Uploaded 1 March 2001

Preliminary reading

[B]irds seem to combine the absence of emotion with irrational drive and therefore epitomize blind nature in contradistinction to the human, and this makes them ideal figures for those forces which are destructive of human social life.
– Richard Allen [1]

The third reading that is offered by Wood and Zizek is the “familial” … Here the birds no longer represent an evil God or a collective natural force, but rather the main character’s overly involved mother.
– Robert Samuels [2]

[I propose] that this child-aversive, future-negating force, answering so well to the inspiriting needs of a moribund familialism, be thought [of] as sinthome-osexuality …
– Lee Edelman [3]

The images of Melanie moving along the wall in circling movements and of her curled up on the sofa “recoiling from nothing at all” heighten [the] sense of her being under attack from her own emotions rather than any external force.
– Susan Smith [4]

The titles show a war between nature and culture, with the irrational and primitive vanquishing human illusions.
– Camille Paglia [5]

[T]he last word on the subject of the film: “It appears that the bird attacks come in waves with long intervals in between. The reason for this does not seem clear [as] yet.”
– Bill Krohn [6]

Introduction: Sturm and Drang

One way or another, the above quotations from recent writing about The Birds (USA 1963) all allude to the film’s depiction of a drive or force that is irrational. I fancy that some such force, at once life- and death-dealing, was always Hitchcock’s subject. Films such as The Ring (England 1927), Rich and Strange (England 1932), Lifeboat (USA 1944), The Trouble with Harry (USA 1955), and The Birds provide its purest and most vivid expression. In more concentrated form, it asserts its presence in the Albert Hall sequence of The Man Who Knew Too Much (USA 1956 version), [7]  whose turbulent Storm Cloud Cantata contains these lines, sung by the choir:

Yet stood the trees
Around whose head, screaming,
The night-birds wheeled and shot away. [8]

In what follows I shall call such a force “Will”, following the usage of the German Romantic philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860). Schopenhauer conceived Will to be the single cosmic principle, a force or striving that is blind and ultimately unknowable. I want to argue that, in the last analysis, Hitchcock’s films are about this Will and nothing else.

Of course, there’s a sense in which I’m on sure ground, so long as I stick to Schopenhauer’s concept, because Will is by his definition all we’ve got. Thus, apropos The Birds, it doesn’t matter to my argument that Robin Wood and Slavoj Zizek downplay readings that interpret the birds as evil deity or “collective natural force” in favour of one that emphasises the hostility and fears of the hero’s mother. The play of human emotions – the main subject, too, of Susan Smith’s reading of the film – is just as much Will as the undulations of the sea and the weather in Lifeboat, or the movement of wind and wheeling birds in the Storm Cloud Cantata. (Zizek offers a fourth, Lacanian reading, in which the birds incarnate “the fact that, on the [S]ymbolizing level, something ‘has not worked out'”,[9]  but a matching interpretation is invited by Schopenhauer’s system, as I’ll show.) What is so striking about the notion of Will to a Hitchcockian like myself is how Schopenhauer characterises it: Will is that which causes change and suffering in the world, whose working in humans is largely unconscious, and whose manifestations include all forms of egoism, notably the sex drive, yet which also logically provides the basis for Schopenhauer’s aesthetic and ethical positions, which are of the first order. Furthermore, as I’ve indicated, the notion of Will pertains to all aspects of the world, the visible as well as the invisible. For a filmmaker, Schopenhauer’s Weltanschauung may well offer the closest thing to a “complete” or “natural” philosophy. [10]  Finally, something else that’s striking is how exactly Schopenhauer’s conception of music matches Hitchcock’s notion of “pure cinema”: both concern the purest, least mediated expression of Will. [11]

In turn, I see Hitchcockian suspense as making an audience experience  the Will, or an analogue thereof. Schopenhauer had noted the same thing of music. In a celebrated passage he wrote: “The effect of the suspension [consists of] a dissonance delaying the final consonance that is with certainty awaited; in this way the longing for it is strengthened … This is clearly an analogue of the satisfaction of the [individual] will which is enhanced through delay.” [12] According to Christopher Janaway, many see this idea especially reflected in Wagner’s composition of Tristan and Isolde  (1865). [13] So perhaps it’s no coincidence that Hitchcock’s favourite composer was Wagner, [14] just as his favourite painter  was Paul Klee – whose manifesto On Modern Art (1924) speaks of the artist embracing “the life force itself” in order to emerge into “that Romanticism which is one with the universe”.[15]  For his part, Hitchcock from about 1934 held to what he called the “moving-around principle”, whereby the ideal cinematic form is the chase. He commented: “I don’t know why. That’s the way it is. But just as the film – be it in preparation, in the camera, or in the projection booth – has to move around, so in the same way I think the story has to move around also.” [16]

In other words, the cinema’s dynamism reflects and extends that of its surroundings. This may not be the most sophisticated explanation of why cinema and Will are allied, [17] but it surely goes to the core of Hitchcock’s method of filmmaking. And it’s empirically-based (“That’s the way it is”). Schopenhauer, too, had the capacity of “looking to see”.[18] Further, Hitchcock made no bones to Truffaut about his position: “Directors who lose control are concerned with the abstract.” [19] [19] It’s clearly a mark of the hero-status of Mitch (Rod Taylor) in The Birds that he so quickly comes to terms with what he calls “the bird war” or “plague”[20] by asking sagely, “It’s happening. Isn’t that a reason [for not denying it]?”[ [21]

Now, to focus what I’ve been saying so far, I want to briefly analyse the already-cited Albert Hall sequence in the remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much. To fully appreciate the sequence, one must attend to both the words and the music of the Storm Cloud Cantata, which the suspenseful events in the auditorium reflect in an almost surreal way. The reader will recall that Jo McKenna (Doris Day) has recently learned that a foreign Prime Minister is going to be assassinated during the concert; and that her young son has been kidnapped and held hostage to silence her. What is she to do? For much of the sequence she seems literally paralyzed, torn between love of her son and a sense of duty to save the life of the eminent person resplendent in his waistcoat and scarlet sash in the dignitaries’ box nearby. In effect, the issue here is: what is the will of an individual against that of the cosmos itself? Meanwhile, the cantata advances inexorably towards its fateful cymbal-crash when the assassin will fire:

There came a whispered terror on the breeze,
And the dark forest shook

And on the trembling trees came nameless fear,
And panic overtook each flying creature of the wild.

And when they all had fled
Yet stood the trees …

Of course, the trees are part of Nature, or Will. The fact that they remain steadfast in the face of the storm, despite their “nameless fear”, suggests the courage of Jo who comes to the Albert Hall, and remains, because she knows that it is her duty to stop the planned assassination. Arguably, in her paralyzed condition, she simply surrenders to what “will be”. [22]  Yet we should note an ambiguity. Given the film’s emphasis on religion – besides other major human concerns like music, social class, etc. – in both the Marrakesh and London scenes, Jo’s eventual wordless scream that deflects the assassin’s aim suggests a last-minute appeal to an entity beyond language and/or the individual will, an entity which (who?) promptly intervenes. That is, Jo’s “whatever will be” song early in the film looks like fatalism – appropriately, she’s visiting an Islamic country at the time – yet still Hitchcock doesn’t preclude the possibility of Divine intervention. There’s a similar ambiguity in, for example, The Trouble With Harry and The Wrong Man (USA 1956). On the other hand, the entity that Jo effectively supplicates or invokes, and which may or may not have been deflected from its own “predetermined” course, could well be just Will. [23] A “force of destiny”, or kismet, seems often to be invoked in Hitchcock, going right back to The Ring and beyond.

Then again, in the very act of her apparent surrendering to Will and/or “what will be”, Jo is humbled in such a way that her own wilfulness is stilled, and that is precisely a situation that Schopenhauer saw as offering a form of “release”. An ambiguous situation again arises, underlined by the closing lyrics of the Storm Cloud Cantata:

Finding release the storm clouds broke and drowned the dying moon.

Finding release the storm clouds broke –

Finding release!

A general release – here the cloud-burst – that is also a personal release – Jo’s, for example – is entirely feasible in Schopenhauer’s epistemology, where the whole phenomenal world remains subjective. He wrote, famously, “The world is my representation”.[24]  Likewise, in Hitchcock’s subjective cinema, outer and inner can scarcely be separated. But, further, Schopenhauer’s ethics  are about self-surrender that leads to enhanced perception and compassion. There’s an analogous situation in The Birds. Another sign of Mitch’s “heroic” learning-curve is his strategic “surrender”, at Melanie’s behest, to the pervasive presence of the birds. Thinking to drive off some of the gathering crows, he picks up a stone, but then immediately lowers it again when Melanie (‘Tippi’ Hedren) protests at his folly, “Don’t Mitch, don’t”. At the end of the film, where a note of compassion is very marked, the Brenners and Melanie are spared (released) to live another day …

And again, Schopenhauer’s notion of the world as Will applies in another way to the Albert Hall sequence. The major human concerns that figure prominently in both the Marrakesh and London scenes are representative of “life”. (Cf the depiction of San Francisco in Vertigo [USA 1958], with its missions, forts, shops, and art galleries: it’s a city seen sub specie aeternitatis.) Those concerns – religion, music, social class – all become focussed during the performance of the Storm Cloud Cantata. For instance, the very words of the cantata help evoke a pantheistic form of religion (naturally the massed choir is apt here); and the concert is attended by an audience of dignitaries, the well-to-do, and the less privileged classes. (The working-class is represented by the Hall’s staff, such as the elderly attendant who approaches Jo for her ticket). [25]  Crucially, the sequence and its music “sum up” the film to this point. Not only has the film itself been full of Sturm und Drang – it is, after all, a melodrama – but the concert by its own range and variegated nature “parallels the world”, as Schopenhauer had observed of orchestral music generally. [26]

“Vital” titles

Verbal and non-verbal indications of Hitchcock’s preoccupation with “life” are everywhere, in and out of the films. The most explicit may be what Fred (Henry Kendall) tells Emily (Joan Barry) at the start of Rich and Strange: “I want more life – life, I tell you.” The film, conceived in the same cautionary vein as Lifeboat and The Birds, proceeds to enact Fred’s wish and to thereby expose the essentially subjective nature of what the term “life” means to this (very) suburban English couple. A descendent of Fred is “Scottie” (James Stewart) in Vertigo, whom Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore) tempts with notions of “colour, excitement, power, freedom”, i.e., heightened life. [27] Like Fred, Scottie is soon deceived by a false anima-figure (the “Princess”, Madeleine – the latter sent by Elster), [28]  and at the end seems likely to remain immured in a deadly solipsism. [29] To Catch a Thief (USA 1955) opens with a shot of a travel poster proclaiming, “If you love life, you’ll love France.” In an approximate reversal of the Vertigo situation, John Robie (Cary Grant) inhabits a “travel-folder heaven” on the French Riviera, and in the course of the film successfully affirms his right to possess both it and the beautiful girl, Francie Stevens (Grace Kelly), who offers him her help. Another Cary Grant vehicle, North by Northwest (USA 1959), contains near the end its hero’s line, “I never felt more alive.” Like The 39 Steps (England 1935), the film is about a quickening process undergone by its hero – and its audience – in what amounts to a demonstration of Henri Bergson’s theory of a “vital force” that, if sufficiently intense, may give direct experience of “freedom”. Bergson’s notion, a more inherently optimistic version of Schopenhauer’s idea of cosmic Will, [30]  was hugely fashionable in the 1920s when Hitchcock was both starting out as a director and mixing in the heady atmosphere of the newly-formed London Film Society, whose members included George Bernard Shaw,[ [31] H.G. Wells, film theorist Ivor Montagu, and others. That Hitchcock always retained a keen conception of “life” as an entity may perhaps be inferred from his boast to a journalist in 1972 that his newest film, Frenzy (USA), was indeed full of “life”.[32]

But to systematically observe the notion of a life-force that is also a death-force evolving in Hitchcock’s work, the best place to look is the titles sequences of the films. Such sequences in Hitchcock were almost never static; [33] however, it took time for them to advance from mere symbolism to direct representation of an ambiguous life/death force. Examples of the latter are the Saul Bass titles sequences for Vertigo, North by Northwest, and Psycho (USA 1960). In each, the working of a mysterious and somewhat sinister force may be felt, but equally each sequence fascinates because of the sheer art and/or design invested in it.(Characteristically, the life/death ambiguity runs right through North by Northwest to its Mount Rushmore climax set amidst Gutzon Borglum’s carved faces of the American Presidents.) A leap-forward for Hitchcock was certainly The Ring, from a story he wrote himself with elements borrowed from E.A. Dupont’s (suitably-named) Variete (1925). The still-shot of the Albert Hall auditorium that’s behind the titles makes impressive use of Stimmung, mood achieved by means of lighting. We see a distant, lit-up boxing ring surrounded by unseen watchers. The intimations of destiny anticipate the film’s own Albert Hall climax – a prize fight – and the Albert Hall sequences of The Man who Knew Too Much (both 1934 and 1956 versions), as well as the “fateful” titles sequence of Strangers on a Train (USA 1951). The latter sequence is set in the domed entrance hall of a busy railway station. It’s fair to say that the circular shape of the Albert Hall, in particular, is used by Hitchcock to imply that the people and “forces” assembled there constitute a microcosm of the wider world.

