Hitchcock's "The Birds"

A friend asked me about the ending of "The Birds" today so I sent her the following thoughts:

Glad you got to see The Birds at last. That ending is really something. I think it works on a number of levels, on two of which I will now provide a brilliant commentary.

In the 1950s especially, Hitchcock cultivated an image in the mass media as a "master of suspense." He told a lot of interviewers that he would love to invent some kind of direct fear-stimulator that would make the audience scared as soon as they sit down, and with writers from film journals he liked to discuss the pretty slick methods he used to get eye-popping shots that would make people jump, scream, etc. So on that level you can say that the final scene is another case of his putting his filmic skills to work on making you really frightened.

It had been a convention of cheap horror movies to conclude with a scene that restores order and logic to the world that had been threatened by the scary monster. A scientist type would explain the whole chain of events in a way that reassured us by making sense of what had happened (or as much sense as you're going to get in a B-movie about a monster). This device made it possible for people to go home and get a good night's sleep. Hitchcock parodied it in Psycho: after what should be the final scene, where a reassuring psychiatrist explains Norman's psychosis, we get one last look at Norman himself, still mad as a hatter and scary as can be.

In The Birds, instead of parody Hitchcock simply jettisoned the conventional ending so that people really won't be able to go home and sleep. (A friend of mine saw it in college when it first came out, and the next day she told me she had been up all night; then dawn came and a bird started twittering and she was really creeped out.)

So basically the ending scared people successfully because it broke with convention. Everyone was expecting an expert in horn-rimmed glasses to provide closure, but there wasn't any closure, and the only bird expert was the silly woman in the restaurant who had claimed that birds were incapable of joining forces against us. So at the end the birds are again gathering their forces and your scary night is only beginning.

Also, even if the characters driving away in the car can escape the birds for good, they're driving away from the camera -- that is, from us -- so we're left in the middle of them.

So that's an explanation on the technical level, but much more interesting is how the movie's ending relates to the architecture of the typical Hitchcock film and to its typical ending. Maybe the best comparison is with North by Northwest. I hope you haven't seen it, because I'm now going to tell you about the ending, although there's never a moment in the movie when you doubt it will end this way: Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint, adversaries in most of the movie, are now on a train on their honeymoon. He pulls her up into his bunk in their bedroom compartment, and Hitchcock cuts to a final shot of the train entering a tunnel. A number of critics call that tunnel shot arch, unsubtle, excessively cute. But they're so stuck on the phallic symbolism that they miss the larger meaning of the shot. Where are the two characters going? Into the dark. Will they come out the other end? The picture will never tell.

Northwest by Northwest is what Hitchcock called "a Hitchcock picture," which not all of his films were. A "Hitchcock picture" takes an ordinary person out of his ordinary life and saves his soul by inducing him to make dangerous moral choices. And I really mean the soul is saved. In Northwest by Northwest, Cary Grant starts the story as an advertising executive with two ex-wives who handles personal relationships with the same cheerful manipulativeness he uses in his profession. His character's name is Roger O. Thornhill, and he says the O stands for "Nothing." (And the monogram on his matchbook is ROT.) The Eva Marie Saint character has a similar background, recruited into meaningful but perilous work from an empty jet-set life very much like the previous life of the Tippi Hedren character in The Birds. The two Northwest by Northwest characters learn that life truly does have meaning if you swallow hard and accept the risk that comes with making moral choices. And that just happens to be pretty well what getting married is all about, so that final, um, entry into the tunnel is a beautiful metaphor for the whole leap of faith they are making.

So a few years later Hitchcock makes The Birds and his concluding shot is now much darker in outlook, yet beneath the darkness and the scariness it is essentially the same as in Northwest by Northwest. Where the earlier film shows two lovers steaming away from us in a train, the later one shows two lovers driving away in a car, also into darkness. Most important, both pairs of lovers have lost forever their smug way of living on the surface.

Hitchcock was a Catholic, and I think it's meaningful that the American writer who is most like him is the Catholic Flannery O'Connor. A great many of her stories are really "Hitchcock films" in miniature. I'm thinking of the woman in "Revelation" who sits in the doctor's waiting room and quietly contemplates how superior she is to the others. One of them suddenly throws a book at her and calls her a "wart hog from hell." In the final scene she looks up into the sky and sees a vast rainbow with people making their way to Heaven -- the "colored" singing and dancing first, then the "white trash," and then finally the "decent" people: "and all their virtues were being burned away."

Catholics don't only give you that one extra chance to get scrubbed up in Purgatory, they know that the "virtues" of the Protestant Ethic are really venial sins that are going to take a heap of scrubbing because there is no place for them in Heaven. You can't be good, you can't be truly human let alone an adopted child of God, if you don't actually choose the good and the perils that it entails.

The Tippi Hedren character is the one who gets the bigger book thrown at her, especially in that scene in the attic, but the Rod Stewart character was also Mr. Smug at the beginning, too. Like Roger O. Thornhill (and like Hitchcock himself) he makes his living in the media, as a reporter. Like the lady in "Revelation," he makes quick and easy judgments of people. Neither of them is ready for love, until the birds strip them of their smugness and leave them open to each other.

In other "Hitchcock films" this kind of salvation-of-fire is sometimes contrasted with easy but spurious avenues to salvation: in The Man Who Knew Too Much, it's the phony chapel. In The Thirty-Nine Steps, the hero at one point gives the cops the slip by marching in the Salvation Army parade -- not that the wonderful Salvation Army is itself spurious, but pretending to be in it is a pretty good metaphor for trying to sham your way through life instead of making a moral choice.

Well, that's one reason I like Hitchcock so much. He gives you a good scare for your money, and at the same time he points you on the path to where you'll never have to be afraid again.