Cinema Travelogue

The connection with Psycho lies beyond the stuffed birds inside the Bates Motel. It’s also how the mommy issue becomes externalized not only with an actively tormented mother-figure in full flesh with strange psychological attachment with her son, but also through the malevolent attack of the birds that exacerbated the strange meet-the-parent situation by 1000%.

Obviously, it’s incredibly redundant to say the bird attacks are symbols of exact themes; the group conversation in the diner is left with no resolution and even the accusation by a group of women on Melanie for bringing the birds to Bodega Bay is abandoned outside of that one scene. The birds appear more as a materialization of the Hitchcockian obsession and sexual malevolence that operate as elements innate to the film itself and cannot simply be removed or overcome by reasons and explanations, just as John’s obsessive tendencies in Vertigo that is ingrained within that film’s form.

Here, Bernard Herman’s dramatic score is replaced by soundscapes of screeching birds. Again, the music that is often used to complement and emphasize the interior emotions filmed through actor faces is exteriorized by the “natural” soundscape. The drama becomes the birds, and the birds are the drama; they are inseparable yet cannot account for one another logically. The two elements seem to run parallel with one another and only intersect in the end, in a subtle but quiet devastating manner, where Lydia finally warmly accepts Melanie after the latter is severed by the birds, deemed no longer capable of threatening the former’s love for her son; one of the sickest shot/counter-shot ever. The apocalyptic final frame represents not only a natural disaster but also the family dynamics of this group leaving by car, and the pictorial coherence in which the macabre desolation of both the internal and the external meets.