The Silence of the Lambs (1991)

Among the furore IMDb caused when they shut down their discussion boards – I am among many who have all but abandoned the long-beloved site now as it became apparent that the forums were its main appeal and function – I went in search of an alternative, finding MovieChat.org. It has the advantage of having transferred all of the old existing IMDb discussions over, so if we can remember the movies we enjoyed discussing, we can find our old posts. On the boards recently, I found quite a bit of talk of The Silence of the Lambs having become outdated; some even argued that Anthony Hopkins did not deserve his Best Actor Oscar. This surprised me not only as a oldtimer lover of the film, but as a general fan of cinema. This movie has been considered for decades already, and it is a pretty contemporary picture. I decided to revisit this old favourite of mine for a review.

At the age of 14, I went through a real tomboy phase, during which I worked out profusely, wore boys’ clothes, and wanted to be a Mighty Morphin’ Power Ranger (had I not become a parent and found my energy levels depleted for evermore, I would still probably be living this dream!), and Clarice Starling became another ideal of this phase. A girlfriend and I obsessed over this story, and more specifically the tangibly erotic relationship between Starling and Lecter, which encapsulated pretty much all of our collective teenage fantasies. I have always been into older guys, but some eleven years on, I still get thrills from Hopkins as Lecter, and his undeniable sex appeal in the face of psychosis.

Starling meets a match

Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) is a trainee at the FBI academy – a serious, enthusiastic young woman, whose presence in the patriarchal landscape of the federal agencies is underpinned with continual clever use of cinematography. From being, in the words of Ebert, ‘a short woman in an elevator full of tall men’, to her visual POV adopted by cameras during verbal exchanges, in which her male counterparts break the fourth wall and talk directly into the camera, while she retorts slightly off-camera. Starling, notably, only finds three intellectual matches that warrant her direct eye contact: her sole female colleague Ordelia (Kasi Lemmon), Hannibal Lecter, and the wanted serial killer Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine).

Starling’s sharp wit and academic strength prompt her superior Crawford (Scott Glenn) to recruit her assistance in the pursuit of Buffalo Bill, who kidnaps fat women, skins them and dumps their bodies, and has now captured the daughter (Brooke Smith) of Senator Martin (Diane Baker). It becomes evident that the bureau guys think that at least Lecter’s professional capacity as a psychiatrist will lend insight to the case – if not his direct personal knowledge - and feel that Starling fills the specific criteria of being physically endearing while being critically minded enough not to be manipulated and remember to do her job.

Eyes that make you want to fuck

In a chilling and prolonged game of cat and mouse, or quid pro quo, Lecter guides Clarice cryptically to the identity of Buffalo Bill, demanding personal anecdotes in return for his clues. Through his carrot-on-a-string bargaining, Lecter wiggles his way into Clarice’s mind in a sinister but oddly paternal fashion. When Lecter later escapes custody and kills several in the effort, Clarice assures Ordelia that he will not target her, explaining that ‘he would consider that rude’, and strangely, in spite of the several elaborately executed murders we have now seen the doctor commit, we know this to be true. There is some bizarre affection between Lecter and Starling that endears him to her and guarantees her safety and success.

Jodie Foster won Best Actress at the Oscars for her performance, fully establishing herself as perhaps the first and only really successful transition from leading child actor to leading adult actor. Foster is most remarkable in her simultaneous professionalism and friendliness. While undoubtedly polished in her craft and a very serious committee to it, she is charming, funny and approachable. On top of all of this, she is trilingual, graduated an esteemed university at the standard age, all while maintaining a hugely successful and publicly forward acting career.

