Surveilling lesbians: The Birds, Hitchcock’s narrative cinema and the criminalization of sexuality

Abstract

This article analyses The Birds in order to distinguish a form of heteropatriarchy characterized by the development of surveillance practices. In the earlier films Vertigo and Rear Window, female characters were represented as intensely desirable, yet also disturbingly unattainable. This article is dissatisfied with the explanation that Hitchcock’s unattainable woman is an example of the 1960s developing lesbian subjectivity. Instead, I use The Birds to prove that Hitchcock’s representation of women has in mind the projects of arranging women for interrogation, eavesdropping on their conversations and intruding upon their intimate moments. Hitchcock’s voyeurism, construable as ambivalent in earlier films, manifests in The Birds as a surveillance practice that assumes access over the private lives of women: a heteropatriarchal strategy that keeps women’s bodies, if not accessible for men, punishable by them. By keeping tabs on the ways that women grow intimate with one another instead of with men, Hitchcock’s cinema moves from narrative to surveillance, blurring the distinction between cinematography and security footage.