Book: The Birds

Overview
Camille Paglia’s 1998 BFI Film Classics monograph treats Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963) as a landmark of modern cinema whose icy precision masks a primal, mythic force. Rather than seeking a rational cause for the avian assaults, the study embraces the film’s refusal to explain, viewing that blankness as its power: a vision of nature’s amoral autonomy arriving without warning at the edge of human order. Paglia traces the film’s movement from urbane play in San Francisco to a coastal world of wind, water, and rock, where ritual rhythms and ancestral fears reassert themselves.

Myth, Nature, and the Pagan Imagination
Paglia frames The Birds as a pagan apocalypse, aligning Hitchcock’s imagery with pre-Christian deities and the classical sublime. The birds operate less as symbols than as a chthonic eruption of the nonhuman, collapsing the Apollonian lines of modern life. She links ocean, sky, and flocks to a goddess continuum of fertility and destruction, arguing that the film stages a confrontation between sleek modernity and archaic nature. The absence of theological or scientific explanation is read as an ethical statement: human narratives shrink before nature’s impersonal will.

Gender, Power, and Family Drama
At the film’s center is a female triangle: Melanie Daniels, the chic outsider; Lydia Brenner, the anxious matriarch; and Cathy, the child around whom protective energies whirl. Paglia interprets Melanie’s arrival as an erotic provocation that unsettles a fragile household order, with the bird attacks mirroring the eruption of repressed tensions. Lydia embodies earth-mother power in decline, fearful of abandonment; Melanie’s jade-green suit announces a glamorous predator whose confidence is tested and stripped. Hitchcock’s blondes, often accused of frigidity, become in Paglia’s reading figures of totemic glamour and vulnerability, with Tippi Hedren’s performance praised for its composed surface and accumulating shock.

Form, Style, and Sound
Paglia details Hitchcock’s control of point of view, cutting, and color design, noting how clean lines and bright daylight intensify dread. The film’s notorious lack of a conventional score functions as an aesthetic manifesto: sound becomes event. With Bernard Herrmann as sound consultant and Oskar Sala’s electronic Trautonium textures, the birds’ cries form an atonal, mechanical chorus, replacing music’s consolations. Montage builds from silence to attack and back again, especially in the schoolhouse sequence where children’s voices and a spare playground frame are patiently overrun by crows.

Scenes and Motifs
The opening pet shop, cages, flirtation, mistaken identities, plants motifs of captivity and trespass. Birthday balloons, the gasoline fire, and the diner’s chorus of conflicting explanations sketch a community grappling with catastrophe through superstition, blame, and denial; the accusatory mother in the café becomes a Greek chorus turned witch-hunt. Lydia’s discovery of the farmer with pecked eyes is read as a modern Gorgon image, terrorizing the seer. The attic assault strips Melanie of costume and control, an ordeal that fuses cinema’s erotic look with ritual trial; Paglia records Hedren’s real injuries to underline Hitchcock’s ruthless pursuit of effect. The final egress, lovebirds calmly aboard, flocks perched like sentinels, offers neither defeat nor victory, only negotiated passage through a conquered landscape.

Sources, Shifts, and Legacy
Paglia contrasts Daphne du Maurier’s Cornwall-set story with Hitchcock’s Americanization: the migration to California, the introduction of social comedy and romance, and the expansion of character psychology. She situates the film after Psycho as a leap into modern disaster cinema, anticipating ecological anxiety and media-age panic while remaining aloof from topical allegory. The study closes by affirming The Birds as both pop spectacle and art-historical object, a cold, dazzling ritual of images that confronts viewers with nature’s faceless sovereignty and the fragility of human arrangements.