Birds Desaster

Film-Philosophy 14.1 2010

Film-Philosophy | ISSN: 1466-4615

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‘It’s the End of the World!’: The Paradox of Event and Body in Hitchcock’s The Birds

Bruno Lessard Ryerson University

After all, what most urgently needs thought in this century, if not the event and the phantasm.

- Michel Foucault (1977, 180)

The rise of ecocriticism in literary and cultural studies in the 1990s has paved

the way for a similar interest in the representation of nature and

environmentalist discourses in film studies.1 Expanding on initial interests in

Romantic poetry and American transcendentalism, pioneering publications

such as Jhan Hochman’s Green Cultural Studies: Nature in Film, Literature,

and Theory (1998), Gill Branston’s Hollywood Utopia: Ecology in

Contemporary American Cinema (2004), and David Ingram’s Green Screen:

Environmentalism and Hollywood Cinema (2004) have contributed to

introducing film scholars to environmentally oriented topics such as

industrialisation’s impact on endangered species, ecofeminism’s critique of

man’s power struggle with nature, the destruction of ecosystems,

instrumental rationality and human beings’ careless treatment of nature.

Given the increasing number of films that focus on the hypothetical

destruction of the earth, the retribution of the earth via natural disasters, and

the representation of post-apocalyptic environments, we could perceive as

only logical the extension of ecocriticism to film studies.

1 For a concise account of the rise of ecocriticism, see Heise (2006).



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My intervention in the rapidly expanding field of ecocriticism argues

that future work in film studies, while continuing to pay attention to the

representation of animals and natural disasters,2 will have to expand its

already broad horizons to foreground one concept that systematically

underlies writings on ‘catastrophe films,’ namely, the event. In twentieth-

century philosophy, the concept of the event has occupied a central place in

the writings of Alfred North Whitehead, Martin Heidegger, Gilles Deleuze,

and Alain Badiou. Nevertheless, as Foucault points out in this article’s

epigraph, few concepts need more to be at the centre of contemporary

thought than that of the event. Nature-oriented film analysis cannot overlook

this most debated of notions. Sparked by the increasingly predominant

position of ‘event(s)’ within the contemporary political, media, and

environmental spheres, ecocriticism provides us with an opportunity to

rethink the relations between the controversial concepts of humanity, nature

and animality as they relate to eventness.

Yet it seems that critics who have analysed ‘disaster films’ have

bypassed crucial factors that should configure the understanding of this

genre. Such films all relating to an implicit concept of the event around

which characters and cinematic language gravitate, I aim to show that it is

nearly impossible to discuss them without a prior theorisation of the visual

production of events in contemporary cinema.3 Considering floods, volcanic

2 Such recent films form a relatively new genre that is called ‘disaster’ films, and it certainly takes its roots in 1950s science-fiction films. What disaster and post-apocalyptic films such as Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982), Waterworld (Kevin Reynolds, 1995), Twister (Jan de Bont, 1996), Dante’s Peak (Roger Donaldson, 1997), 28 Days Later (Danny Boyle, 2002), Time of the Wolf (Michael Haneke, 2002), and 2012 (Roland Emmerich, 2009) have in common, not to mention the apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic worlds depicted in Japanese animation, is their portrayal of a world immersed in the visual representation of destruction or the rendering of an unimaginable aftermath. With the help of digital technologies, morphing, and computer-generated imaging, contemporary filmmakers are able to envision catastrophic events that could only be glimpsed at in science-fiction films of the 1950s. 3 A few film scholars have examined cinema from the point of view of event theory. For investigations of cinema that use a Deleuzian framework, see Büttner and Ries (1997) and Conley (2000). Branston (2007) proposes an interesting concept, ‘issue event cinema’, to characterise recent blockbusters that center on climate change. However, he does not philosophically foreground his notion of event. Mullarkey



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eruptions, or earthquakes as instances of events will hopefully add to both

the theorisation of the event in philosophy and the conceptualisation of

natural catastrophes in film studies.

In this article I will not be concerned with such ‘disaster’ films. Instead,

I will purposely turn to what could be considered a pre-disaster film, Alfred

Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963), in order to shed light on the concept of the

event as it could be used by ecocritics and to suggest that such a concept is

equally pertinent to support the analysis of such a film. I will use The Birds

as a case study for circumscribing the filmmaker’s own theory of the event

and compare it to those of Gilles Deleuze and Alain Badiou. Ultimately,

Hitchcock’s use of bird attacks will be shown to motivate an understanding

of the event as a relational concept that cannot resort to the dichotomy

between continuity and rupture that has been advanced in influential

conceptualisations.

Foucault’s admonition to rethink the concepts of the event and the

phantasm can fruitfully shed light on the fate of The Birds in Hitchcock

studies. Upon closer inspection, one will soon notice that it is the latter term,

phantasm, which has occupied centre stage in critical interventions. To the

detriment of a theorisation of the event that seems to have been taken for

granted, critics have focussed on the film’s depiction of life’s unpredictability,

the maternal superego, threats of castration and fetishism, and the

apocalyptic imaginary, among others.4 I argue that it is imperative to turn to

the notion of event to actually evade interpretations of the film; indeed, the

question ‘What do the bird attacks mean?’ has occupied critics for decades,

but the construction of the attacks as relational events has not been touched

upon.5

(2009, 182-184) briefly examines Titanic (James Cameron, 1997) from the point of view of Bergson and the event. In this article, when discussing events, I am referring to representations of events in films rather than cinema qua modernist event. 4 See respectively Wood (2002); Žižek (1991); Modleski (1989); and Perry (2003). 5 As Ian Buchanan rightly remarks, ‘The impossibility of deciding why the events [in The Birds] are taking place calls into question and literally falsifies our standard means of apprehending them.’ (2006, 138). What Buchanan implicitly argues for is another way of conceiving of the bird attacks, a strategy that cannot resort to approaches based on signification.