Which may bring us to The Manxman (1930). In both the Hall Caine novel (1894), loosely based on Tennyson’s narrative poem, Enoch Arden (1864), and Hitchcock’s film, the Isle of Man represents the world, a corrupted Eden. In the first of many visual references in Hitchcock to the sea as a symbolic force, the titles sequence shows waves breaking on rocks. This evokes Will (see discussion of Lifeboat below), a “force of destiny” whose complementary image is the repeated view of a lighthouse and its revolving beam seen later in the film. The lighthouse was apparently Hitchcock’s idea, for it’s not in the novel, and it adds the same possibility of intervention to forestall fate that would be raised, albeit ambiguously, in The Man Who Knew Too Much. Darkness against light, or rather darkness offset by light, is itself a motif suggestive of the death/life nature of Will, and is ubiqitous in Hitchcock. An instance is the opening shot of The 39 Steps which pans along an electric sign outside a variety hall at night. And of course the variety hall is a further emblem of “life”, anticipating, for example, the Mardi Gras parade that was to have opened To Catch a Thief– only rain necessitated a switch in emphasis to the already-mentioned travel sign, “If you love life …”

The title of Lifeboat is no more fortuitous than the name of its Nazi villain, Willi (Walter Slezak). What is being invoked is Friedrich Nietzsche’s notion of a “will-to-power”, derived in turn from Schopenhauer’s teaching that the primary manifestation in humans of the cosmic Will is “will-to-life”.[34] Will is chiefly symbolised in the film by the surrounding ocean. (Cf in this respect another 1944 film, Lewis Allen’s The Uninvited [USA], in which the sea is called “a place of life and death and eternity too”.) The sea’s vicissitudes, and the weather’s, prove unpredictable and “irrational”, like the human drama played out in the lifeboat by its human occupants. Fittingly, when the “ersatz Superman”, Willi, fails to share his secret water supply, what betrays him are the drops of salt water, sweat, on his forehead. He has tried to embody will-to-power, but it was a “perverted” notion to begin with. Hitchcock sees that beyond the individual’s will there’s a universal Will, to which everything is finally subject. As I phrased the matter in my book: “[Schopenhauer] did not speak of a will-to-power in nature. That was a “perversion” introduced by Nietzsche. The Nazis then in turn “perverted” Nietzsche’s concept by making “will-to-power” a dogma, a political imperative.” [35] Revealingly, a famous remark of Hitchcock’s, about how “everything’s perverted in a different way”, is pure Schopenhauer (though it might be mistaken for Nietzsche!). [36]  When I examine The Birds below, I’ll suggest that such a remark offers a key to the film, including its stance of compassion.

The deathly aspect of the ocean is especially emphasised in the Lifeboat titles sequence, showing the mother ship foundering. [37] An image of a tilting funnel is accompanied by a roar as the water sweeps over the ship, extinguishing the flames of its boiler. Years later, for the spy thriller Torn Curtain (USA 1966), Hitchcock constructed a matching titles sequence in which a flame burns fiercely on the left of screen, representing the sun and “life”, while on the right, a succession of the film’s characters struggle to avoid being smothered by a swirling grey mist. [38] At the film’s end, the main couple (Paul Newman and Julie Andrews) are seen huddling for warmth in front of an electric radiator and pulling around them a “pessimistic”, mist-grey blanket, which finally fills the screen. [39] Meanwhile, half-way through the film, a protracted death scene – that of the doughty Communist security guard named Gromek (Wolfgang Kieling) – has emphasised, in Hitchcock’s words, “how difficult it is to kill a man”. Effectively, it puts us right “inside” Will, which Schopenhauer, modifying Kant, said is directly knowable in just one special sense: namely, our experience of it flowing through our own bodies.

Again, the titles sequence of Spellbound (USA 1945) finds a significant echo years later in a titles sequence proposed for The Trouble With Harry but not used. In the Spellbound sequence, accompanied by the eerie music of the theremin, leaves blow from a tree in Vermont, signalling the working of a force that inflicts mutability on the world. That force is neither malign nor benign – or, rather, it is both. Its death-dealing aspect would seem to be defied by the psychiatric institution optimistically named “Green Manors”, where the film-proper begins, but the wider world soon asserts itself. [40] The same theremin passage accompanies each of the anxiety attacks endured by “J.B.” (Gregory Peck) after he meets Constance (Ingrid Bergman). Given the growth and healing that J.B. undergoes during the film, albeit not without suffering, the motif here in its very ambiguity seems Schopenhauerian. And so it is with a similar idea informing the comedy The Trouble With Harry. Originally the film was to have begun with a time-lapse sequence showing the growth to maturity of a single maple leaf (again the setting is Vermont), from the merest protuberance of a young bud to a full-blown leaf whose palm would have “color[ed] down from the scarlet fingers to a paler red, deep orange and into yellow”. The veins of the leaf would finally have darkened and stiffened, “holding [it] up with Autumn’s regal pride before the death of winter”.[41]  In the event, this somewhat Walt Disney-ish sequence was replaced by a series of sketches in the faux-naif style of Klee, done by artist Saul Steinberg (1914-99). The sting-in-the tail now became the image of a dead body. [42]  What the film-proper then proceeds to show is a set of charmingly amoral, i.e., lively, characters negotiating a particularly adventurous day and coming to terms with their mortality. The film repeatedly hints at the approach of winter. [43]  But, also repeatedly, a church bell rings in the background, unremarked by the characters. [44] So perhaps once again an invisible Divine intervention may have occurred along the way. Then again, maybe not!

Ambiguity is the very essence of Shadow of a Doubt (USA 1943), the last film I want to comment on before turning to The Birds. The titles sequence showing couples dancing the Merry Widow Waltz might seem to be all about “life”, but its sinister strain is unmistakable. Hitchcock presumably wasn’t joking when he once said that with a little effort even the word “love” could be made to sound ominous. [45] Schopenhauer had emphasised that “life” and “love” are simply products of the larger Will, in which creation and destruction go hand in hand. And such a notion is the almost tangible premise of Shadow of a Doubt, as it had been of The Lodger (England 1926). In both films, the general idea is to repudiate by the end the kind of “incestuous atmosphere” that George Orwell, for one, detected in the typical endings of 19th-century novels. Hence, in Shadow of a Doubt, we have the symbolic business with the ring that Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotten) gives his niece and namesake, young Charlie (Teresa Wright), on arriving to stay with her family. At first, she is happy to accept this “betrothal”, seeing it as the answer to her prayer for a “miracle”,[46] and Uncle Charlie as “the one right person to save us”. Later, though, the gift awakens in the teenager a sexual instinct for which her earlier restlessness has prepared her. Her eventual ruthless rejection of her uncle – but not of the ring, which she takes with her to Jack Graham (MacDonald Carey) – thus signifies the working of Will and change, but with a characteristic Hitchcockian ambiguity. The connotation is again of a corrupted garden, or “lost paradise”, here represented by the idyllic small town, Santa Rosa, California, where Charlie’s family lives. [47] Sadly, Charlie could not have known that her dandyish uncle would turn out to be not just a gigolo but a serial-killer preying on wealthy widows! Yet in the larger scheme of things, perhaps he really does “save” his niece’s family. And young Charlie will always know that she remains spiritually bonded to him, exactly as Schopenhauer’s conception of the noumenal would have it. [48] One atypical 19th-century novel does come to mind: Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights (1847), containing Catherine Earnshaw’s fervent cry, “Nelly, I am  Heathcliff!”

The Birds

Hitchcock’s The Birds represents the third story by Daphne du Maurier (1907-89) that he filmed. Both Jamaica Inn (England 1939) and Rebecca (USA 1940) had contained more than a touch of the Gothic – Rebecca, notably, being a mix of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847) with ingredients drawn from later works like playwright Sir Arthur Wing Pinero’s His House in Order (1906) [49] and espionage novelist E. Phillips Oppenheim’s The Great Impersonation (1920) – and one can detect the same modified Gothic spirit in The Birds, albeit with most of the external trappings removed. I shan’t attempt here to analyse how the Gothic novel and Schopenhauer’s contemporanaeous emphasis on such things as Will and the Sublime overlapped, though there are passages in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), for example, that invite such a study. What I would like to do – I trust without sounding smug – is to quote something that Bryan Magee, an authority on both Schopenhauer and Wagner, wrote of Tristan and Isolde. According to Magee, “[p]assage after passage in the text is [demonstrably] poeticized Schopenhauer, and for anyone familiar with Schopenhauer the verbal imagery is unproblematic throughout the work – but alas, only for someone familiar with Schopenhauer”.[50] Mutatis mutandis, it seems to me that a similar remark is justified about The Birds, which I’ll now try and show. Note that Hitchcock’s film itself cites Tristan and Isolde by way of suggesting the sublimated yearning of schoolteacher Annie Hayworth (Suzanne Pleshette) for the unavailable Mitch …

The titles sequence of The Birds is in the two-of-a-kind category. The credits of Jamaica Inn were visibly eroded by waves; those of The Birds appear to be pecked away by swooping and darting birds. In each case, the working of Will is symbolised by the sea and/or the birds. Following the credits, The Birds opens in a San Francisco pet shop. To tease Melanie, Mitch asks her, “Doesn’t this make you feel awful … keeping birds in cages?” She replies, “Well, we can’t just let them fly around the shop, can we?”- thereby missing (or evading) his point. That point proves crucial. Both the film and its trailer remind us that birds have been caged, shot at, eaten and otherwise abused by humans throughout history. In other words, we’re again being told of the working of Will, more precisely human egoism and rapaciousness, exactly as Schopenhauer had characterised those things. [51] Schopenhauer understandably came to regard Will as a cruel joke, best turned against itself, notably with the help of art or music. [52] Accordingly, I see The Birds as an almost literal enactment of that thought. As Mitch leaves the pet shop, he says that it’s time Melanie found herself “on the other end of a gag, for a change”. He gets his wish – writ large.

Next, consider Schopenhauer’s notion of the Sublime. Actually, the notion is Kant’s, but Schopenhauer gives it a special twist. According to Kant, the contemplation of something potentially destructive, viewed from the vantage point of present safety, brings a pleasurable sense of elevation. [53] In the case of The Birds, such a notion might be said to combine with Wordsworth’s well-known definition of poetry (“emotion recollected in tranquillity”) and Hitchcock’s definition of “suspense” as like the judicious thrill of riding a roller-coaster, to help generate that film’s beautiful terror. [54] Schopenhauer’s version of the Sublime would add another slant. A sense of the sublime, he said, corresponds to the serene abandonment of all willing, the highest of human states. [55] He wrote of tragedy: “What gives to everything tragic … the characteristic tendency to the sublime, is the dawning of the knowledge that the world and life can afford us no true satisfaction, and are therefore not worth our attachment to them”.[56]  At first hearing, I dare say, that doesn’t exactly suggest The Birds – though the idea certainly permeates Tristan and Isolde and would seem to be at least mooted by Vertigo. [57]  Nonetheless, from Schopenhauer’s insight about attachment and its opposite, non-attachment, he derived compassion as his supreme ethical imperative; and compassion, as already noted, and discussed below,is a keynote of the end of The Birds. We shouldn’t allow the characteristic ambiguity of Hitchcock’s endings to blind us to possible inferences never quite drawn within the films themselves … [58]

Here’s a related consideration. A paradigm of the films is that they quickly shift locale from the everyday world to a realm where extraordinary events happen (but which patently remains subjective – other people may be glimpsed still going about their business,unheeding). Vertigo, North by Northwest, and Psycho are like that, and so is The Birds, in which radio broadcasts keep reminding us that the bird attacks are, for now, relatively localised. The paradigm doubtless derives from adventure and thriller fiction: Erskine Childers’s celebrated The Riddle of the Sands (1903) [59] and John Buchan’s best-seller The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915) both begin with their respective heroes bored in London, though events soon propel them to more exotic locales. But it’s an emphasis on the subjective – revealingly, in Hitchcock the exotic may be confined to just one apartment (for example, Rope [USA 1948]) – that lets the films raise issues concerning “that which lies beyond”. Those issues are seldom spelt out in the films. Rather, they are felt as something faintly surreal, hinting at what Leonard (Martin Landau) in North by Northwest calls “ceiling and possibilities unlimited”. The inchoate desires of the Nietzschean thrill-killers in Rope – homosexuals like Leonard, let’s note – come to nothing except death. [60] But the surreal note has been sounded in that film from the moment that Brandon (John Dall) and Phillip (Farley Granger) arrange to serve a meal from a chest containing their victim’s body to his unsuspecting family and friends. From that point on, the film plays like an animated version of a painting by, say, Magritte, [61] one of several Surrealists influenced by Freud – who wrote in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1921) that “[t]he aim of all life is death”.[62] Yet the best person to explicate Hitchcock films like Rope and The Birds  is surely Schopenhauer, who himself influenced Nietzsche, Freud, and the Surrealists. [63]

Part of the surreal import of The Birds is to the effect that there’s more than meets our eye – or maybe less – but we’re powerless to substantially change that state of affairs. Further, Hitchcock’s remark about the film, that it shows how “catastrophe surrounds us all”,[64] is both surreal and decidedly Schopenhauerian, much like his remark that “everything’s perverted in a different way”. For Schopenhauer, the relation between these two statements would be that Will causes suffering, which is pandemic (he defined situations of suffering very broadly, as everything from natural disasters to boredom), and that we’re all part of the whole, whether we acknowledge this fact or not. We’re all just Will, and it’s illusory to think that we’re separate entities, though illusion is inevitable because each of us remains subjective. [65] Schopenhauer took from Kant the twin notions of reality and appearance, the noumenal and the phenomenal, the one and the many. He called them Will and Representation. And because we each consist essentially of Will, and nothing else, there’s a sense in which we’re each responsible for, and part of, the suffering in the world. The famous Hitchcockian motif of “transfer of guilt”, first noted by the French critics, is an expression of this truth, that in a sense we’re all one and interchangeable. We’re all variants – “perversions” – of the one Will, though of course those variants are themselves ephemeral and even illusory. Furthermore, for Schopenhauer, and I suspect for Hitchcock, all visible aspects of the cosmos, including rocks, storm clouds, outboard motor boats, telephone boxes, and, yes, birds, are but manifestations, at different “grades of objectification”, of the Will.

