"The Birds": That unreasonable Cold War opponent

Antonette 2021-10-22 14:35:02

"The Flock of Birds" is a very exciting existence in Hitchcock's works. Before or after that, the "Greek-style movies" were logically rigorous, complete in narrative, and clear in the main theme. He also gained a reputation for implanting brand-new emotional factors and logical relations of thinking into the film within the framework of Hollywood movies. The ranks of the masters. But "The Birds" obviously falls outside the scope of these usual suspense/thriller films. It uses seagulls who do not have the ability to think rationally to carry out crazy attacks on humans as the main line of the story, but it does not provide a further rational explanation of the theme, which gives it a different mystery. Although the film still has the typical psychological tension of Hitchcock, what does the director want to show through the uncaused attack on humans by a group of flying birds? This has become a topic of continuous discussion in the history of film.

1

The first half of "The Birds" is more like a romantic love story: the heroine Melanie met the handsome lawyer Mickey in a pet shop in San Francisco. Out of curiosity, she bought two "love birds" as gifts for Mickey's young sister, Kathy, and drove to Mickey's villa in the seaside town for the weekend.

Melanie and Mickey’s relationship heats up rapidly, but at this time something strange begins to happen: a seagull attacked Melanie who was driving a boat in the lake, and scratched her forehead; then swarms of birds attacked the car. The children at the birthday party not only chased unsuspecting children, but also flew into Mickey’s home from the flue and wrecked them; and the next morning, everyone found seagulls attacking the town’s residents in suicide attacks. Many people Killed, including Mickey's former lover and friend's school teacher Annie. Everyone was panicked and at the same time fell into deep confusion: Why did these originally seemingly harmless birds suddenly launch an indiscriminate attack on humans?

At the same time as Melanie and Mickey’s love story line, Hitchcock also arranged another emotional story line of Mickey’s and mother Lydia’s family members: Lydia’s husband died four years ago, and she will support the family. The burden of the burden rests on her son Mickey, and because of this, she is inexplicably worried that Mickey will leave her; out of selfishness, she does not hesitate to disturb the relationship between Mickey and Annie, and of course to the unexpected Melanie Full of jealousy and hostility. This story line full of inexplicable fear, jealousy and hatred, under Hitchcock's arrangement, quietly corresponds to the birds' attacks on humans.

2

The French philosopher Gil Deleuze once expounded a special concept of "sentiment" in the chapter on emotion in his film theory work "Motion-Image". In some films, the director consciously portrays such an emotional state: it is formed in the heart of a certain character, but overflows from them, diffuses in the surrounding space, and becomes an invisible and invisible emotional factor. Infected all the characters and things in the space. Deleuze once used German director Wim Wenders's film "Alice in the City" as a model of "affair movies"; Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai's films "A Fei Zheng Chuan", "Evil and West Poison" and "Chongqing Forest" It is also a model of affection movies. If we trace the history of the development of the "emotions" in the movie, "The Birds" filmed in 1963 may be the first film to consciously use it to express emotions that pervade the time and space, but this emotion is not common in obscurity. Love or tender affection, but a kind of jealousy and hostility that makes one's heart palpitating. It arises from the ulterior inner activities of the characters, but it permeates the entire town like a poisonous gas without them knowing it. The attack of a flock of birds is a sign that it loses control and eats up humans after infecting birds. There is no doubt that this kind of negative situation.

If we carefully study the development of the film’s narrative line, we will find that every attack of the flock of birds is linked to the growth of hostility among humans. Shortly after the beginning of the film, Melanie drove to Anne’s house to find out the name of Mickey’s sister; when Anne learned about the ambiguous relationship between Melanie and Mickey, she was once Mickey’s lover, with jealousy on her face. Disdain; and then when Melanie returned in a boat to give Annie a birthday present, she was attacked by seagulls for the first time. When Lydia met Melanie and Mickey in a small town restaurant, and the three of them had dinner in the villa and chat after the meal, Lydia, the mother, showed potential strong hostility towards the stranger visiting woman. I was always worried that the latter would take away her son; when Anne finally found out to Melanie Mickey’s mother’s unreasonable hatred for all the women close to him, a seagull attempted to slam into the door of Anne’s house and died. To the door. At Casey’s birthday party the next day, Annie first saw Mickey and Melanie talk intimately and instinctively released a jealous look. Then Lydia, who stood behind her, showed this even more. Disgusted; it was at this time that a large number of seagulls suddenly appeared and began to violently attack the children. In the evening, Casey unexpectedly invited Melanie to stay at home for one more night, but Lydia was unhappy-she realized that Mickey could become more intimate with Melanie; at almost the same time, countless Suddenly, the bird flew in from the flue of the fireplace and messed up the whole house. Out of safety concerns, Melanie decided to stay overnight, and Lydia's dissatisfaction was revealed. When she visited the feed supplier the next morning, she found that the latter had been caught by the seagulls. Fell to the ground and died.

