The Birds. By Camille Paglia. London: British Film Institute Publishing/Indiana University Press, 1998. Pp 104. $10.95.

Camille Paglia has been warning us for some time that the second volume of her magnum opus Sexual Personae will focus on popular culture. This is not particularly good news, considering that her greatest strengths lie in deflating feminist egos and steering academics away from asinine theories of classical literature and art. Her fawning essays about specific pop icons or genres—Madonna, Elizabeth Taylor, rock 'n' roll—have produced more than a few embarrassing bits. I fear that if Paglia delivers, as promised, a tome with chapters on other favorite enthusiasms—the Rolling Stones, the Supremes, American football—the project may prove her undoing. Like a pop diva, Paglia has tremendous gifts that must be applied to the right material. Otherwise, she's just bellowing into the microphone, strengthening the case of her detractors, who are legion.

It was with subdued expectations, then, that I approached Paglia's examination of Alfred Hitchcock's 1963 horror film, The Birds. Asked by the British Film Institute to contribute a book-length essay to its Film Classics series, Paglia chose, from a list of some 360 archived works, a movie she had first seen as an impressionable teenager. The result is a long discourse in which enthusiasm is bestowed unflaggingly on a film that doesn't warrant it.

It's easy to see what would initially attract the author of Sexual Personae to Hitchcock's film, the central conflict of which concerns "nature's demonic malevolence" and the havoc it wreaks when various species of birds spontaneously unite in a series of attacks on the inhabitants of Bodega Bay, a small fishing village up the coast from San Francisco. Furthermore, the main character is played not by a trained actress, but by a model—Tippi Hedren—whose impact on the screen as a static icon of female sexuality is striking. Hedren's characterization of Melanie Daniels is all mask. As an actress she shows ambivalence toward the spoken word or any other non-visual actor's tools. "Tippi Hedren was and remains for me the ultimate Hitchcock heroine," Paglia writes, basing her evaluation, I believe, entirely on the character's appearance, which we are told the director obsessed over. In fact, everyone in the film looks great: not just Hedren, but love interest Rod Taylor, Hedren's would-be rival Suzanne Pleshette, and especially Jessica Tandy, playing Taylor's mother, Lydia Brenner.

The problem is that the visuals do not compensate for the movie's basic shortcomings, chief among them the lack of resonance to the film's story. Critics have long noted Paglia's relative weakness in dealing with narrative. She is most comfortable examining a composed tableau, a fixed object, or a still image capturing one character's dominant personality traits. That she cannot elicit meaning from this narrative, however, is no slight on her. There is no meaning. Dialogue in which members of the cast consider the chaos around them only underscores the problem. "Birds have been on this planet, Miss Daniels, since archaeopteryx—140 million years ago," intones the skeptical Ethel Griffies as the local ornithological expert. "Why would they suddenly band together in attack now? Doesn't it seem odd that they'd wait all that time to start a war against humanity?" Indeed, it does seem odd. Why would they? Paglia, familiar with the Daphne du Maurier story on which the film's script is based, observes: "Both the story and the film keep the reason for the bird attacks mysterious." This may be the first time in four books that Camille Paglia is guilty of understatement.

Hoping to anchor the narrative somehow, Hitchcock places the three female leads, including Tandy, in open competition for Taylor's affection. The "clinging, manipulative, widowed mother," writes Paglia, "is a theme based on Hitchcock's own early family experience that obsessively runs through his work." It is a facet of the screenplay not found in the original story which, set in southern England, had the echoes of German air strikes to lend portentousness to the bird attacks. But if the filmmakers intended this quadrangulated emotional battle to bear thematically on their story about "destructive, rapacious nature," they failed. Even Paglia acknowledges that this element of the film is undercooked.

