The Birds descends on OFS for a Hitchcock Halloween

This Halloween, terror comes from the sky when OFS brings Alfred Hitchcock's classic movie The Birds to Oberlin. The most memorable aspects of this film, the bird attacks, greatly over shadow the psychological complexity of this fable about a broken nuclear family. Like all Hitchcock films, the emphasis here is on the tension underlying interpersonal communications, the exploration of Freudian conundrums, and an enveloping sense of existential dread. The Birds, like Albert Camus' The Plague, is more than a horror story of nature gone bezerk, but a deeper meditation on human nature and behavior.

At its most basic level, the film documents the escalation of a bird war on the small California town of Bodega Bay. Hitchcock uses the birds as a metaphor for the complicated character relations which form the real focus of the film. The strange attacks begin when Melanie Daniels (Tipi Hedren) begins to pursue Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor), who meet in a bird shop. Mitch is the Alpha Male, the only attractive male character in the film whom all the women characters desire. With his father dead, Mitch plays father to his sister and mother on the weekends, while upholding social order as a big city lawyer during the week. His mother protectively broods over her son and scares off any potential wives through her cold aggression and disapproval. Melanie Daniels attracts Mitch by her wild, law breaking, unpredictability, threatening the family stability while at the same time seeking entrance into their bond.

Hitchcock, the "master of suspense," builds the story's tension by refusing to provide any logical or complete answers to the bird's mysterious behavior. The movie lures the viewer into its narrative by repeatedly refusing to answer the same question which the characters grapple with: why are the birds attacking? Hitchcock is famous for developing the idea of the McGuffin, a plot device whose meaning is unimportant, yet which is central to the structure of the movie. A McGuffin is a structural device, moving the movie along and building suspense. The suitcase in Pulp Fiction is the perfect example of this device. The importance of the case is that everyone wants, why they want it holds no significance. Here the birds are a living McGuffin, creatures who act aggressively, building tension within the plot, yet whose motivation requires no logical explanation.

In terms of metaphor, the film never attempts to make clear what the birds mean in relation to the family drama played out around their attacks. Hitchcock taps into and manipulates the standard myths of psycho-analysis, reversing the Oedipal complex into a mother's obsessive love of her son, and portraying Mitch as both the upholder of patriarchal law and yet desiring Melanie as the un-inhibited female passion. When Melanie acts her will, does she threaten the mother's matriarchal rule of the family, or Mitch's patriarchal control of the law? The symbols and power dynamics continually turn on one another and lead the audience in circles, like the flock of birds which wheel over the characters' heads. The audience can find countless interpretations to the story which are never adequately validated.

On the most appropriate night for a good scare, The Birds offers a chance to be enthralled in a fun web of suspense. The movie's action sequences are more humorous than frightening by today's digital standards, adding a fun element of hokiness to the feature. It is easy to understand that something else is going on in the movie besides the bird attacks, though what that something else is, Hitchcock provides no definite explanations of. Indeed, the full intricacies of the characters' relationships defy paraphrasing. The film denies logic, like a mystery with its last page torn out. Though The Birds may seem a foray into the action movie, Hitchcock actually pushes the genre of the suspense thriller to its fullest, creating a complex and intriguing movie well worth seeing.

The Birds. OFS. Kettering 11, 7:15 p.m., 9:45 p.m., and midnight.