Here, then, are specific Schopenhauerian ideas that seem demonstrated by The Birds.

(a) Boredom. Ordinary existence consists of pain and recurring boredom and of our efforts to alleviate that condition. [66]

Shadow of a Doubt begins with both Uncle Charlie and his niece, young Charlie, lying on their respective beds, bored. The Birds begins as a bored playgirl, Melanie, meets a successful but mother-dominated young lawyer, Mitch, in a pet shop, and they engage in by-play which immediately spins out of control when a canary escapes from its cage. The general picture of everyday life that Hitchcock paints is of (concealed) suffering and (nominal) contentment precariously balanced in order to render existence reasonably tolerable. Schopenhauer put things similarly:

This is the life of almost [everyone]; they will, they know what they will, and they strive after this with enough success to protect them from despair, and enough failure to preserve them from boredom and its consequences. [67]

It’s difficult to think of any Hitchcock film that doesn’t begin with a character or characters bored or actually suffering. Think of Fred and Emily at the start of Rich and Strange, or even of wealthy Julia Rainbird (Cathleen Nesbitt) at the start of Family Plot (USA 1976) yearning to make contact with her long-lost nephew so that she may ease her conscience for having once expelled him from the family. “How did you know about my troubled sleep?” she naîvely asks Madame Blanche (Barbara Harris) – when all Blanche would have had to do is read Schopenhauer! Hitchcock’s final film is a testimony by the master showman and metaphysician to how he had always profoundly understood audiences’ need to temporarily escape their lives. “It must look real but it must never be real”, he once explained of a Hitchcock film. A sense of relevance is necessary, of course. So a Hitchcock film invariably implies parallels between its characters (or, on occasion, escaped canaries) and the audience. [68] And hence the notable subjectivity of the films which, like Hitchcock’s “moving-around principle”, turns out to have an analogue in the wider world as described by Schopenhauer. “The world is my [subjective] representation.”

(b) Humankind is at one with the natural world. There is only Will.

Schopenhauer wrote:

only [Will] is thing in itself… It is the innermost essence, the kernel, of every particular thing and also of the whole. It appears in every blindly acting force of nature, and also in the deliberate conduct of man … [69]

In an astonishingly modern insight (one of many), Schopenhauer insisted:

One must be blind, deaf and dumb … not to see that the animal is in essence absolutely the same thing that we are, and that the difference lies merely in the accident, the [perceiving] intellect, and not in the substance, which is [Will]. [70]

Throughout The Birds, Hitchcock draws pointed analogies between humans and birds, from the twittering of the pet shop owner, Mrs MacGruder (Ruth McDevitt), and the bright eyes and head-tilting of Melanie and Mrs Brenner (Jessica Tandy), to the (stylised) murmuring and chuckling of the massing birds and the ironic moment when Melanie becomes “caged” in a telephone box.

Yet as a symbol of Will itself, the birds with their “motives” remain shadowy or obscure. Which is as it should be, given that Schopenhauer felt that only in special circumstances can we even begin to “know” Will. (To Kant, of course, the Thing-in-itself was by definition unknowable.) When Zizek suggests that the birds incarnate “the fact that, on the [S]ymbolizing level, something ‘has not worked out'”, he might just as well, it seems to me, invoke the fact that we’re all bound in subjectivity, i.e., what Schopenhauer called the principium individuation is, and therefore are denied full understanding of our condition. As I’ll say in the final section of this essay, Zizek’s Lacanian readings of Hitchcock, when not merely wilful, often seem to me to be capable of being subsumed by a Schopenhauerian reading. Both Schopenhauer and Lacan were Kantians, let’s remember …

(c) The principium individuationis (principle of individuation). Reducing Kant’s “categories” of cognition to just two or three, Schopenhauer said that we have an inbuilt capacity to perceive and comprehend all sense data in terms of time, space, and causality, though these are not inherent characteristics of reality, i.e., Will, itself. [71]

In other words, we experience the world subjectively, as phenomenon, and not as it is in itself, as noumenon. For all we know, there may be much about the cosmos that eludes us entirely and always will do so (whatever scientists believe to the contrary), [72] simply because we do not have the mental categories to begin to grasp “that which lies beyond”. Symbolically, Hitchcock’s birds function as emissaries from that other side, putting us in our place.

But what is most salient about Hitchcock’s (intuitive?) grasp of the principle of individuation is how he makes it work for him in his films. Take the categories of time and space. Given that these are mental categories whose characteristics we “project” onto the outside world (perhaps it’s instructive to recall that physical time and space are said to be other than we actually perceive them: e.g., curved), Hitchcock artfully gives them full rein in his films. Those films become more substantial and satisfying as a result. There’s an illuminating account by Hitchcock’s long-time art director, Robert Boyle, about the sequence in North by Northwest where Thornhill (Cary Grant) arrives at the spies’ house near Mount Rushmore:

That was really worked out. By the time Cary Grant gets up and sees the car come in, we have gone completely around the house and we know exactly where everything is. We know that it’s cantilevered, that it’s on a high place; we know that you can drive a car up there and then we set up a situation where we can put Cary in a very precarious situation, in which if he’s discovered he’d be lost, but also a position where he can see everything.

He has to come in the house, he has to see the airfield, he has to see the balcony inside the house, and he has to see [Eve’s] bedroom inside the house, to let him know what the girl was doing. It’s worked out from the need of the scene. [73]

This sort of thing – telling a film in terms of the audience’s need to orient itself and be prepared for events, i.e., matters of space and time – came easily to Hitchcock. The spies’ house is itself located for us spatially by the (occluded) taxi ride Thornhill takes there from hospital in nearby Rapid City (it is enough that the dialogue establishes for us Thornhill’s exact itinerary); while in temporal terms, the house’s Frank Lloyd Wright look locates it within the modernist setting of the film overall. Similar considerations inform The Birds. At the start, a street corner in San Francisco is located for us in time and space by means of glimpsed travel posters (including one of the Golden Gate Bridge) and airline signs, by familiar icons (a cable-car, the Dewey Monument commemorating an event in the Spanish-American War), by a flock of gulls “heading inland” (as Mrs MacGruder is heard to observe), and so on. Likewise, Bodega Bay is located for us by Melanie’s drive there up the Coast Road[74] and by a further motor tour of its environs she makes after she arrives. Particular significance is given the red mail-box outside Annie Hayworth’s house. It serves as an emblem of her own and Bodega Bay’s relative isolation in terms of distance and time from San Francisco; we’re also told that the mail in this part of the world often fails to arrive! By contrast, Melanie is repeatedly associated with telephones and telephone boxes (as well as her late-model Aston-Martin car). But finally, after a telephone box affords her only brief respite from the birds’ onslaughts, such “social distinctions” are made to seem less important. This is one of the ways the film makes us aware that “it’s all One” …

(d) The “principle of sufficient reason”. This central idea of Schopenhauer’s holds that nothing is without a reason or cause for its being, or at least that we all think that way, quite literally. [75]

It follows from what I’ve been saying that Hitchcock is out to show his audience up, or anyway to make us surrender to his suspense – which is a close analogue of Will. (When Thornhill in North by Northwest says, “I never felt more alive”, he is speaking for us.) An “outflanking technique” is constantly at work in The Birds, as when the ornithologist Mrs Bundy (Ethel Griffies) humbles us with her remark that “birds have been on this planet since archeopteryx”. But nowhere does Hitchcock use the technique more tellingly than in the matter of causality. The film teases us with possible reasons for the bird attacks, starting with “a storm at sea” (noted by Mrs MacGruder), which really explain nothing. Like Will itself, which they help symbolise, the bird attacks are simply a given. Mitch is well on the way to the right attitude when he observes, “It’s happening. Isn’t that a reason?” But the film must first contend with the all-too-human response represented by the hysterical mother (Doreen Lang) in the Tides Restaurant. Turning directly to the camera, she tells the audience, “I think you’re the cause of all this!”

Her accusation epitomises the principle of sufficient reason at work. Faced with what is inexplicable, she seeks both a scapegoat and a way out. In subjective camera, she accuses Melanie/us of being evil and the cause of the bird attacks. Self-delusion was seldom more succinctly portrayed; furthermore, I find the moment to be as ontologically true, in its own way, as the scene of Jo McKenna’s enforced scream in The Man Who Knew Too Much.. [76] But of course there’s more to it. The way in which the moment implicates us, the audience, is both apt and unsettling. For we do cause the bird attacks to happen, in at least two ways. First of all, we watch the film, and even pay money for the privilege, because we want the birds to “do their stuff”. Hadn’t Hitchcock teased the public by announcing, with apparent scant regard for grammar, ” The Birds is coming!”? Accordingly, we may be said to will the birds to come. But also, as we watch and enjoy the chaos wrought by the birds, we nonetheless follow the principle of sufficient reason and, like the mother in the restaurant, seek a cause for the bird attacks that is outside ourselves. This is highly wilful of us. As Schopenhauer would say, both the need for an explanation and the actual reasons that we find are, in the final anaysis, quite as subjective and self-serving as our wilful pleasure in watching the birds wreak their havoc – the fire in the Bodega Bay township, for instance.

(e) All knowledge is subjective.

When Rupert (James Stewart) at the climax of Rope exclaims, “Did you think you were God, Brandon?”, I take him to be asserting the above Schopenhauerian truth. We can never know “that which lies beyond”. The noumenal exists but we are forever barred from it. (Appropriately, Rupert is in the same room as the two killers, and the climax is accompanied in theatrical fashion by the flashing colours of a neon sign outside the window …) [77] To accept this truth, taught by Kant and Schopenhauer, and never disproven (though often ignored), [78]  is to learn humility – and perhaps compassion. Rupert doesn’t altogether learn these things, to judge by his vindictive screech at the end, “You’re going to die, Brandon”. Though he speaks of the world as having hitherto been a dark and mysterious place, he seems too concerned with exculpating himself not to cling to an element of self-deception. Again this is what Schopenhauer would have predicted, given the basically egoistic nature of human willing.

By the time Hitchcock made The Birds, his own level of insight had deepened. Of the striking high-shot of Bodega Bay when the birds attack the town centre, he gave an explanation to Truffaut in purely pragmatic terms: it was intended to show the topography of the town in relation to “the sea, the coast, and the gas station on fire, in one single image”.[79] Emotionally, though, the shot carries its own considerable meaning. One could easily be reminded of a moment in Turgenev’s story, Ghosts, as described by his biographer:

There is … a direct reminiscence of Schopenhauer in the description … of the earth as seen from above, when the humans look small and unimportant and are locked in eternal struggle with blind forces which they cannot control – creatures who have [but lately] emerged from the slime that covers the earth’s surface. [80]

The famous passage in Schopenhauer referred to here is none other than the one in which the philosopher reminds us again of our total immersion in subjectivity: all of empirical reality is “in the first instance … only phenomenon of the brain”.[81] Arguably, in the case of Hitchcock’s “birds’-eye” (“God’s-eye”?) shot, we are being reminded that Will, the noumenon, would regard things quite differently to how we ourselves see and understand them.

(f) “[W]e freely acknowledge that what remains after the complete abolition of the will is, for all who are still full of the will, assuredly nothing. But … to those in whom the will has turned and denied itself, this very real world of ours, with all its suns and galaxies, is – nothing.” [82]

While the famous passage in which Schopenhauer invokes the earth seen from a cosmic perspective opens Volume II of The World as Will and Representation, the above passage about a part of Will that has been turned against itself (and which is thereby momentarily defeated or stilled) concludes Volume I. What is being denied is the will-to-life. Such a denial can obviously not be directly willed but emerges when one’s natural compassion for every being, or the degree of one’s suffering, overcome one’s egoism which always strives for parochial ends[83] . Brilliantly, Schopenhauer made such a state of non-willing (which he likened to the Nirvana  of the Buddhists, or to reabsorption in the Brahman of the Hindus) [84]  the basis of his ethical and aesthetic theories. The value of art, he taught, is very much to skin our eyes so that we may see the world, and our place in it, aright. Likewise, Schopenhauer’s ethics is about seeing the world aright in order to best exercise our natural compassion.