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After a brief introduction to contemporary event theory, I will explore

the way in which the event cannot be discussed without recourse to a concept

of nature that configures emergence and relationality as crucial determinants

in the negotiation of evental situations. More precisely, a theory of the event

and nature that circumscribes the coeval individuation of human and bird in

relation to modalities of evental experience will be preferred to well-known

interpretations of what the bird attacks supposedly mean. The Birds would

allow the spectator to watch the difficult emergence of subjects, and the

diverse phases and individuations that events provoke would permit

characters such as Melanie to reveal the processual and relational genesis of

the individual. I will then turn to Hitchcock’s use of empty-time to

characterise his concept of the event, which discloses a fascinating

ambivalence between emergence and the void. An underlying argument will

be that the film’s events show a general movement beyond traditional

conceptions of being and human subjectivity, a tendency that relates to

various recent critical interventions that have problematised issues of

signification and representation.6 I will conclude with some thoughts on the

paradoxical nature of the bodies and events that the film constructs in

relation to Hitchcock’s fashioning of cinematic time.

The Event: Two Varying Conceptions

In twentieth-century philosophy, the concept of the event has divided

philosophers between two opposing stances that could be roughly

summarised thus: the thinkers who believe in continuity and emergence, and

those who believe in discontinuity and rupture. While the former conceive of

the event as a continuous pattern of emergence that stems from becoming,

6 Indeed, derived from either an enthusiastic encounter with Gilbert Simondon’s and Gilles Deleuze’s writings (e.g., see Shaviro (1993), Gil (1998), Marks (2000), Massumi (2002), and Manning (2007)) or a critical assessment of Deleuze (e.g., see Badiou (1999) and Hansen (2004 and 2006)) several recent studies focussing on movement, affect, sensation, cinema, digital arts, politics, dance, and ontology have subtly questioned the legacy of cultural studies with regard to the study of issues such as race, gender, class, art, and media. Whether it be about pre-individual singularities or generic truths, the traditional notions of being, subjectivity, and body have been radically altered in such work.



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the latter claim that the event shatters any conceivable present and breaks

with the past. The ensuing situation reveals a new world where old

coordinates become obsolete. For those who uphold the concept of the event

as a prolonging experience, the event translates into pure immanence. While

the former conceptualisation is based on Deleuze’s meditations on the event,

the latter can be said to derive from Badiou’s controversial engagement with

Deleuze’s thought and from his own conceptualisations of the event.7

The concept of the event has been equally neglected in recent studies of

film, technology, and culture. However, given the fact that it is nearly

impossible to discuss transformative experiences, modes of emergence,

creativity, and embodied human agency without addressing the concept of

the event, it does seem imperative to theorise a fluid notion of the event that

will pay attention to relationality in all its material and immaterial forms.

The potential problem with Hitchcock’s concept of the event is that it

fluctuates between expressiveness, relationality, radical breaks, and the void.

One has to oppose already proposed concepts of the event as a form of

emergence or becoming or, on the contrary, as marking rupture or

discontinuity in nature,8 for these conceptions would establish a dual or

binary mode of experience that does not reveal how The Birds functions.

Of course, one could argue that Deleuze’s and Badiou’s concepts of the

event would shed new light on the film. On Deleuze’s account, events have

no meaning; they are meaning. Events cannot be reduced to mere effects;

they question the causal relation between cause and effect. Moreover, an

7 For comparative studies of Deleuze and Badiou, see Bostana (2005), Tarby (2006), and Besana (2007). Badiou himself has devoted a great number of pages to Deleuze, one of his major interlocutors with Lacan. See Badiou’s book-length study of Deleuze’s philosophy, The Clamor of Being (1999), and his more explicit comparison in Badiou (2009b, 381-387) 8 To draw a parallel between event theory and film theory, Deleuze’s and Badiou’s diverging views on the configuration of the event cannot but remind one of the dichotomy Bazin (2000) identifies in terms of the filmmakers who believe in the image (i.e, montage) and those who believe in reality (i.e., the long take and depth of field). Whereas Deleuze seems to believe in continuity characteristic of the long take and depth of field, Badiou privileges the cuts and ruptures that define montage. Badiou mentions this issue in an interview and emphasises that cinema should privilege rupture instead of repetition. See Badiou (2004).



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event is to be distinguished from its actual effectuation in time and space.

Deleuze argues that events take place between time periods, and in The Logic

of Sense he explicitly states that ‘The event is coextensive with becoming’

(1990, 8). The event would thus evade meaning, interpretation, and analysis

because it occupies a relational function that alternatively plays with cause

and effect to the point of indeterminacy. Deleuze likens the event to a

singularity that does not relate to identity, essence, or representation: ‘It [the

singularity] is essentially pre-individual, non-personal, and a-conceptual. It is

quite indifferent to the individual and the collective, the personal and the

impersonal, the particular and the general – and to their oppositions.

Singularity is neutral.’ (1990, 52; emphasis in original) Deleuze maintains

that events are not problems but redraw the contours of potential problems,

their conditions, and their hypothetical solutions. Indeed, the ending of The

Birds could be said to show such a state of affairs.

The problems Deleuze mentions usually take the form of two

questions: ‘What happened?’ and ‘What will happen?’ Such an understanding

somewhat bypasses the present form of the question: ‘What happens?’ This

double causality stems from the bodies that are involved in the event and in

the other events that guide or orient future events. Inspired by the Stoics’

account of the event and their revision of causal relations, Deleuze will go on

to claim that events reveal expression and creation instead of necessity or

causality. This could be expressed in the form of ‘What are the expressive

rapports between events?’ or ‘Can one find compatibility or incompatibility

between given events?’ Deleuze claims that such a concept of the event

cannot rely on causality because it looks only at effects. What the

philosopher ultimately argues for is a serial concept of the event that

somewhat eschews causal relations, contradictions, and meaning. The event

would then allow the individual to become someone else or at least be given

a new perspective on the event:

It would be necessary for the individual to grasp herself as event; and that she grasp the event actualised within her as another individual grafted onto her. In this case, she would not understand, want, or represent this event without also understanding and wanting all other



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events as individuals, and without representing all other individuals as events. (Deleuze 1990, 178)

Pointing to the becoming-event of the individual, Deleuze’s serial concept of

the event reveals how it stems from the actions and bodies of humans while

being different from them. Events are different because they are not part of

bodies; they do not represent bodies. They are, Deleuze concludes,

‘incorporeal’ (1990, 182).

