Introduction
In looking at the use of animals in film, with the possible exception of family type, feel-good animal stories, animals are usually symbolic when they are seen in anything more than a cameo type appearance as pets and other casual uses which simply give realism to the film. Most films show an animal or two somewhere in the film, simply because we live with them. It would seem strange to see a park without, at least, a leashed dog or two. Animals are simply a part of human cultures everywhere. However, in many films, they are used symbolically to add meaning to the story.
Different animals in films
This is how animals are used in The Birds and Blade runner, but the interpretation is left up to the audience. Just as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, meaning is what is made by what the filmmaker and the audience each bring to the work, a collaboration between artist and audience.
In Blade Runner, animals are rare, endangered, and highly valuable. Humans are plentiful, perhaps too plentiful in the degraded environments of inner cities, especially the setting in Los Angeles, California. Human-like robots have been created and used for hazardous duties off-world, and they have rebelled, of course, because they are exploited and abused and they were made far too close to humans. In this film, the replicants are symbolic of animals, since they were created to serve the same purposes as the now rare, and largely extinct animals. Animals are mentioned all through the movie; each time they have a specific meaning and are usually tied to the specific action, as when Roy lets go of the white dove he has caught when he dies. In a way, we can assume that this is the statement that he is, after all, human, as his soul rises to heaven. In this movie, animals are not the main focus of the story, but they are used to define what it is to be human. Human beings are shown at their worst and their best, though the examples of the best are not necessarily human by the strict definition which includes birth. Many of the humans behave in a less than human way by definition, while the replicant often shines as an example of humanity. Rachel is an especially good example, but Roy, the prodigal son, is also redeemed in the story, even though he kills his father, rather an Oedipal theme.
In The Birds, the animals, specifically the birds are used differently. They are a collective character, almost devilish, perhaps the personification of evil itself. They prove the antagonist as a group against which the main protagonists struggle to survive. They are the symbols of everything we fear. They also remind us that we are probably the least necessary animals on the planet since we are at the very top of the food chain. The way Hitchcock used the birds in scenes like the playground, we see them as all our worst nightmares. They gather on the playground equipment, slowly increasing in number, watching the children. We get a distinct impression that they are communicating, planning something. Of course, what follows is the attack upon the children in the playground. Edelman and Benjamin read a lot more into this film than I noticed and maybe more than the filmmaker ever dreamed, rather like the surprise that Peter (of Peter, Paul, and Mary) expressed when he read that Puff, the Magic Dragon was a song all about drugs. Most of Hitchcock’s films are simply “jolly good tales” as he would put it. However, that is not to say that they are without undercurrents of meaning.
Hitchcock always had meaning, often quite wry humor and irony. He poked fun at most of society’s conventions and delighted in showing us how very primitive we are. It would certainly have been a very different film if it had been made today, as the little lovebirds would not have been likely to survive. The censors of the time would never have allowed the pretty blonde to smother the cute little lovebirds. Hitchcock would possibly not have been as subtle and might not have honed his skills as director as finely today in light of the relative lack of restrictions. Hitchcock left interpretation very open as he asked the question “Why?” all through the movie, but never presented an answer. As Rosenblatt said in The Reader, The Text and The Poem (1935) the reader brings their baggage along so the work is different every time it is read, or viewed in this case.
Isaac Asimov, in his discussion of intelligence (1958 p 259-262) points to the critic as showing evidence of intelligence when he decides that some new form of music, previously thought to be mere noise, is beautiful by certain new standards. He then asks us how many critics would be exchanged for one Louis Armstrong. Maybe analyzing art is an intellectual pursuit worthy of scholars, but audiences go to the movies to enjoy the entertainment. Alfred Hitchcock always provides good entertainment, but it was not without thought. Alfred Hitchcock often made his points quite easy to see and understand. However, in The Birds, he left a lot to the audience, simply using the birds as a menace that could not be understood. Of the two movies, The Birds is less intertextual in content, drawing for its meanings and undercurrents instead upon cultural knowledge rather than other literature.
Edelstein and Benjamin see the film from a psycho-social viewpoint, digging out psychological theories and sociological statements based upon their interpretations according to their backgrounds. They both presented quite lucid theories as to the interpretation of Hitchcock’s work, but I think it was far more than what was intended to be there. I see Hitchcock’s film almost as a sky full of clouds, which an artist has painted, taking care to place all kinds of symbolic imagery in those clouds so that each viewer would have something to find in them. I understand Edelstein’s points about sexuality and the attack upon society when the conventions of creating progeny are flouted, as in homosexual marriage. However, I think Edelstein is reading far too much into the film. I do believe that Hitchcock intended to say something about the attack on the children being particularly important, but not because it is an attack upon society. Rather, I saw the attack upon the children as logical once the birds learned to communicate because the children were seen by the birds as defective birds, being unable to fly. Most animals will kill off defective progeny or leave them to die. A parallel between children and wild birds is easy to draw, considering how unruly and loud most children are on a playground, not unlike a mixed flock of birds. Of course, the common interpretation is that the birds are getting even for how we humans treat them, as in putting them in cages, killing them, and eating them.
