Ideas - What’s Up with The Birds?

Episode Date: February 19, 2024

Fears of technological overreach, environmental decline, and the violent rise of the irrational: our 21st-century anxieties were anticipated in an unlikely 20th-century horror metaphor. “The Birds�� – a haunting 1953 short story by Daphne duMaurier, and the truly bizarre 1963 Alfred Hitchcock movie that it inspired. *This episode originally aired on Sept. 6, 2023.

Hey there, I'm Kathleen Goltar and I have a confession to make. I am a true crime fanatic. I devour books and films and most of all true crime podcasts. But sometimes I just want to know more. I want to go deeper. And that's where my podcast Crime Story comes in. Every week I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley, the list goes on. For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. This is a CBC Podcast. Take a look at that sparrow. sparrow. Tree dweller, tiny chirper, taker of dusty baths. Just an innocent little bird,

or so it wants us to believe. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. Once in the mid-20th century, sparrows joined with other birds. They massed by the thousands. They formed a worldwide bird army. And then they attacked. Breaching houses. Dive-bombing children. Killing and mutilating with their hideous beaks.

But if no one's told you about this bloody era of history, it's because the attack was entirely imaginary. A literary and pop culture fantasy of bird terrorism. But why? It came from two influential works of 20th century horror. Alfred Hitchcock's movie thriller The Birds and its inspiration, a short story by Daphne du Maurier. On this episode, a look at how everyday birds became the birds,

a horror metaphor that has been interpreted in many different ways. In the story, humans have been wiped out by birds, but what have humans done to the birds to make them function in this way? Feels like kind of a proto-zombie movie, but also has all these very weird gender and family dynamics. The Birds is, I would say, a Freudian three-ring circus. 60, 70 years on, The Birds is still debated and discussed. It seems to peck even at our 21st century anxieties. There's something unsettling and open enough about it

that it can meet the moment of crisis that you're in. What the Bird Saw. That's the name of this documentary by Ideas producer Lisa Godfrey. I've seen tens of geese, maybe a hundred pigeons, but thousands of birds, no. So my best bet is to go to Point Pelee in southwest Ontario. It's an intersection where two major North American bird migration routes meet. Peely is a national park. It's a point that juts out into Lake Erie, and it's a rest stop for bird travelers. Warblers, vireos, tanagers.

More than 390 species have been recorded in the Point Pelee area alone. Here is a map describing the flight paths of just a few. This morning though it's mostly locals, blue jays, red winged blackbirds, so the humans bide their time reading plaques or walking quietly down the trails peering up into the trees. This is actually the southernmost mainland in Canada and weirdly on the map only a few degrees north of the California town where Alfred Hitchcock's movie was set. You are now just south of the 42nd parallel. As far south as Rome some of Canada's rarest plants and animals are found at Point Pelee because of its mild southerly climate. It's a surreal ecosystem. Marsh and woods meet swamp forest and savannah. And regulars have seen some unusual strays here.

A few years ago we had a frigate bird out here and a wood stork. You know, they got pushed up by a hurricane, I think. But none of them are dangerous. You know, the meanest bird on the planet is a female red-winged blackbird. Protective instinct, right? Yeah, her protection, you know, she's not afraid of anything. She'll take anything. I watched them chase that frigate bird, to tell you the truth,

those red-winged blackbirds. I couldn't believe it. They're fearless. Extremely territorial. Coming out into the open at the end of the trails, you're suddenly on a pebble beach in sight of the wound-whipped tip of Point Pelee. A varied group assembles here for this morning's birding jackpot. Determined photographers with big long lenses taking aim as a high school class of Mennonite teenagers

fights the wind to take a count. I can name them. So right there we have a bunch of ring-billed gulls together with that herring gulls and bonaparte gulls. So three species of gulls and flying over them are black-bellied plovers that are just constantly flying in big flocks. Not thousands of birds, but they outnumber us. Clusters of shorebirds and great drifts of gulls flying out away away from us, over the waves. Nat watched them, oyster catchers, red shank, sandalling and curlew,

watched by the water's edge as the slow seas sucked to the shore and then withdrew, leaving the strip of seaweed bare and the shingle churned. The seabirds raced and ran upon the beaches. Then that same impulse to flight seized upon them too, crying, whistling, calling. They skimmed the placid sea and left the shore. That's from the opening of The Birds, the original short story by Daphne du Maurier, the opening of The Birds, the original short story by Daphne du Maurier, a deceptively normal scene of a man watching birds. The story was first published in 1952. It's read here by Catherine Wynne. I'm a specialist in Gothic literature at the University of Hull, and I've published on Bram Stoker, Arthur Conan Doyle, and I'm currently writing a book on Daphne du Maurier and loss.

