In an infamous shot from The Silence of the Lambs’s opening sequence, FBI trainee Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) crams into an elevator flanked by men in belted khakis. She’s conspicuously the only woman, a ponytail and pearl earrings in a tracksuit Rorschached with sweat. For a second before the doors close, a few of the men look directly at her while she pretends not to notice, peering upward at the literal or professional ceiling. What does Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) say she loves most? “Advancement, of course.” Before we know much more than her zoological surname, we see Starling set apart yet surrounded.
You could be convinced by this image—by the overt incongruities for which it’s become shorthand—to assume that ‘difference’ is what Silence is ‘about.’ The sexual difference that distinguishes Starling’s ambitious, moral hero from a stock chivalric knight; the uneasy confluence of queer gender expression and morbid brutality that characterizes serial killer ‘Buffalo Bill’ (Ted Levine). But zoom in on Starling’s gaze trained offscreen, her steely eyes following the lift of her chin, and consider how the film revolves around vision. Not only perception (despite a major POV set piece and a lead-up of cautionary field exercises stressing the importance, and impossibility, of having eyes in the back of one’s head), but empathy and hindsight, and the non-empirical prick of intuition, where vision exceeds the reach of training.
We begin to learn the film’s language of looking as the credits end, with Jonathan Demme’s signature credit mounted over Starling’s back in Behavioral Science chief Jack Crawford’s (Scott Glenn) cramped concrete office. When she turns to face us, hands unclasping, the camera rushes in on her eyes snagging from side to side. Crawford’s bulletin board is tiled with crime scene Polaroids: watery dump sites, ankles looped with rope, a raw right arm flayed wrist to shoulder. Pinned at the low center like a kind of caption is a clipping with the headline “Bill Skins Fifth.” There’s another eager push on Clarice’s concentrated expression before we scan the board in detail, returning to the tabloid. A sidebar titled “Where to Look” teases stories ostensibly unrelated to Bill’s killing spree whose subjects nonetheless vibrate with relevance—transformation, fulfillment, seduction, even fragrance: “Body Signals Are Your Keys to Happiness,” “New Cologne Makes Men Irresistible,” and, most suggestively (remember the film opened on Valentine’s Day 1991), “I Was a Wild Man Until I Met the Girl of My Dreams.”
Tak Fujimoto’s camera is unrestricted but selective; its focus isn’t the grisly collage that summons Starling’s attention so much as the sight of her attention in motion. This is precisely the sublime unity of composition and content that most recommends Demme’s film, and, for this unrepentant repeat offender, insures its viewing against diminishing returns: Silence is a movie about forensic psychology that demands and rewards forensic (as in precise) observation. It’s a crime procedural that never asks us to guess the killer’s long-revealed identity, and a horror film that, in an interview with critic Amy Taubin, Demme likened to “a slasher movie that is devoid not only of slasher scenes but of the anticipation of seeing them.”
If the classic slasher mimics the rhythm of a musical—transitional filler punctuated by numbers, with kills replacing songs—Silence unravels that rhythm, so loosely as to limit costar Hopkins to roughly 20 minutes of screen time, to allow flashbacks from Starling’s past to intrude seamlessly onto the present, to remove our leads for a long, pivotal sequence anchored by ensemble police officers, and to radically transgress the convention of intercutting to ensure only Starling arrives at the right place at the right time. Without losing propulsion, Silence plays with continuity down to the level of the shot: what video essayist Jacob T. Swinney calls the “Jonathan Demme close-up,” though Demme describes a consensus with Fujimoto that no close-up’s composition should be exactly the same. As in life, where every encounter is organically different, so in film should close-ups vary, however modestly. Despite their variations in head position or lens distance, the compositions feel archetypal; the close-ups are and aren’t the same. Unbound from generic and classical conventions, our “anticipation of seeing” gets to be insatiable. From a cameo’s line reading (sweet, open-faced Stacy reproaching her dead friend, “Big dummy”) to a fugitive, blink-and-miss-it image (disembodied hands reaching through the bars as Starling runs from Lecter’s cell), every touch of the film is so specific, so deliberate, it’s as if calibrated for obsession, and the willing, seasoned spectator ends up like Lecter sketching the Duomo, fit to substitute memory for playback well after the view subsides.
