The Birds

Showing at Wealthy Theatre on October 30, tickets are available online.

In 1932, one of the most absurd military operations in modern history took place in Australia in a spree of violence called the Great Emu War. It’s exactly how that sounds: soldiers armed with machine guns undertook killing sprees of the large, flightless birds. The emus proved resilient, and the soldiers’ multiple attempts to reduce the population proved both feeble and difficult. They just wouldn’t die. Over 20,000 emus were ordered to be killed; they barely managed 1,000. According to Britannica, the emus won the war. 

Now, the war of the birds wasn’t a real war, of course. It was a senseless slaughter. But Alfred Hitchcock’s classic 1963 horror film “The Birds” ups the ante and asks, what would an actual blood feud between birds and humans look like? 

“The Birds” flips the script of power and lets the emus’ avian cousins in the coastal city of Bodega Bay, California, reign supreme. Harmless crows, seagulls and sparrows morph into blood-thirsty beasts with a hive mind. At one point, a character even analogizes the attack to a war. It’s silly, it’s dumb and its premise's proximity to the Great Emu War satirizes our own species-wide stupidity—and that’s where “The Birds” excels. 

Continue reading at The Rapidian.