The Threat of the Gothic Patriarchy in Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds

Most scholars focus on the ambiguous meaning of the birds in Alfred Hitchcock's 1963 film The Birds, but this avian threat is little more than a MacGuffin, a catalyst used to further the film's real narrative. Rather than being a supernatural thriller, The Birds actually represents a dark exploration of the modern American Gothic: although the birds indeed prove a physical danger to Melanie's safety, she is ultimately destroyed as an independent subject by the imposing power of the Brenner family, a patriarchal structure metonymically represented by the ancestral house and its looming portrait of Frank Brenner.