The Birds
This week the From Below presents *The Birth of Horror: Stefan’s Birthday. *We will be showing Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963) on Wednesday, *December 3rd *at 7pm.
Here is the link to RSVP f or the film. Doors are at 6:50 and we’re starting the movie at 7:10.
I don’t need to tell you what this film is about or convince you of its artistic merits, just how you don’t need a weatherman to tell you which way the wind blows! Instead, this week I want to use the email to share some of my recent thoughts about time, my mom, and the pleasures of being fed a hearty cinema diet as a child.
I’m turning 32 on the 7th. The Birds was released in 1963, 30 years prior to my birth. My infant self is now closer in calendar time to Alfred Hitchcock on set in Bodega Bay than that baby is to the present Stefan. I had hoped this observation would help concretize the passage of time for me and help me grasp what it might mean to keep getting older, but it hasn’t. Or rather, its failure tells me that time might feel more to me like a sprawling flood settling outwards into a great river delta than the swift or winding stream we are more often taught to imagine it as.
When I was about 11 and expressing a curiosity in “scary movies,” my mom announced that I was ready to receive her curated syllabus of horror films. This began my initiation into the genre, hand-in-hand, a coming-of-age ritual, a ceremonial latching onto a 32’’ TV umbilical cord pumping DVD images rented from my soon-to-be cherished neighborhood video store into my eyeballs and ears. The Birds was the first, my arrival into this re-birth, followed by an adolescent journey through The Shining, Poltergeist, Blair Witch Project, Silence of the Lambs, and The Exorcist.
To be raised is to be taught, and among those many teachings, we are most essentially taught what to value and how precisely to do that valuing. A way of valuing something is to share it with others, and a way to value and love another is to share that which we treasure with them. My parents love movies, so they showed them to me, and they love me, so they showed me what was worth loving. They taught me how to love movies and they taught me how to love by watching a movie side by side, taking delight in the pleasure of a shared meal of images. We eat one dish with separate mouths, and it’s the oneness of the dish, and the separateness of the mouths, that makes love good.
When I was 16 I started driving and got my first laptop. The twin freedoms afforded by the car and the computer were the technological undergirds that set me out on my own to find my tastes. After school I’d drive to meet my friends among the DVDs of Video Library where we’d wind our ways around the shelves, running our fingers over possible titles and savoring the web of associations that would emerge. We were being let into the story, without a narrator, of the human endeavor of cinema, of its production, preservation, distribution, and consumption. There I learned the supreme pleasure of finding what you didn’t know you were looking for. When you do, it makes a movie “yours,” and “your” movies make you You.
On my own I’d browse digitally at home, stumbling and tasting my way through films thanks to Megavideo’s grainy largesse, this time without a loving authoritative hand pre-determining what was worth the watch or not. It was my chance to inhabit the loving role my mom modeled to me–the curator, the knowing initiator, a Virgil– by picking out the most fucked up and bizarre movies I could find that spoke to me so as to, in turn, share the feeling again with my friends, late on a Friday night on their parents’ TVs. In film I find the unity of two real pleasures: being fed to satisfaction and becoming the feeder. A researcher-curator’s pleasure is that of the spelunker, the geologist, a mother, or a chef; a course can be a meal, a class, or a river.
I haven’t seen The Birds since that first watch with my mom. I’m looking forward to reencountering it this week with you all in this place I love.
Of Flock and Feather,
Stefan, Charlie, and Stark