Camille mentions Bernard Herrmann, Remi Gassmann, Oskar Sala, and the Trautonium, but she never addresses the issue of whether The Birds would work better with a conventional score or not. I e-mailed her to ask her that question, but who knows if I'll get a reply. Obviously, Paglia is atuned to film music, her last monthly column for salon.com mentions Elmer Bernstein. Still, I suspect that she is on the like-the-film-as-it-is side of the question.

Paglia also mentions a book I am unfamiliar with, Elizabeth Weis's The Silent Scream: Alfred Hitchcock's Sound Track, a book which deals with the use of sound in Hitchcock and which I presume talks in detail about the scores for Hitchcock films.

Spoto's analysis is perhaps simplistic, but deeply sympathetic: he saw Hitchcock, correctly I suspect, as a deeply withdrawn and isolated man who "could easily have found women to fulfill him sexually," but who preferred to believe in love -- but always the love of a person who could not love him back. God knows why he was twisted that way, but his movies are redolent of this, especially those from VERTIGO onwards.

Maybe Hitch didn't know the proper order of sexual politics, but one can't fault Hedren's refusal. From a woman's perspective, he "ain't" exactly a stud.

I think Rocco has it, Hitch was no stud, but could have had some of these gals just because of his position in society (another sexual politics thing). Nonetheless, he self-sabotaged himself. Masochism. Repressed homosexuality. People will be psycho-analyzing Hitch for centuries to come.

Hitch was less willing to deal with nonsense in his later years--he fired Roy Thinnes from Family Plot after a few days of shooting rather than deal with a shoot of disagreements.

I think the casting off of associates, the increase in drinking, the poor quality of the films, MCA's lowering of Hitch's budgets, are all tied up with Hitch getting older and feeling he'd failed his life in some way.

So, what am I trying to say?

Hitch MUST have been a penny-pincher!

He MUST have been!

In Hollywood, there is a NEVER-ENDING supply of women (AND men...if you prefer) who will do ANYTHING to get ahead.

Hitch was certainly not a chick magnet, but history clearly demonstrates that MONEY IS the chick magnet that succeeds every time!

As Hitch himself wrote (this could easily have been his most heartfelt words to a lover he never got to meet): "I was looking for you ... or someone you might have been." (quoted by Spoto, who cites this as among Hitchock's "most touching" additions to the script for MARY ROSE, a finally unfilmed project based on a romantic novel by James Barrie of "Peter Pan" fame -- and a movie that the studio suits knew he was tailoring for Tippi Hedren, and as a consequence didn't want him to make: as BIRDS scripter Jay Presson Allen said to Spoto, "They knew he'd just fall back into the Tippi trap.")

There is so much to be said about Hitchcock and his conflicts, but all of it's ALREADY been said. I'm just sorry that he had to die (and live) as such an unhappy man. He was a brilliant individual who deserved better, but then, he didn't ASK for better. We do make our own beds, at the end of each given day. As did Hitch, who lived, slept, and finally died in his own, miserable, lonely place. As Spoto quotes an observer of Hitch at the very end of his life: "Leave me alone ... I ... am a sea ... of alone."

In the film Contempt directed by Jean-Luc Godard, one of the characters asks, "why is it women will strip so easily for movies but not in real life"

I'm generalizing, but women tend to have a theatrical approach to living: make-up, fashion, melodramatic emotions, etc. And despite feminism, many women still dream of being models and actresses rather than wives or CEOs. Celebrity means fame, money, social status, and posterity. Trading sex with some guy in the position to fulfill these larger goals seems an easy price to pay for many women. Even when the larger goal can't be reached, mere association with a man of status is preffered to coupling with a Joe Schmoe of low or no status.

Hitchcock had me in mind for another film, MARY ROSE, but I told him, "I can't work with you. I must get out of this contract and I will get out of it."

"I'll ruin your career", he said, and he tried very hard to do just that. Hitch could abandon a dozen actors and actresses, but one did not abandon Hitch. Not easily."

As a side note, a friend of mine recently said to me: Could you imagine the Psycho shower murder without music? Just the sounds of the water, and the screams, and that knife going in, it would be too disturbing, you need the music to tell you this is a movie.