The Birds could be equally examined from the point of view of

Badiou’s influential conceptualisation of the event. Rejecting Deleuze’s

account of the event, Badiou argues that events are not the result of

becoming, extension, evolution, or progression. On the contrary, the French

philosopher claims that events characterise abrupt ruptures and decisive

breaks in that they redefine the parameters of the world. In other words, they

are all about interruption and cessation.9 Events reveal the evental site or

new coordinates that were inconceivable prior to the event taking place.

More importantly, for Badiou authentic subjects do no preexist events; they

are the result of events or traces of evental occurrences.10 The remains of

events would be what we call ‘bodies.’ As opposed to Deleuze’s singularity of

continuity, Badiou posits singularities of interruption . One can become a

true subject when one goes beyond the event or its void and when one

embraces a new way of thinking that is about trajectory or path instead of

becoming.11 Badiou is interested in conceptualising the subject as the trace of

9 Prior to the publication of his 2006 magnum opus, Logiques des mondes, and guided by the thoughtful criticisms of other philosophers, Badiou had been increasingly reconsidering the dichotomy between being and event in his Being and Event (2005 [1988]) and the way in which such a bipolar structure does not account for relation and emergence. See Badiou (2000) and the preface to Logics of Worlds (2009b) for his turn to relationality and the logic of emergence. For insightful comments on the absence of relationality in Badiou, see Bosteels (2005) and Gillespie (2008). 10 To be more precise, in Logics of Worlds (2009b, 62-67) Badiou further qualifies the types of reaction to an event subjects can actually have. He singles out four orientations (faithful, reactive, obscure, and resurrected), which he calls ‘the four subjective destinations.’ 11 Noteworthy is that for Badiou ‘real’ events can only occur post facto in four generic realms called ‘truth procedures’: science, politics, art, and the amorous relationship. These function as the conditions under which philosophical thought can



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the event that is added to the body. This is precisely what the ending of the

film would have us believe: characters who, after the bird-events, will not be

able to continue living on the way they used to.12

It is rather tempting to juxtapose these two concepts of the event to

foreground an analysis of Hitchcock’s film. We could confront Deleuze’s

conception of the individual as becoming-event and Badiou’s subject as

becoming-object of the event. As Badiou puts it: ‘‘Appearing’ is nothing else,

for a being [étant] – initially conceived in its being [être] as pure multiple –

than a becoming-object.’ (2009b, 220-221). In other words, while Badiou’s

focus would be on appearing, Deleuze’s would be on continuing. Whereas

Deleuze speaks of pre-individual singularities and bodies, Badiou does not

conceive of the body as pre-existing but as constituted: ‘‘So we must first of

all answer the following question: in a world where an event-site is given,

what is a body? What is the appearing of a body? Or, more precisely, what

marks out a body among the objects that constitute the appearing of a world’

(2009b, 454). These questions relate to the fact that for Badiou all subjects

are post-evental bodies that still bear the traces of the event. From non-

existence to existence, the Badiouian body is ‘what is beckoned and

mobilized by the post-evental sublimation of the inexistent’ (Badiou 2009b,

470).

Besides their salient divergences, what stands out most between the two

philosophers’ conceptualisations is their congruent view of the post-evental

entity’s task. Indeed, where Deleuze and Badiou seem to converge is in the

take place. Badiou does not address explicitly the possible analysis of events represented within a given truth procedure such as the bird-events in Hitchcock’s The Birds and how such fictional events could relate to the ‘Hitchcock event’ in cinema. 12 Joseph Vogl also speaks of bird-events (Vogel-Ereignisse) in his essay on The Birds. In a way similar to my theoretical orientation, Vogl addresses bird-events in order to evade approaches based on the signification of the attacks. As he points out, ‘Thus before being signs or questions, these birds are events in the film, and this leads to the questions: What events occur with the birds? How do they occur as events?’ (2005, 52) However, Vogl inquires into the bird-event from the point of view of Lacanian theory, which could be said to overdetermine his critical agenda.



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stand that the subject must uphold in order to live after the event. Deleuze

claims that we must ‘become worthy of what happens to us, and thus to will

and release the event, to become the offspring of one’s own events, and

thereby to be reborn, to have one more birth, and to break with one’s carnal

birth’ (1990, 148-149). Being worthy of the event in the face of an

unprecedented situation reappears in Badiou’s own suggestion to confront

post-evental situations and equally underlines the task of the new body: ‘To

accept and declare this body is not enough, if one wishes to be the

contemporary of the present of which this body is the material support. It is

necessary to enter into its composition, to become an active element of this

body. The only real relation to the present is that of incorporation’ (2009b,

508). As the reader can conjecture, the ontological and ontogenetic premises

of both thinkers greatly vary in terms of what qualifies as ‘multiplicity’;

however, given their echoing conclusions as to what awaits the post-evental

subject, whether she be a becoming-event or a becoming-object of the event,

both philosophers point to an ethical stance that does not advocate resisting

either the event or its embodied effectuation in post-evental entities.13

Hitchcock’s film offers a different take on the event, one that relates to

the prospective merging of human and animal subjectivities and their

multifaceted expressions in a particular cinematic time characterised by the

void and relationality. The Birds develops a narrative that features the

individuation of bird and human in a cinematic time that relies on the void to

be effective. The film would thus revisit Deleuze’s and Badiou’s theories of

the event as that which always already involves embodied effectuation and

would think expression, emergence, and the void in coextensive terms.

The Nature of Things

The ‘natural’ world of Bodega Bay and the concept of the event with which

we are concerned in this article refer to various human and non-human

13 In a manifesto published after Logics of Worlds, Badiou elaborates on the singular ethical stance he proposes in the conclusion to Being and Event II (2009b, 507-514), advocating ‘a life worth living [une vie digne de ce nom]’ beyond democratic materialism. See Badiou (2009a).



