Page 30 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

20 Kelly Oliver

Given that The Birds was released during the cold war and just one
year after the Cuban missile crisis, when the threat of nuclear destruction
hung in the collective imagination like an ominous cloud, combined with
rising concerns over capitalism's wanton destruction of the environment,
the birds also represent the revenge of Mother Nature. 21 As Mrs. Bundy
(Ethel Griffies), an ornithologist, tells the people gathered in the restau-
rant, birds are not by nature aggressive creatures; rather, man is. Birds, she
says, have no reason to start a war with man. At this same moment the
waitress yells out "two fried chickens!" A little boy, who has been eating
chicken, asks his mother, "Are the birds going to eat us, Mommy?" And
a man at the bar rants about birds being messy animals that should be
wiped off the face of the earth. In this scene Mrs. Bundy suggests that
whereas birds are by nature passive and peaceful creatures, humanity de-
serves to be attacked by them as recompense for what humans have done
to nature; if the birds have become aggressive, then humanity is respon-
sible. If humans eat birds, then why shouldn't birds eat humans? In an
interview, in his own tongue-in-cheek way, Hitchcock expresses sympathy
for the birds against humans:
I can look at a corpse chopped to bits without batting an eyelid, but I can't bear the
sight of a dead bird. Too heartrending. I can't even bear to see them suffer, birds, or
get tired. During the making of my movie, in which I used fifteen hundred trained
crows, there was a representative of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty
to Animals on the scene at all times, and whenever he said, "That's enough now,
Mr. Hitchcock, I think the birds are getting tired," I would stop at once. I have the
highest consideration for birds, and, quite apart from the movie, I think it very right
they should take their revenge on men that way. For hundreds of centuries birds have
been persecuted by men, killed, put in the pot, in the oven, on the spit, used for writ-
ing pens, feathers for hats, turned into bloodcurdling stuffed ornaments. . . . Such
infamy deserves exemplary punishment. 22

In his films Hitchcock gives us birds carved and eaten in scene after
scene, worn in hats along with other animals (in those beautiful Edith Head
costumes), and turned into bloodcurdling stuffed ornaments in Psycho.
Should it surprise us that Hitchcock's father was a poultry dealer in Lon-
don? When asked why he didn't use wild birds instead of trained ones in
23
The Birds, Hitchcock replied, "I don't trust them." And while he says that
"blood is jolly, red," he claims to be frightened of eggs because the yolks
spill "revolting yellow liquid." 24 If "man's infamy deserves exemplary pun-