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Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963) starts in a pet store, displaying all types of animals in cages. Mitch (Rod Taylor) is looking for lovebirds for his young sister (Veronica Cartwright). Does the film’s early mention of these birds suggest that people can be imprisoned by the exclusive nature of love? Or are their names used for ironic purposes, since the birds that feature in this story will be dispensing anything but affection?

The film soon gives us two human lovebirds when Mitch meets Melanie (Tippi Hedrin), who wants a mynah bird for her cage. The daughter of a big-time newspaper publisher, she has led a rather reckless life, consorting with people who want nothing more of life than to party. Mitch comments that she lives in a “gilded cage.” Even for an heiress, it can be difficult to escape the life one inherits, if Melanie’s is an affluent (and many would say enviable) cell. Mitch, on the other hand, is a lawyer who admits to wanting to put people in jail. This conversation between the two (not conventionally likeable) would-be lovers immediately establishes the theme of human preoccupation with possessing, controlling and confining.

Likewise, the man who helps Melanie rent a boat to surprise Mitch’s sister with lovebirds works behind a cage-like structure; maybe the suggestion is that his job is his jail. Melanie appears a sort of a predator, a bird of prey perhaps, when she hunts Mitch down by finding his address. We might say that Melanie wants to cage him as she invades his “nest,” or hometown and family, which includes Mitch’s mother (Jessica Tandy). In a sense, humans incarcerate themselves in their family situations, and in this instance Tandy feels like a warden, not wanting her son to spread his wings and love outside of her sphere of influence.

As the birds accelerate their attacks, people trade places with their former pets, and the humans are now the ones literally confined, hiding to protect themselves. Melanie and the children are cornered in a car after the onslaught at the school. She is trapped in a claustrophobic phone booth as the birds ram into it. Townspeople and visitors huddle in the diner after the seagulls swoop down on the center of the town. Toward the end of the movie, the main characters are huddled inside Mitch’s house, again emphasizing the cage motif. In one of the film’s most famous scenes, Melanie is smothered by birds biting her in an upstairs bedroom. As a representative of animal abusers (we first see her wearing a fur coat), Melanie is an enemy of nature. Now she is punished by the formerly abused creatures, who show the humans what can happen when the rules of respectful coexistence are broken.

The story is a bleak one. It is “the end of the world,” as the scripture-quoting character in the diner tells us. The last scene shows Mitch’s family and the traumatized Melanie driving away. But they take the lovebirds with them, still as pets in a cage, implying that the people have learned nothing – or, perhaps, that our human lovebirds and the power of domestic bonds are still intact despite the apocalyptic attack of the hostile birds at large.