The storyline of the film has developed to this point, and every attack of the birds is connected with the intense jealousy and hatred that gradually accumulates in the hearts of the characters. Although Lydia and Melanie attempted to dissolve their hatred in the subsequent conversation, the negative situation has long been freed from the subjective control of the characters, floating around in the sky over the town and spreading in every corner. Its frightening intuitiveness Feel the crowds of crows just like Melanie saw on the playground outside the school. The emotions that dominate them are born from the characters, but they are like disasters released from an opened Pandora's Box, which cannot be dealt with at once. The whole town was caught in the shadow of death fear that could not be explained clearly in words.

3

Is the depiction of hatred through the attacks of birds the subject of this mystic thriller? Hitchcock is obviously not satisfied with this. He has a more epoch-specific keynote statement.

Hollywood in the 1950s and 1960s was also an era when Cold War movies flooded the screen. Not only are some military, spy war, and detective films widely involved in the Cold War, there are also some science fiction and mysticism films that express the same theme in a metaphorical way. For example, in the famous science fiction film "The Day the Earth Stood" (1951), the characters in the film are full of narrow Cold War imaginations of unknown creatures, taking them for granted as enemies; "The Magic Flower" was taken in 1956. It is imagined that the invasion of Cold War opponents will unfold from within the human body, as a metaphor for the implicit penetration of political ideology.

In the middle part of "The Flock of Birds", the characters started a debate in the tavern about the phenomenon of birds attacking humans. An old lady who claimed to be an expert on birds, based on scientific experience, believes that humans have sufficient knowledge of birds and that they will not attack humans without cause, but the daily destructive behavior of humans is endangering The existence of birds; a drunkard sitting at the bar shouting that this is the punishment for humans when the end of the world is coming; a fisherman carefully analyzed the behavioral motives of the birds and believed that their attacks were to compete with humans for fish resources; A passerby arbitrarily thinks that there is no need to think about more, as long as he takes up a weapon to fight them in the end is the way out; while a middle-aged mother is so scared that she just wants to take her child to flee the town and fly high.

Rather than saying that these characters are discussing bird attacks, it is that we, as spectators, have witnessed a confrontation of different views about Cold War opponents: pacifists believe that fighting is human stupidity, and rational experience knowledge is the reason for judging opponents. Basis; pessimists believe that the world has been hopelessly headed for destruction; pragmatists are thinking about finding the specific psychological motivation for the opponent’s offensive to prescribe the right medicine; warmongers call on everyone to retaliate; and the weak and terrified ordinary people just want to escape. . Until the end of the film, no one point of view really explained the cause of the bird attack. This is an unsolvable mystery for these characters who are trapped in it. And Hitchcock’s intentions are more like a condescending mockery of group blindness: for example, after a series of car explosions caused by bird attacks, the back of a pacifist (old lady of an ornithologist) appears in the picture. At this time, she was dumbfounded and speechless, realizing that the previous talk was bankrupt, and everything that happened before her was completely beyond her cognitive ability.

4

Does Hitchcock have no answer to this?

Only then did we remember the jealousy, fear, and hostility he deliberately released in the film: the director’s views have been buried everywhere in the film since the beginning of the film; even before the problem occurred. , The answer is already indicating their existence to the audience-it is the jealousy, hatred and hostility between people that stimulated the generation of violent factors, which gave birth to the inexplicable hatred mentality of the Cold War opponents, driving them to irrational madness Attacked ordinary people who were helpless and unknown. Although these opponents seem to belong to another camp that is completely unfamiliar, unable to talk to, and come and go without a trace (just like flying birds), in essence they are still under the inner logical influence of human thought and behavior (negative situations). spread). Moreover, the moment of the conflict does not mean the end of the confrontation between the two sides. Just like the seemingly harmless "lovebirds" taken away by the protagonist at the end of the film, they are likely to be lurking threats, and they will always be in the same way. Attack again.