The end of The Birds (and of Marnie [USA 1964]) concerns compassion. The way this state of affairs may come about is, in broad terms, that the Will opposes itself. I’m arguing that this is what happens when Hitchcock’s birds turn on humans. Human willing is thereby momentarily defeated, allowing the characters’ – and our – natural compassion to emerge. More specifically, the characters’ suffering, Melanie’s in particular (the scene in the attic), and their regained capacity for compassion, notably Lydia Brenner’s (we hear her say of Melanie, “Poor thing!”, as if Melanie were a wounded bird), overcome their basic egoism. [85] Schopenhauer, let’s note, held that everyone’s make-up is threefold:

Man’s three fundamental ethical incentives, egoism, malice, and compassion, are present in everyone in different and incredibly unequal proportions. In accordance with them, motives will operate on man and actions will ensue. [86]

This schema works beautifully when applied to The Birds, and is surely close to Hitchcock’s own understanding. He had more than a touch of malice himself, and at times could be positively ruthless, much like young Charlie Newton in Shadow of a Doubt. Hitchcock’s characters, in fact, all show malice, even the idealised Mrs Newton (Patricia Collinge), who at one point becomes sarcastic towards the two survey-takers (MacDonald Carey and Wallace Ford) who want to interrupt her cake-making routine. In The Birds, Lydia Brenner, set in a routine of her own, initially shows fierce resentment towards the interloper, Melanie.

But compassion wins the day. The mood is splendidly caught by the final shot of sunlight breaking through clouds as if after rain: the “weather” analogy again. In the distance, the Brenners’ car drives away. The birds in the foreground represent Will that has been stilled, allowing the family to escape. Shades, too, of the end of Hitchcock’s Juno and the Paycock (1930), where Juno and Mary Boyle depart Dublin, leaving the city to its “troubles”.[87] Of course, we readily sense that the birds may launch a fresh series of assaults at any time, perhaps in some other locality. [88] Moreover, the truth, however enlightened, that the film speaks to us must finally remain subjective: thus the birds in the foreground certainly represent our will. [89] All of this Schopenhauer had foreseen, as witness his play on the word “nothing” in quotation (f) above, identifying two different sets of persons. Which set we may side with is up to us; very likely, we may feel ourselves torn …

Of especial significance to note here is how, during the making of The Birds, Hitchcock himself changed. Several of his earlier films had contained Nirvana-like moments. But these were essentially parodies of Nirvana. One instance is the end of Psycho. Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins), in his cell, his shoulders draped in a blanket and intoning, “I’m not even going to swat that fly”, momentarily resembles a Buddhist monk. [90] In The Birds, the parodic element is replaced by a new mood. Reportedly, as shooting progressed, the director began to enter into the characters in a way he’d never done before, certainly more than he had first intended. The impressive scene in which the Brenners and Melanie are besieged at home by the birds was totally re-thought by him. He became more sympathetic towards the characters, especially Melanie. It was as if he had arrived at a more profound understanding where, beyond individual “problems” but incorporating them, he was seeing a universal condition (and was sharing it with us). Hitchcock’s official biographer, John Russell Taylor, would stop just short of equating Hitchcock’s attitude here with Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary, c’est moi“;[91] but perhaps, equally, one could invoke Klee’s “Romanticism which is one with the universe” – or the Hindu notion of penetrating the veil of Maya, illusion, at which time a true sympathy becomes possible. [92] Such an attainment would match exactly Schopenhauer’s conception of a major value of art.

(g) “The genitals are the focus of the will.” [93]

To know that “everything’s perverted in a different way” is to know the great truth that all is One. But still the Will in humans works havoc in this phenomenal world, nowhere more so than in matters of sexuality – as Hitchcock’s films time and again remind us. In Rope, Rupert’s limp indicates that he was castrated by a war wound. As if in compensation, Rupert, a bachelor, has cultivated and imposed his Nietzschean ideas on his pupils, yet such is the way of the world that those ideas are interpreted by two of the pupils in a wilful and subjective manner which Rupert had not foreseen. Now, it’s true that Brandon and Phillip are gay; yet are they any more “perverted” than Rupert himself or a world that goes to war and destroys millions of its young men in the process? [94]  The murder of the youth in the film may almost appear “logical” and “natural”, given such an historical context and Nietzsche’s concept of a will-to-power. And clearly sexuality is the name of the game here.

So it is in The Birds, too. On the Internet’s forum the other day, someone asked me about the significance of the love birds. I answered in the following vein (which may sum up some points I’ve been making).

The love birds are a kind of MacGuffin, and ambiguous to boot.

I guess you’re supposed to wonder at their significance!

For Schopenhauer, love was one more expression of Will, which he saw as blind and destructive as well as procreative and inspiriting.

So the ambiguousness of the love birds is fitting. When Melanie brings them with her to Bodega Bay, is she bringing trouble? (Yes!) Or is she bringing the solution to trouble? (Yes!)

Are the love birds themselves the cause of trouble? (Of course not!) Do they represent trouble? (Yes! After all, they are birds, and birds in this film symbolise the working of Will.) Are they more culpable of representing trouble than anything or anyone else? (Not really! Everything and everyone, including you and me, are part of Will.) Do they also represent goodness? (Yes! That’s why when Cathy [Veronica Cartwright] takes them with her in the car at the end, the ambiguity is retained. Cathy is both an innocent child – like young Charlie at the start of Shadow of a Doubt – and guilty, because she is human and becoming a sexual being.)

You could say that the love birds represent original sin, a notion that Schopenhauer was happy to endorse as a general principle. (Cf the symbolism of the wedding-ring that Uncle Charlie gives young Charlie.) [95] Nonetheless, change wrought by Will is basic and necessary. That’s why the anti-incestuous [or anti-stagnation] note at the end of such films as The Lodger, Shadow of a Doubt, and The Birds is so very apt, I think.

The Commentators

At the Hitchcock Centennial Celebration in New York, Robin Wood warned at the sterility of much recent Hitchcock exegesis, which he saw as being too clever by half, too much given to irresponsible showing off. I wouldn’t dispute such a claim. [96] However, recent writing on The Birds has been of mixed quality, some of it remarkable.

Outstanding is Camille Paglia’s monograph,The Birds (BFI Publishing, 1998). Her wonderfully allusive analysis dwells particularly on the film’s women. She writes: “I place The Birds in the main line of British Romanticism, descending from the raw nature-tableaux and sinister femme fatales of Coleridge.” [97] Generally speaking, I’m happy with this citing of Coleridge, whose red-in-tooth-and-claw view of nature Paglia contrasts with Wordsworth’s more cozy understanding. [98] Wordsworth would not have told his readers, “catastrophe surrounds us all”, but Coleridge might have. Like his contemporary Schopenhauer (who went to school in England), Coleridge was deeply and widely read, in several languages, and much influenced by Plato and Kant. Indeed, Coleridge’s famous contrast between “primary imagination” and “the infinite I AM” seems a suitably “poetic” rendering of the phenomenal/noumenal dichotomy. [99]

Paglia only stumbles, in my view, precisely where Schopenhauer would have enlightened. The subjective element of The Birds, extending to the viewer, eludes her. Of the moment when the hysterical mother tells the camera, “I think you’re the cause of all this!”, Paglia merely remarks on the scene’s “mythic power”, and compares the mother to a witch-baiter in The Crucible. She adds (unconvincingly, I think): “on some level, Melanie really is a kind of vampire attuned to nature’s occult messages”.[100]

Also, analysing the end of the film, Paglia remarks on the earlier power struggle between Lydia and Melanie. Paglia agrees with Margaret M. Horwitz that Lydia appears to be “victorious”,[101] and Susan Smith agrees with both of them. [102] This may be a correct reading (who can say?); [103] nonetheless, I think it’s misguided. The note of mutual sympathy and understanding shown by the characters is very strong here. The question is not so much what are they going to do in the future as what are we going to do with our new, hard-won knowledge? I recall how Truffaut originally saw Rear Window as “gloomy” and “pessimistic”, and “quite evil”, but eventually came to acknowledge the film’s “rather compassionate approach”. Asked about this, Hitchcock agreed that what the film shows is “simply a display of human weaknesses and people in pursuit of happiness”.[104] That seems to me to be the right way of looking at The Birds, too.

About Richard Allen’s essay, ‘Avian Metaphor in The Birds’ (Hitchcock Annual, 1997-98), I would have to say, quoting Spellbound, that it’s “brilliant but lifeless”. Still, it complements Paglia’s more colourful study. In essence, Allen surveys the commentators who have preceded him in order to produce a synthesis which one reads dutifully rather than with delight. What it lacks is a convincing overview. (Schopenhauer, still the only major philosopher to combine Western and Eastern outlooks, might have provided one). Take this observation of Allen’s:

In The Birds Hitchcock poses something of a double-bind. The hierarchy between human and natural orders that the birds threaten by their attacks can be restored only by separating out human and bird-like qualities, yet … the social order can be restored only if Melanie can be stripped of her otherness or birdlike qualities, and this happens in her final “rape” by the birds. Yet in losing her “birdlike” qualities, Melanie is threatened with the loss of precisely those qualities that define her. Stripped of her “nature” she loses her identity as well. [105]

I can only call this a beat-up! Yes, something like what Allen describes does occur in the film. But I would have thought it a familiar-enough syndrome, both in Hitchcock and in ethics. That is, I see the issue here as being the age-old one of the relation and value of personality as opposed to impersonality, or of what Schopenhauer called one’s empirical character versus one’s underlying intelligible character (the will). [106] That the film arrives at a point where such an issue emerges is to Hitchcock’s credit, a mark of his film’s grappling with matters that have exercised thinkers since ancient times, not least the Buddhists and the Hindus. Actually, of course, we are back with matters like Jo’s “paralysis” at the Albert Hall, the religious and psychological notion of “dying in order to live”, Schopenhauer’s insistence that there is in fact no fundamental difference between people and animals, and so on. What a pity, then, that Allen doesn’t bring to his piece a breadth of reference that would situate the film more meaningfully. [107]

Robert Samuels, in his Hitchcock’s Bi-textuality (SUNY Press, 1998), also surveys the work of previous interpreters of The Birds, then proceeds with his own account which leans heavily on Zizek. His book’s main idea is that a Hitchcock film allows expression to many normally suppressed or forbidden feelings and viewpoints before returning us to some sort of “normality” which is the socialised world we all inhabit – Lacan’s Symbolic realm – structured by language and a basically patriarchal, heterosexist outlook. Such a reading works well with a film like Notorious (USA 1946), which Samuels discusses, or Under Capricorn (England/USA 1949), which he doesn’t. I’m not sure about The Birds, though. Actually, Samuels’s take on that film is that it lets him examine how “the bi-textual [and unknowable] Real is constantly being gendered female by viewers and critics”.[108] For his part, he thinks the gender of the birds is in question throughout the film:

When Melanie Daniels first attempts to buy a bird, she asks the clerk: “This one won’t be a chick, will he?” The film thus begins by raising the problem of gender and sexual identification. This aspect of gender confusion is repeated when Melanie gives a pair of love birds to Mitch Brenner’s sister Cathy, who later asks Melanie: “Is there a man and a woman? I can’t tell which is which.” [109]

Matters of gender identification had fascinated Hitchcock from his first film, The Pleasure Garden (Germany/England, 1926), in which a gay couple are discreetly introduced; through Murder! (England 1930), where gender (and other) roles appear very fluid; to Sabotage (England 1936), in which a rather cissy-looking young man in the aquarium tells his girlfriend, “After laying a million eggs, the female oyster changes her sex”. All of which may bear out the idea, “everything’s perverted in a different way”. But in The Birds, in the lines quoted by Samuels above, Hitchcock seems mainly concerned to establish a certain self-possession in Melanie (n.b., the word “chick” is immediately opposed in the film’s dialogue to “a full-grown mynah-bird”, not to “a male bird”) and a pre-pubescent “innocence” in Cathy. Samuels can be very facile in his interpreting! At one point, he tries to link the alcoholic Alicia (Ingrid Bergman) in Notorious to feminine traits of “fluidity” (here echoing Luce Irigaray). When Alicia speaks jokingly of blowing up the Suez Canal, Samuels concludes that she “is highlighting the way her fluid nature stands as a threat to men”.[110] Samuels may have got his facileness from Zizek, but that’s hardly an excuse! [111]

In other words, the very thing about recent Hitchcock commentary that Robin Wood warned against is exemplified in Samuels (though there are worse perpetrators, as I’ll indicate). In truth, Samuels’s best points are often made when he offers his own meta-commentary on those of others. Of the Tides Restaurant scene, he notes the various (and contradictory) explanations of the bird attacks by the characters. Then he adds:

No matter what these different theories are and how well they match the different theories that Zizek has discussed, I believe that their sheer proliferation points to the desperate attempts that people make in order to explain away any action that doesn’t seem to follow any strict causal logic. [112]

According to Samuels, in such a situation all we can do is “make ideological responses that attempt to project onto the place of the Other, a fundamental experience of nothingness”.[113] Though he doesn’t know it, he is echoing Schopenhauer and reminding us how close Kant’s and Schopenhauer’s “Thing-in-itself”/Will is to Lacan’s notion of the Real.

