The ruptured system of traditional Hollywood coupling and the consequent destruction of identification and pleasurable spectating renders The Birds, at its outset at least, a film conforming to the Mulvian prescription for an “alternative cinema” (Mulvey, 36). Mulvey’s political agenda, her essay’s raison d’être, is to explain away the structures of pleasure that pervade cinematic narratives, to undermine the all too ingrained paradigm that articulates “woman as (passive) raw material for the (active) gaze of man” (46). To a certain extent, The Birds embodies Mulvey’s desired cinematic alternative, but only as a problem to be overcome. What Mulvey takes to be progressive, The Birds fashions perverse. The film’s opening movements (Melanie as active) disrupt normative Hollywood conventions; the birds flock to Bodega Bay to reinstate the symbolic order.

 The birds’ first attack signifies their intent to normalize the inverted roles occupied by Melanie and Mitch. Having been spotted by Mitch and identified as the intruder that delivered the lovebirds, Melanie retreats toward where she came from, reinforcing her active disavowal of her to-be-looked-at-ness. At the same time, her retreat, her movement backwards, signifies the upcoming reversal of her perverse assertiveness. As she approaches her dock and a just-arriving Mitch, the first bird attack occurs, the timeliness of which must not be overlooked. An attempt to reverse the gendered inversion, the attacking bird forces passivity upon Melanie. The blitz places her in a vulnerable situation, focusing Mitch’s gaze squarely upon her. Here, for the first time, Mitch is placed in the role of protector. The bird’s motive – if we allow ourselves to credit it with such intent – is to reinscribe in Melanie the to-be-looked-at-ness that she has tried to disown, the ultimate goal of which is to have Melanie and Mitch enter into a normative, heterosexual union.

         A woman’s blaming gaze implicates the spectator alongside Melanie                    

The birds’ function to regulate the film’s central romance is the filmic embodiment of the spectator’s parallel desire. Hitchcock illustrates this analogous relationship in the scene in which a terrified mother confronts Melanie about the birds’ attacks. The woman says: “Why are they doing this? Why are they doing this? They said when you got here the whole thing started. 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!” This confrontation is shot so that the angry woman is looking directly into the camera, directly at Melanie, whose point of view the spectator assumes. The effect here is twofold: on the one hand, Melanie is implicated in the birds’ destructive actions insofar as her actions (her perversely masculine and active role) have upset the symbolic order. In this way, the woman is correct to think that Melanie is “the cause of all this.” On the other hand, the spectator is implicated alongside the birds, for they desire the same thing: normative heterosexual coupling. The spectator wishes for the pleasures produced by scopophilia – the pleasure in gazing at the passive female as sexual object – and narcissism – the pleasure of identifying with his idealized filmic like (Mulvey, 39). These pleasures are achieved only when the passive female/active male dichotomy is enacted. In this way, the birds mirror the spectator’s desires and act as the regulating force that can bring about their fulfillment. The alignment of the spectator with the birds is given further visual validation in the famous bird’s-eye view shot of Bodega Bay aflame. At first merely an establishing shot, this view takes on greater meaning as birds fill the frame. The shot changes from benign objectivity to the malign subjectivity of the birds, thus implicating the spectator in the birds’ actions once again. (For further analysis of this masterful, anxiety-inducing sequence see Slavoj Žižek’s The Fright of Real Tears: Krzysztof Kieslowski Between Theory and Post-Theory, namely the second chapter, “Back to the Suture.”)