Ted Levine is a tremendous talent, and what strikes me more and more all the time is just how audacious he was to take such a role as Buffalo Bill. Set among the height of the AIDS epidemic and an increasingly mainstream gay culture, the film drew some criticism (as Verhoeven and Ezsterhas experienced a few years later with Basic Instinct) due to some overly sensitive people considering it homophobic or transphobic. I wonder if now they would even consider approaching such topics in such a politically correct world. But even back then, it would seem that criticism was selective. In addition, every young actor knows not to be too bold in their role choices if they want to carry on, for fear of stigma. Levine storms the set and throws his all into Bill, and his subsequent success should stand as testament to his enormous daring and ability.

Lecter, speaking in learned psychological terms, explains to Clarice that Bill believes he is a transsexual because of a much deeper seeded need for transformation, as manifested in the symbolic moths he uses as calling cards. Bill’s blurred sexual orientation and gender identity are made clear as delusions consequent of his true psychotic condition, and because of this are quite incidental. It continues to stun me when people jump to quick conclusions that films are sexist because one female character is bad, or are racist because one black character is idiotic. Based in some part on the antics of mentally-scarred Mummy’s boy Ed Gein, logic need not apply, as we are looking at a character who is not of the conventional psychological capacity. Bill may like to apply make-up and tuck his penis between his thighs, but is that any more relevant to his killing of women than his love of fluffy dogs or his immense tailoring skills? In these terms, no. Consider the exchange in which Lecter puts to Clarice, ‘what does Bill do?’ Her response is that he kills women, but in psychological terms, that is not the answer. ‘He covets’, Lecter explains. Bill’s rooted covetousness is the main driver of every other characteristic. He covets that which he cannot be or have – the body of a woman being his main focus. Within his mental arena, this same fixation could have been upon children, animals, inanimate objects, whatever. But this twisted character bending the barriers of conventional gender are in no way an indication of wide held view of all gay/transgender people being psychotic murderers. Case closed.

In spite of Lecter’s high regard as a figure of the horror genre, it is questionable whether this is a horror story. It occurs entirely within reality, and its format and focus is much more on the criminal perspective, the investigative thrills. None of the horror sequences – mutilations, that is – are either implied or occur off-screen, and in this way SOTL found its way into the annals of classic horror, scarring people for years to come, in the same way that Texas Chainsaw Massacre did, by allowing the audience to feel the hysteria of the unknown. Had this been intended as a horror, we would see Bill ‘skin his humps’, or Lecter literally deface (LOL, sorry) Sergeant Pembry. This is a sophisticated crime thriller, and plays out in that way, with dramatic red herrings popping up, diverting federal and audience attention, just as the antagonist intends.

Hannibal Lecter – thanks to the collective works of Thomas Harris, Anthony Hopkins and the various screenwriters who revised the script that eventually ended up on the screen – has gone down in history as a horror icon for one prominent reason: the shrewd intellectualism that renders him practically invincible. We are used to the antagonists who pull of elaborate action sequences and blow up opponents in crazy ways; we are used to the retarded or otherwise faceless bogeymen that stalk neighbourhood babysitters and high school girls. What we are not used to is a very human psychopath, who actually can be reasoned with and is capable of developing emotional attachments to other living beings. And we are not used to them using so little violence, and so much intellect, in their murderous endeavours. Hannibal Lecter embodies the level of mental capacity so high that its perceptions border on the clairvoyant, that any audience member surely envies in some way. 

Hopkins’ later performance in Hannibal, that I could never grow to love due to Julianne Moore’s replacement of Foster, ignited the erotic tension that SOTL encapsulated. Although the movie deviated from the novel, when Clarice handcuffs herself to Lecter in Krendler’s house and he traps her hair in the fridge, and their faces are so close, and he asks her, ‘Would you ever tell me, “Stop; if you loved me you’d stop”?’… that is the kind of sexual tension I could get off to every night for the rest of my life. The dynamic between Lecter and Starling is electrifying, and Hopkins and Foster somehow hit on the most explosive formula. Their on-screen relationship is one of those that seems so perfect that the universe must have prophesised it millennia previously, like John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John, or Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw and Richard Dreyfuss.