My conviction, though, is that Schopenhauer’s empirically-based and -illustrated explanation of the “world-riddle” (as the matter used to be called) illuminates Hitchcock’s films more fully than does Lacanian analysis, certainly as wielded by exegetes like Samuels and Zizek. Not only does Schopenhauer’s ontology subsume Lacan’s, it seems to me, but it carries aesthetic and ethical corollories that anticipate Hitchcock’s own views. Schopenhauer’s deep love of music and the theatre shows through time and again in his writings. Now let me be anecdotal for a moment. The other day I asked a friend, Dr Tag Gallagher, author of The Adventures of Roberto Rossellini (1998), for a frank evaluation of Zizek’s writings on Rossellini. [114] Tag replied that he knew only of a piece by Zizek on Europe ’51 (Italy 1952) which he considered accurate enough. But he added that the piece suffered from Zizek’s over-elaborate approach whose conclusions “he could have achieved in one simple straightforward paragraph had he used [Italian philosopher and literary critic] Croce”. Mutatis mutandis, that’s how I see a lot of current writing on Hitchcock that shows ignorance of Schopenhauer. [115]

The best thing about Susan Smith’s chapter on The Birds, in her Hitchcock: Suspense, Humour and Tone (BFI Publishing, 2000), may be her deft spotting of significant motifs in the film’s dialogue, such as Mitch’s oft-repeated “I don’t know” and Melanie and Lydia’s separate refrains in the early part of the film, “I see” (and cognate expressions). So a typical remark of Melanie’s, to the Bodega Bay storekeeper, is: “You see, I want to surprise [the Brenners]. I don’t want them to see me arrive – it’s a surprise, you see.” Something similar is noted by Bill Krohn about those characters, especially Melanie, who cry out a warning of bird attack, “Look!” [116] If Will is indeed blind, as Schopenhauer said it was, and we all partake of it without understanding what it really is, i.e., blindly, then perhaps we are being conditioned here for the film’s biggest “surprise” of all – the punitive bird attacks themselves – [117] and set up for the literal blinding or near-blinding that the birds inflict. Farmer Dan Fawcett and schoolteacher Annie Hayworth both have their eyes pecked out by the birds. [118]

Now, I must try to be fair to Smith’s chapter on The Birds, if only because I haven’t had time yet to read her whole book. [119] But I must say that her ambitious attempt to provide “[m]ultiple perspectives, multiple readings”[[120] of what the birds signify, from the standpoint of each of the main characters in turn, soon made me uncomfortable. Too often the suggested connections seemed imagined rather than real. Typical is a paragraph beginning thus:

The sequence where Melanie discovers Annie’s body signals a crucial turning point in the female protagonist’s working-through of her abandonment in childhood for it reconstrues such loss in terms of a selfless act of maternal sacrifice carried out by the schoolteacher in order to save her ex-lover’s sister and surrogate child. [121]

Certainly Melanie learns a lesson in selflessness from Annie’s sacrifice, but Smith’s elaborate argument in the quoted paragraph, that such sacrifice is essentially a “maternal” one, doesn’t convince me – I feel I’m reading the critic’s narrative, not the film’s, which has other concerns in view, including a lot of pragmatic ones not raised by Smith. [122] I find myself asking what became of the sensible notion of “Occam’s razor”? Some of Smith’s “character studies” seem woven from the air, not from things that are demonstrably occurring in the film.

In a draft of the present essay, I was going to praise Smith’s description of the attic scene, in which Melanie is attacked by the birds. But then I saw that she has misrepresented it. According to Smith’s account, “the female protagonist’s instinctive identification with the child [is shown] as she calls out Cathy’s name at one point”.[123] (I thought: how careless of me not to have noticed or remembered that.) In fact, the voice we hear is Lydia’s outside the door – in a clumsy voice-over line – saying to Mitch, “Is Cathy in there?” Presumably Hitchcock wanted us to know that help is arriving before the door is forced open by Mitch, yet surely Lydia would have looked around for Cathy downstairs prior to following Mitch up to investigate the sounds from the attic? (Perhaps Cathy was in the toilet?!)

Smith’s chapter on The Birds, then, strikes me as brittle, not brilliant, but even that is more than I’m disposed to say about the queer-theory analysis of the film offered by Lee Edelman (one of Robert Samuels’s principal mentors or influences) in ‘Hitchcock’s future’, which is Chapter 16 of Alfred Hitchcock: Centenary Essays (BFI Publishing, 1999) edited by Richard Allen and Ishii-Gonzalès. Though Edelman’s theories readily allow him to spot a death-drive working in The Birds, and to assimilate it to the supposed threat to patriarchy and the familial posed by homosexuality, which he then in turn somehow blends with Lacan’s shadowy notion of the sinthom(e), [124] at least one reader is repelled by so much theorising! I wouldn’t have been, perhaps, had I not felt that a good two-thirds of this cumbersome essay is superfluous by any test. Brevity is the soul of wit, as Freud showed theoretically. You’d think that Edelman would appreciate that. Unfortunately, to re-invoke Robin Wood, much writing on Hitchcock these days is showy rather than substantial. I call such essays ‘Heath Robinsons’, contraptions that are only fascinating because of their very crankiness.[ [125]

Theory, even a “theory of everything”, like Schopenhauer’s, is exclusive rather than inclusive. When insufficiently based in empirical observation, it can be arid when not downright misguided or wrong. [126] Socrates, feeling vastly ignorant, went around Athens talking to “experts”. But they turned out to know less than he did because they had only their particular expertises or skills. [127] I would say that Lee Edelman is no Socrates. He writes purely as a queer-theorist on Hitchcock, not as a true Hitchcockian (one who knows the films inside out, from many viewings and perspectives), and the results leave one undernourished and sceptical. An instance is this observation about the schoolchildren’s roundelay-type nonsense song (“I married my wife in the month of June”):

The order of narrative futurity for which the children have come to stand thus stands, with this song, exposed as bound to a structure of repetition – a structure that, as the formal support of the meaninglessness of reality, resists domestication by the meaning that it bears, despite being made to bear the meaning of domestic reproduction … Perhaps, then, we shouldn’t be too surprised when Melanie turns and discovers the crows … and Hitchcock frames her reaction-shot against a crudely painted background, evoking with this the derealisation effected by the birds as they bring out the repetition compulsion, the meaninglessness of the drive … [128]

In the final analysis, life may indeed be meaningless, as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, for two, reported long ago. Edelman’s gloss on this is to say that society intrudes at this point and renders sexuality  the “force that threatens to leave futurity foutÙ“.[129] But like Robert Samuels and others, Edelman is too facile and over-reaching in his exegesis of particular films. Take the reaction-shot of Melanie he cites in the above passage. I agree that Hitchcock manipulated the image, but by blanching it, not by using “a crudely painted background”. He had employed an identical technique in Vertigo, at the moment when the acrophobic Scottie had looked down from Midge’s footstool, and in North by Northwest, when Thornhill at the Chicago airport had learned that Eve was a US agent and in deadly danger. In each case, the moment is one of shock and apprehension. [130] But, try as I might, I cannot interpret such shock in The Birds as a statement about meaninglessness. That is all in Edelman’s head.

In any event, the scene where Melanie waits in the schoolyard for the children to finish their song invites more interesting observations than Edelman provides. Camille Paglia’s reading of this scene, in which she likens the jungle gym covered with crows to Apollonian society besieged by Dionysian forces (cf Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy), [131] is especially good. In my own book I compare Hitchcock’s use of the children’s song to his use of the Storm Cloud Cantata in The Man Who Knew too Much: that’s to say, in both films a musical divertissement threatens at any moment to dissolve into terror. Teasingly, it keeps sounding as if about to end, then continues.

Technical considerations, including the manipulation of audience emotion, are at least as much a part of making art as expressive ones, and both require their appreciation. That’s a reason why Truffaut’s book-length interview with Hitchcock is a seminal text, and why Bill Krohn’s recently-published Hitchcock at Work (Phaidon Press, London, 2000) is likely to become another. Krohn, the Hollywood correspondent of Cahiers du cinema since 1978, has compiled his basic material from the official Hitchcock archives, studio records, and interviews with Hitchcock’s collaborators, and has supplemented it from his wide reading and inside knowledge of the film scene. His book, which is visually splendid, provides a “Socratic”, i.e., wise and informed, text on Hitchcock the creative artist, and so may stand as a corrective to much that is misguided in current Hitchcock studies.

The book’s best chapters include those on Shadow of a Doubt and Notorious, but Krohn also finds things of interest to report about The Birds. He notes, for instance, that before settling on Daphne du Maurier’s story as the subject of his film to follow Psycho, Hitchcock had optioned The Mind Thing, a novel by science-fiction writer Frederic Brown. The eponymous “Mind thing” is an alien who can possess any living creature when it is sleeping. The novel’s hero ends up besieged in an isolated cabin by a variety of animals and birds which the alien is controlling. Shades of Christian Nyby’s The Thing (USA 1951), Fred Wilcox’s Forbidden Planet (USA 1956), and similar movies about seemingly unstoppable forces – or “monsters from the id’ as Margaret Tarratt calls them. [132] Krohn’s own comment is to the point: “Clearly, Hitchcock wanted to make a film in which Nature declares war on the human race …” [133] He then suggests a possible link to Hitchcock’s use of subjective camera, which “is systematized in this film to a greater degree than ever before”. Did reading Brown’s novel, he wonders, sharpen Hitchcock’s awareness of the implications of his customary style? [134] Krohn regards the birds, which “seem to fly out of the eyes of the characters”, as being “the ultimate expression of what one critic [William Rothman] has called ‘the murderous gaze’ in Hitchcock’s work”.[135]

QED, then. Or almost. Theory of course has its place in explicating the ways in which films affect us at many levels, but one wants to say again that we should beware, as practitioners and/or readers, of its use in relative ignorance, where empirical knowledge (for instance, of Hitchcock’s fifty-odd films, individually and collectively) is lacking. Remember Socrates! It’s to the credit of Camille Paglia that she obviously did her homework on Hitchcock before she wrote ‘ The Birds ‘. As for Krohn’s book, I would trust it ahead of any book of theory to tell me salient things about the films. I consider that film theory has never taken Hitchcock’s measure because, frankly, he knew more about what he was doing than all the theorists put together. To followers of Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, et al., I urge you to read Krohn’s book. And when I come across a comment on deconstruction – clearly an influence on people like Samuels and Edelman – claiming that it’s “the theory that says you can make texts mean anything you want”,[136]  I smile ruefully and tell myself, yes, you certainly could say that.

William Rothman, influenced by Lacan, is right to talk of “the murderous gaze” in Hitchcock’s films. (Krohn’s chapter on The Birds notes that such a gaze is detectable in Easy Virtue [England 1927], if not earlier.) My question is: does Schopenhauer subsume Lacan, as I’ve claimed, or is the truth more the reverse? Inasmuch as Hitchcock himself believed in a life-force that is also a death-force, or anyway was happy to refer to one in many of his films (e.g., the seasons/mutability imagery in The Ring, Spellbound, The Trouble With Harry, The Wrong Man, et al.), I would say that the first hypothesis offers rich rewards to Hitchcockians. And when I then examine Hitchcock’s films, including The Birds, in the light of my study of Schopenhauer, and find those films illumined as a result – to the point where I think I finally grasp what “everything’s perverted in a different way” and “catastrophe surrounds us all” mean! – I am convinced. By contrast, after reading the Lacanians on Hitchcock, I feel that they have merely glossed aspects of the films, not the creative vision itself. [137] There is indeed a “murderous gaze” in Hitchcock, which is really ours (Hitchcock gives us what we want, and mirrors our very wanting), and Schopenhauer’s own impressive descriptions of that gaze show that he knew how the world goes, all right. He said that what activates our gaze is “will”, or “will-to-life”, part of the ambivalent cosmic Will which is in everything. [138] How well that concept illuminates the sublime Storm Cloud Cantata scene in The Man Who Knew Too Much! Meanwhile, the Lacanians strike me as just so damn clinical!