*
Despite the Rosebud-esque title, The Silence of the Lambs takes shape around a string of conversations. Crawford first sends Starling to Baltimore to interview an incarcerated Lecter about at-large killer Buffalo Bill, under the guise of conducting a boilerplate profiling questionnaire. But he warns her to only ask questions, not to answer or surrender information: “You don’t want Hannibal Lecter inside your head.” Over the course of the film, Starling meets Lecter four times: she’ll overcome the initial humiliation of their introduction, play with his anagrammatic clues to Bill’s identity, and, at Crawford’s behest, offer Lecter a fraudulent prison transfer in a misguided attempt to force his hand. That’s not the ‘something for something’ Lecter has in mind when he repeatedly intones quid pro quo, a phrase that commonly describes commensurate exchanges—tit for tat—whose archaic usage was less strictly reciprocal than substitutive: in a medicinal context, for example, one thing in place of another.
And isn’t this world rife with substitutions? In his review, Vincent Canby described the transference between Dr. Lecter and Starling as familial and romantic as well as therapeutic: “Though the bulletproof glass, in dizzy succession, Hannibal and Clarice become analyst and analysand, teacher and pupil, father and daughter, lover and beloved, while always remaining cat and mouse.” This reminds me of a line from Tom Tykwer’s The Princess and the Warrior (2000), another fairytale darkened by unresolved trauma and set in a psychiatric hospital. After ex-soldier Bodo saves her life, nurse Sissi makes overtures of a future together, recounting a dream where “We were brother and sister, father and mother, wife and husband. And both of us were both.” Later they leave the hospital, healed, and drive to the sea.
Both of us were both—I’ve always been moved by the total reciprocity of that sentiment, as I am by the uncanny affinity between Lecter and Clarice. Initially, he’s her quarry, her shot at proving to prospective boss Crawford that she’s ready for whatever Behavioral Science entails. Taubin describes the overarching daddy issues of Thomas Harris’s 1988 source novel: “[Starling] was emotionally tied not only to her real father—the policeman who left her an orphan at age eleven—but to the substitute fathers: Lecter (bad) and Crawford (good).” In his adaptation, Ted Tally muffles Starling’s Oedipal longing, eliminating the unfortunate romantic relationship between her and Crawford without totally neutralizing the charge of his favoritism. What both Canby’s review and Tykwer’s film understand is that, for some, it’s not as simple as delineating one form of need from another; some losses are so total that every subsequent loss feels like its ripple. For Starling, what’s irresistible isn’t replacing the lost father with a new father, but that Lecter’s cooperation may help her save kidnapped Catherine Martin (Brooke Smith), and, by extension, cauterize the memory of her own helplessness with the triumph of Catherine’s rescue. One cure in place of another.
That Hopkins’ Hannibal Lecter was romanticized as anything from a camp icon to a perverse sex symbol aggrieved Tally and mystified Demme, though the latter admitted his wife Joanne Howard was among the converted: “I must admit that when we were filming and even to this very day, Tony takes a certain pleasure from suddenly baring his teeth and dive bombing some woman or other’s neck. I have noticed that the women do what my wife does, which is to bare her throat the way a deer does to a wolf and say, go ahead, go ahead!” (1)
A tableau of vampirism this literal and hackneyed never appears in the film, but in the disc commentary, Hopkins reveals modeling his and-a-nice-Chianti tooth-sucking sound on Bela Lugosi’s Dracula (1931), specifically on the actor’s visceral reaction to Jonathan Harker’s cut finger. There’s more than a little Lugosi in Hopkins’s sophisticated Lecter: his old-world sensibility, his insidiously neat slick-back. Monstrosity with a side of unimpeachable manners. Karina Longworth explains, “there had never been a supernatural villain on movie screens who presented himself as a gentleman, even a dandy, the way Lugosi did”—and Hopkins resumes the mantle of gentleman villain with aplomb, his sense of Lecter as “a killing machine” à la 2001’s Hal paradoxically humanized by “some atom of compassion, some atom of human affection and human love […] It’s like Iago in Othello, or Richard III […] what makes them fascinating is that there is a core inside and people think, if I could only get into that core, I’d make him a better person. And I think that’s the erotic part.”
