The Many Faces of One Woman in Hitchcock’s The Birds - Part 2

For Part 1 see below.

In this film, there is not really one true sympathetic character. Everyone is frightened, distressed, overwhelmed and distraught. Hitchcock paints an unusually dark picture of humanity.
This is a film dominated by women and in many ways they are ‘the birds’.
Along with Melanie we have two other central female figures:
The castrating, infirm, domineering mother figure, Lydia Daniels.
The injured, dejected and tragic figure of Annie Hayworth.
As well as more minor, but no less revealing:
The sister Cathy.
The ornithologist, Mrs. Bundy.
The hysterical women in the café.
The children at the birthday party – all girls.

All represents aspects of the female and all come together to create a mostly unsympathetic whole.
Mitch is, interestingly enough, a son who’s mother pathology is relatively benign, and represents a much more developed, more sedate, sane and grown up, though, still in many ways, infantilized version of Norman Bates.
In contrast to Pycho and Frenzy, the presence, influence and demands of ‘mother’ , in The Birds, is overt and clear, rather than repressed, subversive and psychotic, here there is a real juxtaposition of female characters with mother and a real presence of all the women in Mitch’s life. Each of these women representing an aspect of womanhood: the mother, the romantic subject of the present, the jilted lover of the past, now ‘friend’ and the sister. It is, in fact, a rather complete portrait of women in a man’s life, and thus a key to how men see them.
While Mitch is not a prominent figure in the actual narrative, he is the object of desire for all three adult women. This is played out beautifully in three scenes of subtle struggle and transference between these women: Melanie who is the damaged motherless child herself, Annie Hayworth, the jilted lover destined to die, and the ever controlling ‘mother’ Lydia:
1) Meeting Mrs. Brenner at the café.
2) The conversation at Annie’s house after Melanie returns from dinner.
3) Melanie and Lydia Daniels’ conversation in Lydia’s bedroom after Lydia discovers Dan Fawcett’s body.