Footnotes:

[1] Richard Allen, ‘Avian metaphor in The Birds.’ The Hitchcock Annual (1997-98 issue): 50.
[2] Robert Samuels, Hitchcock’s Bi-Textuality: Lacan, Feminisms, and Queer Theory. Albany: SUNY Press, 1998: 126.
[3] Lee Edelman, “Hitchcock’s future”. In Alfred Hitchcock: Centenary Essays, edited by Richard Allen and Sam Ishii-Gonzalès. London: British Film Institute, 1999: 240.
[4] Susan Smith, Hitchcock: Suspense, Humour and Tone. London: British Film Institute, 2000: 139.
[5] Paglia, Camille. The Birds. London: British Film Institute, 1998: 20.
[6] Bill Krohn,  Hitchcock at Work. London: Phaidon Press, 2000: 249.
[7] Hitchcock had earlier used the circular Albert Hall as the setting for both the climactic prize-fight in The Ring – a film whose punning on “ring” and “round” I discuss in my book, The Alfred Hitchcock Story (London: Titan Books, 1999), p. 19 – and the Storm Cloud Cantata sequence in the first version of The Man Who Knew Too Much (England 1934). All three scenes have a sense of fatality and moment. (Note: any further citations from my book will, as here, quote the page numbers of the UK edition – I disown the cut and “simplified” US version.)
[8] For providing me with the words of the Storm Cloud Cantata, I thank Hitchcock expert, Steven L. DeRosa. Both he and Krohn (167-70) note that the 1956 film makes slight changes to the words in the 1934 film.
[9] Quoted in Samuels: 126.
[10] Certainly a good deal more than the thought of Jacques Lacan, as I’ll discuss in the text. Actually, I’m strongly reminded of how when Jean Renoir went to India to make The River (USA/India 1950), he said that he had “been a Hindu all [his] life”. There are affinities in Schopenhauer to both Buddhism and Hinduism, including the tendency to see this world as a prison from which the human spirit must be liberated, and the Hindu notion of “Brahman”, the one unchanging reality behind surface appearances. Though Schopenhauer is typically described as a philosophical “pessimist”, his thought is far from imposing puritanical and other restraints. The instance of the life-celebrating Renoir is suggestive. Even more so, perhaps, is that of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, on whom Schopenhauer and Hitchcock (and Gustav Mahler, himself a Schopenhauerian) were major influences. “Schopenhauer”, Fassbinder told an interviewer, “says that human existence is worthless, to put it in a primitive way. Then you can make a lot out of it. To know that human existence is useless doesn’t mean that one has to commit suicide. It means all the possibilities are there. You can have a wonderful time.” (Quoted in Judy Stone, Eye of the World: Conversations with International Filmmakers. 1997. My apologies to readers: I don’t have a page citation for this quote.) German art and cinema since the early years of last century (when Hitchcock encountered them) have often contained oriental motifs. Also, in German Expressionism one finds various “vitalist” concerns, such as the need to seek an authentic existence – though the plays and films may end pessimistically. For what it’s worth, the physical appearance of Dr Caligari in Robert Wiene’s celebrated 1919 film was based on a late photograph of Schopenhauer. (S.S. Prawer, Caligari’s Children: The Film as Tale of Terror. Oxford University Press.1980: 173.) In turn, it’s interesting to note how Hitchcock’s Rich and Strange brings its English couple up against an oriental outlook and thereby shows how inauthentic and “unexamined” the couple’s own existence is …
[11] Christopher Janaway in his excellent and succinct Schopenhauer (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994: 70-71), writes: “Schopenhauer’s philosophical theory of music … remains one of the most striking theories of the power of music to express emotion … Schopenhauer contends that the progression of musical notes through time is immediately understood by the human mind as an analogy of the progress of our own inner strivings [i.e., will].” Cf one of Hitchcock’s definitions of “pure cinema”: “pieces of film put together [in order to create emotion], like notes of music make a melody”.
[12] Janaway: 71.
[13] Janaway: 71.
[14] To Mr and Mrs John Galsworthy, Hitchcock explained: “[Wagner’s] so melodramatic.” (Taylor, John Russell, Hitch: The Life and Work of Alfred Hitchcock. London and Boston: Faber & Faber, 1978: 110.)
[15] Paul Klee, Paul Klee on Modern Art. London: Faber & Faber: Faber paper-covered edition, 1966: 43. Cf Patrick Gardiner’s Schopenhauer (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1967: 202): “[I]t [should not] be forgotten that there have been artists and writers, of whom in recent times Paul Klee and Rilke are examples, who have spoken of their work … in language which is often close to that used by Schopenhauer …” That Hitchcock’s favourite painter was Klee emerged when he was interviewed by Charles Thomas Samuels. See Samuels. Encountering Directors. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1972: 239.
[16] Quoted in James Naremore (ed.), North by Northwest. New Brunswick: Rutgers Films in Print, 1993: 179.
[17] In CineAction   50 (September, 1999: 75), Steven Schneider observes that Hitchcock “was a much better director than theoretician”. Hitchcock himself was uneasy about his “moving-around principle”. In the same interview with Jean Domarchi and Jean Douchet (both of Cahiers du cinema) as his definition quoted in the text, he adds defensively: “That may well be a foolish association of ideas” (Naremore: 179). Nonetheless, he intuited a certain validity in his theory, and he made his films accordingly. To be clear, I don’t claim that Hitchcock (unlike, say, Chaplin) ever read Schopenhauer, only that Hitchcock’s world-view resembles the German philosopher’s in many important points of detail. Nor have I attempted in this article to suggest any but the most salient ways in which the two men’s outlooks overlapped, and the reasons therefor: e.g., the concern of both with empirical reality, of “looking to see”. On how an interest in a “life-force” was strong in England in the late 19th century and the first part of the 20th century, see my article on North North by Northwest that’s on the Web. The URL is . For further thoughts on the “vitalist” philosophies of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Bergson, and speculation about the pertinence and influence of these apropos Hitchcock, see Mogg, The Alfred Hitchcock Story: 4 and passim.
[18] A valuable comment made by a British academic about Schopenhauer, on a BBC study tape in my possession – but at present mislaid, for which I apologise to my readers.
[19] Truffaut, Francois. Hitchcock. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1967: 64.
[20] This I take to be the film’s pertinent nod to Albert Camus’s La peste (1947).
[21] I often tell myself that we exist in the midst of more (or other) than nothing, and how that “something” is Will. Why deny its existence (I ask myself)? They say that a fish doesn’t know it’s in water, but surely we needn’t be like that fish – or like one of Plato’s cave-dwellers, for that matter? (Schopenhauer was much taken with Plato’s fable.) Then I ask myself whether Hitchcock had similar thoughts, and I conclude that he did …
[22] The song that we hear Jo singing energetically, if fatalistically, to her son in Marrakesh, “Que sera, sera”, is a key to the film – including the foreign embassy climax, where the song itself becomes the means of defeating “what will [seemingly] be”. Cf my hypothesis in the present article, that The Birds shows Will being turned against itself, in order to obtain a form of “release” …
[23] Cf Edvard Munch’s famous Symbolist/expressionist painting, The Scream (1893), whose subject Marina Vaizey (in her book, 100 Masterpieces of Art. London: Peerage Books, 1979: 98) describes as “[m]an at the mercy of terrible forces beyond his control, forces within himself maybe”. When art director Robert Boyle was first informed by Hitchcock of his intention to make The Birds, Boyle did some preliminary sketches inspired by Munch’s painting (Paglia:18). In the Albert Hall, Jo’s scream is surrealistically anticipated by the words of the cantata about the “screaming” night-birds.
[24] Schopenhauer’s magnum opus begins as follows: “‘The world is my representation’: this is a truth valid with reference to every living and knowing being, although man alone can bring it into reflective, abstract consciousness.” See Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation. New York: Dover Publications (translated by E.F.J. Payne), 1966: Volume I: 3.
[25] Of Rear Window, Hitchcock told Truffaut (160) that the view of the apartments from Jeff’s window shows “a real index of individual behaviour … a small universe”, and explained that “[t]he picture would have been very dull if we hadn’t done that.” For “dull”, we might read “without a feeling of significance” (a l‡ Goethe’s phrase, “the dignity of significance”).
[26] Janaway: 72. “The base is like the lowest grade of the will’s objectification … inorganic nature … The melody on top is analogous to … the intellectual life and endeavour of man … All the parts in between … are the various manifestations of will throughout [nature] …” Janaway comments that “[t]his idea, though fanciful, is a rather fine one”, has often attracted musicians to it, and that few other writers besides Schopenhauer “have come nearer to the impossible achievement of evoking [music’s] pleasures in a purely verbal medium”. In fact, Schopenhauer’s idea is no more fanciful than Hitchcock’s “moving-around principle”: both ideas show an intuition of something true about how the world goes.
[27] Vertigo is one of several Hitchcock films that attempt to give us a “Bergsonian” intuition of “life” as an entity. I discuss this matter in the text.
[28] 28] For what it’s worth, several Japanese films (e.g., Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu monogatari, 1953) contain ghostly “princesses” who tempt ambitious, married males from the path of virtue and right conduct.
[29] I say in The Alfred Hitchcock Story  (149) that by the end of Vertigo the mission tower has come to represent much more than just a phallic symbol, approaching something like Coleridge’s “dread watchtower of the absolute self”.
[30] Solomon, Robert C. Continental Philosophy since 1750: The Rise and Fall of the Self. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1988: 108.
[31] The enormously influential Shaw, whose Complete Works, including Man and Superman (1903), Hitchcock owned, promoted the thought of both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.
[32] The same quantitative reckoning of “life” is evident in Psycho when Norman remarks to Marion, “You’ve never had an empty moment in your entire life, have you?”, and she, “a perfectly ordinary bourgeoise, as Hitchcock called her, replies, “Only my share.”
[33] I’m told that Hitchcock’s first film as director, The Pleasure Garden, had the titles overlaid by an action-shot of a female dancer – though the sequence is absent from the print I’ve seen.
[34] Nietzsche’s notion of will-to-power is implied in the title of John Buchan’s The Power House (1912); and the novel, which immediately preceded the same author’s The Thirty-Nine Steps, critiques the warped ambitions of its Nietzschean villain – who is a prototype of Hitchcock villains like Tobin in Saboteur ( USA 1942) and Vandamm in North by Northwest. See Mogg (book): 70.
[35] [Mogg (book): 89. I would argue that Hitchcock’s critique of Nietzsche, though not without ambivalence, puts the director on Schopenhauerian bedrock. As for politics, Hitchcock once told Richard Schickel that it incorporates some of man’s meanest attitudes to man. Schopenhauer might have endorsed that sentiment.
[36] Note, though, that Hitchcock refers to “everything”, not “everyone”. His remark was made to the editors of Movie (UK).
[37] It had to be a mother  ship, of course! Analysing Vertigo in my book (149), I refer to Goethe’s Faust, Part II, with its realm of “the Mothers”, and cite Camille Paglia’s remark (in her outstanding Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. London: Penguin Books, 1991: 257) that, “[t]he male struggles through his sexual stages, returning to the mother even when he thinks himself most free of her”. My book, passim, notes the presence of the Great Mother behind many of Hitchcock’s films. Hitchcock probably read Faust (cf Alfred Hitchcock, Hitchcock on Hitchcock. Edited by Sidney Gottlieb. California and London: Uni. of California Press and Faber & Faber, 1995: 144). Goethe and Schopenhauer, let’s note, were contemporaries and friends.
[38] Cf Paglia, Sexual Personae: 40: “Mythology begins with cosmogony, the creation of the world. Somehow out of the chaos of matter comes order. The plenum, a soupy fullness, divides itself into objects and beings.” And cf this observation of Schopenhauer’s: “In Buddhism the world arises as a consequence of an inexplicable clouding of the heavenly clarity of … Nirvana after a long period of quietude. Its origin is thus … fundamentally to be understood in a moral sense, notwithstanding the case has an exact analogy in the … origin of the sun in an inexplicable primeval streak of mist.” (Arthur Schopenhauer, ‘On the Suffering of the World’. In Schopenhauer: Essays and Aphorisms, edited by R.J. Hollingdale. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970: 48.) There are references to cosmogony in other Hitchcock films, notably The Trouble With Harry.
[39] The grey blanket stands in contrast to the multi-coloured, tartan blanket beneath which the same couple had disported themselves at the start of the film. In the entry on Torn Curtain in my book (172), I note another such dichotomy: “In Richard Wormser’s novel of the film, based on Brian Moore’s screenplay, the Countess [Lila Kedrova] says, “I am an old woman. But there is la vie left in me. Lots of la vie.” The film suggests as much by giving her a colourful scarf. By contrast, the East Berlin scenes are generally drab.” The grey blanket at the end of the film also recalls the ends of Number Seventeen (England 1932) and Psycho.