I'm Stoker, Arthur Conan Doyle, and I'm currently writing a book on Daphne du Maurier and loss. Loss is everywhere in du Maurier's fiction, but often experienced against an idyllic backdrop. Cornwall is a beautiful county, a coastal county, very rural. In the privacy of her West Country home, we meet the famous author of Rebecca, Frenchman's Creek, The King's General, and other bestsellers. Miss Daphne du Maurier, by the way, she's a keen archer and birdwatcher, but her novels and film scripts leave her very little spare time. She's beloved for her moody interior work, but The Birds is quite different. It's du Maurier looking outward at the wider world and at the impacts of technology and war. Daphne du Maurier, of course, like all of her generation, has lived through the Second World War,

but she's very much, she's closer to the Second World War in one sense. Mr. Maurier is the wife of Major General Browning, leader of the Arbonne Red Devils. That was his role in the Second World War. He's a very high-ranking officer. Though a controversial leader who slid into addiction and ill mental health. There are personal costs to war, and then there are global ones. The second atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima,

and this is the first film of the result. Most of the city appears to have been obliterated. And of course, what we are coming out of in the Second World War is the legacy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, how that changed the world. And we're not going back from that point. So in 1952, when the birds appears, uneasiness is still in the air. De Maurier's story suggests that even in peacetime, even in a beautiful, tranquil place, trauma cannot be avoided, and death may still come from above. But at the beginning of the story,

there's just a lone farm worker eating lunch by the cliff's edge, a message comes to the birds in autumn, like a warning, winter is coming. Many of them perish, and like people who, apprehensive of death before their time, drive themselves to work or folly, the birds do likewise. The birds had been more restless than ever this fall, the agitation more marked, because the days were still. As the tractor traced its path up and down the western hills, the figure of the farmer silhouetted on the driving seat. The whole machine and the man upon it would be lost momentarily

in the great cloud of wheeling, crying birds. There were many more than usual. Nat was sure of this. Always in autumn, they follow the plough, but not in great flocks like these. It opens then with this individual called Nat Hocken, and we see the world really through Nat's eyes. He's a World War II veteran.

Nat Hawken has a wartime disability. He has come from a different part of England originally. He comes from Plymouth, and Plymouth was bombed, as he tells us in the story, by the Nazis. So he has that experience of warfare and obliteration. And this is something that the locals in his community, where he now lives in this part of Cornwall, they haven't had that experience of aerial bombardment. Nat has been taking solace in nature, in the predictable rise and fall of the seasons and in traditional ways of farming. He works part-time on this farm. He works very much with the implements of the hand. So he likes hoes, he likes to thatch, he likes to mend hedges. Nat is in sync with nature's rhythms. So he notices the new agitation in the air around him. He starts to think about the birds and that something is happening with the birds. Something

is changing because he watches the birds. Birds start to attack humans, they attack houses, Birds start to attack humans, they attack houses, they break down windows and break through into people's rooms. And their attacks, their assaults are vicious. Covering his head with his arms, he ran towards the cottage. They kept coming at him from the air, silence save for the beating wings, the terrible fluttering wings. He could feel the blood on his hands, his wrists, his neck. Each stab of a swooping beak tore his flesh. If only he could keep them from his eyes.

When they dived low and missed, they crashed, bruised and broken on the ground. As Nat ran, he stumbled, kicking their spent bodies in front of him. He found the door. He hammered upon it with his bleeding hands. Let me in, he shouted. It's Nat. Let me in, he shouted loud, to make himself heard above the whir of the gulls' wings. Then he saw the gannet, poised for the dive, above him in the sky. The gulls circled, retired, soared, one after another against the wind. Only the gannet remained. One single gannet above him in the sky.

The wings folded suddenly to its body. It dropped like a stone. Nat screamed and the door opened. He stumbled across the threshold and his wife threw her weight against the door. They heard the thud of the gannet as it fell. They heard the thud of the gannet as it fell. Birds, as Nat tells us in this story, tend to stay within their own species. But here the birds have grouped together.

