Humanbeings Depicted In The Film The Birds

Hithcock’s liflong theme of birds as agents and markers of chaos appears in the film The Birds (1963). The birds considered as loving and unharming attack humanbeings. The birds include crows, sparrows, seagulls etc. Hitchcok revels the shallow human relationship and it is emphasised each time by the bird attack. Birds operate as markers of chaos unleashed by shallow human relation, it is important to consider precisely when each attack occurs. For instance the attack on the gull on Melanie’s head follows her coy teasing of Mitch; the gull crashes into Anne’s door after Annie discusses her loneliness; later in Cathy’s birthday party when Melanie discusses her abandonment; sparrows invade the Brenner living room as a frightened Lydia encourages

The attacks can be seen as an emblematic representation of “original sin” (Spoto 336). The bird attacks disrupt the life of entire people in Bodega Bay. Birds otherwise harmless turns to be harmful and destructive causing anarchy, chaos, disorder and topples the entire hierarchical structure. Humanbeings are basically selfish, everyone has weakness, they are susceptible to both. Every generation contribute their part before they die and which even causes innocents like children to suffer due to their mere presence in the sinful world. We cannot blame the avenging God for the chaos it is the result of human sinfulness and that is why birds are not sparing the children. When Psycho’s world is swallowed up in death The Birds leaves open the possibility for salvation. The Birds end of a positive note, a hope for salvation. As the Brenner family with Melanie leaves the place fully shattered nearly surviving-there is hope because they have taken with them the love birds who “haven’t harmed anyone”

Judy Barton imitates Madeliene and inturn imitates dead Carlotta Valdes. As her name suggests, she is a “mocking bird”, one woman imitating another (Spoto 287). Birds, bird imagery and bird names appear as trope in Hithcock films. In Shadow of a Doubt (1943) also evil enters stealthily in the form of a visiting Uncle Charlie on the run from police into a small town family of Santa Rosa. Unbeknownst to the family Uncle Charlie is a serial killer. His oldest niece who shares his name, Charlie thinks he is “the most wonderful person in the world.” Gradually she learns the terrible secret but cannot tell anyone as the truth can devastate her mother. Uncle Charlie tries several times to kill his niece but in the last attempt falls to his death in front of a train and thus evil gets its due credit. Unthreatening ordinary things can sometimes become threatening as in Psycho. Hithcock shatters the notion that intense filial devotion can conquer death and cancel the past, and he treats with satiric, Swiftian vengeance the two great American psychological obsessions: the role of Mother, and the embarrassed secretiveness that surrounds both lovemaking and the bathroom. Spoto’s view corroborates thus: “For Psycho describes, as perhaps no other American film before or since, the inordinate