[40] There are pre-echoes here of Vertigo, with its tall-standing sequoias, “always green, ever-living”; as for mutability, this was always a Hitchcock theme, as discussed in the text.
[41] My thanks to Richard Franklin, who loaned me a studio copy of the screenplay, from which this extract is taken.
[42] The titles sequence of The Trouble With Harry has lately been added as a playable item (minus sound) to Steven L. DeRosa’s admirable website, Hitchcock and His Writers. The URL is . (As instructed on the page, “Click the photo for the Flash intro”.)
[43] Notice, for example, the painting of a wintery scene above the mantelpiece in Jennifer’s house, offset – perhaps in denial – by vases of colourful autumn foliage.
[44] Cf the similar use of a church bell’s recurrent – and again unremarked – ringing heard in To Catch a Thief, and the ambiguous scene set on the steps of the Fairvale church in Psycho (a scene deleted from Gus Van Sant’s 1998 version of the film).
[45] Truffaut: 218.
[46] Cf Manny’s prayer in The Wrong Man – which appears to be granted when his double is apprehended across town shortly afterwards. Later, the nurse in the sanatorium speaks of “miracles” that “take time”. Hitchcock’s understanding of the categories of space, time, and causality is Schopenhauerian, and is discussed in the text.
[47] Santa Rosa was used in Irving Pichel’s Happy Land (USA), later the same year. In 1986, it featured in another feel-good movie, Francis Coppola’s Peggy Sue Got Married (USA).
[48] Ultimately, in the realm of Kant’s unknowable Ding-an-sich (“Thing-in-itself”), which Schopenhauer equated with Will, we are all one single entity. That ultimate realm is the noumenal. But of course our essential subjectivity blinkers us, and confines us in effect to the realm of appearances, the phenomenal. I discuss a few of the implications of this in the text.
[49] Pinero’s play also has much in common with Noel Coward’s Easy Virtue (1925), filmed by Hitchcock in 1927. See my book:17.
[50] Magee, Bryan. The Philosophy of Schopenhauer. Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press and O.U.P., 1983: 361.
[51] He wasn’t the only one to do so, of course. Nature turns the guilt of murder back against humans is the poem Whistling Jack (1929) by John Shaw Neilson. The bird of the title, an Australian grey butcher-bird, may be an emissary of God, the human narrator thinks by the end. Humbled, he acknowledges the truth of such lines spoken by the bird as, “But for a million cruelties you would not be alive.”
[52] Cf Janaway: 92.
[53] Janaway: 69.
[54] Cf Andre Breton’s notion of “convulsive beauty” achieved in Surrealism by means of irrational justapositions. Lautreamont’s phrase about “the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table” – adopted by the Surrealists as a catch-cry – is exemplary. It also seems to me to catch an essential quality of The Birds. The irrational or unlikely juxtapositions (the mannequin-like Melanie rowing serenely across the bay, say) invites a certain aesthetic distance in the viewer even as the narrative suspense draws the viewer in, while the sense of impending disaster, perhaps apocalypse, lends a note of the sublime. Hitchcock’s mastery was very much a matter of his awareness of these effects and his facility at playing the film and the audience like a musical instrument – or Will. “[I]n the fiction film the director is the god; he must create life”, Hitchcock told Truffaut (70)
[55] At such times, Schopenhauer felt, a word like “Nirvana” may seem appropriate, though he emphasised (at the end of Volume I of The World as Will and Representation) that the word itself is meaningless, an evasion.
[56] Quoted in Janaway: 69-70.
[57] On Tristan, see, for example, the excerpt quoted by Magee: 360: “To us who have looked lovingly/on the night of death/and been entrusted/with its deep secret/the day’s illusions – /fame and honour/power and profit – /have the glitter of mere/dust in the sunlight/into which it disperses …” As for Scottie (James Stewart) in Vertigo, the whole idea (I would argue), as established by the opening scene, where Scottie clings to the guttering, i.e., to life, is that he is not detached, not free.
[58] According to Joseph Stefano, Hitchcock ruthlessly deleted moments in Psycho that seemed to invite compassion for wasted human life, such as a shot of Marion’s corpse showing her buttocks. Stefano thought the shot achingly beautiful and pleaded for its retention, but Hitchcock evidently preferred that the story alone carry the meaning. A note of compassion is present at the end of The Birds, but inferences about the way we devalue life (an earlier joke about Bloody Marys notwithstanding), or whether life has positive value to start with, are essentially left to the audience to draw …
[59] For the influence of Childers’s novel on Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent (USA 1940), see my book: 75.
[60] Lee Edelman has a point – however verbose and blinkered, as discussed in the present text – when he associates in Hitchcock homosexuality and the death-drive.
[61] The Threatened Assassin (1926-27), say.
[62] Quoted in Simon Wilson, Surrealist Painting. London: Phaidon Press, 1975: 5.
[63] Various commentators, among them Janaway and Magee, have detailed the impressive spread of Schopenhauer’s thought. See, for example, Janaway, Chapter 9 (‘Schopenhauer’s influence’): 100-07. Schopenhauer’s influence on Nietzsche is at its most apparent – and positive – in Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy (1872). Schopenhauer’s influence on Freud was initially indirect (via other writers, like Eduard von Hartmann). Freud eventually acknowledged the similarities in their thought, but claimed, “I read Schopenhauer very late in my life”. (Janaway’s dry comment on this [107]: “One almost hesitates to point out that Freud must have known at some level what to avoid reading, in order to preserve this title to originality.”) Wilson (5) notes of the Surrealist painters how Freud “provided an endorsement for [their] predilection for erotic and macabre subject matter, particularly in combination … [P]aintings by Ernst and the early work of de Chirico became the models and point of departure for a whole group of Surrealist painters, Magritte, Delvaux, Dali among them.” But Wilson (4) also notes that Ernst had taken particular inspiration from de Chirico (1888-1978), whose “metaphysical” painting he had come across early in 1919. In turn, as Aniela Jaffe tells us, de Chirico had been “deeply influenced by the philosophies of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer” (Aniela Jaffe, ‘Symbolism in the visual arts’. In Man and his Symbols, edited by Carl G. Jung. London: Aldus Books, 1964: 255). De Chirico wrote: “Schopenhauer and Nietzsche were the first to teach the deep significance of the senselessness of life, and to show how this senselessness could be transformed into art … The dreadful void they discovered is the very soulless and untroubled beauty of matter.” (Quoted in Jaffe/Jung: 255)
[64] Cf Schopenhauer: “Just as the boatman sits in his small boat, trusting the frail craft in a stormy sea that is boundless in every direction, rising and falling with the howling, mountainous waves, so in the midst of a world full of suffering and misery the individual man calmly sits, supported by and trusting the principium individuation is, or the way in which the individual knows things as phenomenon. The boundless world, everywhere full of suffering in the infinite past, in the infinite future, is strange to him, is indeed a fiction.” Schopenhauer (1966): Volume I: 352-53.
[65] In other words, “we’re all in our private traps”, as Norman says in Psycho, and none of us is completely free (perhaps not even the saints or geniuses among us, whom Schopenhauer felt have what it most takes to escape Plato’s cave).
[66] Cf Janaway: 6 – and my note above about novels by Childers, Buchan, et al.
[67] [67] Quoted in Janaway: 67.
[68] Mitch likens the canary to Melanie: “Back in your cage, Melanie Daniels.” She, in turn, represents the audience’s own initial complacency, though we scarcely realise it at the time. Numerous Hitchcock films begin with implicit parallels to the situation of the audience. For instance, the camera may move from a cold exterior (Number Seventeen, Spellbound, Torn Curtain) to an interior that promises warmth and/or excitement (a supposedly deserted house in which a light is mysteriously moving; a sanitorium in which patients are playing at cards – a nice Expressionist touch; a ship’s cabin where a couple are having sex beneath a blanket).
[69] Quoted in Janaway: 31.
[70] Quoted in Hollingdale: 189.
[71] Cf Janaway: 24 and 31.
[72] Cf the thought of Martin Heidegger. Professor Richard Polt, who recently co-translated into English Heidegger’s 1935 lectures, “Introduction to Metaphysics”, said in an interview: “One of Heidegger’s main points is that science and technology are built upon something that cannot be understood in scientific or technological terms. Poetry and art, for instance, might be ways of reaching that deeper truth, that experience of the world that is pre-scientific.” (‘Being Martin Heidegger’, interview with Richard Polt by Ralph Brave, November 13, 2000, on the website.) For what it’s worth, Solomon, Continental Philosophy since 1750: 167 observes that “[i]t would seem that [Heidegger] agrees with Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein, that in the end one should be silent – or at least very obscure.”
[73] ‘Robert Boyle in conversation with Sheila Benson’, on the American Movie Classics website, no date. (I visited it in October 2000.) The URL is . In the same “conversation”, Boyle calls Hitchcock “the most collaborative filmmaker” he ever worked with. “He talked to everybody” Boyle continues; “he’d talk to his driver about things. His door was always open and he was always asking people how they felt. He would tell you a scene, and most often it was so brilliant that you didn’t bother to criticize it, and then he’d ask you how you felt about it. This wasn’t just me; it was anybody, the person who served the doughnuts and coffee on the set he would talk to about the script, about the story. I think one of the reasons was that he was very, very attuned to the audience, and everybody was an audience. It was something that was uncanny about him; he made movies for the audience because he was the audience.” This sort of insight offered by Boyle I find richly rewarding and suggestive about Hitchcock’s work, rather more so than (nine times out of ten) pages of theory. It confirms, for instance, Hitchcock’s empirical bent, his capacity for “looking to see”. It also seems to confirm how closely Hitchcock had his finger on the collective will of an audience.
[74] Cf Marion Crane’s drive to the Bates Motel in Psycho, which likewise for the audience establishes a California ambience at a visceral level, thereby lending subsequent events added “realism” and conviction.
[75] Cf Gardiner: 69.
[76] The earlier scene, too, concerned a lone individual, a mother, confronting the working of an impersonal principle or force, Will.
[77] Cf my book: 105: “The film’s finale … takes place while the room is flooded by red, green and white light from a neon ‘STORAGE’ sign just outside. Hitch likened this to a musical effect. He probably took it from the novel Enter Sir John (1929), on which Murder! was based, where the three colours evoke Harlequin. Its use in Rope may imply that the three characters are all ‘merely players’ and that there’s little essential difference between them – for all that Rupert tries to deny it.”
[78] That is my understanding. However, answering a question of mine to the ‘Film Theory’ forum on the Internet recently, a correspondent, Kenneth Mackendrick, began by noting that Slavoj Zizek retains the Kantian idea of the noumenal, and added that “he reads it through both Schelling and Hegel … (and, of course, Lacan)”. [Schopenhauer, by the way, despised Schelling and Hegel, especially the latter, calling them charlatans!] But Mackendrick would question whether Kant remains unrefuted: “I’d go so far as to say that anyone who takes issue with the Cartesian ego takes issue with Kant …”
[79] Truffaut: 221.
[80] Quoted in Magee: 381. Here’s a related point. The last part of the quotation, referring to “creatures who have [but lately] emerged from the slime”, reminds me of the famous opening of a novel that Hitchcock studied at school, Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1853), and particularly this passage: “As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.” In my book (145), I suggest that Dickens’s novel considerably influenced The Wrong Man (another work about a seemingly interminable legal process), which has more than one reference to (slow and imperfect) evolution. In the same vein, The Birds has its reference to archeopteryx. All of which fits with Schopenhauerian “pessimism”, and the extensive and near-invisible (therefore humbling) working of a time/space/causality nexus …
[8] Schopenhauer (1966): Volume II: 3.
[82] Schopenhauer (1966): Volume I: 411-12.
[83] Cf Janaway: 95. Another “will-less” way of overcoming basic egoism, or of temporarily stilling the will (resulting in new knowledge and wisdom), is, I imagine, to undertake a practice like yoga or meditation, or to engage in the regular reciting of a mantra or prayers.
[84] Schopenhauer (1966): Volume I: 411.
[85] The same phrase, “Poor thing!”, is used by Midge in Vertigo when she hears the sad story of Carlotta Valdes.
[86] Quoted in Janaway: 80.
[87] Sean O’Casey was definitely in Hitchcock’s mind when making The Birds. Hitchcock told Truffaut as much, noting that the drunk who proclaims “It’s the end of the world” was like an O’Casey character (or O’Casey himself?). (Truffaut: 48.)
[88] Cf the last paragraph of Camus’s La peste.

