The Birds by Alfred Hitchcock - Essay Example

Perhaps that’s why it’s effective, because you do not know what’s going on. The tension is quite evident as the film starts and it never ends until you press stop in your player. I think it is a metaphor for new relationships. The movie Birds is about how jealousy can bring havoc to people’s lives. I personally think fear is a product of ignorance and mistrust, for that matter. And Hitchcock, as a master observer of the human condition, perfectly captures this idea. The story of the movie is loosely based on a novella written by Daphne Du Maurier which has a similar title.

However, only the concept and the title were used. The setting, characters, milieu and other elements of the story were dropped. The story is centered on two characters: Melanie and Mitch, who began their relationship at the start of the movie. They met in a pet shop and they quarreled over love birds. Melanie “lost” the fight and bought the lovebirds and delivered it to Mitch’s house secretly. This act leads the audience to encounter more female characters: Mitch’s mother (Lydia), Mitch’s sister (Cathy) and Mitch’s ex-girlfriend (Annie).

Then when Melanie stays over for a night in Mitch’s house, a bird killed itself (yes, like suicide) because it hit the front door. Then another bird attacks in Cathy’s party, then more attacks come, until the climax came when Lydia discovers her friend lying dead in his bathroom. Many theories started to go about in the town. Talk about the apocalypse was the most popular theory. A tourist cried not to talk such things because it’s scaring her children while an amateur ornithologist claims that those are not bird attacks since birds do not attack.

Then a gasoline station explodes, invariably caused by a bird. Then more deaths ensue, and more violence is caused by birds. For some reason, the tourist blames Melanie for the attacks, and then the next big scene we see is that Annie is lying dead, with Cathy crying over her. The couple, together with Cathy and Lydia, takes refuge in an abandoned home and they boarded it up. Throughout the night, they hear bird noises on the roof, scratching and trying to break into the house. Now Melanie did some investigation when everybody was asleep late in the night.

She discovered that the birds have infiltrated the attic! The birds attacked her, and Mitch comes to save her. The movie ends while the family boards the car as they try to bring Melanie to the hospital, and the birds look at them menacingly, although they did not attack them. The theme of this movie is fear, and our reactions to fear, especially when it comes to personal relationships. Many people have different analyses over the film, and the most convincing take on it is that it’s about the birds symbolizing the women.

Look at it this way: the movie’s main characters are Mitch and Melanie. The whole avian ordeal began when they picked up the fight in the pet shop. Perhaps, you know, the tourist was right in saying that Melanie was indeed the cause of the bird attacks, but of course, we do not know that, and that gap in knowledge provides the necessary tension in the movie. Anyway, Mitch and Melanie are the main characters. Then the movie shows different women characters: Lydia, Cathy and Annie. They’re all basically birds (chicks) and they all vie for the attention of one man, Mitch.

This is all about women (birds) being territorial. It is