Bodega Bay In Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds

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In The Birds (1963) Hitchcock presents Bodega Bay, a small town, north of San Franciso, removed from the protective cocoon of advanced civilization. Hitchcock offers a sharp and exact view of rural culture persisting in the face of urbanisation and modernity which is established through numerous angles. Local citizens come handy for the urban socialite Melanie (Tippi Hedren) who knows everything and everybody in the locality. Mr.Brinkmayer’s general store stands for agrarian America on the verge of decline. The general store gives a direct view of how diversification and topographical spread- the two salient characteristics of urban economy and spatial usage in modernity-well contradicted in the store. Everything is available in this store and multitudes of purposes are fulfilled here-functional, …show more content…
Everything gets destroyed by the bird attack except the general store (Pomerance 214-216). The citizens in Bodega Bay use a direct, unpresuming, unadorned sort of speech except Melanie and Mitch (Rod Taylor) who use language in a metaphorical, playful and ironic way. Mitch’s ex-girlfriend Annie Hayworth (Suzanne Pleshette) even though knows how to use language artfully, but has deliberately placed herself immersed in rural life. Mitch’s mother Lydia (Jessica Tandy) behaves and speaks like a city person retired to the country, comfortably and with directness and simplicity. Difference between city and a village surfaces in the film. In city people are moving fast, busy in their endeavours to amass wealth in the process they exploits, hunts, evades and at times surveils others but village life is a different enterprise, there is a lack of acquisitiveness where people are satiated with what they have and therefore no jitteriness. Hence American small town fascinate Hithcock even in the 1940s but he didn’t wanted his small town characters “too homespun for modern times” and desired instead to make a picture of rural life inflected by the spirit of
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