I would normally have greater sympathy for Paglia, considering the unenviable task before her—making the case for a dud film—but she chose the subject herself. As always, she's done her homework, digesting earlier studies of Hitchcock by François Truffault, Peter Bogdanovich, and others, and citing bird motifs from other Hitchcock films. Her shot-by-shot analysis of the script is meticulous and patient, and she's particularly good at highlighting some of the best staged scenes, including the nighttime dialogue between Hedren and Pleshette which never becomes a confrontation. ("It's like two military gals at the barracks, swapping tales of misadventure in the field of love.") The book includes a still photograph of the scene, with Pleshette in the foreground smoking a cigarette and Hedren in the background talking on the telephone with Taylor, but also smoking a cigarette. It's the sort of glamorous Hollywood image that Paglia—and most people—relish.

The book itself is unusually handsome. It contains twenty-four beautiful color stills and about the same number in black-and-white. But neither great looks nor Paglia's Herculean efforts can salvage this project. Recounting the scene where a distraught woman accuses Hedren's character of causing the bird attacks, the author writes: "on some level, Melanie really is a kind of vampire attuned to nature's occult messages." Well—no, she's not. We may wish she were, because that might give this story some push. But Paglia can cite nothing in support of this assertion other than the hysterical woman's accusation. Elsewhere, the author tries to justify incongruous details by calling Hitchcock a "Surrealist," and she overpraises the aerial shot of the town's burning gas station, with its not entirely seamless matting, as "one of the most startlingly memorable shots in the history of film." Finally, she concludes the book by asking: "Are the bird attacks on Bodega Bay a freak phenomenon or a harbinger of global destruction? What relationship, if any, do they have to the ferocious psychodrama of female power?" She responds to these vital questions, upon which the film stands or falls, not by citing the text at hand, or even other Hitchcock films. Instead, she refers to movies based on works by Tennessee Williams in which cruel nature and possessive mothers are more fruitfully examined. Only by employing such extravagant feats of intertextual citation can she claim to find resonance in The Birds.

Why not examine Suddenly Last Summer or The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, then? What keeps Paglia personally committed to this film? Unlike Salman Rushdie, whose essay on The Wizard of Oz in the BFI series reconfigures that classic into a story about home and exile specifically applicable to the author, Paglia does not place herself in The Birds. One can imagine Melanie Daniels as the embattled critic, pecked by feminist know-nothings ("flying female Harpies") who reject her unconventional views, but Paglia never explicitly identifies herself with the role. Nor does she, conversely, draw pleasure from the suffering of the movie's glamorous central figure, whom she views as a blonde sorority queen destroyed by the same nature that once placed her at the pinnacle of sexual power. Hitchcock, as the author notes, viewed his heroine as the embodiment of complacency confronted with reality for the first time, but Paglia has only admiration both for the actress Tippi Hedren, who "exudes cocky self-confidence and a mesmerising narcissism," and for the character Melanie Daniels, "an exquisite artifact of high civilisation."

Paglia's book suggests that her commitment to Hitchcock's film does not derive from any emotional stake in the narrative. Rather, Paglia's chief interest appears to be intellectual, or should I say professional. It behooves her to champion the film and Hedren's performance because both have implications for Paglia's critical methodology, with its reliance on snap-shot judgments of favorite personality types. ("I adore the bitches of Hollywood.") If a vacuous leading lady were to provide insufficient material for serious artistic inquiry—if we needed a successfully inhabited character to proceed—then Paglia's general approach to art and literature would become suspect. Additionally, The Birds, regardless of its artistic merits, gives the author an opportunity to riff on familiar themes, most tellingly the confluence of nature's disarray with the ascent of female power. Paglia cites captivity and domestication as the film's underlying concerns, emphasizing that for men the house is both a safe haven and a female trap. Thus, for Paglia, the film's long assault sequence in the Brenner home illustrates the ambiguous nature of the crisis for the female characters, who benefit from the panicked retreat of their man, Rod Taylor's Mitch, to hearth and home—the woman's domain.

It is a central paradox of Camille Paglia's work that the author, who so forcefully defends the notion of great art in the face of relativistic assault, will champion any mediocre product that is compatible with her larger vision. It is that paradox that I fear will unravel all too messily in Volume Two of Sexual Personae.