They're thinking like humans and they're thinking in a military capacity. Now, what's really struck me about the story, when I read it again, was that Daphne du Maurier obviously was writing within her time. It's infused with all this imagery of war, ideas of siege. As in human war, the birds strike their enemy in cycles, in coordinated attacks. But the owner of the big farm where Nat works, a farmer named Trigg, says he knows what to do. Trigg, when he thinks about the birds, he says, oh, let's have a shooting party. And he says, Nat, come along. Do you need a gun? And Nat's there, what would a gun do against flocks of birds?

That proves true. During a lull in the attacks, Nat discovers the mutilated corpse of his boss, Trigg's eyes pecked out. Catherine Wynne sees this as symbolic. Unlike Nat, farmer Trigg is not nature observant. Trigg is somebody who is not associated with the landscape in that way. He's clearly making money. He is not attentive to the birds' rhythms. The post-war period when The Birds was written was one that changed farming.

Technology advanced with the introduction of farm machinery like the tractor that starts this story off. It was possible now to do larger scale industrial agriculture. One of the greatest problems of the world is to provide food for its ever-increasing population. To meet this problem, man has mechanized by means of the motorized tractor practically every farm problem of today. Farmer Trigg represents, I presume, the present and the future. You can see him as a figure who's very much using the machinery of that modern age, the machinery of the 1950s, to farm.

Humans started to dominate the landscape rather than work within it, something Nat notices in the story. What he sees around him are changes in the technology of farming. So we need to be really sensitive, I think, in this story to the actual social changes. Farms in the UK were traditionally bordered by shrubs or trees or stones that generated greenery. These boundaries were removed as farms expanded, and along with them went flora, fauna, and bird habitats. Growing up in Ireland, Catherine Wynne saw that firsthand. So my family bought a farm in

1977, a little farm with small fields, but on these fields we had tractors, but at the same time we were very conscious that the birds were nesting in these fields as well, and one particular bird is the corn crake. My mother heard the corn crake and she said to me, listen to that sound. Listen to the corn crake. You might not hear it again because that's the sound that has what was by that point, the 1980s, becoming very unfamiliar in the Irish landscape. And today, the corn crake populations of Ireland are really on the coastal margins now.

So it's a small bird that would have nested in the grasses and the sides of the fields and I remember my mother would always walk around the fields when the tractor was there to cut the grass she'd walk around the sides of the fields to make sure that there weren't any birds nesting and what I see today is where I live today is in in Lincolnshire which is an eastern county of England where there is very fertile land so large-scale open fields even today what I noticed in the fields that they were they were covered in sheets and sheets of white plastic which is very very unnatural whatever's growing underneath them I don't know but it's so unnatural it's so out of sync we are so out of sync with nature in the types of industrial agriculture that we are engaged in.

And there are no hedgerows and there are few birds. We're rapidly learning that hedgerows are very important in our fight against climate change. They actually take in carbon. They store carbon in two different ways, really. Disappearing hedgerows are an issue for UK conservationists even now and Daphne du Maurier was conscious of it in the 1950s when she was writing The Birds. The hedgerows are very very important in this story because the hedgerows are where the birds of course nest and locate themselves before the attack but the hedgerow is someplace where it not puts his family in the daytime in between the attacks, leaving them in the shelter of nature. But ultimately, de Maurier's story offers humans no relief and no safe shelter.

The pitiless birds attack everyone, even the young. If you think about de Maurier at this particular time, she's just come out of war. She has three children herself. And she's come out of a wartime situation into another uncertain world. And she's very much, I think, thinking about, you know, what is the future of these children? Her children are still quite young at this point. What is the future of these children? What are the futures of our children? And of the world itself. Nat and his family hear radio reports that suggest the bird attacks are widespread. It's global. It's not even just the national community.

It's not just something that's attacked Britain. It seems to be international as well. Were they dropping bombs on the birds? I don't know, answered Nat. I don't think so. He did not want to tell her that the sound they had heard was the crashing of aircraft. It was, he had no doubt, a venture on the part of the authorities to send out reconnaissance forces. But they might have known the venture was suicidal.

What could aircraft do against birds that flung themselves to death against propeller and fuselage but hurtled to the ground themselves? This was being tried now, he he supposed over the whole country and at a cost someone high up had lost his head where have the planes gone dad asked jill back to base he said come now time to tuck down for bed it kept his wife occupied on dressing the children before the fire, seeing to the bedding, one thing and another, while he went round the cottage again, making sure that nothing had worked loose. Nat secures his old stone cottage, he calms his family, but he realises that may not be enough. There is a sense that communication has gone with the outside world. The radio doesn't work anymore.

