• horsesvisions > paintings — Birdland > Genesis

Franck Brenner, whose disappearance is cruelly acute in the nuclear family, is the omnipresent figure of the "pater familias" who monitors and judges through a single painting : his portrait on the wall of the Brenner's farm in Bodega Bay. A static and ubiquitous but unavoidable icon, who sees everything but who never manifests, whose mannas his widow constantly invokes by comparing her dead adored stellar husband to her living son’s shortcomings and alleged weakness.

The missing father’s importance, combined with the hidden meanings of Patti Smith's composition and those of the characters imagined by Evan Hunter, aka Ed McBain (Hitchcock's screenwriter chosen to write The Birds, based on the eponymous short story by Daphné Du Maurier), then referred to another common denominator between Smith’s work, that of Reich and that of Hitchcock : the dimension of psychoanalysis.

As we have seen before, Smith’s Birdland is directly inspired by A Book of Dreams, a work recounting the tumultuous childhood of Peter Reich alongside his beloved father, Wilhelm Reich. The latter, who suffered a heart attack during a final stay in American jails in 1957, was a controversial psychoanalyst, a pioneer in researches upon the role of sex in trauma experienced by adults and the inventor of sexual therapies advocating the liberation of the being by the orgasm. His panel of theories and therapeutic practices, that made him later pass for a pornographer in the eyes of puritanical America of that time (that of the Hays Code and of sexual prohibition), led to his imprisonment.

A Communist of the first hour and a disciple of Sigmund Freud (until the inevitable break), he fled Nazi Germany to land in America, convinced that he had identified the manifestation of the Universal Energy with Orgone and its evil counterpart DOR (Deadly Orgone Radiation). A “Jack of all” scientist who touched every domain, he affirmed to have discovered a way to cause rain showers at will with his Cloudbuster, a strange machine that he had built (and which evoked some unlikely hybrid cross between a cannon and an organ), and with which he bombed clouds to rain. Passionate about flying saucers, which his son and him called in their secret coded language "EAs", he argued that the United States had become a statist dictatorship that concealed from the people the truth about UFOs.