1) In this scene, Melanie and Lydia are introduced and so is the identification between to the two women. The suspicion with which they regard each other from the outset is apparent and though it is a short scene, it is one which is deep in meaning and foreshadowing, shot with such clarity of terms, framing and content, that one does not need to be a scholar to interpret it:
The son stands behind his mother, together in one frame, the new women in her own world, framed and filmed with softening “star” filters. The stark doubling of the two female figures ever more underlined by their almost identical hairdos, as well as Jessica Tandy’s harsh performance and Tippi Hedren’s cool colors. The dialogue is terse and staccato in rhythm and there is nothing but hostility in the air. First greeting Melanie, the minute she has the lay of the land, Lydia Brenner never once speaks directly to her, and her looks of icy, suspicious, threatened (and threatening) scorn are enough to make anyone but the bravest soul head right back to the comfort and security of San Francisco.
This is, in fact, the moment of recognition, when the mother knows she has met her “replacement”, and which will dictate her behavior toward Melanie from here on, as we will see in their second major scene together below. All the women in Mitch’s life understand what Melanie is in town for, once they hear that she has come to deliver “Love Birds”. In the case of Cathy, the sister, she is embraced as a potential mother figure, in the case of Annie, (as we will see below) she is the affirmation that her fantasy of having a relationship with Mitch is dead (literally and figuratively) and in the case of the mother, Lydia, she has brought the final replacement and abandonment.
2) The scene between Melanie and Annie after the dinner at the Daniels’ highlights another portrait of women in Mitch’s life. The two women both involved with the same man, one past and one present/future. One warm, one cool; one strategic, analytical, calm, collected, the other emotional, warm, overt (Annie even says “I am like an open book”); one dressed sharply, formally, the other in a bath robe. This scene displays more than the “relationship” of the two women and their tug of war over Mitch, one which Annie in effect has lost in advance; it is, rather, a small intense picture of the two paradigms of womanhood, and of the choices men make between different types of female models, a choice that cannot be reconciled by having both. In this case, though both women are independent, modern women, it is not only the fact that Melanie is cool and calculated, but her resemblance to mother is so clear, that she has the upper hand over the emotional, (maybe even hysterical) Annie, who needs a drink just to tell her story. Annie does presage the transference and potential for conflict between Melanie and Lydia, but we know that Melanie will not succumb to the ‘threat’ so easily, simply in the way she answers Annie’s question on whether Lydia seemed a “trifle” distant with the word: “A trifle”.
In both this scene and the next we see the transference of roles from past lover to future lover; and from mother to wife (and future mother)…in both scenes Melanie asks Annie and Lydia, about how much of a say Mitch has in the matter of choosing his wife, Annie makes it clear to Melanie that it is Lydia who is in charge and will probably succumb to passing the torch to her double rather then anyone else. Annie realizes her own end is near.
She is, of course, killed by the birds.
And in this, maybe, we have a symbolic hint about Hitchcock’s notions of survival:
It is cold, ruthless, strategic, hard fought life - not for the weak at heart. Only the strong survive, and Annie is the figure of internal weakness and ends up dead.
3) In the central encounter between ‘Mother’, Lydia and Lover/Future Wife, Melanie, we find strong emotional manipulation and transference. The doubling of the two here is brought to absolute perfection. Melanie takes over temporarily as the mother figure while Lydia has the expanse to exhibit her neurosis in full, but what we actually see is that they are really two faces of the same woman separated only in time.
While she has had a more conventional female role, it is clear that Lydia’s neurosis is not psychotic, it is about the trials of the more traditional Victorian mother and her need not to relinquish control. She certainly has a hold on her children, though is not a motherly hold, even she admits this. Hitchcock portrays a grim picture of the “old world’ mother: cold and distant, more concerned with her own needs rather than her children’s, more concerned with being a wife than mother, and she professes:
“…I don’t fuss and fret about my children…(Frank, her husband) really understood the children, he really understood them…he had the knack of entering into their world and becoming part of them…I wish I could be like that…I miss him…Mitch has his own life, I am glad he stayed here today, I feel safer with him here”
Though, she has taken over as the responsible parent from her male partner, at the end this has not transformed her into a modern independent woman, but into a dependent controlling witch- a remnant of the past. She longs for the secure days when her life had meaning by the very presence of a husband, who understood the world and whom she could count on, and in effect, mother. Lydia Daniels is devoid of any warmth, compassion and understanding for her children- a wife, a widow, first, not a mother. (In fact toward the end of the film, as they all experience the last attack on the house - after Annie’s death - Cathy is comforted for the most part by Melanie not by Lydia).
In this scene, though, Lydia manipulates her supposed weakness to channel Melanie into understanding who is still in charge, and the sense that Melanie will not escape the ‘doom’ of having to co-exist with this ‘mother’. Even though Melanie herself was abandoned, ironically if she wants to be with Mitch she will have to contend with his mother and Lydia’s fear of being abandoned and alone herself.
Lydia says (in what can be an almost comic Hitchcockian line:
“This business with the birds has really upset me”
It sure has.
And as the final attack on Melanie, the sudden resurgence of Lydia into the role of mother (in an interesting “Pieta” like framing as she cradles Melanie), and the final escape of all Mitch’s (surviving) women in one car away from hysteria of the birds shows, all these women come together at the end to inhabit one space in the life of a man.