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modes of life in all their diversity and intersections. It is precisely at such

intersections between humans and birds that Hitchcock’s The Birds

configures its concept of nature. The film does not postulate a generic

difference between humans and birds; on the contrary, it displaces birds from

their animalistic base to the plane of humanity via various cinematic

techniques that strikingly evoke subjectivity on their part. While the

filmmaker is not concerned with the traditional attributes with which nature

is often endowed (e.g., authenticity, value, peacefulness, permanence),

Hitchcock seems more intent on problematising the concept of nature by

showing its unstable points of reference. In fact, he displays a relentless will

to denaturalise human nature, or what passes as human nature, in the face of

unprecedented events that drastically alter any process of individuation.

In his extensive reflection on individuation, Gilbert Simondon often

uses the expression ‘theatre of individuation’ to describe the continuous

processes within which living agents, as variables that do not preexist

relations but come to realisation via relations, evolve in perpetual forms of

metastability. Instead of positing ‘being’ or ‘substance’ as the primary terms

of a relation, Simondon argues that, if we still want to have recourse to such

perennial categories, relation should function as that which enables ‘being’ or

‘substance’ in the first place because ‘we cannot distinguish the extrinsic from

the intrinsic; what is truly and essentially the individual is the active relation,

the exchange between the extrinsic and the intrinsic … The individual is the

result of a constituting relation, not the interiority a constituted term.’ (2005,

62)14 Following on Simondon’s insight into relationality, the individual

would be the theater of a relational activity.

Simondon’s writings have not been disseminated within film studies as

much as those of other French thinkers such as Lacan and Deleuze. However,

14 At stake for Simondon, and for any theory of the event, is the priorisation of relation and the debunking of any ‘founding’ term such as ‘substance’, ‘being’, ‘representation’ or ‘identity’ that systematically obscures how emergence and individuation function. Given that ‘relation’ cannot exist if it is not linked to at least two concepts, it cannot be described as another master or transcendental concept in the tradition of Western metaphysics. Jean-Hugues Barthélémy has recently touched on this fundamental point (cf. 2006, 132).



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his account of relationality in the context of a ‘theatre of individuation’ is

most compelling, provided that we adapt it to speak of a ‘cinema of

individuation,’ which is what The Birds offers the spectator. In such a

‘cinema of relationality,’ the characters and the birds do not function as

preexisting terms; their problematic relation precisely is what the film

reveals. The many interpretations of what the bird attacks would signify fail

to disclose how the montage of individuation takes place in this particular

universe that foregrounds relations between shots, birds, and humans and the

events that can potentially jeopardise the process of individuation.15

In the film the axiomatic differentiation between humans and birds is

questioned as the relations between the animal world and humanity

invariably disclose the collapse of any founding term. Hitchcock would tend

to adopt a monist understanding of nature and humanity in his cinema of

individuation, and The Birds contests and redistributes into zones of

uncertainty the cultural divide between human and non-human, rational

subject and animal.16 One could argue that the film’s events reconfigure the

concept of animality as a relational notion that binds human and animal in

more than one way, and such a renewed understanding forces the revision of

the concept in the context of the emergence of subjectivity in non-human

forms and non-subjective experience in human forms.

A first example of the emergence of non-subjective behavior in the

human could be the female characters’ own lack of speech facing the terrible

outcomes of the bird attacks. Lack of speech having always been a

predominant characteristic to differentiate between humans and animals,17

this trait would possess a modular form in all beings, as it completely

15 Indeed, Simondon is often thought of as the precursor of a philosophical orientation that privileges becoming, Deleuze being its major proponent. However, Simondon himself does mention that there are ‘disruptive processes which are not structuring but only destructive.’ (2005, 550; emphases in original) 16 The film’s general trajectory actually recalls Deleuze’s description of a Francis Bacon painting: ‘In place of formal correspondences, what Bacon’s painting constitutes is a zone of indiscernibility or undecidability between man and animal.’ (2004, 20; emphasis in original). 17 Kate Soper notes: ‘Western thought has therefore, in an important sense, regarded the animal as the antithesis to the human, and done so very largely on account of its lack of speech.’ (1995, 81).



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vanishes in the case of Lydia when she discovers the eyeless corpse of Dan

Fawcett and when Melanie is subjected to the famous bird attack near the

end of the film. If animals indeed mediate our perception of ourselves and of

others, as the lovebirds do in the ‘bird shop sequence’ that stages Melanie

and Mitch’s first encounter, how can we still hold on to a constructed

differentiation that pits animalistic behavior against human habitus?

The potential problem with the preceding depiction of nature lies in the

question of animality, which does not pertain to representation. Rather, it is

a matter of creation, emergence, and affect. Indeed, too often relegated to

discussions of representation, animality in cinema functions in more sensual,

processual, and relational terms that variously move viewers and the

characters themselves. Therefore, it is simply not a question of cultural

discourse, denied rights, or symbolic representation with which we are

concerned.18 A viable position between rights and representation, I argue, is

to focus on the aspects that tie ‘humans’ and ‘animals’ and in the very

questioning of these rigid categories in order to offer an account of

distributed expressiveness among life forms. This position would normally

lead us to the study of ethology, which would entail, as Erin Manning

reminds us, paying attention to ‘the composition of relations or powers

between different things. Ethologies are not about knowledge as end-points

but about accumulation and difference. They are about extension, about

expressions, about events, about becomings.’ (2007, 144)19 Hitchcock

renders his concept of nature and its underlying ethology in a way that

allows him to experiment with various forms of emergence. These forms

point to the bird attacks and their creation of a relational concept of nature

that transforms human subjects into post-evental entities.

In his books on cinema, Deleuze makes interesting remarks on The

Birds that refer to the relational quality he discerns in Hitchcock’s works in

18 As Greg Garrard has justly emphasised: ‘The study of the relations between animals and humans in the Humanities is split between philosophical considerations of animal rights and cultural analysis of the representation of animals.’ (2004, 136). 19 The contemporary interest in ethology derives from Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza. See the final chapter of Deleuze (2003, 164-175).



