The MacGuffin: News and Comment (08/Sep/2012)
(c) Ken Mogg (2012)
Sep 8
Some thoughts this time on Hitchcock and animals - and birds. This week I had occasion to read an essay by Marian Scholtmeijer, "The Power of Otherness: Animals in Women's Fiction" (in Adams & Donovan, 'Animals and Women', 1995), which includes some observations on Daphne du Maurier's short story "The Birds". Scholtmeijer notes that Du Maurier's vision is 'much more apocalyptic than' the one in Hitchcock's film version. But there are resemblances, nonetheless. I was struck by this: '[Du Maurier] sides with the birds even to the extent of denying both humans and readers that most human of needs: explanation.' And Scholtmeijer adds: 'the denial of explanation imitates the animal's perspective under the assaults of humankind. Du Maurier puts humankind in the role of the victimized animal: helpless, disorganized, and completely confused.' It's a good point, I think - and when Hitchcock transposes the same situation into his film it becomes one more example of what I call his 'subjective technique'. That is, in his films, in all kinds of ways, Hitchcock seeks to make the audience actually think and feel as a character or characters onscreen. So if the characters in The Birds feel at times like caged birds, so, too, do the film's audience. Maybe I should have thought of this example when explaining to someone recently about how the McKittrick Hotel scene in Vertigo is another good instance of 'subjective technique': when 'Madeleine' inexplicably vanishes from her upstairs room, the audience is bewildered in precisely the same way as Scottie is bewildered. ('Subjective technique' can work in many different ways. For example, we may see things from a particular character's viewpoint in a broad sense: roughly the first half of Torn Curtain is shown from Sarah's point of view who wonders, like us, at Michael's behaviour and whether he has really decided to work for the Communists.) Mind you, it's doubtful if Hitchcock was particularly concerned with making us experience bird-like suffering, although the trailer for The Birds certainly reminds us of our culpability in avian suffering down the ages, and Hitchcock pretends to be quite put off his food - a chicken dinner - by the thought. True to what Keats called the 'poetic character', Hitchcock could be ambivalent in his sympathies - certainly towards animals - both in his films and in real life. On the one hand, he was a professed animal-lover, no doubt about that. Pat Hitchcock tells the story of how the whole Hitchcock family one night stayed home to watch Born Free (1966), and were all reduced to tears by the end. My files mention two instances, years apart, of Hitchcock at the studio seeing animals - a cat, and one of his own dogs - run over, and being hardly able to talk to his staff for days afterwards. There's also a story told by his assistant, Peggy Robertson, about how she selected a new film for him to watch in his private screening-room at the studio. As they were watching it together, Hitchcock, disturbed, said, 'That animal is going to be killed'. Peggy responded, 'Oh, I don't think so' - but Hitchcock proved to be right. Whereupon, he angrily left the screening-room, saying, 'I told you never to select a film for me with animal cruelty in it.' (Hitchcock sometimes quoted Scots poet Robert Burns: 'Man's inhumanity to man/ Makes countless thousands mourn.' I'm sure he also had a soft-spot for Burns's famous poem "To a [Field] Mouse", which includes the lines, 'I'm truly sorry man's dominion/ Has broken Nature's social union,/ An' justifies that ill opinion/ Which makes thee startle/ At me, thy poor earth-born companion,/ An' fellow-mortal!') On the other hand, I can think of two instances where Hitchcock proved indifferent to the fate of animals. The publicity for The Paradine Case made a splash of how the large white rug in Mrs Paradine's bedroom at 'Hindley Hall' was composed of pelts from a rare animal - the arctic fox (I think it was). And (at least) once, when wild deer invaded the Hitchcocks' property at Santa Cruz and ate the grapes in the vineyard, Hitchcock issued orders that the deer be shot. So it may be fair to say that Hitchcock - like many of us, probably - could be contradictory in his attitudes, which as we've seen here recently was exactly what he often put into his films: opposites running together. He was an artist, not a saint. (The same goes for the philosopher Schopenhauer, in scores of ways the equivalent of Hitchcock - and who professed sentiments similar to those of Robert Burns, quoted above. Schopenhauer, a meat-eater, once said, defensively, 'It is no more necessary for a philosopher to be a saint than it is necessary for a saint to be a philosopher.' Hmm.)
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