Benjamin, who is only interpreting Baudelaire and arguing against the interpretations of others, would easily see from his point of view also, but I see his interpretation as even further away from mine, and I believe that Hitchcock never intended so much. However, his interpretation of shock is interesting. Hitchcock delighted in shocking the audience, as he often said in his television cameos. Hitchcock was an artist with film. He delighted in presenting the audience with questions, and in exciting them to a point of holding their collective breath. He could draw out the suspense further than any other filmmaker of his time, possibly of all time. He was known to have said that the excitement was in the anticipation of a bang, not in the bang. The scene in the playground, “utilizes pace, juxtaposition, and precise dramatic timing to transform meticulously planned shots into sequences of heightened, unrelenting suspense. ” (LoBrutto 233) The playground scene works perfectly in this intent, as it makes the audience sit up and take notice. We begin to anticipate each new arrival to the flock of birds. Hitchcock switches the camera between the children and the birds keeping the framing tight, and not letting us see the entire panorama. We hear the point and counterpoint of crows’ versus children’s voices and they are not unlike. When the attack finally comes it is more a release than a goal. As an audience, we find that once again we can breathe.
If the birds are at all symbolic, it is the primitive nature underlying humanity and human civilization that it points out. The juxtaposition of untamed adult birds versus pre-civilized humans in the form of rowdy children forms a symbolic collage. The birthday girl was right at that stage when we pass from childhood to adolescence and an ideal focal point for the action. Will nature survive the onslaught of the human race or will naturally rise and destroy us?
The answer to that is also a consideration of Blade Runner. The movie begins with an image of an owl, replicants as it turns out, with a camera for an eye. We see a close-up of the eye, and it appears several more times in the story as a transitional device to present flashbacks. The next animal we see is the snake which the entertainer uses in her dance. She even says that she would not be working in such a dump if she could afford a real snake. We begin to get the idea that animals are rare when the company doctor is questioning the male replicant. The questions are designed to incite emotional response and so the question about the tortoise on its back is important. A human would instantly say they would help the tortoise, protect it. The replicant does not even know what it is.
When the girl, Rachel, is questioned she gets the answers right whenever animals are mentioned, and even reacts emotionally correctly, mostly because she does not know she is a replicant and has been given false memories to help her to acquire personality and develop an emotional response. The owl is watching everything and filming it. In the old building where the first male replicant runs, we see a rat escape into the trash, and a crow hops across the empty floor where the last scene takes place. The replicant owl films the scene where Roy kills Tyrell after finding out that there is no way for him to get “more life”. We even see a white bird fly up as Roy dies after saving Deckard, symbolic, perhaps, of the soul rising to heaven.
Tyrell is seen as saying that the motto of the company is that the replicants will be more human than human. This explains why Roy saved Deckard before dying. He has achieved much more than is made instantly apparent, as he has not only developed emotional response, but he has acquired conscience and feels empathy and compassion. He has nothing to gain by killing Decker or letting him die and nothing to gain by saving him, except, perhaps, his redemption. He does not know about Rachel, so he thinks he is the last of Deckard’s targets, and he does not hate Decker for doing his job. Roy can forgive, so he can also earn forgiveness. He is more human than humans.
The most powerful symbol in Blade Runner is the unicorn. It appears in Decker’s dreams as a powerful, very phallic, symbol of potency. It is a mythical animal that probably never lived, and so it cannot die. It is also Bryant’s logo, so to speak. By leaving it at Deckard’s apartment, we get a hint that maybe the girl will live after all, since the unicorn never did. Some interpret this as meaning that Deckard is, himself, a replicant.
