The Silence of The Lambs (1991) / An essay in film
Does the world need another critique on The Silence of The Lambs? Seeing as the value of self-deprecation has dropped in these recent times of self-vaunting, I will allow the audacity of choosing to let this review be in the world to speak for itself.
First, a synopsis for those who do not covet that which they see. In this context, we covet the knowledge of trying to know and understand well the workings of the films that we watch: this film, based on the novel of the same name by Thomas Harris, follows FBI Agent Clarice Starling and her task of grooming the incarcerated genius serial killer, Hannibal “the Cannibal” Lector, for help in catching “Buffalo Bill”, the latest and most active serial killer this side of the America Mid-West.
Clarice, played by Jodie Foster, is an up-and-coming criminal psychologist. Fresh out of the academy, she must enter the The Baltimore Hospital for the Criminally Insane and embark on the difficult and unnerving task of performing a series of interviews with Dr. Lector (played by Anthony Hopkins). Dr. Lector, a former psychiatrist, is known for notoriously having eaten some of his former patients. The thing is, Lector is a near-genius and the FBI desperately need his help in apprehending Buffalo Bill who, up until this point, has left next-to-no pattern to pick-up on.
Jodie Foster has said that she wanted to play Clarice Starling before she’d seen the script from right after that she’d read the book because there existed a sub-plot of someone saving someone else’s life. I would argue that it is not a sub-plot seeing as the title of the film is derived from Starling’s childhood pathology as divined by Dr. Lector during the famous “quid pro quo” scene with Foster’s character. The pathology is her motivation for so desperately wanting to safe another’s life.
But if the movie’s theme is the triumph of righteousness, then there is a second, underlying factor that makes the movie so indelibly layered: the subliminal and alternately oriented arc of the anti-hero, Dr. Lector. I think this is really the great strength of the film; that all the while we are following the investigation and the attempt to capture the serial killer “Buffalo Bill” (Ted Levine — amazing performance), we are being worked over by the character of Lector, or by Demme or by Hopkins as actor himself. Lector is the budding anti-hero and we love him when he’s on screen because of his consummate intelligence and we’re not mortified when he makes it out of the building and into the ambulance. In fact, at this point, you are positively rooting for the elegantly spoken psychopath to get free.
Much like a superhero with a superpower, something that we all desire, this joy of witnessing intellectual deftness is the mask Demme uses to confuse us when we try to calculate the morality of our awe for Lector. To this critics mind, the being-in-the-company of Lector’s pre-cognition and near omniscience, the intelligence of Foster’s character and the journey of Lector without bearing on the central desires of Foster and Co. in their pursuit of Bill, is whence the great pleasures of this film derive.
One has to wonder if Thomas Harris, the author of the novel, wrote Hannibal Lector’s character in this way intentionally? Or did Anthony Hopkins pull a Captain Phillips’s on Tak Fujimoto’s camera (invokes retrospective film reference) while being directed to stare straight down the barrel of the lens? I would say Demme did this but I don’t think anyone could’ve predicted just how incredibly electrifying the performance of Hopkins was going to be: it is virtuoso.
We do know that Demme understands the reach, capability i.e. consequences that a man like Hannibal Lector is capable of. And this is not about the explicit demise of Miggs, his neighbouring cell-mate: that plot point is just intentional character development. But rather it is the wiggle of Jack Crawford’s finger against the skin of Agent Starling’s hand during a hand-shake at the end of the film. Our minds immediately jump back to Lector’s perniciousness about Crawford (Starling’s boss): does Crawford have sexual fantasies about Starling? We don’t know if its true or not that Crawford covets Clarice and it doesn’t matter now: Lector has made Clarice paranoid, he has made us paranoid. And he has stayed with us. In our minds, we know that it will but hope that it might not, likely be for a long-time. The scene reveals the subtly from Demme: using retrospection to suggest future ramifications that we know the story will never depict. And all this after the climax, what shrewd use of timing, what deft direction.
Demme was right the entire time: the subjective camera worked for this film. So well. Demme shows such a deep understanding of the narrative and the characters and how he makes them churn the movie along.
The film is incredibly entertaining. The shots are are austere in their continuity of descriptions of scene and yet so incredibly rich in colour and detail. The ensemble cast bring the details into great relief and float this film way beyond the often stagnant mangroves of mindless film-making. This is no pedestrian movie. This picture is the fruits of a director deeply in love with the story and film making.
May this film persist as a monument of pop-culture, a film project well-nurtured and a preservation of some unbelievable acting, especially from Hopkins and Levine.
RIP Jonathan Demme.
