The Birds

As a movie, a story about things that could have happened, it made no sense. As an allegory, a set of symbols expressing a thought, it was terrifying. As a movie, a cool and sophisticated woman is annoyed by a man in a pet store and decides to stalk him to a rural town just to show him how unbothered she is by him. Plot twist, birds attack and the whole town descends into idiocy. People drive cars INTO fires. Women lie down and wait patiently for birds to peck them to death. Tippi Hedren attempts to escape birds by locking herself into a room that she has just discovered to be filled with birds. People use advanced escape techniques such as rolling around against walls and moaning. The threat level is bad 60s Doctor Who.

As an allegory, Tippi is an unnatural woman. She is cool, unemotional. She is urban and unapologetic. She is in the gossip columns as sexually liberated. She is distant from her mother. She bosses men around. She can drive her own car and boat. She is dressed in a strict, chic, and poison green suit. More unnaturally, SHE pursues a man up the California coast to teach him a lesson about making a fool of her.

Once out of the city, in a more natural setting, things go wrong. She makes the town people uncomfortable. The birds are the town and nature reacting to her. As the movie and birds escalate, her perfect hair and suit are picked apart as symbols of her unmaking. Somehow, she never gets any other clothes, so for the three days of the movie, she is confined to her green suit, getting more and more disheveled each day. The birds attacks are focused on this town, and on her. She is the unnatural element that must be driven away, the same way birds would attack a predator near their nest.

By the end of the movie, she is no longer the woman in control. She is a mess, her perfection stripped and humbled. She assumes the role of loving daughter to Jessica Tandy and nurturing mother figure to Suzanne Pleshette. Her hair is soft. He jewelry gone. She depends on Rod Taylor to rescue her. In the final moments, she assumes her natural role as a woman, the sun shines, and the birds quite and let her be taken away to safety.