These two movies are almost mirrored images of each other, rather like the two halves of a Rorschach test (made from an inkblot in a folded piece of paper and used to discern the thought patterns of deviant patients in psychiatry). The sense of how animals are used is almost exactly the opposite. In the Birds, the animals are ominous, dangerous, and quite horrifying. They seem to be the personification of evil. In Blade, Runner animals are revered and used to gauge the relative humanness of people and to condemn those who do not show the proper human reaction when presented with ideas of injuring animals. In The Birds, the animals (birds) are intent on destroying the children, the symbol of the future of the race. In Blade, Runner man has nearly destroyed the animal kingdom and it is the substitute for animals (humanoid replicants) which are seen as dangerous to humans. The action in Hitchcock’s film is centered in a small Oceanside community of the northern California coast while Blade Runner takes place in the degraded surroundings of a greatly changes Los Angeles inner city, but the off-camera action takes place as far away as the Orion cluster. Hitchcock’s story is almost introspective, looking in to explore the deepest fears of our culture, while Blade Runner looks out to the future results of who we are and what we do. Emotionally they touch on the same subconscious level, but they are displaying the two sides of human culture: inner turmoil and primal fear against culture-wide definitions of humanness and our cultural biases.
Eye of animals is used in both films. In Hitchcock’s film, the eyes are either human or avian. Often we see avian eyes as we are given the impression they are communicating. Birds have very large and sometimes quite wicked-looking eyes, and in great numbers that can appear quite formidable. The eyes in Blade Runner are watching and are sometimes used to communicate with the audience through filmed action, as done by the replicated owl in the office surveillance system. Blade Runner concentrates upon the eyes of certain humans and of the replicants, especially Rachel, whose eyes do not give away her status until nearly three times the normal diagnostic questions. We see her eyes as she is questioned then we see the replicant owl’s eyes.
Animals are not extinct in Blade Runner, but they are so prohibitively rare that many people have never seen most animals. It seemed particularly odd that replicants, being human-created, but organic, and so indistinguishable from humans to require a complicated psychological test to identify the non-humans, and even then, the only real separation was the existence or not of a real childhood. No children are appearing in the film. The closest we get is photos done in the 1940s style which is prevalent in the film as if they were history. The only other hint that children exist is the offer of a new start in the off-world colonies and in the idea that Rachel was modeled on Tyrell’s niece.
“DECKARD SHE DOESN’T KNOWS?
TYRELL SHE’S BEGINNING TO SUSPECT, I THINK.
DECKARD SUSPECT! HOW CAN IT NOT KNOW WHAT IT IS?
TYRELL COMMERCE is OUR GOAL HERE AT TYRELL; ‘MORE HUMAN THAN HUMAN’ is OUR MOTTO.” (Blade Runner 1982)
We note that Deckard switches from “her” to “it” So he is not even granting the replicants the status of animal, even though they were biological. Yet, they fill the niche left empty by the conspicuous absence of animals, though there are replicated animals also.
Replicants had no childhood, since they were created fully grown, yet they were initially as innocent as children until the company decided to give them false memories. The emotional trauma which could result from that is barely touched upon in the story. However, there is a heavy allusion to it in Roy’s short soliloquy as he dies: “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tanhauser Gate. All those… moments will be lost like tears in the rain.” (Blade Runner 1982) Roy is more human at this point than most of the “real” humans in the story. He speaks poetically and understands that it is his perception that has value when he expresses it in art (poetry).
“Something that Joseph Francavilla observes about the replicants in Blade Runner applies to the synthetics in the Alien series as well: “scientifically manufactured, ‘these entities’ function as mirrors for people, by allowing examination and moral scrutiny of ourselves, our technology, and our treatment of other beings.” Repositioned, postmodern synthetics like Roy Batty and Rachael Tyrell-or like Ash, Bishop, and Call- suggest the inevitable dissolution of the line between natural and unnatural or artificial life, a line that has thinned out not just in film but in everything. “ (Westfahl and Slusser 134)
What separates the replicants from the humans is said to be their emotions. However, it is so much more than that. It is not merely the feeling of emotions that makes us human, but the expression of those emotions, which includes good and bad. Animals only kill for food and protection. They also do not create art and music. An animal will sacrifice its life for its offspring driven by instinct, but what makes a dog sacrifice its life for its owner?
One thing noticed in the readings for this film was that there is an impression that the replicants, especially the animals, were mechanical, as in robots. I do not believe this is so. I believe that the animals and the humans were all biological, even though they were, as was said in the film, created. It does not make sense to have mechanical animals when replication has been perfected. One would postulate that the replicants would not be able to reproduce, even though it is obvious that they can copulate. The escaped replicant Pris is designated as a basic pleasure model. This casts a whole new aura over the practice of creating and using replicants. They are slaves for hazardous duty, was, and human pleasure. This seems unethical as we, the audience outside the environment of the film, see them as more human than most of the throng inhabiting L.A.
