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Poetry is for The Birds (I Wrote this a Few Weeks Back and I Never Posted It)
As I was waiting for the side mirror of new old car to be reattached, (it was knocked off on my first day of teaching), I read Camila Paglia's 100 page analysis of “The Birds” (its part of the BFI/British Film Institute version. I always thought it was a very interesting but minor Hitchcock film (It was certainly not as good as “Psycho,” “ Rebecca,” “Spellbound,” or “Rear Window”), even though “The Birds” was highly influential (the claustrophobic scene where the trapped people nail boards to the wall in "Night of the Living Dead" was a direct steal from “The Birds.”)
Overall, I enjoy Paglia's work, and I always thought there was much more underneath of the surface plot than is immediately apparent. Paglia does a good job of showing some thematic connections between his films that I missed (for instance she sees "Marnie" as a retelling of the beginning of “Psycho” with a happy ending because the female thief eventually finds happiness after she is punished.) Paglia also thinks that Tippi’s black high heeled crow images connect her character to the crows in the film, and that she acts like a predator in the film. She also claims that when Hedren’s Melanie character leaves the love birds at Robert Taylor’s apartment, she is marking territory like a cat (A woman once left a coat in my house once, and it took her six months to get it out, and I also thought it was a conscious attempt to mark territory, but I’m sure men do this too in their own way.) That last sentence was a monstrosity.
Paglia knows quite a bit about poetry, and she often connects the film's elements to earlier poems especially British romantic ones (this should come as no great shock since "The Visionary Company, author, Harold Bloom was her mentor), but it some times the connections to poetry are strained (I don't care if the flies on the corpse in a scene in “The Birds” reminded her of a line in Charles Rimbaud Alan Lautrement's “The Grave in the tomb of Herman Melville, which she read thirty years ago.”)
I also got the sense that Paglia commits postmodern heresy she seems to think that she is legitimizing a lower art form (film) by connecting it with a higher one (poetry). Overall the book is a great read too (I also loved Paglia’s commentary on “Basic Instinct” which is one of the DVD editions).
Fellini probably had the last word when he said that he thought of “The Birds,” as a "poem of apocalypse," which also applies to "Night of the Living Dead." This quote appears in Pagla’s text.
Perhaps I should avoid posting leftover writings next time. I may just wing it.
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