                 Heightened anxiety due to a literal birds-eye-view                                                       

In spite of the birds’ violent attempts to restore normativity to Mitch and Melanie’s relationship, Melanie continues in her perverse quest to remain in a position of power and activity.  A bold expression of her active position, Melanie inexplicably enters the upstairs bedroom where the birds wait to pummel her. Saved by Mitch – another step toward restored normativity – Melanie redoubles her attempts to avoid passivity. According to Mulvey, “women in representation can signify castration, and activate voyeuristic or fetishistic mechanisms to circumvent this threat” (Mulvey, 46). Melanie’s desired active position and disavowal of her to-be-looked-at-ness, however, reinstate this threat instead of cancelling it. The modes of circumvention inscribed in the position of power held by the male protagonists of traditional narratives are precluded alongside the destruction of that power brought about by the inversion of the active/passive dichotomy. Melanie speaks castration, or, better yet, screams it in an attempt to remain in a position of power. As she regains consciousness after being attacked she finds herself in a passive position; in an attempt to regain her untraditionally active role she aims to blind the spectator and Mitch alike. In a subjective shot from the point of view of Mitch, Melanie lashes out toward our eyes – the camera – in an effort to blind them, if not gouge them out. Her look is directly upon us as her shadowed hand consumes the frame. The identification with Mitch, though in conflict with what has been said above regarding the spectator’s inability to identify with characters in the diegesis, is not the problem that it might seem to be; now that Melanie has been attacked and assumes the passive position, the male spectator and Mitch, if only temporarily, have regained their normative, active position. With her outburst Melanie aims to restore the film’s untraditional gender positions and, in turn, elicits the anxiety of visual castration in the spectator.

  Melanie’s last-ditch effort to free herself from her to-be-looked-at-ness         

The ending of The Birds, typically seen as unresolved, takes on new meaning in light of what has been said. Pummeled to the point of exhaustion, Melanie, in the end, regains the feminine’s passive status. Moreover, Melanie is carried to the car by Mitch, another articulation of her newfound passivity. A sign that the symbolic order has been restored, the birds sit calmly as Mitch loads Melanie, his mother, and his sister into the car. As they drive off into the sunset and the birds - like the spectator - sit contently, the film ends resolved. The traditional passive female/active male dichotomy has been restored along with the pleasure it produces in the spectator. 

                      The birds as spectators, finally at peace                                 

The Birds does resist meaning, though only if the birds themselves are seen as the perverse component of the film. Lee Edelman’s reading, while only a part of his intriguing look at futurism, falls victim to this trap. The seeming uncanniness of the birds can lead to many unwarranted appraisals of the overall meaning of the film. One perversity of the film resides in the fact that the most perverse quality disguises itself as a wholly normative element. The relationship between Melanie and Mitch is raised to the level of the perverse because the role each plays in the love narrative ultimately is reversed; Melanie is the active pursuer, while Mitch is the passively pursued. The birds appear in order to set right this twisted situation. In this way, the birds are the most conservative aspect of Hitchcock’s film. Challenged by the strangeness of Melanie and Mitch’s relationship, the birds regulate the normative order. In this hyper-normative role the birds once again seem to embody a perversion.

To say the least, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 film, The Birds, is confounding, if not altogether resistant of meaning. Lee Edelman, in No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, suggests that the birds are “the arbitrary, future-negating force of a brutal and mindless [death] drive” (Edelman, 127). While it is tempting to assign meaninglessness and futurelessness to Hitchcock’s mystifying creatures - to understand them as thanatos incarnate - such a reading produces an understanding of the birds that runs directly counter to their true function in the narrative; there is meaning to be found in their madness. Locating the true perversity of The Birds will, in fact, refute Edelman’s charge that the birds combat reproductive futurism. It is neither the irrational presence of the birds, nor their evil acts that constitute the predominant perversity of Hitchcock’s film.  Rather, the anxiety of The Birds is to be found in its deviation away from the active male/passive female binary that pervades classical Hollywood narratives and the filmic structures that support this dichotomy. To understand this pervasive structure we turn to Laura Mulvey’s seminal text, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in which she reveals the hyper-normativity established by this binary that plagues the cinema. The Bird’s perversity, it will be shown, is twofold: (1) it establishes its female protagonist as the active agent of the narrative and, therefore, (2) disrupts the structures of identification and pleasure production for the spectator. Far from meaningless, the birds’ arrival on the scene signifies the attempt to restore the symbolic order and the heterosexual coupling, the eros, that promises a future.

