The Novel

Author: Thomas Harris (b. 1940)

First published: 1988

The Film

Year released: 1991

Director: Jonathan Demme (1944-2017)

Screenplay by: Ted Tally

Starring: Jodie Foster, Anthony Hopkins, Scott Glenn, Ted Levine

Context

The Silence of the Lambs was the first horror film to win an Oscar for Best Picture. Adapted from the novel by Thomas Harris, the film brought a new level of sophistication to the genre. (In part, this was accomplished by incorporating elements from police procedurals.) The film also brought to the screen one the most compelling characters in film history, Anthony Hopkins as Dr. Hannibal Lecter. Hannibal had been played on-screen before by Brian Cox in Manhunter (1986), but it was Hopkins’s performance in The Silence of the Lambs that made Hannibal Lecter a household name.

Thomas Harris worked for six years for the Associated Press before becoming a novelist in 1974. He published The Silence of the Lambs in 1988. It was his second novel to feature Hannibal Lecter; the first was Red Dragon (1981). The novel pits FBI Academy student Clarice Starling against Hannibal as she attempts to use him and his special insights in order to solve the case of a serial killer nicknamed “Buffalo Bill.” The novel is the most successful of the five that Harris wrote, and it has sold millions of copies. His 1981 novel, Red Dragon, had previously been adapted for the screen in Manhunter (1986), directed by Michael Mann. The film rights to The Silence of the Lambs were sold for a half million dollars even before the book was released.

The Silence of the Lambs was director Jonathan Demme’s fourteenth motion picture. He started in the early 1970s working for B-movie and exploitation film producer Roger Corman. By the end of the 1980s, he had successfully directed several major motion pictures in a variety of genres, including an innovative concert film for the Talking Heads; Swing Shift starring Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell; Swimming to Cambodia, an adaptation of Spalding Gray’s one-man theatrical monologue; and the mafia comedy Married to the Mob. He was called “commercial cinema’s most reliable and direct link to the avant-garde” by New York films critic Janet Maslin. Following the success of The Silence of the Lambs, Demme directed other popular movies, including Philadelphia and the film version of Toni Morrison’s Beloved.

Film Analysis

The iconic movie poster for the The Silence of the Lambs shows Clarice’s face with a moth over her mouth, a so-called death’s head hawkmoth. These moths have a pattern on their backs resembling a human skull. The poster artwork has superimposed upon the photograph of the moth a photo by Salvador Dalí called “In Voluptas Mors.” This is a black and white photograph in which nude female models were posed to create the visual illusion of a skull. In the movie, the moth is the calling card of the serial killer Jame Gumb, known as “Buffalo Bill.” An object is found lodged in the throat of one of his victims, and it turns out to be the pupa of a death’s head moth. Later in the film, we learn that Gumb breeds moths and butterflies. The image is significant because moths symbolize not only death but (like butterflies) transformation.

Gumb wants to transform into something that he is not. Gumb is a serial killer who is obsessed with transvestism and with becoming a woman. The character has been heavily criticized as a litany of queer stereotypes: he sews clothes, owns a poodle, disco dances, has body piercings, cross-dresses, dates men...and he murders women in order to skin them alive and create a female “suit” that he can wear. Hollywood films had a long history to that point of portraying LGBTQ individuals as dangerous psychopaths. In 1991, with the AIDS epidemic still ravaging the community, many had had enough. Hundreds of protests were organized at theaters around the country, and there was also a demonstration outside the Academy Awards ceremony the following year. Demme defended the movie, saying that Gumb was not “really” transgender or gay, he was just a psychopath.

In contrast to the film’s depiction of LGBTQ characters, the movie scored points for its representation of women. The film opens with the protagonist, Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster), running an obstacle course alone in the early morning. She is an FBI agent in training who came from a poor background in the South but later graduated from the University of Virginia. She is ambitious, tough, and intelligent. Clarice is selected for a special mission, the “interesting errand,” her superior calls it, of interviewing Hannibal Lecter. Demme uses cinematography to make the viewer sympathetic to Clarice and to her personal and professional struggle. In the FBI office in Quantico, Virginia, the camera shows men towering over Clarice in the narrow hallways and elevators. Then she verbally spars with Dr. Chilton who runs the ward where Hannibal is incarcerated. Chilton attempts to seduce her and, when that fails, he ruthlessly belittles her for the rest of their meeting. She struggles to project authority and professionalism as the two walk down the hallways of the hospital and pass through several prison doors. Chilton visibly wields his authority. Clarice, although nervous, holds her own. Foster won an Academy Award for her performance of Clarice. In these opening scenes, she conveys Clarice’s tight braiding together of personal uncertainty, ambition, and intelligence through her eyes and body language. Nearly arriving at Lecter’s cell, she says to Dr. Chilton that she would like to interview Lecter alone. He berates her for having wasted his time. She parries with a smile and says to him, “But then I would have missed the pleasure of your company.” The line and the smile are delivered with performative politeness and a hint of sarcasm. This is the something that the movie does well, especially in the back-and-forth between Clarice and Hannibal: the art of dialogue as a struggle for power.

