Being and The Birds: Or: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Heidegger (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock)

Philosopher and film critic Derek Hawthorne draws on the thought of Martin Heidegger to illuminate Alfred Hitchcock's 1963 classic The Birds, about a series of savage and inexplicable bird attacks on Bodega Bay, a sleepy California fishing village. Hawthorne argues that The Birds depicts a Heideggerian "event" (Ereignis): a sudden and fundamental transformation of the meaning of everything. Modern men believe we are masters of our own destiny. Heidegger calls this "humanism" and rejects it completely. The Birds is an anti-humanist film. In the space of one weekend, all pretensions to the understanding and mastery of nature are shattered, and man is reduced to helplessness in the face of unfathomable mystery.

"Derek Hawthorne's Being and The Birds is the most penetrating and insightful commentary on The Birds ever written, drawing on the film, the original story by Daphne Du Maurier, the film's production history, and even its surprising connection to Edvard Munch's The Scream. Hawthorne also manages to explain Heidegger's key ideas in remarkably accessible prose. Thus Being and the Birds serves as an ideal brief introduction to the most important philosopher of the last century."-Trevor Lynch, author of Trevor Lynch's Classics of Right-Wing Cinema

"Being and The Birds: Heidegger and Hitchcock, analyzed by a profound and passionate scholar of movies and metaphysics. If you are into both, you will be kept on the edge of your seat while reading this masterly, surprising essay. It is a first-rate intellectual Ereignis and surpasses Camille Paglia's British Film Institute study as the best thing ever written on The Birds."-Martin Lichtmesz, author of Ethnopluralismus: Verteidigung und Kritik