Day 13: The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
“The Silence of the Lambs” is a masterful mash-up of gothic horror and police procedural, chilling the spine with tense editing, intimate camera work, and career making performances by Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster. With a keen sense for suspense, director Jonathan Demme delivers a terrify tale that tends to bypass many of the thriller cliches in an attempt to go somewhere deeper- somewhere more personal. It is in this more personal atmosphere that the film grabs at its audience, never letting them go. It takes our need to relate, in this case with Foster’s Clarice Starling, and uses it against us. For the more vulnerable she becomes the more vulnerable we become.
In the film, Jack Crawford (Scott Glenn) of the FBI’s Behaviour Science Unit pulls ace student Clarice Starling (Foster) from her academy training so she may assist in the ongoing investigation of the serial killer Buffalo Bill- a sadistic being who murders and skins young woman. Starling’s job is simple yet filled with complexity as she is tasked with interviewing incarcerated master killer Hannibal Lecter, who eats his victims, in order to hopefully gain a better insight or possibly the identity of Buffalo Bill. But when the evil Lecter takes a personal interest in Clarice and the trail for Buffalo Bill grows hotter by the day, it will be a battle of wits to see who winds up on top and even left alive.
“The Silence of the Lambs,” as I’ve mentioned before, is a thriller that attempts to go in a deeper more personal direction than many of its genre peers and, in this instance, it shines a magnifying glass on the role of females in law enforcement, society, and even film. Upon its release, there were many in the feminist movement who scolded the film for its killing and mutilation of woman. Notable feminist and women’s rights advocate Betty Friedan stated, in an interview with Playboy magazine of all things, ”I thought it was absolutely outrageous that “The Silence of the Lambs” won four Oscars…I’m not saying that the movie shouldn’t have been shown. I’m not denying the movie was an artistic triumph, but it was about the evisceration, the skinning alive of women. That is what I find offensive. Not the Playboy centerfold.”
But what Ms. Friedan, and many of her ilk, seem to ignore is the triumphant rise of Clarice Starling in the film from a starting point of loneliness, isolation, and humiliation. At the very beginning of the film we find Starling running a fitness course by herself, away from the rest of the predominantly male academy. Later, it is hinted that Starling might have been picked by Crawford to interview Lecter simply because her womanly ways might woo the killer into a false sense of security and, directly after her meeting with Lecter, another inmate hurls a handful of his seamen in her face. At this point, it can not get any more humiliating for Clarice and, oddly enough, the only person truly on her side is Lecter.
As the story progresses, we find that, as Amy Taubin puts it in a Criterion essay on the film, ”Clarice’s mission is not to marry the prince but to rescue the maiden,” which, in this case, Buffalo Bill has suffering in a pit in his basement. As Clarice grows closer to her goal, the jeers of local policemen, the chagrin of Lecter’s male doctor, and even the playful offer of a date from a professor helping in the case all work to hinder Clarice as being seen as a serious investigator, but, never the less, Clarice overcomes all these obsticles in her search for Buffalo Bill and even gains the respect of Lector, who considers her too interesting to kill.
“The Silence of the Lambs” is truly one of the scariest films of all time and this is so expertly accomplished because we grow to care for our heroine and hope she rises above the obstacles that are put in her way by both herself and others. It’s this level of humanism that makes Clarice so relatable and the very lack of the same that marks Lecter as one of the worst (and yet most interesting) souls in all of cinema.
For more on “The Silence of the Lambs,” check out Criterion’s page here.
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