The Many Faces of One Woman in Hitchcock’s The Birds - Part 1

Hitchcock’s portrayal of women in his films is probably the single most controversial and complex aspect of his work.
Given the multitude of scholarly writings on the subject it is a challenging task to add much to this; and yet the subject does not cease to intrigue, does not cease to perplex and provoke thought.
In her defining work, The Women Who Knew Too Much, Tania Modleski basically promotes the notion that Hitchcock was neither a misogynist, nor that he was sympathetic to women:
“His work is characterized by a thoroughgoing ambivalence about femininity – which explains why it has been possible for critics to argue with some plausibility on either side of the issue”
A clear conclusion on this matter is not possible, given it’s being shrouded in a sheath of complexity and contradiction.
I have chosen to look at the question of women, femininity and misogyny (issues that have traversed his work) in a film which is not analyzed in Modleski’s work, but which in my mind is as important a contribution to the attempt to come to grips with the subject as any, The Birds.
Coming after Psycho, in The Birds, Hitchcock many scholars have seen a companion piece; another film so infused with layers and multiple modes of interpretation: social, political, personal even environmental, that to understand it, one must choose a point of view. As in most of Hitchcock’s films, this matter of choosing a ‘point of view’, following a certain strand to it’s conclusion, wherever it leads, then going back to view the film again from a completely different point-of-view, is an intriguing subject in and of itself - Hitchcock telling us something about the nature of the auteur, who is the original arbiter of interpretation. And indeed, rich interpretation is Hitchcock scholars’ and fans’ most fulfilling activity. As Woods writes: “In a work of art as organic as The Birds it is possible to pick on almost anything as the ‘key’ to the meaning”. By choosing to look at this film through the prism of the relationship of Hitchcock’s work towards women, I am also choosing to put aside the other readings of the film, namely, “The Doomsday” reading.
As discussed elsewhere, the ‘bird’ is purely metaphorical, one which relates directly to many things, but most directly to the notion of woman in British slang. In a movie where the ratio of female to male is probably 50:1, it is hard not too view this as one of the most accessible interpretations to the film.
In this short essay, I would like to posit that this is not a film about “women”! This is a film about woman, a composite image of a diverse group of characters who together make up “the woman” (in this case the woman in Mitch Daniels’ life). For, in my mind, more than all the films that came before it (and maybe just in Frenzy, which came after it) there isn’t one woman who represents the whole, not one woman who can be deemed the feminine center, but rather it is a composite of all these characters that paints the full picture.
Tippi Hedren’s Melanie (arguably one of the most cool of Hitchcock’s blondes…and very hard to like) is the central female protagonist of the film. She is not, like many of Hitchcock’s other romantic female leads (and I am thinking of Daisy in ‘The Lodger’ or of Marion in ‘Psycho’) a heroine per se and does not ‘represent womanhood’. She is a vehicle who is a point of identification, representing narrative thrust, centered around ‘woman’ but not ‘THE’ heroine in the classic sense of the word.
In fact, from the start Melanie is portrayed as a scheming, mischievous, manipulative character, which could be construed to seem like female traits, but her energy and assertiveness is so very ‘male’. This San Franciscan sophisticate, the bored socialite daughter of a newspaper mogul, has the kind of time, money and inclination so as to be viewed as the sort of male Cary Grant: suavely, coolly, calculatedly pursuing her object of desire. This modern woman’s active pursuit of Mitch Daniels, so subverts the traditional patriarchal order that it, by itself, could be the reason that ‘the birds have gone berserk’, that things have gone awry .
The birds’ behavior is a reflection of the subconscious psychic struggle between the combination of controlling, almost disturbed mother, conniving object of desire and jilted lover and it’s manifestation in the complete loss of the birds’ naturalistic behavior.
Melanie’s active rather than passive role is the first ‘aberration’ and even though in many ways it was Mitch who initiated the first contact between them, (he did follow her into the store and his first words to her were “can you help me”), but she, instead of telling him the truth, (that she doesn’t work in the store), initiated her side of the relationship on the basis of deception, and this sets The Birds, literally, into motion.
The sense that it is Melanie’s male behavior, with certain deception at its the root, which undermines the natural order of things and is the cause of and is mirrored in the birds’ behavior is given even more validity, when during the central attack scene with a café full of a (jury) of women, Melanie is accused of being the cause of it all, of being ‘evil’ by one of the hysterical women hiding there.
Is the changing role of women, and specifically the modern, assertive woman, the root of all abnormality in our world, we might think Hitchcock is asking? Is he implying this, or is he actually mocking those who espouse this notion?