The BBC has shut down. So they are alone. They are the only survivors by the end of the narrative, locked in their kitchen in a siege-like state, waiting for the night to come and for the next attack by the birds. The reason for the bird attacks in du Maurier's story remains unexplained. What interference has led to the birds becoming militaristic, to the birds attacking, to the birds acting out of nature? Something has happened to them, tied into some type of technological, chemical kind of change that has resulted in the birds becoming militaristic.

A great towering mushroom effect could be seen going higher and higher and reaching into the stratosphere. Because the bomb was exploded high above the ground, the greatest part of its harmful radioactive material was dissipated in the stratosphere. Daphne du Maurier lived through World War II. She was an English patriot. She was married to an airborne commander. And yet, in the wake of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, her fiction seems to express a more complex set of concerns than she allowed for publicly.

Today, in so many places around the world, wars still rage. In Ukraine, the misery of a major conflict has returned to Europe. With its trenches, tanks and artillery, it's the kind of fighting Europe thought it had left behind in the 20th century. But this war has also been a battleground for some very modern technology. It is the world's first full-scale drone war. Technology still shapes things, and death still comes from above.

And then there's nature. In war and in peace, it suffers because of us. For me, what really struck me about this story, if we look at this and we see it today in 2023 and we think about the way in which what she's describing with the birds is what we are living through environmentally today. There are changes in nature. The birds are not attacking us. The birds themselves are being obliterated by us. In the story, humans have been wiped out by birds. But what have humans done to the birds

to make them function in this way? The birds in du Maurier's fiction are monstrous. But in life, birds are our victims. Catherine Wynne says du Maurier recognized that we were doing that, even back in 1952. We know the birds are disappearing around us. We know that. We're told that every day. We see it. We see it in our gardens. But what she's saying is, she flips that on its head and I think it's really, really interesting. The birds are attacking. Now you think about yourselves.

You're the birds. Biodiversity is important for its own sake. But more than that, our whole food and planetary system depends on it. We are fundamentally destroying ourselves. We become the birds. Back in Ontario, leaving the birdwatcher's paradise of Point Pelee, you travel through Leamington, a farm community, but in the most contemporary sense. Leamington was once most famous as Ontario's tomato capital, home to Heinz and its famous ketchup. These days, though, this place of rich soil and temperate weather is a site of big farming, technology, agribusiness. In place of open fields, hectare upon hectare of white greenhouses, as big as airplane hangars and as far as the eye can see.

Inside them, migrant workers from Mexico and the Caribbean grow and pick the crops. Cucumbers, peppers, cannabis, and of course, tomatoes. At night, the greenhouse grow lights glow a purple blue high up into the night sky. You can see them from Detroit. People traveling through sometimes mistake it for the Aurora Borealis. On one hand, light pollution. On the other, 24-7 food production all year round. Last year, the municipality passed an abatement bylaw, but adoption has been slow.

In spring, in fall, thousands of birds fly through here at night. It's safer and cooler in the dark. They use the stars and the moon as navigation. But when greenhouses glow, the light they generate overtakes the night sky. Sometimes it's impossible to see the stars or the moon. Naturalists worry that it confuses the birds. You're listening to What the Bird Saw,

an Ideas documentary with literary scholar Catherine Wynne. Ideas is a podcast and a broadcast heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, across North America on Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. Find us on the CBC Listen app and wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayed. Hey there, I'm David Common.

If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you gotta know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto wherever you get your podcasts.

This is Toronto, wherever you get your podcasts. Alfred Hitchcock had adapted several Daphne du Maurier novels for the screen, most famously Rebecca. Then he optioned her 1952 short story, The Birds. How do you do? My name is Alfred Hitchcock, and I would like to tell you about my forthcoming lecture. It is about the birds and their age-long relationship with man. It will be seen in theatres like this across the country.

In Hitchcock's telling, the story was transformed. All that remained of Desmouriers' original was its idyllic seaside setting and the contrasting horror of murderous birds. They're coming! They're coming! Du Maurier's global subtext, fears about war, technology, the environment, receded in his version. Instead, Hitchcock's birds seemed to come from his character's inner lives. Chaos set off by unspoken feelings and desires.

Hitchcock's adaptation does share at least one thing with the Daphne du Maurier original, the power to compel. The Birds is simply one of those films that's able to speak to generation after generation in ways, let's say, that European art cinema has failed to do. Hitchcock's adaptation, that's the subject of the second half of What the Birds Saw, a documentary by Ideas producer Lisa Godfrey.