The butterfly motif doesn’t just apply to Buffalo Bill. Clarice is also engaged in a personal transformation. From humble origins, she is becoming a successful professional woman in a high stakes, male-dominated field. She is committed to leaning in and to doing it by the book. In many ways, The Silence of the Lambs can be seen as a commentary on the theme of re-invention, a quintessentially American obsession. On the one hand, we have the psychopath who becomes a woman by dressing up in a dead-lady suit; on the other hand, there is Clarice. A good student, hardworking and ambitious, respectful of her superiors (who wisely see the good qualities in her), and now a newbie at the FBI, she pursues the opportunities that the agency gives her. At the film’s end, she becomes a full agent.

In 1991, the FBI was still in the doghouse to many Americans as a result of the exposure of covert domestic operations like COINTELPRO, revealed to the public in the 1970s when activists broke into a local FBI office, stole documents, and gave them to the press. The agency was so enamored with their portrayal in The Silence of the Lambs that they gave Demme the opportunity to film on location in their offices in Quantico, and they consulted extensively on the script. (Since then, the FBI has taken to image shaping through consulting on Hollywood films much more proactively.) One of the producers for the movie, Ed Saxon, stated in 2018, “We had political qualms about how closely we were working with the FBI and how much we were making the FBI look like heroes when the FBI’s history as an organ of the state has been complicated, to say the least.” Saxon also implied that the FBI wanted the movie’s depiction of Starling to function as a recruiting tool for the agency.

Gumb is a psychopath, but he is no Hannibal Lecter. Hannibal is a “pure psychopath” according to Dr. Chilton, who speaks of his captive as if he were a butterfly in his collection. The psychopath as a figure in popular culture has a somewhat fluid relation to concepts in the mental health professions. Whatever else the symptoms, in The Silence of the Lambs pure psychopathy is apparently tantamount to genius. As Kant says, genius in art makes the rules against which the work should be judged. The psychopath makes his own rules, too, and so exudes a kind of higher autonomy, even when he is in chains in a prison. Hannibal is scary but also brilliant and charming, while Clarice, who stands in for the viewer, is merely bright and hardworking. Clarice follows the rules. There is a scene in the novel that didn’t make it into the movie where Hannibal mocks mere “experts,” those who work to obtain credentials, pursue professional training, and take jobs “on government grants.” Bureaucratic men and women are one thing, and Hannibal is another entirely. He is not only gifted with almost supernatural senses and abilities, he is aristocratic, well-traveled, a cultivated man of Western civilization, tasteful.

Anthony Hopkins has said that he modeled his performance of Lecter in part on HAL 9000, the computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey. A brilliant idea, because HAL might be the first of a contemporary kind of psychopath in film, literature, and television. The new psychopaths differ from the old ones in that they aren’t tortured, misshapen creatures; instead, they are often successful, delicately mannered or fussy (even when they are doing or saying things that are atrocious), and very smart. They just happen to lack some human moral core, like HAL.

Significance

In 1992, The Silence of the Lambs was nominated for seven Academy Awards and won five: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, and Best Screenplay. Just outside the awards ceremony and unknown to television viewers, hundreds of protesters marched behind police barricades. Three major films had been released in the previous year that featured villains who were gays or lesbians: Basic Instinct, JFK, and The Silence of the Lambs. These movies repeated a stereotype in twentieth-century fiction and film that linked homosexuals with evil and villainy. This trope was a topic of conversation and criticism among the literati as early as the 1950s, but it did not go away easily. In 1954, for example, Normal Mailer published “The Homosexual Villain,” in which he acknowledged that he himself had written novels with homosexual characters in them, because homosexuality functioned as a kind of shorthand for evil.

Demme has been praised for his thoughtful cinematography in the film, above all for the way he used point-of-view shots. Demme often positions the camera so that it mimics the aggressive gazes of the men around Clarice. Just as she is an object of unwanted advances and scrutiny, Demme’s camera gazes at Clarice in an almost threatening manner. When she is walking down the hallways towards Lecter in his cell, for example, the camera is already there in the empty hall waiting for her to come into view. Later, when she slides under the door of the “Your Self Storage Garage,” the camera is positioned inside the dark space, viewing her as she struggles vulnerably. There are other shots in the film like this, and they are matched by elements in the dialogue. “Don’t you feel eyes moving over your body, Clarice?” asks Hannibal. When they first meet, separated by a full-length plexi-glass wall, Lecter tells Clarice to come closer to him—and closer still—so that he can look at her badge. The camera technique conveys the feeling that Clarice is vulnerable and perhaps not entirely in control of the space around her.

Demme’s camera shots can also be seen as a nod to the “male gaze” discourse that originated with Laura Mulvey’s manifesto-like essay from 1975, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Mulvey posited that conventional Hollywood movies rely on voyeuristic pleasure and the male gaze in their depictions of women. This is readily grasped if one thinks of classic Hollywood scenes introducing beautiful leading ladies: the lighting might change or the focus soften, for example, in order to showcase the woman’s beauty in the eyes of the protagonist and the viewer. (A classic case is Kim Novak’s first scene in Vertigo.) The visual pleasure of conventional cinema, according to Mulvey, reproduces this sexualized gaze and is thus political because it assumes a male viewer and a female object. In Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs, however, we are encouraged to identify with the female lead rather than to fetishize her. Thus, when Demme uses the camera to effect a deliberately aggressive gaze at her, the audience is made to recognize the menace or sadism inherent in that gaze. We also naturally feel her discomfort.

Further Reading

Bibliography