Teaching at the college level, I try to respond to major news events within whatever context I think is appropriate to the courses I'm teaching. As Bush began his invasion of Iraq, I modified my film history syllabus by showing almost every week films that had something to do with war: Lewis Milestone's All Quiet on the Western Front, Renoir's The Grand Illusion, Excerpts from Capra's Why We Fight films, a few Disney and WB wartime toons, Rome, Open City, Frankenheimer's Manchurian Candidate, and the two definitive war satires from Hollywood, Duck Soup and Dr. Strangelove. Since my dissertation covered a "current event," that material also went into a lot of the courses I was teaching.
Reading and re-reading lots of books in preparation to teach my course on Alfred Hitchcock, I realized that there is no way I can show The Birds this spring. No way. Not after Sandy Hook.
For those who might not recall, The Birds is basically about key personal and social human relationships in response to something completely inexplicable: the mass attacks by a variety of common species of birds on humans. The reason for the bird attacks is never given. Daphne Du Marier's original short story, set in England, evokes the bombing of Britain during World War II, though it's not fair to suggest the birds are symbols of the Nazi rockets. While it is tempting to read Hitchcock's film as a fable about the end of the world, it's probably unfair to limit our understanding to a singular apocalyptic vision. (It might be seen as the next "evolution" in Hitchcock's refusal to offer any explanation: compare the lack-of-reason in this film to the psychiatrist's explanation at the end of Psycho, another film where brutal attacks seem to have no rational cause.)
The central character is a spoiled socialite, an ur-Paris Hilton: wealthy, self-centered, and with too much time on her hands, which she uses to get into trouble. Entering a pet shop in San Francisco, she encounters a defense lawyer, who flirts with her. (It's much more complicated than that. Forgive me.) Discovering that he regularly weekends at his family home in Bodega Bay, she goes there...and becomes the first to be attacked, by a gull. Some see the attacks as connected to her arrival in town; others see them as a manifestation of the lawyer's mom's jealousy toward the socialite.
Whatever the case may be, one of the central scenes in the film is a bird attack on a group of schoolchildren as they are being dismissed at the end of the day. The film's sound is a disturbing mix of bird noises and screams. (Famously, the film has absolutely no music score.) The children manage to avoid death, but one of their teachers does not.
As remarkable a film as this is, it's just not possible to screen it today without Sandy Hook resonating from it. It's unfair to show a group of students -- who themselves were children when the planes hit the Towers -- such a film at this time. The images of children running for their lives on the fictional screen reminds us too much of the pictures coming from outside the elementary school were troopers where hurrying their young charges to safety. It's not really a matter of censorship as it is sensitivity.
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