Riffing on Lecter’s trace of humanity, Hopkins describes a penetration fantasy that’s mental, even moral—and strangely mundane. I can fix him, psychopath edition, where eroticism is the desperate symptom of a wish to get through to someone, and fingers grazing across an exchanged case file embody consummation. Similarly, in Starling’s much-built-up account of what happened on the farm in Montana, her confession is less meaningful than the vulnerability required to give it. At the makeshift holding cell in Memphis, instead of allowing Starling’s monologue to transport us elsewhere in her mind, the camera softly extinguishes the room. She narrates taking off in the direction of screams despite her fear: “I had to.” Starling’s story does not, as we might expect from conventional horror, reveal something terrible that changed her forever—even if something did—but exposes the kind of person she already was. That is the revelation Lecter values. At last, he’s inside her head.
*
Silence is replete with motifs and patterns a computer wouldn’t catch. At Bill’s house, against the frowsy chaos of mismatched wallpaper, a framed painting of butterflies floats above Starling’s left shoulder, out of her sightline. After she kills him, two quick inserts follow: a window shot open with audible birdsong, and a close-up on a corkscrew butterfly mobile, still spinning. The many American flags we see as tarps and pennants, renewing their allegiance to violence. The mise-en-scène of Starling’s whiteness as she’s stood beside a pale orchid in Dr. Chilton’s mahogany office, wrapped in a lamb-like bathrobe in her inexplicably dark apartment, and paired with fellow trainee Ardelia Mapp, played sensitively by Kasi Lemmons—who’ll also play the Black best friend/unsung research assistant to Virginia Madsen’s ambitious white colleague in Candyman (1992).
There’s the intertextual doubling of Starling searching Fredrica Bimmel’s old house like the descendant of Psycho’s Lila Crane, down to their both finding dresses in a forbidding wardrobe. There’s doubling within the film itself, its very frames: the sound of wings ruffling, and how closely the journey through myriad doors to Lecter’s adamantine chamber resembles Starling’s descent to Bill’s basement well. It’s no wonder Roger Ebert was able to attend a “five-day shot-by-shot analysis” of the film at the University of Colorado in 1992, of which he wrote, “Our group discovered more in the film than even its director, Jonathan Demme, knows he included. We may even have found more in the film than is here…” (2)
If the director’s commentary is any indication, Ebert’s right that Demme downplayed his authorial expertise. When I rewatched the film for this essay, I made a note about birdsong persisting through the end credits—its possible connection to a sound Starling hears on the FBI’s Yellow Brick Road, where we see her pause momentarily and react (with curiosity, appreciation?) before powering on. Over and over, we hear the soundtrack of flight. Demme had a more prosaic explanation: “The lingering sound of birds at the end is just another example of filmmakers who don’t know how to end a picture. Just hanging in there as long as we possibly can thinking, ‘Gee, if they’re running some black film through the camera, through the projector here at the end, we better give everybody something to listen to, in case there’s still someone sitting there.’”
His self-deprecation might be a bit deflating, if we hadn’t spent the entire film aligned with a woman who discovers by instinct and can’t always explain what she knows. Though the end result (Bill’s defeat, Catherine’s rescue) is what decorates Starling’s FBI Academy graduation, and earns her a lingering handshake from Crawford, it’s how she behaved when she didn’t know what she was doing that inspires Lecter’s superlative endearment: “The world’s more interesting with you in it.” Though he left us so much to sift through, I wish we could say the same to Jonathan Demme now.
(1) I’ve quoted liberally from the Criterion special edition audio commentary recorded in 1994, with director Jonathan Demme, actors Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins, screenwriter Ted Tally, and former FBI agent John Douglas. Transcriptions my own.
(2) Ebert, Roger. “Did You Notice the V Shapes? The Ghostly Figure?: Close Examination of Silence of the Lambs Reveals Much: National Edition.” National Post (Toronto). 2001.