Let's get this out of the way first. Alfred Hitchcock made some scary movies, but birds? Really? Ornithophobia is the fear of birds. And this is quite a prevalent, quite a popular fear. Oh my god, it's so scary. You're all right. Who knew that so many people are afraid of birds? And yet, like birds themselves, those people are all around us. In Montreal, for instance. Hi, my name is Lynn Kozak, and I'm an associate professor at McGill. I mostly work on ancient Greek literature, but I'm also really interested in horror and

contemporary media. I'm terrified of going into the underpass, and I hear the pigeons, and they're making the weird noises, and they don't want me there, and I don't want to be there, and then they're swooping down, and I'm running with no dignity whatsoever. Then there are people like Scott Poole of Charleston, South Carolina. I actually love birds. I sort of briefly had a pet crow, a crow whose wing was injured and came and lived with me for a little while. His name was Steve. I don't know.

He looked like a Steve to me. Hi, I'm Scott Poole, and I write and teach about monsters. I am a professor of history at the College of Charleston. Scott does understand why people like Lynn find birds scary. I've been told they seem kind of reptilian, and of course, in their DNA, they are. And some of it, I think, also is just our general approach to the natural world, which the film, I think, plays with very well of the unknowability and the real difficulty, I think, of being able to anthropomorphize them. They seem, you know, quite inhuman. Ancient beliefs and primal fears.

I am terrified of having my eyes poked out. I was thinking about Aristophanes' play when there's instantly, when there's a bird attack, one of the main characters brings a pot over his head. So it's, you know, it's a very ancient, very ancient reaction to not want to have your eyes poked out by a bird. There's all sorts of folklore and superstitions about birds as omens of death. And, you know, those associations are truly, truly ancient. They act in groups. They act in patterns. There was, obviously, with the film, a lot that Hitchcock could work with there. I remember seeing The Birds when I was still quite young. I remember seeing it as a child and being scared of it.

It did play into those fears I have of birds and really always worrying that they're going to pick my eyes out. As to whether Hitchcock's The Birds actually qualifies as horror. I'm not sure who first had that quote, and I want to say it's John Carpenter, but maybe I'm wrong. That horror isn't a genre, it's an affect. An emotional bodily response. Because horror literally means to shudder. Lynn Kozak studies the place where tragedy meets horror, whether it's in modern horror or tales of the ancient Greeks. Aristotle said that what we should feel when we

see something tragic is fear and pity and that anyone who heard the story of Oedipus would shudder when they heard it. How do you feel in your body when you're actually responding to these texts? And so yeah, I feel awful when I watch the birds. So for me, it is a clear horror text because it is so unsettling. Watching it as an adult, it feels like kind of a proto zombie movie, but also has all these very weird gender and family dynamics. And so yeah, I was really struck by how how much it stood out against both other kind of creature features, but also against Hitchcock's other films. It's a very strange film. Scott Poole agrees. He studied the Hitchcock movie for a couple of reasons.

Because of its role in sort of the history of the horror film, it's actually pretty influential. Even for today's horror creators, like Jordan Peele. The Birds is probably the greatest invasion movie of all time. The main characters find themselves, you know, under siege. As an author and scholar, Scott Poole interprets horror through the lens of history. As long as there have been horror films, horror films have tended to be a little bit more political than other genres. They were not mainstream, so they could kind of afford to go out on a limb now and again. Hitchcock was a Brit in America. He might have used birds as a metaphor to explore early 60s society,

the Cold War, or racial or class conflicts. But for Scott? So what's interesting to me about The Birds, and I know that this is counter to a number of interpretations of the film, is how apolitical in many respects it is. Hitchcock made it, as so many of his films are, very much psychological, subjective stories about individuals, small groups of individuals, rather than about a bigger societal context. He took things in a psychosexual direction. Though on the surface, that isn't totally evident. The plot is pretty straightforward. Back in your gilded cage, Melanie Daniels. How did you know my name? A little birdie told me. Melanie Daniels, played by Tibby Hedren, is a San Francisco socialite. She visits the seaside town of Bodega Bay to play a flirtatious prank on Mitch Brenner,

a lawyer who teased her in a pet store that sells birds. Within hours of Melanie's arrival in Bodega Bay, birds start attacking people. Melanie takes shelter with Mitch and his family, his widowed mother Lydia and his little sister Kathy, at their waterfront farm. Mother, I'd like you to meet Melanie Daniels. Miss Daniels, my mother. How do you do? How do you do, Miss Daniels? The local bird attacks rise in intensity. Birds terrorize children. They peck out the eyes of a farmer and Mitch's ex, the schoolteacher Annie. Oh no, stay here, stay here.

