Movie Review – The Silence of the Lambs

The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
Written by Ted Tally
Directed by Jonathan Demme

There are many glaring omissions in my film-viewing life, and this was one of them. I’d seen bits & pieces of The Silence of the Lambs over the years. Channel surfing in my twenties led me to see Clarice & Hannibal’s chats in prison, Mr. Lecter’s fantastic escape, and Clarice’s showdown in the labyrinth of Buffalo Bill. Yet, I had never seen the picture from start to finish while having seen the sequel Hannibal, 1984’s Manhunter, and the second version of that in Red Dragon. I’d also watched the first season of Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal. It seems silly that I’d never managed Lambs in total, so I decided to amend that for the horror season. Was it good? Of course, it was. It was also a reminder of how much this film impacted the crime/thriller genre for the rest of the 1990s and into the 2000s.

Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) is an FBI trainee asked to interview the notorious Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) as part of the agency’s initiative to develop a database of psychological profiles on serial killers. Starling doesn’t realize that her boss, Jack Crawford (Scott Glenn), isn’t being honest about his purpose for having her visit the cannibal at his Baltimore prison cell. A killer in the American South nicknamed Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine) has been kidnapping and killing women over the last few months. When their bodies turn up, the women are partially skinned, pointing at some grander grotesque plan by Bill. Lecter has a connection to Bill, and the former psychiatrist’s insights are crucial to saving the latest victim before her time runs out.

Lambs is a perfectly structured & paced film, a perfect example of an economical film. This is not related to the budget but to how every scene in the film serves a purpose in either moving the plot forward or providing rich character development that illuminates the themes. It’s a sign that the writer used a deft editor’s hand to comb through the script and cut out superfluous material. There are plenty of scenes not related to the ticking clock of the serial killer, but they serve a purpose in that they allow us to better understand Clarice and Lecter. Even the side characters, performed wonderfully by various familiar faces, feel fully realized without ever bogging the story down. Even if we don’t spend much time with them, we feel we know who they are by the time the credits roll.

I hadn’t realized how intentionally campy Hopkins’ performance as Lecter was until I watched it this time. If you weren’t alive or old enough to remember when this film came out, it was one of those things that the culture immediately absorbed and kept remixing for years to come. Parodies of Lecter’s weird sucking noise or his tone of speech even popped up in children’s animated shows. The choices Hopkins makes are so bold and might come off as silly in the hands of another actor. There’s a confident wink to the audience, but at the same time, the film never treats Lecter as anything but a threat. The hotel ballroom/elevator sequence is still just as chilling now as then, the realization that the person these cops are dealing with is operating on an intellectual level that just simply cannot reach.

Foster is excellent as Clarice. Her accent can be spotty, but the way she carries herself, her reactions, her eyes. Director Demme understands that as a woman, she is an outlier in many places she is going, so he frames the film through her perspective. Numerous shots have male actors staring down the camera, putting us in Clarice’s discomfort, the way she is being made to feel like prey. It’s not just Lecter or Bill who stalk Clarice when she shows up to crime scenes swarming with hyper-masculine cops and law enforcement; the FBI agent is continuously sized up, looked at with the silent question, “What’s she doing here?” hovering in the air.

That said, the film’s politics haven’t aged all that well, especially with Buffalo Bill. There’s a concerted effort by the script to point out that Bill is not “transsexual” (the term they use) but a profoundly mentally ill person adopting traits of others. We learn that Lecter was treating a patient who was trans & was also a friend of Bill’s, implying that the serial killer was mimicking other groups as a way to find himself? However, his murder of women is done to make a suit of human leather so that he can cocoon himself in it and become a woman. I can’t help but think this movie is responsible for at least some transphobia and even homophobia in the years that followed. The nuance being asked of a general audience to distinguish Bill from an actual transgender person is dubious today, and I suspect most audiences just lumped them all together anyway.

The cinematography is excellent here, and the performances are incredible, yet this film glorifies American law enforcement while villainizing a transgender person. It would be disingenuous to write some fawning review and not address that point. I can easily imagine the panic of a transgender person, whether closeted or out at the time, going into the theater and seeing this movie. I’m sure the audience cheered when Clarice kills Bill; he is the villain. Yet, how must a trans person have felt hearing that? How did they feel during the “Goodbye Horses” scene where Bill’s gender dysphoria is on full display, presented as a grotesque; a knife into the bodies of trans people trying to live in peace. 

Clarice’s motivation to do what she does comes from the title, a childhood instance of hearing lambs led to the slaughter on the farm she grew up on. Now, she wants to save the “little lambs” around the country who are in danger of being killed. This obscures the FBI’s rich history of murder & terrorism across the United States, targeting movements that sought to improve the lives of the vulnerable lambs who didn’t fit into the supremacist view of the establishment. I don’t make any bones about being very left-wing, and I don’t really care if a film is considered a “masterpiece” or not; if we are going to give certain movies such a prominent place in our culture, then we should be eager & open to hearing them critiqued from all sides. 

Yes, Silence of the Lambs is gorgeously constructed, and the actors here are putting everything they have into their performances. Even Demme knew that the film was seen as an attack on transgender people, and he tried to do damage control, but it was too late. For a long time, if trans identity was brought up in America, many people would think of Buffalo Bill. That has diminished in the following decades, but the harm was done. It’s also part of a continuing use of mentally ill people as villains in crime stories rather than victims of a criminal system. Most mentally ill people, the vast majority of trans & queer people, and pretty much any group that doesn’t have inherent structural power will not be epic-level mass murderers who are a danger to the public. History has shown us that the worst crimes are committed by those who have power via institutions (the wealthy, military, church, and private corporations), not poor people trying to scrape by and survive. Maybe one day we can get a movie about one of them being hunted down and killed before they can hurt anyone again.