaper fortune (that is to say, she’s Patty Hearst, ten years too early). Melanie lives by her own rules. She skips and saunters through life, plays tricks on squares, travels the world, has adventures, aggresively pursues men and drives a fast car.
She meets Mitch, who is a lawyer and presumptive model of manhood. Mitch disapproves of Melanie, whom he sees as an annoying menace who deserves to be taken down a notch.
Melanie decides to pursue Mitch, for reasons that remain unclear. Is she interested in him sexually? Does she want to “teach him a lesson” somehow, reassert her upper-class authority? In any case, she decides to play a mild trick on him and is willing to traipse out to his mother’s house in Bodega Bay to do it.
Bodega Bay is, in the world of this movie, “the sticks,” and Melanie is clearly out of her element there. The nicest reaction she gets from showing up in her fur, her silver sports car and her French roll is that the elderly storekeeper is befuddled and amused by her. Everyone else clearly hates her. Annie the schoolteacher is plainly jealous of her (she was once Mitch’s girlfriend and has followed him to Bodega Bay herself, abandoning city life, her boho background and sexual fulfillment in order to, literally, take care of his little sister) and Mitch’s mother acts as though she’d like to pound nails into the back of Melanie’s head.
Mitch doesn’t approve of her, Annie doesn’t approve of her, Mom doesn’t approve of her, the whole town doesn’t approve of her. In the local restaurant, even the old lesbian ornithologist and the crusty old fisherman, two marginal characters who you would think would have had their share of disapproval from locals over the years, don’t approve of her. The middle-aged mother trying to protect her kids strongly disapproves of her, even though she’s in a housecoat, in a restaurant, with her two kids, in the middle of the afternoon, on a school day (what was she doing in the restaurant? Was she running away, taking the kids away from a drunken, abusive father? That would at least explain her high-strung personality). Apparently, no matter who you are and what your background is, everyone agrees that the worst thing in the world is a carefree monied blonde.
Why does everyone store up their resentment for Melanie? Mitch’s mom Lydia, a real piece of work, is a controlling, overprotective, emasculating bitch but no one resents her. Mitch defends gangsters and strings the simmering, resentful Annie along for years but no one resents him (Annie literally dies protecting Mitch’s little sister and Mitch doesn’t even think to drag her body in from the street).
About halfway through the movie, birds start attacking. It’s almost like the town’s resentment and fury against Melanie, the “bad vibes” she causes, reaches a point where the vibes themselves drive the birds insane. And if the birds attacked Melanie and only Melanie, you get the feeling that would suit everyone fine. But they don’t, they attack everyone equally. The storm of resentment breaks and everyone gets caught in it.
I’m watching this movie and Tippi Hedren keeps reminding me of different people. “The Hitchcock Blonde” is such a cliche at this point it’s hard to pinpoint exactly who she reminds me of. She looks like Grace Kelly, which makes sense, and she looks like Melanie Griffith, which also makes sense (as she’s her mother, after all). (Brian DePalma, of course, cast Melanie Griffith as a kind of gutter-version of the Hitchcock Blonde in Body Double.) She looks like Sharon Stone, who was the definitive post-Hitchcock Hitchcock Blonde in Basic Instinct, she looks like Naomi Watts, who played a version of the part in Mulholland Drive, and she looks like Anne Heche, who played the Hitchcock Blonde part in the remake of Psycho.
Then it all snaps into focus: Tippi Hedren is a dead ringer for Paris Hilton. Suddenly the movie makes sense. Thirty years before the fact, Alfred Hitchcock made a movie about the world-wide hatred of Paris Hilton. You might say that, since Paris Hilton did not yet exist, Hitchcock had to invent her. Substitute “jumping into that fountain in Rome naked” with “having sex on video on the internet” and the parallel becomes complete.
The Birds is about the destruction of the Hitchcock Blonde. Everyone hates her, so she must be destroyed. So we watch as Melanie is turned from a sassy, carefree gadabout to a quivering, crippled catatonic. Along the way, we see her turned into a compliant girlfriend, a handy housewife, damsel-in-distress and caring mother-figure. Finally she is attacked, alone and directly, and reduced to nothingness, a victim, a thing to be rescued by man-man Mitch, without personality or point-of-view.
Many complain that the movie ends too abruptly, but if you look at the narrative this way, it ends exactly where it should; the Blonde is destroyed, the narrative is complete. After the birds violently attack Melanie in the bedroom (!), they don’t do a thing to Mitch (apart from a few warning pecks) as he walks to the garage and gets out the car. The birds have what they want; they’ve destroyed the Hitchcock Blonde and they’re willing to sit by and patiently watch as she gets driven out of town. Melanie has a small cut on her forehead but Mom Lydia wraps her entire head in gauze, covering up her blonde hair and making her look more like a cripple. As a final symbolic act, the sportscar she came to town in, representing her wealth and independence, is commandeered by Mitch, new head of the family, to drive her away.
(And Tippi Hedren named her daughter after this character!)
Note to Universal: this movie is sorely in need of restoration. The DVD transfer is substandard by today’s measure and the extensive special-effects work has aged terribly. There’s nothing to be done about the occasional phony-baloney painted backdrops, but not only does the traveling matte look work look awful, the bird-attack scenes with their multiple film-element layers have deteriorated to a disastrous degree.
