(Posted as part of the Close-Up Blog-a-thon hosted at The House Next Door)
Whenever I'm pressed to pick what I think is the ONE best movie of all time, I invariably say Alfred Hitchcock's 1963 classic "The Birds."
For my money, Lydia Brenner (Jessica Tandy) discovering the eye-pecked body of Dan Fawcett is one of the most memorable scenes in all of cinema.
This small moment is every bit as gripping as the elaborately staged gas station fire/attack scene and Melanie's final violent encounter with the title characters in the attic.
No sound or music. Tandy doesn't even scream audibly.
Instead of a zooming in on the gruesome corpse, Hitchcock chose a series of three quick cuts, each getting closer to the body until it's just a head shot.
According to Peter Bogdanovich, Hitchcock did this to simulate Lydia's point of view as she suddenly realizes what she's seeing.
This also made the scene easier to edit in case it didn't pass muster with the film standards board.
Hitchcock wasn't one for gratuitous gore. He claims he shot Psycho in black and white because of the carnage during the shower scene (sure, it was cheaper too).
So, one has to assume that the discovery of Dan Fawcett with no eyes isn't just for effect.
As noted by Camille Paglia, "The Birds" is essentially about "a war between nature and culture, with the irrational and primitive vanquishing human illusions."
I think poor old Dan represents the blindness of the main characters to reality in both their personal lives and the world in general. Society has lived in an artificial cocoon of it's own creation called "civilization" for so long that it's oblivious to (or simply ignores) the true nature of things.
In a restaurant just before the gas station attack, three symbols of civilization: religion (the old drunk at the end of the bar spouting Bible verses), science (the ornithologist lady with the beret and an air of superiority) and commerce (the black suited businessman who's got his own problems and can't be bothered) discuss their theories as to why birds have suddenly gone on the warpath and what can be done about it.
None of them seem to have a clue. Interestingly, the old drunk comes the closest when he says "it's the end of the world." But people have stopped taking him seriously a long time ago.
After all she's been through, at the end of the film Melanie is still deluding herself. Cut up both physically and emotionally from the bird assault in the attic, the expression on her face as she looks up at Mitch's mother, Lydia, suggests a sincere belief that she has finally discovered a suitable surrogate for her own long lost mother.
Lydia's reaction (beautifully portrayed by Jessica Tandy) is appropriately sympathetic. But it's clear that, even now, she's no more attached to Melanie than any of the other women (or "birds" in English vernacular) who Mitch has brought home.
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