Tragedy refers to some of the drama based in human suffering. It talks about the events that happen and change the identity and history of an individual or an entire community. Personal tragedies may affect ones family, environment or their entire lives.
Tragedy has had many different people try and explain it over the years. Some people say that nature has a way of punishing people for their bad deeds. Others believe that tragedy comes from temptations inflicted by the devil. Traditionally, anyone with a consequent flow of tragedy in their lives is a bad omen to the community. In some communities they go as far as banishing some of these people.
However, it may be impossible to tell where when and how tragedy occurs. In most cases different people go through different tragedies. The important thing would be to know how to handle any form of tragedy in your life when it hits.
Trying to understand the root of the bad things happening in your life would make you go into a deeper depression. When tragedy strikes, how you strike back determines your survival.
“The birds” is a suspense and horror film produced in the early 1950’s. Evan Hunter originally wrote the screen play but Alfred Hitchcock directed the film in 1963. The story involves a lot of suspense and horror.
In 1961 there was an epidemic in California where residents awoke to dead birds on the streets one morning. Alfred Hitchcock got this as inspiration and even used some of the research findings to produce the film. It brings to life the tragic events that happened in this town (Gottlieb and Brookhouse 201).
The film starts with a love story. A young established lady, Melanie, meets a man, Mitch, at a pet shop and they hit it off well. He had come to buy his younger sister a pair of love birds for her birthday and had intentionally mistaken Melanie for the shop attendant.
That seemed to get her attention and his explanation to this quite charmed her. She even went ahead and bought the birds leaving them at his doorstep with a note attached. This marked the beginning of a new friendship and relationship. That built to a comforting hand in times of tragedy.
In our day to day lives, love is the height of all risk. It can either lead to be a beautiful life or a dreadful disaster. In your youth the most you think about is having fun and living in the moment. The only time we think about our futures is in regard to career and money and having the best of everything.
But love has a huge role to play in our lives. Settling down and having one partner helps one focus on other important things and plan a better future. Some of the time we let true love go and end up being heart broken. In such times we are unable to open our hearts to someone else.
This leaves us to live with the comfort of our jobs, houses and money not knowing that none of that can truly fill the void in our hearts. Love is what you make it to be. It can work to make you the happiest person alive or crush your heart. That has been the greatest lesson in my life, learning to love unconditionally.
Tragedy begins to strike in the film when there are un-explained bird attacks in the whole neighborhood. It begins when Melanie was leaving Mitch’s house to drop off the love birds. A seagull inflicts a wound on her forehead. On Cathy’s (Mitch’s younger sister) birthday, the guests are attacked by seagulls that gather round in the venue. The series of tragedies only get worse from here on.
Lydia was the next victim (Mitch’s mother) finding one of her friends dead in his house, his eyes pecked out by some birds. The bird attacks also happen in Cathy’s school when the children are attacked by birds in the playground. However, in the midst of all the tragedy we see the relationship between Melanie and Mitch and His family continuing to strengthen.
What really happens when tragedy starts to happen in reality? In my personal experience, losing my mother, my home and moving in with a stranger was about the worst tragedy in my life. Coping with the emotional pain was hard to handle, especially at my tender age.
Months of counseling and treatment started me off in the road to recovery. Small steps and starting to come in to terms with the events that had happened helped me learn to live again. The process of having too much pain around you affects not only you but also the people around you. When you are emotionally unstable, you are not able to handle any responsibility handed to you.
The feeling of not being in control of your emotions leaves you vulnerable to any other attack that may occur. Proper counseling and care ensures that you learn to handle pain and pressure from the events that have occurred. One is only able to live a fulfilling life only if they are able to handle and control their emotions. You may not stop tragedy but you can control your emotional balance in such cases.
Some of the residents start to think it is the apocalypse others even claim it to be witchcraft. Residents at this point are getting nervous and are coming up with all possible explanations as to why all the tragedy is happening. It was rather hard to explain how birds that had lived there would suddenly become violent and hostile.
All these speculations were starting to scare the children and the rumor spreading was stopped. However, events only become worse after the attacks. An explosion at a gas station harms more residents than any of the other attacks. Birds then begin to attack when the people who were in the dinner try to run for their lives.
Melanie, who at this point was trapped in a phone booth, is rescued by Mitch. Lydia, on the other hand is sure that Melanie is the cause of all the tragedy.
She claims that none of these strange and horrifying events had happened prior to her arrival. This leaves Melanie in a dilemma. Could she be the cause of all the events happening? Had her presence brought danger and pain to everyone around her?
This list of events made me think about pain in peoples’ lives. Did some people have the ability to bring disaster to a whole neighborhood even without knowing it? In reality if you have too much trouble in your life you are labeled with all sorts of names. Traditionally a woman who would lose her husband at a in the first years of marriage, was labeled a murderer.
In our current generation a woman over the age of forty with no family of her own is labeled as one married to her career. It almost does not matter the emotions of the person going through the tragedy.
In most cases people affected by any tragedy will always have someone to blame for it. In life you are not able to stop what people say or think about you but you can control how you react to what they say. Whether to take it as true or not is entirely up to you.
In the last section of the film, Melanie, Mitch, Lydia and Cathy take refuge in a friends’ house. However, this night the birds attack even more viciously than they ever had. Sometime in the night they are able to get into the house and hurt Mitch, but they manage to fix the broken window.
As they rested, in the middle of the night, Melanie heard some noises in the attic and decided to see what was happening without disturbing the rest. This leads her to a room where she is trapped in with the birds. Mitch and Lydia hear her screams and rescue and tend to her wounds.
However, the wounds are too severe and they decide to take her to hospital. As they leave the house they notice that the birds do not attack them. Driving as the sun rises and Melanie siting unconscious leaves the suspense of the future. With the birds not attacking them and the rising of the sun, this may mark a new beginning for all of them or the end of a horrifying experience.
The rising of the sun marks a new beginning. And in every person’s life there is a point where you start over. Get a new meaning to life and living. It may or may not be a life or death situation. In my personal experience it was losing my family and being uncertain of my future.
Not knowing what to do with my entire life brought me down to my knees. However, a point came when I was at my lowest and there was a ray of hope for a brighter future. Following that small light through college and into employment kept me afloat. I strongly believe that it is in those moments when life is meaningless that we get the small ray of hope that helps us move on.
“The birds” is a story of love, strength, friendship, and tragedy. It shows just how much one single community can handle so much tragedy and still get through it. However, the film ends in suspicion which we can relate to our everyday lives. In reality we do not know what happens when the sun rises.
We live hoping that every day will be better than the last. We all hope that tragedy never hits our doors, even when we are almost sure it will at some point. Through experience I believe that you cannot control all the things that happen in your life. You are only able to control your reaction to all the events that happen.
Works Cited
Gottlieb, Sidney, and Brookhouse Christopher. An Interview with Evan Hunter in Framing Hitchcock: Selected Essays from the Hitchcock Annual. New York: Wayne State University Press, 2008. Print.