The Birds is a story of abandonment told through the eyes of two aggrieved women. Let’s meet them now.
First we have Melanie Daniels: the abandoned daughter.
Pretty, wealthy, spoiled, prankster, aloof, behaved but inconsiderate & vain. All of this, though, is a facade, a pretense for protection. Inside she is still a wounded girl whose mother abandoned her. A wound still evident from her conversation:
My mother? Don't waste your time. She ditched us when I was 11 and ran off with some hotel man in the East.
This is the tails side of Hitchcock’s Birds-as-Mother coin. Melanie is daughter abandoned by her mother.
And next we have the main bird, the bird upon which the entire movie revolves. The Mother.
Lydia Brenner. Mannered, distant, begrudgingly gracious, passively critical, unsubtly alienating, aggressively disapproving & in poor control of emotional restraint. Lydia is this way less for facade and more for artillery.
Abandoned at her husband’s death, Lydia describes herself thus:
I wish I were a stronger person. I lost my husband four years ago, you know. It's terrible how you... you depend on someone else for strength, and then... suddenly all the strength is gone, and you're alone.
Inside, Lydia is weak, frightened, lashing, regretful, mournful, desperate & clinging. She is the heads side of Hitchcock’s Birds-as-Mother coin: Lydia is Mother abandoned.
Though all these qualities are evident to Lydia; the seething, frightening levels of anger she lives in because of them is something she has yet to admit consciously.
And so Alfred provides an extra side of Lydia for us. Another bird. A bird part that can consciously acknowledge Lydia’s dark depths: Annie Hayworth...
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