Do you happen to have a pair of birds that are just friendly?

[sovay]

I don't care that it may have eventually paved the way for Piranha 3D, The Birds (1963) is actually quite an effective piece of apocalyptic fiction/survival horror—it has a lot more in common with Night of the Living Dead (1968) than Jaws (1975)—but I wish large portions of the audience had not felt compelled to treat it like Mystery Science Theater 3000. I had come to see a big-screen showing of a Hitchcock film I had only seen in pieces, on television. I can only conclude they had come for a classic of high camp; there were waves of laughter at each bird attack, at each death, at moments of tension or chaos. The couple sitting next to me were particular offenders, miming voices for the characters, interjecting mock-warnings Rocky Horror-style. Several times I thought of yelling for everyone to just shut up and watch the movie; I hate people when they cannot take art on its own terms and decide that it's more fun to snicker at the old-fashioned special effects than pay attention to the story. Yes, those are trained crows. Yes, that's fake blood. Yes, the sodium vapor process is not as seamless as CGI, yes, rear projection doesn't look like location shooting and never did, yes, that's a cloud of starlings pouring down the chimney and Tippi Hedren turning her face back and forth in silent-movie anguish—but if you find the premise and the execution of a film inherently amusing, how about you rent and mock it on your own time and stop interfering with the atmosphere it might create for someone else? Thank God, the audience became more subdued in the last third of the movie, which is increasingly claustrophobic and more about suggestion than action until all of a sudden it's not (affording, I suppose, fewer opportunities for the cheaply risible), and I was in fact able to filter out the earlier noise, but I would prefer not to have needed to. I don't understand. Maybe I'm jaded, but not every movie is a post-ironic parody of itself; it shouldn't be treated as such.

Comments

[gaudior.livejournal.com]

I will admit to having a dual experience in watching The Birds, both struck by the effective creepiness and horror and thrown entirely out of the mood every time one of the special effects was obviously fake. It's the only movie I've ever wanted there to be a remake of, because the original concept is so good, but my visual vocabulary just insists that obviously-fake-looking-birds = funny.

I'm sorry, though, that the audience you watched it with couldn't shut up about it.

[sovay]

It's the only movie I've ever wanted there to be a remake of, because the original concept is so good, but my visual vocabulary just insists that obviously-fake-looking-birds = funny.

I think I can filter for obviously fake special effects, possibly because so many of the movies I watched as a child were from an era even before bluescreen; I do wince sometimes at spectacularly fake blood, but it's also possible to tell whether the director means it for the real thing or the Black Knight in Monty Python. I was going to write that it's like theatrical illusion, but we demand greater realism from films than from the theater, because onstage nobody expects actual ocean, actual chariot races (and it is sometimes downright weird if you get them). Trying to think of a comparable example to The Birds, what I came up with was John Huston's Moby Dick (1956), which I watched a few years ago with fleurdelis28; it has cinematography like a faded, hand-colored photograph and marvelous casting, including an effective, counterintuitive Gregory Peck and an uncredited A.L. Lloyd as a shantyman leading "Blood Red Roses," and a completely fake whale and even more completely fake drowned Ahab in the last, apocalyptic scene and it doesn't matter to me: the film has built up such a careful pitch of myth by that point, it would have to melt down on a basic script-level, not just run up against the limitations of water tanks and early animatronics. I didn't find myself affected quite so powerfully by The Birds—no surprise, I have less of a thing for birds than water—but by the time the special effects started flurrying onto the scene, I the atmosphere could take it.

(It does always throw me that Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn are clearly in a swimming pool somewhere in the last shots of The African Queen (1951) after all the footage of the Congo and the Ulanga, but I assume that was done so that nobody died of dysentery outright. I'll give them a pass for that.)

I'm sorry, though, that the audience you watched it with couldn't shut up about it.

I just couldn't figure out why so many of them had come, if what they wanted was to snark. That's what drinking games in somebody's living room are for.