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general.20 As a matter of fact, Deleuze emphasises not only the relations

between subjects, animals, events, and objects in Hitchcock’s cinema but also

the blurring of ontological boundaries that such relations provoke. For

example, discussing the final sequence in which the birds witness the

departure of the humans without attacking them, Deleuze concludes that at

this precise moment ‘the human and the inhuman enter into an uncertain

relationship’ (1986, 20). The merging of human and inhuman certainly

suggests the effacement of categorical distinctions between these entities, but

a more elaborate description certainly is appropriate to account for the birds’

behaviour in the final sequence of the film.21

Faced with The Birds, one cannot help but feel that the emphasis

placed on relationality reveals multifaceted components that would benefit

from a broader perspective. This would include a description of nature (and

the birds) in a way that would testify to the importance of affect in order to

enlarge the concept of relation to its actual effectuation in the film. Building

on Whitehead’s deceptively famous empiricist description of nature as ‘that

which we observe in perception through the senses’ (2004, 3),22 one could

emphasise the fact that, besides his focus on the senses, the philosopher

conceptualises nature as an entity which primarily relates to life as event.

20 John Rajchman has also commented upon Hitchcock’s reliance on relation: ‘Alfred Hitchcock is an ‘empiricist’ for Deleuze since he constructs a cinematic time built from relations prior to the individuals that fill them.’ (1998, 3). 21 One should not underestimate the power of non-verbal communication to affect the relational quality of the exchanges between human and birds in the last minutes of the film. Interestingly, Hitchcock’s use of innovative electronics to produce birdlike sounds contributes to accentuate the spectator’s impression that the apparently impossible communication between humans and birds cannot be resolved. Electronics allows Hitchcock to produce a new form of aural intrusion into the experience of cinema, one paralleling the birds’ into the society of Bodega Bay, and to question spectatorial expectations, the restrictive confines of human subjectivity, and ontology. In her study of music in Hitchcock’s The Birds, Elisabeth Weis focuses on suspense and audience manipulation to claim that the use of electronics and sound effects points to a desire to go ‘beyond subjectivity,’ describing the film as an ‘extrasubjective’ work. (1982, 136) As will be made more explicit in the following pages, going beyond subjectivity may not be the appropriate phrase to describe the expressive processes at work between characters and birds. For a recent analysis of what one critic calls Hitchcock’s ‘most revolutionary sound track,’ see Sullivan (2006, 259-272). 22 For a thorough examination of Whitehead’s philosophy, see Stengers (2002). For a recent reappraisal of Whitehead in English, see Shaviro (2009).



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Whitehead distinguishes three features that can help locate and describe an

event, namely, place, time, and character. Strangely recalling Whitehead’s

description of the event, Deleuze, elaborating on The Birds, mentions three

characteristics that organise the bird attacks: modes, places, and victims. (cf.

Deleuze 1986, 20)23 As will be made clearer in the next section, these three

features cannot be adequately described in their relational combinations if

the concept of the event does not configure the analysis of nature and birds.

If indeed events are shot through with affects, the birds and the humans who

are produced by events see their bodies transformed into sensuous ‘archives

of experience’ that relate to the various modes of (im)materiality that qualify

events in the first place.24 The spectator’s task would be to identify such a

processual individuation.

The Hitchcokian Bird-Event

If the individuation of both birds and humans is to be understood as a

concept that does not presuppose the domination of one term over another

but instead emphasises the primary relation between terms as its major mode

of effectuation, how can we account for a version of the concept of the event

that insidiously excludes the materiality of the subject in the ‘cinema of

individuation’?25 Hitchcock certainly integrates various bodies before,

during, and after the attacks. If the film’s bird-events point to the potential

23 For a comparative analysis of Deleuze and Whitehead, see Villani (1996). 24 I borrow the expression ‘archive of experience’ from Massumi (2003). 25 It is noteworthy that critics who adhere to a Deleuzian approach to the event always seem to face, sooner or later, the imperative return of materiality, even though they claim that events are ‘immaterial.’ For example, Alan Bourassa argues that ‘It is important not to confuse the event with a state of things, with bodies and materials that come together to produce results. Rather than being a set of bodies and things, rather than being the mingling and colliding of these bodies, the event is the effect of their mingling and colliding […] Existing and not existing; non-corporeal, yet the effect of bodies; neither active nor passive, yet the result of action and passion, the event is always paradoxical. And its greatest paradox is its relation to language.’ (2002, 66; emphasis in original) What Bourassa ultimately concedes is the relational concept of the event which I advocate in this article, one that takes into consideration the event’s paradoxical regime of materiality instead of dismissing it. Contrary to Bourassa’s emphasis on language, I wish to stress that the greatest paradox of the event is in its treatment of and relation to the body. I return to the paradox of event and body in the last section.



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individuation of bird and human, it cannot relegate the body to an

immaterial realm. One has to focus on how The Birds displays the

individuation of bodies and on what its logic of appearance or emergence is.

The birds force the humans to engage in multiple individuations, albeit with

difficulty, and, as spectators, we watch the transformative process of humans

who face terrifying events. The film would thus offer a contribution to both

event theory and ontogenesis; first, The Birds constructs a relational milieu

to think bodies and events, and, second, ontogenesis and individuation can

now be reconceptualised via a notion of event that integrates corporeality

and affect without taking the individual as always already constituted. The

problem for Hitchcock in The Birds is to think events, bodies, and

individuation alongside the effects of the bird-events as they unfold in

cinematic time.

In order to solve this problem, Hitchcock unfolds events in a serial

pattern that deserves closer attention. While one could describe the film’s

narrative arc as a series of bird attacks that culminates in the final attack on

Melanie, this insight would fail to disclose the manner in which the bird

attacks are interspersed with three ‘interludes’ – the bird that smashes into

Annie’s front door and which functions as bad omen; Lydia’s discovery of

Dan Fawcett’s eyeless corpse; and Annie’s dead body that is found by Mitch

and Melanie – that ultimately reveal Hitchcock’s understanding of evental

situations. As we shall see, the filmmaker provides a concept of the event that

intermeshes empty-time, bodies, and event time.26

After the single bird’s attack on Melanie in the boat, we have the first

post-evental situation: the discovery of a dead seagull on Annie’s porch. Two

attacks will follow this discovery: the birds that crash Kathy’s outdoor

birthday party, and the birds that later invade the Brenner house through the

chimney. Between this third attack and the fourth, there is the second

interlude featuring Lydia’s dramatic discovery of Dan Fawcett’s body and the

26 My use of ‘empty-time’ within the context of event theory is indebted to Bernard Groethuysen, but I have adapted it to the study of film. See Groethuysen (1935-1936).