Hitchcock is a keen-thinking and intelligent film master, but this does not mean that he is also a film thinker with a strong perspective and perspective (such as Kubrick's position in film history). After "The Birds", his two Cold War-themed films "Break through the Iron Curtain" and "Spirits" showed his complete ignorance of the Cold War opponents on the other side of the Iron Curtain, even naive and ridiculous. It is precisely because of this that in "The Flock of Birds", from the perspective of a typical Western conservative, he portrays the severe threat of violence brought by the opposing ideological camp (civilization) to the Western world, as well as the victims of the West. The spirit in a state of ignorance is extremely panic and hesitating. He made a meaningful mockery of the pacifists, assuming that the attackers from another world have no idea what rationality is, so they do not follow the empiricists' definition and classification of them. At the same time, he tried to do a Freudian analysis of the opponent's psychology (this is the angle that the characters neglected to consider in the restaurant debate), substituting the Oedipus/Oedipus affection, using the actor's mother to confront him. The envy and jealousy of the charming and energetic heroine initiated conflicts, which led to the logic of Western individualists, who attributed the Cold War to one’s envy of the other’s abundance, peace, beauty, and enthusiasm, wishingly The hostility generated by personal emotional grievances and hatred is the psychological motivation of the other party, and the illusion that once the emotion is stimulated, it will quickly break away from the character's body and spread to the entire Western civilization, externalizing into a flock of birds and seemingly unreasonable attacks on helpless people .

In terms of drama and technology, "The Birds" is a thriller film of excellent quality. But this cannot conceal Hitchcock's fundamental cognition of ideological rivals from the standpoint of Western civilization. The civilization/ideology dispute has nothing to do with the conflict of Western individualism under psychoanalysis. It is a manifestation of the ideological conflicts of different civilizations. Its political depth and breadth far exceed the scope of personal interests and emotional conflicts. Human beings in one camp cannot use their own cognitive logic to speculate on the thinking mode and behavior motives of the other camp, or attempt to incorporate the thinking of another civilization into their own fixed and closed thinking framework. Persevering here can only produce deeper levels of dislocation, confusion, misunderstanding and contradictions that cannot be shaken off, and the result will inevitably be like the humans in "The Birds", bewildered in fear. Hitchcock mocked the assumptions of the characters in the film, but he himself unknowingly adopted the same mode of thinking because of cognitive limitations. Regrettably, to this day, human beings who are in a political and ideological hedge are still as wrong as the characters in the film but do not know it. In the state of cognition where the opposing parties fail to speculate on each other and ultimately become unreasonable to each other, the risks we face are just like the unexplained ending of "The Birds", which is unpredictable and inevitable.

(First published on the "Iris" movie WeChat public account)

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Extended Reading
  • Tianna 2022-04-23 07:01:26

    The so-called classics that must be read and gnawed repeatedly. The current epidemic is also a flock of birds, forcing humans into their own reinforced concrete boxes. The flock of birds is a terror that never ends and is everywhere. And this terror accompanies human existence from beginning to end. Terrorist attacks, epidemics, ecological disasters, etc. all look different. Throwing this horror into a psychoanalytic box is too narrow.

  • Katheryn 2022-03-24 09:01:24

    The restaurant has a big discussion about the information arrangement, and the rhythm is extremely gorgeous, extremely! That! magnificent! Korea! The gas station fire gave Melanie four static reaction shots. Generally speaking, these shots are broken. But I don't know what Hitchcock's plan is to mock Eisenstein?

The Birds quotes

  • Mitch Brenner: Her father's part owner of one of the big newspapers in San Francisco.

    Lydia Brenner: You'd think he could manage to keep her name out of print. She's always mentioned in the columns, Mitch.

    Mitch Brenner: Yes, I know.

    Lydia Brenner: She is the one who jumped into a fountain in Rome last summer, isn't she?

    Mitch Brenner: Yes.

    Lydia Brenner: I suppose I'm old fashioned. I know it's supposed to be very warm there, but, well, actually the newspaper said she was naked.

  • Mitch Brenner: I think I can handle Melanie Daniels by myself.

    Lydia Brenner: Well, as long as you know what you want Mitch.

    Mitch Brenner: I know exactly what I want.