DuMaurier and Hitchcocks Birds, Essay Example

Paths That Cross and Mingle

“Yea, though I walk through the valley of death I shall fear no evil for thou art with me. Thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.” It is too bad that they were not handy to fight back against The Birds. The creativity of fiction writers can find evil anywhere, such as in ice cream trucks, in clowns, and even in a mundane creature: the bird. This was not the first time- nor the last- that the bird had been awed and feared alike. Birds have found a prominent place in the human psyche: as indigenous trickster characters and revered gods the world over and as signs of purity an hope. With the works of Edgar Allan Poe, birds became more than a backdrop; they became the misunderstood harbingers of fate. They came in the beginning of du Maurier’s version of The Birds and had “drawn blood. Frightened… bewildered….seeking shelter, had stabbed him [Nat] in the darkness”. Nat responds by shaking the odd occurrence off and going back to sleep (Maurier 28).

In general, blonde-haired women are stereotyped as flirty, carefree, carrying light burdens. Where the birds are dim and menacing there must be a goddess in white or platinum blonde to shine a light through the darkness. There also must be a dark and brooding brunette hero to be the guardian. Because The Birds was produced in black and white, the use of neutral and extremely dark or light shades is important to establish contrast and sometimes to not establish contrast. Hitchcock’s cinematography has its moments of masterful poignancy- moments in which it looks like the birds come and go in some supernatural fog.

Hitchcock’s The Birds has that directorial quirk that he was his celebrated signature. Hitchcock, like Du Maurier, had a talent for building suspense with the smallest details. That being said, visually and mentally evocative imagery can be quite different and cannot be lumped together. Similarity of plot cannot disguise the two completely different perspectives of the two artists. Even if the author herself had written the script and directed it, it would have had small inconsistencies and differences from the original, printed version because each medium has its own strengths and weaknesses to lay out on the table.

A prime example is that of control. Both du Maurier and Hitchcock sought control over their artistic work. However, due to the sheer magnitude of the number of people required to produce a film, that was near impossible for Hitchcock. He was often heard calling his actors cattle. Needless to say, he was not universally adored. Actors aside, other film industry experts, such as screenplay writers, were frequently ostracized by his single-minded ambition to reach his ultimate goal for a film. Hate it or love it, the move from the du Maurier’s killer seagulls to the murderous ravens was a substitution which leant an inherent artistry and a more threatening and almost evil tone to the film.

In her book, The Rebecca Notebook and Other Memories, Daphne du Maurier outlined her list of five “must-have” literary components: atmosphere, simplicity, theme adhesion, well-defined characters, and patience for development. While Du Maurier’s birds were vengeful and her plot was suspenseful; Hitchcock’s birds were merely a prop to reach a new cinematic level and his concept of plot centered around writers piecing film together into the most comprehensible and convenient story line.

While Du Maurier’s birds were vengeful and her plot was suspenseful; Hitchcock’s birds were merely a prop to reach a new cinematic level and his concept of plot centered around writers piecing film together (post-mortem) into the most comprehensible and convenient story line. If these two had melded together it might have produced an attention to color, style, and plot much like that of modern-day director M. Night Shymalan.

One of the more unique creative decisions undertaken by Hitchcock insisted upon no soundtrack other than recordings of birds and feathers flapping. If the spectator listens very closely, the reach of the birds is everywhere at once.

Hitchcock approached the menace of the fed-up flock as a humanistic, Freudian study, as though he were studying Abnormal Psychology in criminal humans. He gave the birds a dark and brooding soul. It has been argued that his humanistic approach to the depiction of the birds is representative of his attitude toward women. After all, a common slang term for women during his younger years was “bird”.  Unfortunately, there is no way to know for sure whether he intended to portray this alternate symbolism. We do know that he was himself non-traditional, and we do know that he admired the 1950’s “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” expectation of silence and order. Media is among the most effective means of conveying an intended social agenda, such as the return to tradition.

Hitchcock bows low to the floor to capture dynamic perspective and blur the lines between the horizon and the approaching birds. He uses the images of fleeing children and last-second cutaways from the death. Thus, the grotesque description is within the audience’s imagination. The slaughter is only as morbidly descriptive as the imagination of the person watching (Hitchcock 1967). Similarly, in the original literature, du Maurier describes the dangling legs of a deceased man and ventures no further into the fatality (Maurier, 1963).

Two elements, upon which McCombe builds his case for Alfred Hitchcock’s cinematography as “Hyper-Romantic”, are those of family and of the wonders of the natural world. Hitchcock’s on-screen portrayals of relationships tended to be stodgy and rigid- a retro 1950’s dream shattered by the inconveniences of reality, of the likes of Du Maurier and her feminist predilection.

Whether it was known to him or not, Hitchcock lingers on themes of the beauty and fear of flight, of the Cold War’s legacy of paranoia and distrust, and of the duality of this inimical bird. In his discussions concerning Deleuze and The Birds, Buchanan lauded the screenshot legend’s ability to blend the looming terror of the birds “without ever pushing the oedipal drama into the background, they nevertheless obscure it from view: in effect, it gets lost in the foreground, in the tumult of the attacking birds” (Buchanan, 2002, 2).  In 1925 Sergei Eisenstein filmed as the Czar’s regime of soldiers killed a woman in the streets. They shot her through the eye.  The birds are constantly aiming for the eyes, the windows to the soul that had already turned away from the rest of the world and into their own corner of pre-modernistic paradise. There is a punishment for turning away, for being selfish, because the birds do not call and warn in vain. In a personal letter to a friend, du Maurier described the revelatory process of writing: “The evil in us comes to the surface. Unless we recognise it in time, accept it, understand it, we are all destroyed, just as the people in The Birds were destroyed” (Wisker 1).