159

famous jump cuts on his disfigured face. Again, two bird attacks will follow

this post-evental interlude: the attack on the school children and the attack

on the gas station and its surrounding area. The fifth and sixth attacks will

be separated by another post-evental interlude: Mitch and Melanie’s

unexpected discovery of Annie’s body. Afterwards, the final bird attacks, the

sixth and the seventh, will be on the house and in an upstairs room in the

culminating confrontation between Melanie and the birds.

The preceding breakdown of the bird attacks allows us to better

understand Hitchcock’s mastery of suspense and, most importantly, his serial

concept of the event as it unfolds in cinematic time. There are an undeniable

pattern and rhythm at work after the first attack on Melanie riding her boat

across Bodega Bay. This rhythm follows a 1-2-1-2-1-2 pattern in which ‘1’

stands for a post-evental interlude while ‘2’ refers to the two attacks that

ensue. Paying closer attention to this serial pattern, we gather that

Hitchcock’s notion of the event differs from that of Badiou and Deleuze in

the sense that his ‘bird-events’ do not mark either radical novelty or

perennial becoming. On the contrary, his is a more nuanced understanding of

evental situations that demonstrates the interrelation between empty-time

and event time, between bodies and the birds that attack them either

onscreen or offscreen. The very narrative arc of the film, via its cyclical

unfolding of event-time, reveals that for Hitchcock events do more than

follow one another in patterns of either sheer rupture or indefinite

prolongation. The ‘interludes’ testify to a conjunctive understanding of the

event in which bodies follow other bodies in various patterns of empty-time

(the interludes) and event time (the attacks) based on the relational proximity

of bodies, either dead or alive.

Hitchcock’s dual notion of the event, as an overlapping phenomenon

that integrates bodies in two temporal regimes, empty-time and event time,

thus questions the very notion of event time as excluding bodies. The

overlapping of events in the film would presuppose a concept of the event

that questions causality and contingency, as they relate to time-based

understandings of events. Bird attacks do not represent nature’s cruelty, or



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Melanie’s and humanity’s complacency, as Hitchcock famously described the

meaning of his film. They function according to an entirely different

economy of motion, affection, and (dis)placement that highlights how

humans actually come to terms with events. Where Hitchcock departs from

both Deleuze and Badiou is in his postulation of a concept of the event that is

directly linked to the experience of individuation as an embodied affair based

on relational patterns between affective emergence and the void. Hitchcock’s

film deploys events and modes of emergence that relate that which happens

and how it happens. The manner in which things do happen is in their

embodied consequences: bodies get hurt, children scream and cry, and

humans die horrible deaths. The filmmaker’s original perspective on the

event is that he foregrounds relation as the primary form of expression

between empty-time, events, and the bodies that link them.

The film’s innovative concept of the event divides time between empty-

time and event time and finds a way to ultimately relate them. It is

noteworthy that Hitchcock’s emphasis on relationality and suspense makes

his cinematic practice depart from that of other filmmakers such as Ozu and

Antonioni who have been mentioned as equally alternating between narrative

and empty-time. In Hitchcock’s films, however, empty-time is paradoxically

filled with characters or focuses on a specific character’s body part. Not only

does he focus on characters in these moments but he also exploits the various

ranges of emotional experience of humans who fear potential attacks, thus

relating time-effects to corporeal manifestations. Therefore, Hitchcock’s

notion of temporal emptiness is always already related to the expressive

nature of bodies and the underlying concern for the difficult individuation of

human and bird.

An interesting example of the uneasy rapprochement between humans

and birds relates to Hitchcock’s configuration of empty-time. In the jungle

gym scene that precedes the attack on the school children, Melanie is seen

sitting on a fence, lighting a cigarette while several birds arrive and perch

behind her. The spectator soon realises that after each cut the number of

birds increases. As we look at Melanie smoking her cigarette, waiting for the



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children to go to recess, her facial expression reveals impatience and

uncertainty. As soon as the spectator’s gaze identifies with Melanie’s via a

subjective shot which tracks a flying bird’s descent, the next shot shows the

jungle gym covered with dozens of birds. This shot is immediately followed

by the gradual upward ascension of Melanie’s face in the frame that highly

contrasts with the birds’ downward motions. Hitchcock’s strategy is not only

to direct our attention to the impending bird-event but also to the moments

before and after the event. His characters thus become links or traces

between attacks, and the temporal flow of the film is thus decelerated to

allow the presence of empty-time frames.

The crucial attack on the gas station near the Tides restaurant further

exemplifies Hitchcock’s use of empty-time and its relation to the dialectics of

entrapment that is fundamental in the film. Divided into three parts, the fifth

attack’s narrative arc is characterised by a first sequence in which the

characters in the restaurant draw our attention to menacing gas leaks that

will lead to explosions. Here Hitchcock introduces a fascinating combination

of motion and stillness that has received little attention. Anxiously waiting to

see if a man lighting a cigar will drop his match and cause an explosion,

Melanie and the other characters then witness a series of spectacular

explosions. What is particularly striking are the reaction shots that frame

Melanie’s stupefied face. Indeed, Melanie’s face reacts to explosions, but her

face is uncannily immobilised in the frame as though we were looking at a

photograph of a woman emoting before a shocking sight. Four such reaction

shots are used in less than four seconds, and they cut between explosions,

displaying Melanie posing and looking in a new direction each time. On the

one hand, the immobile face of Melanie thus contrasts with the other

characters’ agitation in the background; on the other hand, Melanie’s face

literally poses for shots that represent empty-time in both her embodied

reception of the events and in the very film itself. The first portion of the

attack qua event therefore emphasises empty-time as embodied stillness.

The second part of the attack, interspersed with a bird’s eye point-of-

view shot, consists in Melanie exiting the restaurant and taking refuge in a



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phone booth into which several birds will crash. This type of entrapment

certainly prefigures the final bird attack that also centres around Melanie,

but here it most importantly refines the notion of embodied empty-time as

relates to entrapment. Seeking a way to link empty-time and event time by

using bodies as the relation between the two, Hitchcock gives spectators an

attack on his lead actress and transforms her into the link that joins the first

and the third part of the attack, that is, between embodied stillness and

further entrapment. Mitch’s sudden arrival will allow Melanie to safely

return inside the restaurant.

