I used to watch this as a kid and saw it as just a scary movie about birds. This time, though, I was intrigued by all the very intentional but odd decisions about the character of Melanie. In the beginning of the movie, it's like wtf, why is she just like pathologically lying, and going to such extreme measures just to one-up this guy. It's like her development as a character goes from her being capable and confident (whilst being a self entitled, cold, and attention seeking), to her being helpless but also nurturing (taking care of Cathy even better than her own mother can). It's weird. It's like the point of the birds attacking was to make her submissive. There's some sexist Hitchcock shit going on in there - I need to think about it more to articulate it better..
This movie has such a fucked up behind the scenes filming story it is hard sometimes to move past it. From sending Tippie Hedrin's daughter (Melanie Griffith) a doll resembling her mother in a coffin-shaped box, to locking Tippie in a room with actual birds to make her freaked out for the scene (Stanley Kubrick took a page out of this book for The Shining), Alfred Hitchcock needless to say, crossed the line. But the scene where the mother walks into the house and the dude has his eyes gouged out-classic.
I used to watch this as a kid and saw it as just a scary movie about birds. This time, though, I was intrigued by all the very intentional but odd decisions about the character of Melanie. In the beginning of the movie, it's like wtf, why is she just like pathologically lying, and going to such extreme measures just to one-up this guy. It's like her development as a character goes from her being capable and confident (whilst being a self entitled, cold, and attention seeking), to her being helpless but also nurturing (taking care of Cathy even better than her own mother can). It's weird. It's like the point of the birds attacking was to make her submissive. There's some sexist Hitchcock shit going on in there - I need to think about it more to articulate it better..
ReplyDeleteThis movie has such a fucked up behind the scenes filming story it is hard sometimes to move past it. From sending Tippie Hedrin's daughter (Melanie Griffith) a doll resembling her mother in a coffin-shaped box, to locking Tippie in a room with actual birds to make her freaked out for the scene (Stanley Kubrick took a page out of this book for The Shining), Alfred Hitchcock needless to say, crossed the line. But the scene where the mother walks into the house and the dude has his eyes gouged out-classic.
ReplyDelete