Page 23 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

Alfred Hitchcock 13

with allegorical and metaphorical associations between humans and ani-
mals. 6 Birds in particular, associated with women and with the deadly
gaze of the camera, play a central role in both Psycho and The Birds. And
Mamie (1964) revolves around the association of woman and animal that
drives Mark Rutland (Sean Connery) wild. Rather than give us mad sci-
entists or science gone wrong, Hitchcock gives us cool-headed lawyers and
zoologists who interrogate and study nature/woman in their attempts to
domesticate her. In his films from the early 1960s Hitchcock makes sexual
perversion and illicit sex the mundane triggers for gruesome horror that
shocks precisely because it domesticates the monstrous. In this chapter
I will explore the association of women and animals as horrific in what
Michèle Piso calls Hitchcock's "trilogy of modern despair": 7 Psycho, The
Birds, and Mamie.
In her analysis of Hitchcock's Frenzy (1972), with its grisly rape and
murder scenes and connections between cooked animal parts and women's
corpses, Tania Modleski argues that the film's graphic violence should be
considered "not simply as the reflection of the dirty mind of a frustrated
old man nor even of a new 'freedom' in sexual mores, but rather as a cul-
8
tural response to women's demands for sexual and social liberation." The
same can be said of Hitchcock's trilogy from the early 1960s. Throughout
the 1950s and 1960s birth control advocates were going to court to legal-
ize birth control; and in i960, the same year that Psycho was released, the
Food and Drug Administration approved birth control pills, which gave
women more sexual freedom. In 1963, the same year that The Birds was
released, the first report of the President's Commission on the Status of
Women indicated that women were discriminated against in the work-
force; and The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan's commentary on white
middle-class housewives' dissatisfaction with domestic life, was published.
In the context of this history it is noteworthy that women have been called
"birds" and "chicks." In 1964, the year that Mamie was released, Title VII
of the Civil Rights Act, which bars discrimination in employment on the
basis of race or sex, was passed; and the Equal Employment Opportunity
Commission was established—Marion Crane, Marnie Edgar, and her
mother, Bernice Edgar, are, after all, working girls.
In Psycho, The Birds, and Marnie the association between women
and animals becomes explicit, and the mother comes to occupy an espe-
cially significant and threatening position. Although the mother is a lim-
inal figure throughout Hitchcock's work, especially in films such as The