The third and last segment in this attack presents us with Mitch and

Melanie returning to an apparently empty restaurant. Yet around the corner

they find several women in two single files, waiting for the attack to end.

While they gaze at Melanie as though she were responsible for the bird

attacks, as one woman intimates, the spectator gradually comes to

understand the narrative arc of this most important attack. Indeed, while the

first part of the attack features Melanie’s face in very peculiar reaction shots

as quasi-photographs, the second part features the culminating event, an

attack on Melanie trapped in an enclosed space. The third part of the attack

underscores the collective stupefaction at the bird-events. The attack’s figure

of entrapment thus unfolds three times: Melanie’s body trapped in time (first

part of attack); Melanie’s body trapped in space (second part); and various

characters trapped in hermeneutic circles (third part).

As spectators of the film very well know, the attack on the gas station

features two enigmatic bird’s eye views that punctuate the action. These

shots directly relate to one of Hitchcock’s innovations in the film: the use of

empty-time in which characters wait to be assigned a position in the

expressive pattern. Therefore, it is not the meaning of the bird attacks that

matters but the functioning of the attacks between empty-times and how

these empty-times are constructed. In other words, the importance of the

bird-events cannot be reduced to an outside ‘force’ that would explain or

justify their occurrence. In fact, one could argue that Hitchcock pokes fun at

the spectators or film critics who seem intent on reproducing the very same



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questionings of characters who constantly seek the meaning behind the

attacks, typically asking: ‘Why are they doing this?’ or ‘Why did they want to

kill children?’

Completing its relational conceptualisation of events and empty-times,

The Birds ends with two devastating attacks. The first, during which the

main characters are secluded in the house, shows birds entering through

windows and doors, and the second features the culminating attack during

which Melanie will be severely injured. Between these two attacks, there is a

beautifully lit scene in which low-angle camera work successively reveals the

faces of Mitch, Melanie, and Lydia. This scene perfectly embodies

Hitchcock’s notions of event, empty-time, and emergence. The characters’

appearance in the frame ensues from an upward motion: Mitch from the low

right, Melanie from the low left, and Lydia arising in the center of the image.

The camera then pulls back to reveal Lydia in close-up, medium shot, and

long shot, integrating Melanie on the left, and, still pulling back, Mitch also

on the left. This scene stands as one of the most significant constructions of

empty-time in the film, as the characters listen to the birds fly away. When

the three characters are in the frame, desperately waiting for the birds to go,

one perceives that Hitchcock’s emerging tableau vivant truly expresses the

novel concept of the event that he ingeniously constructs in his film.

Contrary to a Deleuzian reading of the preceding attacks and events, I

prefer to underline the way in which The Birds manages to resolve the

tension between Deleuze’s insight that Hitchcock’s cinema is a cinema of

relations and the fact that Deleuze’s own theory of the event fails to adopt an

equally relational perspective. Indeed, given the number of ‘embodied events’

– murders, accidents, attacks, happenstances – that recur in Hitchcock’s

1963 work and in his films in general, it seems difficult to entertain the idea

that his is a cinema of relations that does not put forward a relational theory

of evental situations. Hitchcock’s innovation with regard to cinema is not

only to have reconfigured cinematic time in terms of relation, as Deleuze

justly points out, but also to have grafted onto this a relational theory of the

event that merges empty-time, bodies, and event time in a way that radically



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challenges a theory of the event that relies on pure continuity and becoming

such as Deleuze’s.

In the Realm of Paradoxical Bodies

Relying on ecocriticism to explore Hitchcock’s work does not culminate in

examining how birds, dogs, or cats function in his visual world. Rather, it

should entail focusing on his films from a perspective that has been used to

reorient debates over auteurist and psychoanalytic concerns.27 This article

has proposed that we put the emphasis on the movement and emergence of

bodies, as they relate to a process of effectuation that could not exist without

the void acting as that which enables appearance in the first place. The

evaluation of new life forms and confrontations between objects, animals,

and humans demand such a revision of both ontological demarcations and

the ethical and corporeal imports of such processes.

At the end of the film, Melanie’s body is drastically cut and bruised,

and her psychological state could be likened to catatonia.28 The coeval

individuation of bird and human certainly has a price: bodies are

transformed, and a new world order seems to emanate from the quasi-

apocalyptic scenery that characterises the film’s denouement.29 The birds

27 Already in the early 1980s, Fredric Jameson expressed the desire to study the conditions of emergence of Hitchcock’s cinema as event: ‘It is therefore less a question of ‘deciding’ what genre Hitchcock’s films belong in, than rather of reconstructing the generic traditions, constraints, and raw materials, out of which alone, at a specific moment of their historical evolution, that unique and ‘non-generic’ thing called a Hitchcock film was able to emerge.’ (2007, 138) More importantly, Jameson has linked the abandon of genre criticism to a criticism that would do ‘away with consciousness, ‘character,’ and the anthropomorphic.’ (quoted in Cohen 2005a, 2) Cohen’s recent studies of Hitchcock’s films evade the classic debates to which Jameson alludes in order to emphasise teletechnic revolutions and the filmmaker’s cinema as event. 28 I will refer the reader to Donald Spoto’s account of the disturbing shoot of the final bird attack for the description of the radical merging between actress and female subject in the case of Hitchcock’s infamous treatment of and infatuation with his leading star, Tippi Hedren. See Spoto (1999, 458-461). 29 Consider Camille Paglia’s description of the final sequence of the film: ‘It’s a composite of thirty-two images against a matte painting…of the barnyard, landscape and dawn sky. The barn and moving car required separate segments, as did the foreground, which is in three parts with multiplied photos of the same gulls. Though a third of the birds are fake, there are some live chickens as well as 500 local ducks painted grey. The rustling birds who stir but don’t fly as Mitch edges out the porch



165

have invaded the human world and have deliberately forced the blurring of

distinctions between human and non-human bodies.