In the final scene, Mitch slowly drives his family and Melanie away from Bodega Bay, the future uncertain, as thousands of birds gaze on. The birds earned a mixed reaction upon its release, but for decades it's been one of the most watched and debated and analyzed of the classic horror films all over the world. Because even if you don't know what exactly is going on in this movie, you can tell that something weird is going on in this movie. And sometimes killer birds are the least of it. Frankly, The Birds is, I would say, a Freudian three-ring circus. The Oedipal tension that exists between the character of Mitch and his mother, Jessica Tandy's character, Lydia. Miss Daniels brought us some birds from San Francisco. Oh.

For Kathy, for her birthday. As a matter of fact, Miss Daniels is staying up here for the weekend, so I've already invited her for dinner tonight. You did say birds? Yes, lovebirds. Oh, I see. Oedipal tension is underscored for us again and again. She's a charming girl, isn't she, Mitch?

Yes. Certainly pretty. Mm-hmm. How long have you known her? Now, I told you, dear, we met yesterday. She's always mentioned in the columns, Mitch. Yes, I know. Scott says this Freudian circus was quite deliberate on Hitchcock's part. He had attracted enormous amount of attention from French New Wave directors and writers, writers of film criticism, who were quite interested in finding Freudian themes, quite interested in promoting auteur theory, the idea

that the director is the creative power behind the film, not the performers, not the studio. So I think Hitchcock, in some respects, really sought to perform that narrative. Freud, auteur theory, all very 20th century male, so you'd expect manly Mitch to be the central character, torn between his needy mother and her beautiful young rival, but he's not. Instead, the story is set in motion by Melanie. When we meet her, we meet a quite independent, free-thinking young person who has had a, you know, kind of semi-wild youth. Mitch's mom, when they first meet, she brings up that, hey, Melanie's, you know, has been in the news.

She was dancing in a fountain in Italy. She is the one who jumped into a fountain in Rome last summer, isn't she? Actually, the newspaper said she was naked. Yes, I know, dear. Of course, it's none of my business, but when you bring a girl like that... Darling. Yes?

I think I can handle Melanie Daniels by myself. Melanie literally drives herself to Bodega Bay. She commandeers a boat wearing a 1960s skirt suit, and she breaks into a virtual stranger's house to boldly deliver some lovebirds as a flirtatious joke. Melanie really drives the action. She might have come off as flighty, but Tippi Hedren invests Melanie with maturity, as if she's charting her own course.

She doesn't fit the typical social roles of mid-century women, and maybe that's why others see her as trouble. There's a suggestion by some of the residents of Bodega Bay that she brought the birds with her, that she is essentially the reason that these strange occurrences are happening. Why are they doing this? Why are they doing this? They said when you got here, the whole thing started.

Why are they doing this? They said when you got here, the whole thing started. Almost as if they are this concrete expression of her desire for Mitch, her desire for independence, possibly her anger at a world that is marginalizing her. Who are you? What are you? Where did you come from? I think you're the cause of all this. I think you're evil. Evil! The scene where Bodega Bay townspeople turn on Melanie takes place in a diner, and all of her accusers are women. She's shamed.

Scott Poole says Melanie's driving of the story takes a sharp left turn at this point. After that idea is introduced, you'll notice that in the film, Melanie becomes an increasingly passive character. Culminating in the movie's climactic scene. The horrific scene where she's attacked by the birds. Afterwards, she is kind of this catatonic

shale. She becomes the female character in every horror movie that was made before Halloween, before John Carpenter's Halloween. There may be a clue to Melanie's defeat in a story from behind the scenes on the film. In her 2016 memoir, Tippi Hedren told of being a 30-year-old single mother working as a model when Alfred Hitchcock saw her in a commercial and immediately signed her to an exclusive five-year deal. He and his wife and collaborator

Elma then coached her and taught her how to act. But for Hitchcock... That turned into a romantic obsession that then turned into harassment. He had me followed. He did things like have my handwriting analyzed. He just wanted to control, you know, my life. And there I was with a, you know, a grown woman with a daughter. It wasn't the kind of deal that I would make. There was the good side and the bad side, but the bad side was really bad.