 The task of locating the perversity in The Birds is fulfilled most simply in pointing to the birds themselves, though their confounding presence, to be sure, is not the ultimate source of the film’s anxiety. A MacGuffin writ large, the birds act as the response to, not the centerpiece of, the subtextual perversity. As in many of Hitchcock’s films, these plot elements are wickedly misleading. “Well, it’s the device, the gimmick,” Hitchcock tells Truffaut in their legendary interviews; “the logicians are wrong in trying to figure out the truth of a MacGuffin, since it’s beside the point […] they’re of no importance whatever” (Truffaut, 138). For the characters in the film, of course, the birds are of great importance. For Hitchcock, “the master of suspense,” they are important insofar as they advance the plot and elicit an emotional reaction from his audience. To the excavator of perversions (far from logicians, for perversity resists logical explanation), on the other hand, the birds pose only a question – Why?! – which is left unanswered in the diegesis, but finds is resolution once the true perversity of the film is discovered.

Though not the foundational deviance of the film, the birds do create the ostensible anxiety therein. In his 1919 essay “The Uncanny,” Freud provides the framework for labeling the birds such. The uncanny, certainly a characteristic “within the field of the frightening,” (Freud, 123) entails more than fear-inducing unfamiliarity. Freud protests the conclusions of his predecessor, E. Jentsch, who suggests “the essential condition for the emergence of a sense of the uncanny is intellectual uncertainty” (125). Indeed, what is unknown tends to frighten, an observable fact throughout The Birds and a foundational tenet of all horror films. For Freud, however, the uncanny (Unheimlich) emerges when the unknown and the known, the familiar and unfamiliar, coincide. One rendering of Heimlich – the opposite of uncanny – lends itself perfectly to an understanding of the birds: “of animals: tame, associating familiarly with humans […] ‘Wild animals … that are brought up tame and accustomed to humans’ […] ‘The stork remains a beautiful tame bird all the same’” (126-127). This definition accounts for the usual tameness of birds, the disposition of the lovebirds that Melanie (Tippi Hedren) gives to Cathy (Veronica Cartwright), in general, the benign relationship between bird and man. When, in the film, they turn from friendly fowl to ferocious foe, that familiarity is fractured. There to remind us of the birds’ potential to not wreak havoc, the lovebirds speak familiarity, while, outside, their evil counterparts denote unfamiliarity and, therefore, complete the paradox of the uncanny. In one fell swoop, the birds create the outward anxiety of Hitchcock’s film, but they still beg the question: Why?

The truly perverse, uncanny component of The Birds buries itself beneath the familiarity of the Hollywood love narrative that unfolds between Melanie and Mitch (Rod Taylor), only to be unearthed once the reversal of their gendered roles is understood. As Laura Mulvey notes in her seminal essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” love narratives have obsessively fashioned the male protagonist as active and the female, in her “to-be-looked-at-ness,” as passive (Mulvey, 40). Access to The Birds’ underlying perversion begins in recognizing that this active male/passive female binary has been inverted. Mitch is not the active, gazing male, but the object of Melanie’s probing gaze. This inversion is most apparent early in the film. Having snuck into the Brenners’ home and delivered the caged lovebirds for Mitch’s younger sister, Melanie returns to her boat and pushes away from the Brenners’ dock only to sit motionless in the bay and watch Mitch and his reaction to the gift (see image below). Moreover, her pursuit entailed the twisting sixty-mile drive from San Francisco to Bodega Bay that Hitchcock emphasized with overly long shots of Melanie’s car en route to Mitch. In these ways, Melanie breaks from the traditional Hollywood passive female archetype and embodies the active (perhaps hyper-active) pursuer.

            Melanie as active voyeur from her boat on Bodega Bay

The active female/passive male structure displayed in The Birds is, without a doubt, uncanny. As Mulvey acknowledges, indeed loathes, the active male/passive female model is beyond familiar, it permeates narrative cinema to its core. The Birds reversal of this paradigm, however, is hidden beneath its ultimate product: this narrative thread is still seen as a love story. The familiar trajectory of the love story is simultaneously unfamiliar because of the inverted gender positions of the pursuer and the pursued. “The uncanny (das Unheimlich, ‘the unhomely’),” Freud writes, “is in some way a species of the familiar (das Heimliche, ‘the homely’)” (Freud, 134). The romantic relationship that develops between Melanie and Mitch is a species of the familiar Hollywood love trope, though an uncanny species in which deep-seated gendered conventions of the cinema are destroyed. The abrogation of this dichotomy is itself uncanny and, moreover, it spawns an array of further uncanny perversions that intensify the anxiety that it creates.

