Dublin to Bodega Bay

Abstract

The final scenes of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1966 film The Birds take place in a restaurant in Bodega Bay, in Northern California. A garrulous, oddly out-of-place Irishman holds forth. Functioning as a one-man Greek chorus, he alcoholically prophesies imminent disaster. He is as well, it would seem, a figure out of Hitchcock’s film past, creating an intertextuality between the conclusion of this Hitchcock drama and the conclusion of Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock, and further still perhaps, harkening back to Hitchcock’s earliest years in the German film industry, when he was a British director and not, as he later became, an American one.