There was the good side and the bad side, but the bad side was really bad. Tippi Hedren says that no one else knew, so she simply tried to remain above it and do her job. But then came that climactic scene of her being attacked. They had a number of mechanical birds, animatronics that they could use, and they were going to do that. animatronics that they could use and they were going to do that. According again to her own account, Hitchcock changes his mind. They use these real birds. She's injured in it. Packed and bloodied for five days, says Tippi Hedren. Without sounding preachy, I hope, one should not watch this film without that subtext in mind. I think in some respects, it helps us understand the trajectory of that character. Vertigo, psycho, feminist critics have had a lot to say about the way Hitchcock's tormented feelings about women shaped his work, and that was

even before the accusation from Tippi Hedren. Lynn Kozak feels Hitchcock's presence when she's watching the birds now. So much of our gaze is his gaze on Melanie, and I think that there's something unsettling in being put in that position. Hitchcock died in 1982. His imprint is still there, obviously, but everything around the film has changed, and we can choose to see it in new ways. You know, if I am the audience and I have power, rather than giving Hitchcock the permanent power of authorship. For instance, that this is actually a film centered on women and about female roles and

relationships, and that the script and the actors bring different emphases to things. Take Mitch, Melanie's love interest. He's a kind of standard, leading man, handsome guy. He's almost a plot device. We see less of him and more of his former flame, Annie. Her scenes with Melanie are about the beginnings of a friendship. Oh, hi. I was wondering, do you suppose I could have the room for just a single night?

I just put some coffee on the stove. Lynn is not the only observer to see something there. You know, I think that her and Annie would have made a wonderful couple. I really like that relationship. And in fact, that relationship feels kind of more meaningful than her relationship with Mitch. Annie, there's nothing between Mr. Brenner and me. Isn't there? Well, maybe there isn't. Maybe there's never been anything between Mitch and any girl. There's another woman standing in the way of Melanie's desire for Mitch, his mother. Did she

seem a trifle distant? A trifle. You know, her attitude nearly drove me crazy. When I got back to San Francisco, I spent days trying to figure out exactly what I'd done to displease her. What had you done? Nothing. I simply existed. We still have this uneasy feeling throughout that Lydia and Mitch function somehow more as a couple than as a mother-son relationship. And that there's something extraneous then about Melanie. And the only way it feels throughout the film, the only way that the family can be kind of reconstituted is by Melanie not being a sexual threat, which is what Annie says. Now that I'm no longer a threat, we're very good friends.

Why did she object to you? Because she was afraid. Afraid you'd take Mitch? Afraid I'd give Mitch. I don't understand. Afraid of any woman who would give Mitch the one thing Lydia can give him? Love. Yeah, there's a lot going on in terms of its interaction with Oedipus.

And not only in the Freudian sense, but also the ancient one. By the way, the American pronunciation is Oedipal, and the UK pronunciation is Oedipal. Some people use both. Yeah, so Sophocles' play is our main source for the Oedipus myth. And what happens is that the city Thebes has been afflicted by a plague, and the people of Thebes implore Oedipus, who's their new ruler, to help them find the cause of the plague. An oracle reveals that the land is cursed, and that's déjà vu for poor Oedipus, who's been told he's fated to kill his father and marry his mother.

Understandably, he leaves home and marries a safe stranger in Thebes. Except it turns out that those people back home, they weren't really his parents. The plot of the play is just Oedipus slowly realizing, oh wait, I killed this guy on the road. Oh wait, that might have been Laius. Oh wait, if that was Laius and he was my father, then who is my mother? And then, oh wait. He is devastated because he's been sleeping with his mom and has had children with his mom. So that's when he puts his eyes out because the knowledge is kind of too much and he punishes himself. Eye-poking, a plague, a mother-wife, this is sounding pretty familiar.

Because, of course, we have Annie reference Oedipus when she's describing the relationship between Lydia and Mitch. Jealous woman, right? Clinging, possessive mother? Wrong. With all due respect to Oedipus, I don't think that was the case. But she uses Oedipus as a counterexample, right? Because she says, with all due respect to Oedipus, this is not what Lydia is. She's not a possessive, jealous woman.

