The Borders of Things

Cawing

So a quick note on Hitchcock. We watched The Birds the other night, which I had never seen before. What a film. I'm working on Moby-Dick right now and my fascination with animal disruptions of our cultural worlds has been on overdrive. I looked up Zizek's reading of the film, which was fairly congruent with my own. Since he says it better than I can, here's the money quote from his book Looking Awry:

"Thus the birds, far from functioning as a 'symbol' whose 'signification' can be detected, on the contrary block, mask, by their massive presence, the film’s 'signification,' their function being to make us forget, during their vertiginous and dazzling attacks, with what, in the end, we are dealing: the triangle of a mother, her son, and the woman he loves."