Camille Paglia’s The Birds: A Hitchcock Masterpiece

In her penetrating analysis of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963), Camille Paglia interprets the film as a masterpiece of modern myth—a work that exposes the primal forces lurking beneath civilized life. She argues that The Birds transcends mere suspense or allegory; it is a symbolic meditation on nature, sexuality, and apocalypse.

Paglia situates the film within Hitchcock’s larger vision of erotic tension and moral ambiguity, but she sees The Birds as his most metaphysical creation. Nature, in her reading, is not benevolent but pagan and amoral—a vast, unconscious power that erupts into human order. The sudden avian attacks represent the collapse of rationality before the mystery and terror of the natural world.

At the film’s center is Melanie Daniels, played by Tippi Hedren, whom Paglia reads as a glamorous pagan goddess—stylish, autonomous, and emotionally opaque. Her arrival in the coastal town of Bodega Bay disturbs the fragile equilibrium of its repressed inhabitants. Paglia likens Melanie’s beauty and sexual independence to the disruptive archetypes of myth—figures like Circe or Lilith—whose presence awakens chaos.

The escalating bird assaults, then, symbolize both ecological revenge and erotic punishment: nature striking back against the human attempt to control it. Paglia reads the film’s open ending—not with moral closure but with dread-filled silence—as a modernist gesture of cosmic humility.

There are so many layers to the story including the manner in which Hitchcock seamlessly inserts various interpretations of the meaning of this avian chaos. In one scene Mrs. Bundy, an elderly ornithologist, takes a contrarian stance, saying, "Birds have been on this planet, Miss Daniels, since Archaeopteryx; a hundred and forty million years ago. Doesn't it seem odd that they'd wait all that time to start a - a war against humanity?"

Well, yes, it does seem odd, but can someone else explain what is happening? Another character tells everyone in the diner that it's the end of the world. Considering that there are more than 100 billion birds and only a few billion humans, this would not be a war many of us would be eager to fight.

Painting by the author

Ultimately, Paglia regards The Birds as a work of religious power, though without theology—a revelation of the pagan sublime. Hitchcock, she suggests, understood that terror and beauty spring from the same source, and that civilization rests upon forces it can neither master nor fully understand.

In Paglia’s reading, The Birds becomes not just a thriller, but a modern myth of nature’s return—a confrontation with the ancient gods we thought we’d outgrown. 

Paglia's book belongs to a series of BFI Film Classics. Whereas most of this 110-page volume is a scene by scene account of the film, nearly every observation contains revelations of references to previous Hitchcock films, Hollywood history, mythology and literature. 

If interested, the entirety can be found online here, though I myself felt it compelling enough to purchase it for my library. (Belated birthday present.) 

Once you've read the book, I'm certain you will be compelled to see the movie again as I was.  

URL for the online version of this book: https://api.pageplace.de/preview/DT0400.9781838719388_A39237384/preview-9781838719388_A39237384.pdf?utm_source=chatgpt.com