Which, though unconvincing, centers this story on the female characters again, not Mitch. What she's doing is reading the Oedipus myth as a paradigm for female desire, for feminine desire. And I think that that's not the Freud reading. The Freud reading is really about the desire from the child for the mother. And so I find that's really interesting because even though the myth is being brought up and then being rejected, the myth that's being brought up is actually a kind of revisionist myth that speaks

instead to feminine desire. Other scholars have made the connection between this other Oedipus and the birds. Leiden doesn't see it as an exact match, more of a playing with the original myth, one that can offer up new meanings. For instance, the final scene of the movie. No. No. Scott Poole. She ends up collapsing really into the arms

of her former nemesis, Mitch's mother. It can be seen as a kind of resolution to the Freudian Oedipal conflict, with an untamed Melanie now domesticated. And interestingly, that's the point at which Mitch's mother, Lydia, decides, okay, I actually like this young woman. I can mother her. And it seems to be that display of passivity that does it. The Greek Oedipal interpretation is different. Lynn Kozak points to an earlier scene in the movie where Melanie reveals that she was actually abandoned by her own mother as an 11-year-old. So is this a moment where she's found her mother and it's actually a positive thing?

a moment where she's found her mother and it's actually a positive thing. It's not about, so much about desexualizing Melanie as a threat to this weird Oedipal relationship, but instead maybe it's actually investing Melanie with the agency to kind of find the mother she needed, that maybe she didn't need Mitch. The Birds is simply one of those films that's able to speak to generation after generation in ways let's say that European art cinema has failed to do. The violent attacks of the birds are obviously explosive outbursts of maternal superego. So the birds are raw incestuous energy. Sixty years after the debut of Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, it's still debated by scholars and thinkers,

if not each new generation of viewers. Take the top searches related to it online. What is the meaning of The Birds? What caused the birds to go crazy in the birds? At the end of the birds, we have no idea why any of this has happened, and we don't really know what's going to happen next. It's left hanging for us whether or not this is happening elsewhere. That last sort of bleak shot of the film just shows birds everywhere and Melanie's car being driven away, the family driving away and escaping, but we don't know, you know, what becomes of them. Lynn Kozak points out that ambiguous storytelling has ancient roots. In Oedipus, there are all these forces at work in that play, including the plague, including these various oracles, that are external forces that we have no control over and no real explanation for, out of the realm of the rational. And so I think that that's what's so, so unsettling about both works.

For Scott Poole, I am going to absolutely mangle a wonderful quote, but the film critic Robin Wood, who wrote so much wonderful criticism of horror and of Hitchcock in particular, said about the birds that the birds themselves become the embodiment of all that is arbitrary and uncontrollable in the world. and i think that's the continuing power in the same way that that's the continuing power of horror and of our fascination with the monster i mean what is the monster but an embodiment of chaos, an embodiment of randomness, a thing that shouldn't be, but there it is. And the horror film's job, in a way, is to show us that and to do that to us. I think that that comes across and audiences find that in it, despite a lot of the Freudian hijinks. Controlling mothers, sexually threatening young women,

and the chaos that their natures release. That may well have been Hitchcock's 1960s intent as the author of this film, but in the 2020s... I don't know. For a contemporary audience, what Hitchcock himself was trying to do is really all that interesting. A story about people locked down by an unpredictable threat, living with an uncertain future, it hits viewers today in a different way. The audience, it brings their own meaning, their experience of a global pandemic, it hits viewers today in a different way. The audience, it brings their own meaning, their experience of a global pandemic,

their fears and anxieties about the world. Audiences are so often the auteurs, and I think with the birds that we have a perfect example of that. Lynn Kozak sees similar things at work when she looks at contemporary productions of ancient Greek drama. You know, one of the things I've found interesting in looking at how people are receiving Oedipus is that it's slowly kind of transitioning from, oh wow, this is a pandemic play to, oh wow, this is a climate crisis play. And I think that you can see a very similar wave of readings with the birds. But, you know, I think that that's also really the beauty of real tragedy or real horror is that

there's something unsettling and open enough about it that it can meet the moment of crisis that you're in. And you can see not only the crisis that you're in, but also how people are responding to the crisis that you're in within that text. And so I think that that's what's going to keep the birds as relevant as what's kept Oedipus relevant for millennia. You've been listening to What the Bird Saw, an Ideas documentary featuring Lynn Kozak, ancient Greek literary scholar, and writer and historian Scott Poole.

There's more information on our website, cbc.ca slash ideas. The documentary was produced by Lisa Godfrey. Web producer for Ideas is Lisa Ayuso. Danielle Duval is technical producer. Ideas senior producer is Nikola Lukšić. The executive producer is Greg Kelly. And I'm Nala Ayyad. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.