What the final sequence shows, in all its fragile balance, is what both

Deleuze and Badiou mention discussing events: one must negotiate the event

and accept the new bodies that result from it. Indeed, humans partake of and

stem from events, and, in the film, they are part of the process that ties them

to birds. The ethical step toward accepting the event certainly demands that

characters come to terms with the attacks and accept that their embodied

presence in the world will be tied forever to insecurity and imbalance. In

other words, their bodies as well have to negotiate new spaces that cannot be

similar to the ones that preceded the events. The fashioning of new bodies,

which relate to the radical confrontation between birds and humans, reflects

the film’s emphasis on a renewed conception of emergence. Insofar as it

eschews focussing on the ontology of the event (in the form of being and

event) in order to suggest the expression of events (in the form of emergence

and event), the film is not so much about unpredictable turns of events or

unforeseeable catastrophes as much as bodies that act and are acted upon.

The uncertain cohabitation between humans and birds, which the final

sequence shows, echoes this relational concept of nature, the equally

relational notion of empty-time in Hitchcock’s films, and the innovative

concept of the event that emerges from the subjects’ paradoxical corporeal

effectuation.

Such effectuation deserves a final development and clarification. On

the one hand, events take place concomitantly with interstitial and

paradoxical bodies, in-between and ephemeral organisms that cannot be

accounted for in theories such as Deleuze’s and Badiou’s that deny the

multifaceted and relational workings of materiality in the unfolding of events

and bodies. As Jenny Edbauer has pointed out: ‘The affective body is an were either tranquilised or wore ‘miniature binders’, and the feet of the gulls on rooftops were secured with elastic bands.’ (1998, 17) Couldn’t we say that the final shots perfectly render the composite and hybrid nature of both the event and individuation, as birds and humans confront artifice, stillness, and (im)mobility in the face of the supreme non-event with which the film closes? Aren’t human forms in the film all ‘secured with elastic bands’ in the post-evental stage?



166

event; it is implicated in the doubleness of the event … we must come to

understand the body as an affective body, as a total event.’ (2004, n.p.) On

the other hand, Hitchcock’s film reveals that an approach to the event that

would exclusively focus on corporeality would limit the scope of such a

theory and would confine it to immobile bodies outside the relational pattern

between event and body. It is probably Foucault, in his description of the

event, who has most adequately described the paradox between ephemerality

and materiality that characterises the unfolding of events which a film such

as The Birds offers: ‘Of course, an event is neither substance, nor accident,

nor quality nor process; events are not corporeal. And yet, an event is

certainly not immaterial; it takes effect, becomes effect, always on the level of

materiality.’ (1982, 231) Putting the emphasis on the qualities that undergird

the effectuation of evental situations, Foucault shows how the event, even

though it is not the result of bodies, nevertheless participates in a paradoxical

regime that joins together material and incorporeal agents and constituents:

‘Let us say that the philosophy of event should advance in the direction, at

first sight paradoxical, of an incorporeal materialism.’ (1982, 231)

On such a differentiated account of the event, the bird attacks, as

events considered in light of paradoxical instances of evanescent materiality

and material volatility, cannot be reduced to the apocalyptic scenarios of

disaster films. Even though one could be tempted to describe the ending of

The Birds as apocalyptic, a closer look would reveal a more ambiguous

tension between time, event, and body. As Tom Cohen has remarked, ‘the

birds cannot be apocalyptic. Their invasion as a warping of temporal logic

implies a folding in of the frame, without outside.’ (2005b, 154) Surely, the

end of the world has not arrived yet, but the film produces a world in which

such a kinetic space blurs the boundaries between bird and human, event and

non-event, and their effectuation in empty-time. Such a process redefines

what it is to be a post-evental entity because, as José Gil puts it apropos of

atmospheric sensation, it evinces what ‘separates the interior from the

exterior, one body from the next, bodies and things.’ (2000, 16)



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Cohen’s and Gil’s comments direct our attention to what Hitchcock

himself understood a long time ago in classics such as Rear Window (1954),

Vertigo (1958), and Psycho (1960): suspense and audience manipulation can

be effective only if they recalibrate what it is to feel and experience via the

transformational and associative potential of bodies to affect and be affected.

A forthcoming task may be to conceptualise the void and the event in terms

of the reciprocal individuation (and concretisation) of bodies, events, and

media.30 In the meantime, the confrontation of differentiated bodies does not

have to be a traumatic experience; in fact, it can be even beneficial, as in the

case of Hitchcock’s family drama that turns into a case study for rethinking

the interrelations among the animal, the human, and nature and their often

difficult individuations. Therefore, it is not only a matter of embodying

paradoxical spaces, as when Gil mentions that ‘A human body […] can

become animal, become mineral, plant, become atmosphere, hole, ocean,

become pure movement’ (2006, 28), but also of constructing and conceiving

of interstitial bodies that constantly engage, merge, or vie with various forms

of life in hybrid environments.

It is when birds and humans have never been so entwined, as in the

final moments when nature and event coincide in relational patterns and,

mostly, when ontological differences no longer seem to matter, that the film

pushes to the extreme the obligation to face the bird-event. If an animal is

not to be defined by its species or its organs but by the relations and

assemblages in which it participates, as Deleuze has often emphasised,

couldn’t we say that the characters in the film (and humans for that matter)

must equally be reconsidered not from the point of view of identity and

subjectivity but from the vantage point of the event(s) that (re)define what it

is to be in the throes of effectuation and individuation, of movement and the

void?

30 Gil points in this direction when he remarks that the void is that which ‘is inscribed in the work as non-inscription. It is the site of a non-inscription.’ (2000, 18) Some filmic work would produce situations in which the spectator would be invited to locate the non-inscriptions of events by way of circumscribing the void. For such a critical perspective on cinematic work, see Lessard ( 2009).



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The author wishes to thank Paula Willoquet-Maricondi for her comments on

the first draft of this article



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Filmography

Hitchcock, Alfred (1954) Rear Window. USA.

Hitchcock, Alfred (1958) Vertigo. USA.

Hitchcock, Alfred (1960) Psycho. USA.

Hitchcock, Alfred (1963) The Birds. USA.

Documents

Birds Desaster