Alfred Hitchcock’s famous films Psycho and The Birds both portray women in a uniquely comparable way as each of these two films centre around the journey of a woman. His famous 1960 film, Psycho, follows Marion Crane, a Phoenix secretary who stumbles across and seizes the opportunity to claim a large sum of cash to start a new life. His equally critiqued 1963 film, The Birds, focuses on wealthy business woman Melony Daniels, as she travels to the green retreat Bodega Bay in order to win over a handsome lawyer where she soon discovers bizarre oddities during her stay there. Through the director’s decisions and ideas of using various filming elements such as costume, actor’s performance, camera shots, and various distinctive concepts, Hitchcock’s
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In Psycho, the paper pocket of forty-thousand dollars is assigned as the films MacGuffin in order to devise an apparent plot involving Marion cunningly stealing away with it. Throughout the beginning half of the film, Hitchcock uses reoccurring close-ups after near all dramatic sequences, not only to reaffirm its existence as a potential plot driving force, but to represent and symbolise Marion’s deception. Contrastingly in The Birds, this embodiment of duplicity is made through Melony’s ensemble with Annie Hayworth while they compete for their ideal partner. Listening in while seated in her night gown smoking a cigarette, Annie is cleverly juxtaposed in a wide shot with Melony on the phone to Mitch as she converses with him in a soft, flirtatious tone, after persisting toward Annie that there is nothing happening between her and Mitch. This expresses Melony’s manipulation over Annie to obtain what she desires, though Annie was well aware that she was not being spoken to truthfully. An alternate approach Hitchcock makes in his films to forward his idealisation of women being manipulative is through the implementation of a controlling mother figure. In The Birds, Mitch’s mother Lydia is costumed comparably to Melony as they both competed for Mitch. Her rolled back grey hair, vivid red lipstick and strong blue eyes paired with the utilization of effective low angle shots capture the domineering and manipulative mother figure she is. Likewise, Bates mother in Psycho “[is] a clingy and demanding woman” who uses derogatory language such as calling him “boy” to dominate him in their discussions. Further emphasized by her overwhelming motif silhouette, she manipulates him and overrules his every action, so that “like a dutiful son, [he] covered up all
In Psycho, the paper pocket of forty-thousand dollars is assigned as the films MacGuffin in order to devise an apparent plot involving Marion cunningly stealing away with it. Throughout the beginning half of the film, Hitchcock uses reoccurring close-ups after near all dramatic sequences, not only to reaffirm its existence as a potential plot driving force, but to represent and symbolise Marion’s deception. Contrastingly in The Birds, this embodiment of duplicity is made through Melony’s ensemble with Annie Hayworth while they compete for their ideal partner. Listening in while seated in her night gown smoking a cigarette, Annie is cleverly juxtaposed in a wide shot with Melony on the phone to Mitch as she converses with him in a soft, flirtatious tone, after persisting toward Annie that there is nothing happening between her and Mitch. This expresses Melony’s manipulation over Annie to obtain what she desires, though Annie was well aware that she was not being spoken to truthfully. An alternate approach Hitchcock makes in his films to forward his idealisation of women being manipulative is through the implementation of a controlling mother figure. In The Birds, Mitch’s mother Lydia is costumed comparably to Melony as they both competed for Mitch. Her rolled back grey hair, vivid red lipstick and strong blue eyes paired with the utilization of effective low angle shots capture the domineering and manipulative mother figure she is. Likewise, Bates mother in Psycho “[is] a clingy and demanding woman” who uses derogatory language such as calling him “boy” to dominate him in their discussions. Further emphasized by her overwhelming motif silhouette, she manipulates him and overrules his every action, so that “like a dutiful son, [he] covered up all