I hadn't really thought of it in those terms before. But I told him that that was Hitchcock's original intention but he felt it didn't work without music. Supposedly because the scene goes flat, but who knows what Hitch had in mind. He shot Psycho in black and white so he wouldn't show the red blood in the tub, maybe it was a censorship decision but it's said he felt it would be too shocking. Using this rationale, is it possible Hitch added the music to make the scene LESS shocking rather than more? If so, it gives you an interesting take on what Hitch thought of film music overall.

Chris--Although humanity has had about 12 to 16 thousand years of civilization since the start of agriculture, man as a primate has had 4.4 to 4.6 million years of evolution before that. The few years we've had of cities, culture, the ego, and increasing populations, has not been enough to completely alter a great deal of the mechanisms of primate psychology and physiology.

Like chickens and other creatures, primates live in a heirarchy that tends towards monarchy, with alpha males and beta males, a whole pecking order. And beneath this reality is another level of genetic survival (Lacan and Freud would say that beneath even this level is something even darker and unconscious--a devil?--that repeats human suffering and longs for death and anhililation, but while we live with this it hasn't destroyed us yet).

Ambition is personal and individual. Money, sex, power over your own life and perhaps others, desires to serve others and the species at large, the desire to leave some legacy after death---these are all things that motivate individuals. But when you talk of instinct, then we enter the realm of the autonomous nervous system formed over those millions of years of development.

Underlying personal ambition are more basics hard-wired into us.

For instance, love and the emotion of being in love are basically chemical, linked to smell, but they are nonetheless felt with intensity.

If an alpha male is protective of a female, she will automatically feel a desire to sleep with the man, she may not act on it, but it will be there. This has as much to do with survival of the self and offspring as it does anything else.

Money is linked in our civilization to survival. That's why to women, it's attractive regardless of the physical looks of the person with it.

Ambition is viewed as a way for the individual to obtain happiness, but the idea of getting something out of life is rather young, maybe only as young as the Industrial revolution, shorter work hours, and the rise in leisure time.

Throughout history and pre-history, survival was the issue. For some in the third world working 12-16 hours a day, it is still the basic issue.

Religions of various types have always been used hypocritically by the elite against the self, sex, materialism, personal pleasure, etc. as a means of keeping unstable beta types to the basic task without breaking down the power structures. Subsequently, until the rise of a standard of living was enough to reach a majority of people, most people believed in these ideas. Since pleasure is more mass-obtainable now, religious influence has eroded.

And human games like Melanie and Mitch's or the jealousy between Annie and Melanie or the judgment of Mrs. Brenner over Melanie all break down when again the issue reverts to one of sheer survival.

Animals may act on instinct alone, but we humans have instinct too--just touch a hot stove by accident. As for faith, hope, love, charity, all that belongs to civilization and culture--it may be the factors that keep humanity alive or they may be the things we're most proud of, the things that we feel seperate us from other forms of animal, but when the birds are attacking, they break down. You may sacrifice yourself for others like Annie (a rather pagan belief actually, see The Golden Bough by Fraser), but the basic issue once again becomes survival. In The Birds, even all the love these people have for each other momentarily breaks down under the pressure of the house under attack as they go screaming from corner to corner losing it.

I don't believe that human nature is dark, but I do believe that Mother Nature suffers daily from PMS. We should consider the pros and cons of reality bluntly and keep in mind a balance of the praise and criticism, hope but not blind optimism, scepticism but not instant doomsaying.

Of course he plays with the idea of a bird revenge. There is the moment in the restaurant where someone orders a chicken and Hitchcock did make a humorous short trailer documenting how we've mistreated the birds through the centuries, but I think Hitch uses the birds as a metaphor and the bird attacks are not to be taken just literally.

Hitchcock's view of sin makes each of us vulnerable to the fickle finger of fate. This time around, instead of Cary Grant being mistaken for a spy, it's Tippi Hedren and the Brenners and the town of Bodega Bay that's picked out for one of Hitch's trials by fire.

Both Robin Wood and Camille Paglia see the overall context of the film: that the bird attacks are connected to the personal and sexual tensions between everyone.

As for everything else, it just comes from reading too many cultural anthropology books in my youth. A lot of these ideas aren't mine, I repeat them because they just seem to explain things better for me than other theories do. I am religious, but when it comes to life on earth, we must look at everything as scientists, as Spocks, wishes and emotions should not cloud what is true.

NP: Taxi Driver (Bernard Herrmann)