The Birds

The Birds (1963)

[www.imdb.com/title/tt0056869]

The Gist:

Well, there are these birds and they're trying to kill everyone. Of course, you don't get to that immediately. Instead, the film explores an interesting romantic drama between its two protagonists while throwing off centered forebodings of the killer birds here and there. And then at some point the romantic drama is sidelined by the birds trying to kill everyone. The most impressive thing about the story is how the external conflict impacts the internal narrative. It warms the mother up to the young woman (she had previously been very snooty and perhaps afraid of her son finding a woman he loved and leaving her alone) and it makes the two protagonists stop kidding themselves express their true feelings for each other (there had, of course, been a sort of dance of courtship that involved the two being bitterly opposed to each other). And then you have the birds, which work on two levels. One is the absurd, the attacking birds are often inserted into the film with bad special effects super imposition (which I suppose was good at the time) and it gives the film a sort of camp feel. This fits the film very well because I mean come on, these people are getting their ass kicked! They'll just lie on the floor and let the bird snack on them. Grab them by the throat and choke the shit out of them, what the fuck people go down fighting! Thankfully, the film worked in such a way that I didn't have to take these deaths too seriously, instead I just enjoyed that beautiful Hitchcock melodrama. However, on another level, it does work in a more serious way. Not with how they kill the people, that's still kind of funny. However, the film goes through moments that emphasize the terror of an unknown destructive force in the world, some lurking agent of death without any motive or reason behind it. And afterall, isn't that what death is? Don't the birds work on a greater metaphor for life and death as a whole? Or is that a strange read into the film?