Although Hitchcock’s idealism is worn on the sleeve, the presence of such sentimentality in the original work of du Maurier cannot be discounted either. The melodramatic romance is reminiscent of the tragic romance of Wuthering Heights. Thompson proposes that the roots underlying du Maurier’s literary motif is older yet; Thompson proposes that du Maurier’s basic plot characteristics and features have firm roots in the legendary fall of King Arthur. Arthur is killed by his own embittered creation, his unclaimed son, Mordred, and they both doggedly pursue the golden-haired Guinevere for their own selfish reasons. (Thompson, 2010, 52). In such a light, one might wonder what the Holy Grail is, what the “ultimate boon” of this particular heroic cycle. Is it survival, preservation of nature, or appreciation?

Those three themes not only apply to the birds themselves- but also to the underlying feminist struggle which du Maurier subtly furthered through her literature. Horror is traditionally a boys’ club. A few upstart stragglers might wonder in and cause a stir, but the genre of horror literature belongs to men. Women are not socially programmed to think or write unpleasant things. Wisker jests, in good fun, that the description of the evils of the antagonist are more appealing to mankind than the commendable values of the hero (Wisker, 2005). Du Maurier reconfigures the traditional masculine heroic mold by making Nat a bit of a bookworm (Maurier, 1963).

Du Maurier’s literature uses womankind as a parallel for nature, as a fellow oppressed group, but The Birds character of Melanie makes her presence in the novella known by ordering a delicacy: cooked bird. Women destroy each other, too, it seems. Du Maurier is not the idealist that Hitchcock is. Castratrix is du Maurier’s chosen mythic motif of the oppression of women due to mankind’s fear of their natural sexual, intuitive, and life-bearing state. To du Maurier the struggle of Nat to escape the birds is the fight to get away from nature and to nature, simultaneously, as he guards over Melanie, his Round Table’s golden Guinevere. The struggles of man and technology face off against the struggles of woman and nature (Wisker, 2005). Ironically, we are now pitting man and woman against each other yet again: the artistry of du Maurier versus that of Hitchcock. Perhaps more ironically, du Maurier’s own son and daughter-in-law were viciously attacked by seagulls in 2001.

The divide was further illustrated in the approach that Hitchcock chose. He wanted big and bad. For the time period, the special effects included and the stars involved in the production of The Birds was flabbergasting. Hitchcock understood the differences of showmanship that stood between a good story and a good film, and he was avidly in pursuit of an Academy Award.

Hitchcock and du Maurier have in common their ability to successfully convey the ominous, heebie-jeebies kind of creepy that makes the reader have to resist the urge to bite their nails. Hitchcock has his showman’s flair and occasionally-cheesy scene executions, i.e. his infamous Psycho sharp music and last-second look-away, and du Maurier has her pain-staking ability to draw the suspense into hours of entertaining reading and even break up the action with subtle tastes of humor. (Not even she can do it too long; The Birds is a short novella.)

That is the extent of the similarity between the written and “Holly”-written versions. As was mentioned earlier, Alfred Hitchcock preferred to concentrate mainly on the basics of the plot and let the rest develop around the cinematography. The original work was “only the loom on which he weaved his web”. This exclusivity only furthered his influence and affluence within the film industry. Although Daphne du Maurier also advocated the live-and-let-live principle of “build it up little by little”, she did not lose the direction in which the paper was originally intended. If Hitchcock’s rendition can indeed be called hyper-romantic, as McCombe claims, then perhaps this tendency to take such a large leap of faith was an extension of the inspiration involved in his personal creative process (2005).

Despite these differences, there is a certain Gothic appeal which lends itself to a show of heroism and the beauty in the shades of black. (Secretly men do watch those cheesy romantic comedies, too.) Despite the differences in the execution of the same basic plot, the underlying principles remain intact. The Gothic, romantic hero of both artworks has “an interest in the mystical, violence, and the grotesque, as well as a morbid preoccupation with death, and the irrational” (McCombe 65). Both are set in what should be utopia- California or Cornwall, the land of King Arthur; both are condemnatory of the excesses of humankind; both are true to the tenets of dramatic suspense and horror.

The audience may not agree with Hitchcock’s self-centered chauvinism or with du Maurier’s extremely analytical feminism, but they together create two sides which form one puzzle. Strangely enough, the picture formed is not just that of a horror story; it is the finger-pointing and misunderstanding as old as the Biblical tale of Adam and Eve. Both accounts are puzzling and more inquisitive than decisive, as if du Maurier and Hitchcock both were uncertain as to their own feelings and posed the question to the world at large. Instead, we question the future of mankind as usual.

Works Cited

Buchanan, Ian. “Schizoanalysis and Hitchcock: Deleuze and The Birds.” Strategies: Journal of Theory, Culture & Politics 15.1 (2002): 105-118. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 22 June 2010.

du Maurier, Daphne. The birds and other stories. 1963, Print.

Hitchcock, Alfred. The Birds. 1963, Film.

McCombe, John P. “Oh, I See…. “: The Birds and the Culmination of Hitchcock’s Hyper- Romantic Vision.” Cinema Journal 44.3 (2005): 64-80. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 24 June 2010.

Thompson, Terry W. “Sourcing Arthur’s Last Stand in du Maurier’s “The Birds”.” ANQ 23.1  (2010): 51-55. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 23 June 2010.

Wisker, Gina. “Don’t Look Now! The compulsions and revelations of Daphne du Maurier’s horror writing.” Journal of Gender Studies 8.1 (1999): 19-33. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 25 June 2010.