[89] Cf the shot of the hysterical mother’s accusation, “I think you’re the cause of all this!”
[90] [90] Perkins is yet another of Hitchcock’s gay actors cast in a villainous or deathly role. Other Nirvana-like, or related, moments in Hitchcock include Lina’s willing acceptance of a drink she believes to be poisoned, in Suspicion (USA 1941), and the subjective moonlight shot from the top of Mount Rushmore, in North by Northwest, that almost palpably appeals to Thornhill to let go. Potentially he is “half in love with easeful death” (while Lina is clearly more than half so). That Keatsian phrase was a favourite of John Buchan’s, and recurs in his books (e.g., Mr Standfast, 1919). Similar Nirvana-like or “Keatsian” moments are to be found in other popular British fiction and plays of the inter-war years. The climax of the Bulldog Drummond novel, The Final Count (1926), by “Sapper”, concerns an attempt by the villain to plunge a dirigible of VIPs to their deaths: the account of the fateful trip begins by invoking a now almost-forgotten play (and film) of the time, Sutton Vane’s Outward Bound, in which a group of people meet on a liner and discover that they’re all dead and bound for purgatory, prompting one of them to speak of just sailing on forever. But the actual account of the dirigible’s trip is told as if from inside the aircraft; Bulldog Drummond is on board, and smiles grimly when he notices that the villain has laid in masses of heavily-scented hothouse flowers that lend an “Eastern” or “Oriental” touch to proceedings. Details in the episode patently influenced parts of the clipper scene in Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent.
[91] Taylor: 268. (Emma Bovary was reportedly Hitchcock’s favourite character in fiction.)
[92] Cf Janaway: 15, 83. Also, concerning a possible connotation of the title of Torn Curtain, see my book: 165.
[93] Cf Janaway: 50.
[94] Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux, which raises similar ironies, had come out in the previous year.
[95] The ring in Shadow of a Doubt had belonged to one of Uncle Charlie’s “merry widow” victims, i.e., to a woman who had outlived her husband and made merry on her inheritance, thereby allowing herself to be seduced (and/or murdered) by Uncle Charlie. The idea here anticipates that of Monsieur Verdoux. In giving the ring to his niece, Uncle Charlie is effectively denying the concupiscent nature of the life-force, wanting to “purify” what had been “tainted”. Cf the symbolism of the coming-out ball in The Lodger, at which the Ivor Novello character murders (or colludes in murdering) his sister, before the world can “have” her. Cf my book: 15. Shadow of a Doubt is in many ways a remake of The Lodger for American audiences, just as Saboteur had been a remake in many respects of The 39 Steps. Original sin, and the Adam and Eve story, are often evoked in Hitchcock, strikingly by the snake-like bangle that Bob Corby (Ian Hunter) gives Mabel (Lilian Hall-Davis) in The Ring. See my book: 19. As for Schopenhauer, he was happy to quote the Spanish dramatist Calderun, who, in Life is a Dream (1635), wrote that “man’s greatest offence/ Is that he has been born”. “In that verse”, comments Schopenhauer, “Calderun has merely expressed the Christian dogma of original sin.” (Schopenhauer [1966], Volume I: 355.) In turn, Hitchcock’s images of “falling” (!) sometimes also carry connotations of birth or rebirth, as in Spellbound.
[96] Frankly, I had been saying much the same thing for years in my journal, ‘The MacGuffin’, and on its website!
[97] Paglia (1998): 7.
[98] Hitchcock at the start of Frenzy mocks Wordworth’s optimism when a glib politician quotes from The Prelude (“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,/ But to be young was very heaven!”), and next minute a body is pulled from the Thames. In Hitchcock’s fallen world, or corrupted garden – which is very much on display in Frenzy– the life-force is always also a death-force …
[99] “The primary imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.” (Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, Chapter 13.)
[100] Paglia (1998): 74.
[101] Paglia (1998): 86. The citation refers to Margaret M. Horwitz’s ‘ The Birds: A mother’s love’. In A Hitchcock Reader, edited by Marshall Deutelbaum and Leland Poague. Ames, Iowa: Iowa State University Press, 1986: 286.
[102] Smith: 151, n. 33.
[103] Actually, during the film’s preparation, Hitchcock told ‘Tippi’ Hedren that (a) Melanie more or less takes over from Lydia after the finches come down the chimney (“I think Lydia’s gone. She went kaput when the thousand finches came through.”); and (b) at the end of the film, it might be necessary to introduce some touch “that isn’t corny” to show that, despite Melanie’s state of shock after the attic scene, “she’s not going to be mothered by Lydia the rest of her life”. (Transcript of tape-recording, in Dan Auiler’s Hitchcock’s Notebooks: An Authorized and Illustrated Look Inside the Creative Mind of Alfred Hitchcock. New York: Avon Books, 1999: 392-93.)
[104] Truffaut: 186.
[105] Hitchcock Annual, 1997-98: 57.
[106] Cf Gardiner: 159.
[107] Allen has assimilated the work of other film scholars, all right. I don’t question that. But see my comment later in the text about what Socrates found when he consulted “the experts”.
[108] By “bi-textuality” Samuels means “bisexual textuality” (Samuels: 4). The Real is that which lies beyond the Symbolic realm, unaffected by the latter’s structures and signifiers. (I’m not sure that it’s legitimate to characterise the Real as having sexual attributes, but Samuels finds it convenient to do so …)
[109] Samuels: 124.
[110] Samuels: 68.
[111] On the ‘Method and Theory’ forum (a spin-off from the ‘Film Theory’ forum) on the Internet, a correspondent, Boris Vidovic, of the Finnish Film Archive, Helsinki, recently wrote: “What Zizek is doing … in most of his writings … is reading into the film (or into whatever phenomena his ‘theoretical’ teeth get stuck) his own interpretation(s) that may or may not have much to do with the text itself.” That happens to be close to my own observation, I must say.
[112] Samuels: 129. Prawer, Caligari’s Children: 121-22, refers to a celebrated passage in Schopenhauer about individuals in whom “that ineradicable dread , common to all human beings (and possibly even to the more intelligent animals), … suddenly seizes them … when it appears that some change has occurred without a cause, or a deceased person exists again; or when in any other way [the principium individuationis seems to undergo an exception]”. (This quotation comes from Schopenhauer [1966]: Volume I: 353.) Prawer feels that Schopenhauer’s insight offers a useful, non-Freudian explanation of “uncanny” feelings. Certainly the passage illuminates a film like Vertigo and Hitchcock’s masterly manipulation of the collective principium individuationis of his audience.
[113] Samuels: 129.
[114] This was after I’d read a somewhat negative report about those writings, on the ‘Method and Theory’ forum in October, 2000.
[115] My opinion of Frederic Jameson’s essay, ‘Spatial Systems in North by Northwest’, in Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock), edited by Slavoj Zizek (London and New York: Verso, 1992): 47-72, is that it erects a vast theoretical scaffold in order to deliver … a modicum of insight.
[116] Krohn: 257-59.
[117] Cf Smith: 131.
[118] Cf Smith: 129.
[119] It’s pertinent to note that Smith is Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Sunderland, England, under Deborah Thomas, who has published some very fine articles on Hitchcock.
[120] [120] Smith: 135.
[121] Smith: 138.
[122] Smith contributed an essay on Sabotage to the book, already-cited, Alfred Hitchcock: Centenary Essays  (1999), edited by Richard Allen and Ishii-Gonzalès. That essay, on pp. 44-57, is called ‘Disruption, destruction, denial: Hitchcock as saboteur’, and became the basis of Chapter 1 of Smith’s own book. Accordingly, I include here my critique of Smith’s essay – or, rather, one aspect of it – from my daily MacGuffin/ Hitchcock scholars website (June 5 and June 6, 2000). I have omitted some incidental material.
[…] Writers of film analysis, it seems to me, toss off too many obiter dictums! Thus Dr Susan Smith marrs an excellent essay on Hitchcock’s Sabotage (which nonetheless a friend of mine thought “far-fetched”) … when she writes about the bird-shop scene that “the sound of a cockerel crowing twice loudly in the backyard, as the Professor takes his visitor to his living quarters at the rear, alludes umistakably to Hitchcock’s own authorial presence in the background and in a way that symbolically proclaims the director’s involvement with sabotage as an implied assertion of film-making potency” (p. 49). I’ve several comments on that. First, the use of “unmistakably” is a cheat – it’s of the same order as the claim you see made by shoddy writers that something or other represents “precisely” what they claim it represents, when in fact the alleged connection isn’t precise (or even apparent) at all! Second, any claim that the sound of a cockerel crowing in Sabotage represents a self-reference by Hitchcock to his own name and presence must answer the question of whether other similar moments in Hitchcock films (e.g., when a cock’s crow is heard at dawn at the end of the police-station scene in Young and Innocent [England 1937]) carries the same “meaning”. And if not, why not? (Also, vice versa.) Third, such a claim about the scene in Sabotage should at least address what other reasons Hitchcock might have had for including a cock’s crowing at that point. I can think of at least two. One is that at a moment of transition, Hitchcock felt the need to put in some brief distraction to cover what would otherwise be felt as an “emptiness”. That is standard technique. In addition, Hitchcock might have wanted the contrast of the cockerel’s raucous crowing with the relatively melodious (if loud) whistling of the canaries in the earlier part of the scene. Again, that’s fairly standard technique. A fourth comment I would make is that I wonder why on earth Hitchcock would want to include any such self-reference anyway (which not one audience-member in a thousand would pick up). True, there is another reference later in the film to “cocks”, in the “Who Killed Cock Robin?” cartoon showing in Mr Verloc’s cinema. But again I fail to see why that should be considered a self-reference by Hitchcock. (It would surely be petty, and even distasteful, of him, especially in the tragic context of that particular moment when Mrs Verloc has just learnt of the death of her young brother.) In [my book, p. 52], I suggest that the main point, other than the emotional contrast involved (an audience laughing happily; Mrs Verloc’s grief), of the cartoon sequence in Hitchcock’s film is that we’re shown one cock robin being killed and succeeded by another, which suggests the folly of men as opposed to the natural goodness and sense of women – a theme both of Sabotage and of Hitchcock’s earlier Juno and the PayCOCK!
[123] Smith, Hitchcock: 140. It ocurred to me that Smith saw a slightly different print to the one we have in Australia, but that seems unlikely. Certainly a friend who checked out the attic scene with me agrees that the line about Cathy is spoken by Lydia outside the door – and that it is clumsy, for the reason I give in the text.
[124] “The sinthome, as Lacan evokes it in the difficult last phase of his career, designates a locus of enjoyment beyond the logic of interpretation, and thus beyond the logic of the symptom and its cure. It refers to … the subject … no longer as subject of desire, but as subject of the drive.” (Edelman: 240.) “The right balance is attained when we conceive [certain extended motifs in Hitchcock] as sinthoms in the Lacanian sense: as a signifier’s constellation (formula) which fixes a certain core of enjoyment, like mannerisms in painting – characteristic details which persist and repeat themselves without implying a common meaning …” (‘Hitchcockian sinthoms‘ by Slavoj Zizek, in Zizek: 126.) For some obscure reason (I think “obscure” is the word), I’m reminded of Hegel! No, I mustn’t be disingenuous. I’m remembering what Roger Kimball wrote recently about that “ideal professor’s philosopher” (“Hegel’s books cry out for academic commentary – the more the better”) and how Schopenhauer “was wrong to attribute mystifying motives to Hegel. He may have [indeed] been … a ‘charlatan,’ but [he] was a sincere charlatan. He said a lot of loopy things. He believed them all.” (Roger Kimball, ‘The difficulty with Hegel’, in The New Criterion, September 2000, as reprinted on the website.) Zizek and Samuels and Edelman all make use of Lacan – sincerely so, no doubt – but it seems to me that they thereby illuminate Hitchcock rather less than they think, or intend.
[125] ” Heath Robinson. A phrase sometimes applied to an absurdly complicated or “cranky” mechanical device, especially one performing a basically simple function. The name is that of W. Heath Robinson (1872-1944), whose amusing drawings of such absurdities in Punch and elsewhere were distinctive of their kind.” (Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase & Fable. Fifteenth edition, edited by Adrian Room. London: Cassell, 1996: 506.)
[126] Schopenhauer wisely distinguished between percepts and concepts. The former have their basis in empirical reality; the latter may refer exclusively to other concepts – on and on, never touching base in the real world, becoming ever more abstract. Cf Schopenhauer (1966), Volume II: 77: “Perception is … alone … the unconditionally true genuine knowledge, fully worthy of the name. For it alone imparts insight proper; it alone is actually assimilated by man, passes into his inner nature, and can quite justifiably be called his, whereas the concepts merely cling to him.”
[127] Cf Duke Maskell, ‘Course beyond the great unknowing.’ In the Higher Education pages of The Australian, 18 October, 2000: “The men Socrates talked to, those who had a techne, that is, turned out not to know more than he did because they knew only their skills.”
[128] Edelman: 251-52.
[129]  Edelman: 254.
[130] In North by Northwest, there’s an aural equivalent of these moments, once pointed out to me by Richard Franklin. In the pine forest, when Thornhill learns that Eve (Eva Marie Saint) is to leave the country with Vandamm (James Mason), Hitchcock conveys to us Thornhill’s shock by momentarily dropping the “buzz track” (ambient sound), thus creating a “stunned silence”.
[131] Paglia: 66. I’ve already noted above the considerable influence of Schopenhauer’s thought on Nietzsche’s, not least the Apollonian vs Dionysian dichotomy that Nietzsche conceived for The Birth of Tragedy.
[132] Tarratt, Margaret. ‘Monsters from the Id’, two-part article in Films and Filming, December 1970: 38-42, and January 1971: 40-42.
[133] Krohn: 240.
[134] Krohn: 240.
[135] Krohn: 256. William Rothman’s book, Hitchcock – The Murderous Gaze, was published by Harvard University Press in 1982.
[136] Quoted in Bruce Ellis Benson, ‘Traces of God: The faith of Jacques Derrida’, on the website – Books & Culture segment, Sept/Oct 2000. (The quoted remark was made by a colleague of Benson’s.) Benson adds: “Understandably, critics like John Searle and Amy Gutmann view deconstruction as providing license for irresponsible scholarship.”
[137] Naturally that “vision” incorporates Hitchcock’s Catholicism. But Hitchcock was always prepared to “look to see” and, besides, was intently aware of his global audience. Also, he was admirably open-minded in other areas, such as his reading – from Hoffmann to Poe to Dickens to Flaubert to Oscar Wilde. Accordingly, I find the following note, from a Schopenhauer website (), helpful: “The art of the decadent movement was most congenially suited to the philosophy of Schopenhauer, which was essentially Buddhistic (Catholicism as bastard Buddhism). Therefore the aesthetic behind [that art] was very sound. Art as release from the frustration of the will.”
[138] Cf, for example, this brilliant passage from Schopenhauer (1966), Volume II: 568: “Since … the will wills life absolutely and for all time, it exhibits itself at the same time as sexual impulse which has an endless series of generations in view. This impulse does away with that unconcern, cheerfulness, and innocence that would accompany a merely individual existence, since it brings into consciousness unrest, uneasiness, and melancholy, and into the course of life misfortunes, cares and misery. On the other hand, if it is voluntarily suppressed, as we see in rare exceptions, then this is the turning of the will, which changes its course. It is then absorbed in, and does not go beyond, the individual; but this can happen only through his doing a painful violence to himself. If this has taken place, that unconcern and cheerfulness of the merely individual existence are restored to consciousness, and indeed raised to a higher power.”