The soundtracks of both the movies discussed incorporate animal sounds in very new and different ways for their time. The Blade Runner soundtrack by Vangelis is a dark melodic combination of classic composition and futuristic synthesizers which mirrors the film-noir retro-future envisioned by Ridley Scott. Vangelis, fresh from his Academy Award-winning score for Chariots of Fire, composed and performed the music on his synthesizers. (Sammon, pp. 419–423) In addition to some very eerie music, we hear ambient sound, much of it animal: the rhythmic sound of flapping owl wings, yowling cats and howling dogs, even rodent sounds. Most of these blends in with the music as if, somehow, the animals are part of the orchestra, but it gives the impression from the echoes that we are hearing ancient sounds of creatures long past.
Hitchcock used a lot of bird sounds and blended children’s voices in. The scene in the playground makes extensive use of this in almost a jazz kind of way as they speak and answer like jazz musicians but with a sharp, less than melodic tone. Dissonance and odd screeching sounds that sometimes decay into ominous silence and sometimes rise to a scream in the urban wilderness, literally shock the audience to instant alertness. The soundtrack for the birds was completely new to audiences of the time, who were used to “pretty” sounds. In any case, animal sounds punctuate the action of both these films and are evident, if attention is paid, all through the film.
Animals used in The Birds and Blade Runner serve a different purpose in each, but in both of these films, they provide the motif against which the story is told and they are used to define the limits of the action. In The Birds, the birds are active characters in the story, serving as a collective antagonist. They are the evil force against which the protagonists must fight, and they represent our deepest fears of attack upon our society. They attack the children, the symbol of the future of our culture, maybe our race. Hitchcock never explains why they do what they do, so the audience is free to fill that in for themselves. After all, they are animals, and we cannot know their minds.
The animals in Blade Runner are also used as a motif, but never actually appear in reality, unless one counts the odd rat or crow and the white dove (maybe). The animals which are seen throughout, especially the pets seen in the market, are all replicants, biological creations. The movie tries to define, or urge s the audience to define what it is to be human, using animals as the measuring stick against which the humanoid replicants are judged. While the replicants are never actually defined as to their place in the movie, they seem to be even less than animals in the culture of the movie, even though they sometimes behave better than the humans in the story.
Animals are the central theme here, and defining the place of the humans and replicants is the central issue of the story. The questions posed ask us if the replicants are human after all or are they also animals or something even less. The human race is not represented as very laudable here, mostly shown as destroyers or destroyed. The race has sunk to a lower level than ever since primitive times, become a parasite on everything else, and the destroyer of the planet. We get the impression that it is the common belief that humans were supposed to be the guardians of animals and have failed utterly in this task. There is even a hint that replicants are better humans than humans.
So, in the final analysis, these two movies represent opposite methodology in their uses of animals. In The Birds animals is a character, collective evil. They think and they communicate and they want to destroy our children, attacking them, which is a symbolic attack upon our culture. It is possible to interpret the reasons in many ways, and this is never explained. In Blade Runner animals are more thematic, defining humans. Genetic engineering has gone insane as has the destruction of the planet. People are even encouraged to emigrate to other worlds where they can have a new start. Animals are never actually shown, unless the crows and rats are real, which we are not told. The animals which do appear are highly symbolic and attached to specific meaning in the story, but not characters. In both movies, the soundtrack is filled with animal sounds, and we see images of animal eyes. However, while Blade Runner would have had a different theme and been a far lesser movie than it is, The Birds could not have been made at all without the use of animals.
References
- Bankes, Paul, et al. “Censorship and Restraint: Lessons Learned from the Catalyst.” College Student Journal 35.3 (2001): 335+.
- Blade Runner, 1982, Ridley Scott, Warner Brothers, California
- Cowen, Tyler. “The Fate of Culture.” The Wilson Quarterly 2002: 78+.
- Fiske, John. “Global, National, Local? Some Problems of Culture in a Postmodern World.” Velvet Light Trap not cited.40 (1997): 56-66.
- The Birds, 1963, Hitchcock, Alfred, Universal Studios, California
- LoBrutto, Vincent. Becoming Film Literate: The Art and Craft of Motion Pictures. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005.
- Mccarty, John A. “Chapter Three Product Placement: the Nature of the Practice and Potential Avenues of Inquiry.” The Psychology of Entertainment Media: Blurring the Lines between Entertainment and Persuasion. Ed. L. J. Shrum. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004. 45-60.
- Rosenblatt, Louise M., 1994; The Reader the Text the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work ; Southern Illinois University Press, reprint edition
- Westfahl, Gary, and George Slusser, eds. No Cure for the Future: Disease and Medicine in Science Fiction and Fantasy. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002.