Beyond the screened actions taken by the main characters, their appearances and personal histories reinforce their inverted roles. Melanie exudes the assertiveness and power usually ascribed to the masculine position. Her tremendous wealth and social and political resources afford her influence and luxury; she has birds delivered to her home on a whim and has easy access to Mitch’s address and identity via her father’s newspaper. Moreover, we are told, she is legend for her exuberant, if inappropriate, outbursts, such as her nude jaunt through a fountain in Rome (she is as notorious as Ingrid Bergman’s character in Hitchcock’s 1946 Notorious, a film that might lend itself to an analysis similar to the one being undertaken here). Early in the film Mitch jokes: “Back in your gilded cage, Melanie Daniels.” Melanie certainly is free of the confines of her cage; she is unbound by the cinema’s traditional, normative view of female-as-passive.

On the other hand, Mitch disrupts traditional notions of masculinity in a number of ways. A literal “momma’s boy,” Mitch travels to Bodega Bay each weekend to stay with his mother and younger sister. And, as Annie Hayworth (Suzanna Pleshette) tells Melanie, alluding to Mitch’s possible homosexuality, “Maybe there’s never been anything between Mitch and any girl.” In all of these ways, the film bolsters the contention that the relationship between Melanie and Mitch is an inversion of the traditional active male/passive female dichotomy that structures Hollywood narratives.

The assumed male spectator of the psychoanalytic model in which we are working is thus problematized unavoidably by the presence of a female protagonist with whom he cannot identify and the passive male at the end of her gaze with whom he no longer wishes to identify. To identify with the female protagonist would be to traverse the inherent gender difference. Moreover, Mulvey writes, “[m]an is reluctant to gaze at his exhibitionist like” (Mulvey, 41). Identifying with the female, therefore, creates a doubly anxious spectator, confused by his own identity while at the same time objectifying his otherwise mirrored self. On the other hand, identifying with the passive male would place the spectator at the receiving end of the female protagonist’s gaze. According to Mulvey, “the male figure cannot bear the burden of sexual objectification,” precluding the possibility of identification with his filmic like (41). Unable to cathect onto either the active female or passive male position, the spectator is left in a liminal arrangement. This situation counters the spectator’s traditionally held position of power produced in identifying with the active male protagonist and creates the anxiety of an indefinite identity. As Mulvey has put it:

As the spectator identifies with the main male protagonist, he projects his look onto that of his like, his screen surrogate, so that the power of the male protagonist as he controls events coincides with the active power of the erotic look, both giving a satisfying sense of omnipotence. (Mulvey, 41)

Watching The Birds, the male spectator loses this power and the accompanying satisfaction. The power resides in Melanie and the spectator cannot share in it with her. The inversion of gender roles in The Birds transforms the pleasure of power into the anxiety of amnesia – the spectator’s identity is in libidinal limbo.

Mulvey’s treatment of the oppositely gendered situation in which a female spectator confronts the dilemma of identifying with the traditional male protagonist clarifies further why the male spectator resists identification with Melanie. In her follow up to “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ inspired by King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun (1946),” Mulvey accounts for the female spectator’s ability to traverse gender difference and identify with the active male. Her masculine point of view is not the integration of a foreign identity, but a regression to the pre-Oedipal stage in which sexuality is undifferentiated. “In this sense,” Mulvey concludes, “Hollywood genre films structured around masculine pleasure, offering an identification with the active point of view, allow a woman spectator to rediscover that lost aspect of her sexual identity” (Afterthoughts, 31). This cross-gender identification, therefore, is founded upon similarity, though a similarity that has been forgotten. The creation of the feminine does not coincide with the creation of the masculine, but emerges out of it. The male spectator, therefore, cannot regress to the pre-Oedipal stage to gain access to feminine identification; to occupy the feminine point of view the male spectator would need to assume an inherently oppositional position.

                                                                                                                                 [Like the birds, Part 2 is coming!]