silence of the lambs

What is it that is so creepy about The Silence of the Lambs? Of course, the story or rather, multiple stories within are pretty creepy. There is our friend Hannibal the Cannibal, the famous and brilliant psychiatrist who had a penchant for eating people he didn't quite like, but had a taste for nonetheless. But Hannibal doesn't frighten us that much. Or at least, he doesn't frighten me. I wouldn't want to be on his bad side, but I'm not a rude person and I think we'd likely agree on who should be eaten and who not.  They may not taste good, but ridding the world of people who leave a bad taste in your mouth in any way is not such a bad mission. The world would be a better place with fewer rude people.  No, the real creep and monster of the film is Buffalo Bill. The man on the fringe in every sense, for not only is he a serial killer, he's some kind of transsexual who is just a bit too carried away. Rejected by every respectable clinic that refuses to surgically make him a woman, Bill decides to make himself a woman out of other women, skinning the bits he needs to make a kind of woman suit that he can wear to real sub-culture parties on weird summer cruises off the cape or god knows where, all decked out in his dead-girl suit. Talk about disturbing. This part is in the book, though not mentioned directly in the film. For the real skinny on Buffalo Bill, one must read the book by Thomas Harris - a quick read at that and a good one.

Buffalo bill is the one who scares us most, and it is he who carries us through the film.  Jodi Foster as the perfect willing FBI agent, eager to make her mark and with a slight schoolgirl crush on her superior Jack Crawford is flawless in her role of, as Hannibal says, "Poor West Virginia white-trash" and a "rube" eager to make good and go "all the way to the FBI."  All true, but she's smart and her background only makes her all the more eager to prove that she is just as smart if not smarter, than many of the white-collar superiors that surround her.  Yet despite her smarts, Clarice Starling, FBI agent soon to be, is still treated to more than a fair share of sexism as she makes her way through the states in pursuit of Buffalo Bill. There is the way she is treated among men by other men. The way Jack Crawford won't discuss "this type of sex crime" in front of Starling even though she is, in short, the agent in charge of the case and the one who will be processing the body of the first of Buffalo Bill's skinned victims.  Poor Starling is subject to Multiple Miggs, another nut-job who shares a cellblock with Hannibal and who not only makes rude remarks (the <I>an smell your cunt</I> line that became famous) and who later masturbates and throws a handful of semen in her ace as she walks by. Multiple Miggs maybe e crazy, but his physical behavior is not better or worse than the way Starling is treated by other men, only their treatment is less obvious -- less overt -- but it is just as insulting.  Starling proves that she can stand up to this kind of treatment again and again, and in fact, the only man who does seem o be fully on her side and who recognizes her smarts in the way that they should be recognized is our old friend Hannibal who is, as he says courteous, notices that she is "courteous and responsive to courtesy." That Starling may be "poor, white trash" as he says, but she has an IQ that can and will drive out any competition and it does.  It will be Starling who will in the end find our killer, our Buffalo Bill, and she alone will face him in his dark, dank basement where he keeps his prisoner's in a dried-well in the basement.

Directed by Jonathan Demme, the film has a greenish and dark tinge, like the whole thing has been shot in the inside of a an old, dark country house somewhere in the middle of the country, which is, in fact, where our Buffalo Bill is hiding -- in a big old house somewhere in America.  The cast of the film, the green hue throughout and the leaf mold and insect themes -- our Buffalo Bill raises death's head moths in his basement, a sign of his transformation from male cocoon to the beautiful painted lady he hopes to be when his skin-suit is finally finished -- all of this adds to a psychological component that lends a darkness to the film that leaves the viewer uneasy. It's easy to say that we are ill at ease be cause this is, after all, a horror film. But it's not that simple. It's in the way it is shot, the creepy death's head moths lodged in the back of victims throats as signs of what their death represents, it is in the dead leaves that mar the dead girls body as she is pulled from the river, it's in the plainness of Clarice Starling -- her open face and West Virginia accent. In short, it is in the very ordinariness of the film. We are left with the sense that this could be anywhere, anytime, any day and in any part of the country except for perhaps, California because it's too sunny there and too plastic, less real in some ways. Silence of the Lambs succeeds because it captures the humdrum and mundaneness of every day life.

Even the one victim that lives, Katherine Martin, the senator's daughter is someone we can relate to -- if not us, then she is like someone we know or have known, as she drives along carefree in her car, singing along to the radio, pulling into her building lot and saying hello to the cat, until she sees Jame Gumm, Buffalo Bill's real name, who needs a hand loading a couch into his panel truck (lesson: never help a man alone who is anywhere near a panel truck; serial killers always have panel trucks with rear windows that are curtained or covered in some other fashion. They need this to haul bodies around, or to shove you into before they knock you out or whatever.  The panel truck will appear again in Red Dragon, the car of Frances Dolarhyde, the mirror-smashing mama's boy who wet the bed and never grew up and goes about killing whole families to feel powerful again.  Jonathan Demme has done his research, as had the author who knew that serial killers of this kind anyway are usually rather ordinary seeming men in their mid to late thirties with a fair amount of bodily strength and a panel truck.  These are the details that stick, and they register with us because we have seen them somewhere before -- perhaps on the n news, or another film, but in any event, they ring true and that is why this film works.  There is not a detail here that is out of place. Even our Hannibal killing people he finds rude or distasteful doesn't' seem so out of place -- haven't we all felt this way at some point? Can't we relate? A d lord, though we most of us wouldn't eat a person for being rude, I would wager there have been times, say in the movies when you could have killed a person for talking on and on while the rest of the crowd was trying to watch the film but was too afraid to say anything for fear of starting a fight or some altercation of some kind with some out of control gang of youth or loud people. It's the bullied child in all of us that wants to come out and this is why most viewers do not come away from Silence hating Hannibal Lecter. Lecter, as I've said, is more understandable, more sympathetic and that's okay with us. As long as we leave him alone and are on our good behavior, we can assume he'll leave us alone and we're okay with that.

By contrast, Buffalo Bill is completely lacking in any manners to say the very least. More, he puts himself on the side of those other men who seem to have nothing but a love/hate relationship with women -- on the one hand, wanting or needing them but always to suit some end of his own. In his case, wanting to be one. Like many of the other men in the film, he has a disregard for women yet he needs them for his ultimate goal. How different is he then from say, Jack Crawford, Clarice's boss, who covets Clarice, from whom we do feel some sexual tension and while Crawford isn't a bad guy, a killer, he wouldn't skin Clarice or any other woman that we can see, he still places her in some subordinate role that is acted out again and again. Even our Doctor Chilton at the Baltimore mental institution where Hannibal is housed is a misogynist in his own way; he has no respect for Clarice as a real FBI agent; instead, she is meat for a date; he tells her "Baltimore can be quite a fun town with the right guide" meaning him, and when she refuses though politely, his anger and his ego rebuff is apparent.  In short, the only man who treats Clarice with respect is the monster Hannibal.  It may not seem obvious, and yes, I see you anticipate that even here between these two there is some sort of sexual tension, I get the feeling that were it not for the fact that he likes to eat his enemies, if he could live a life more normal, they wouldn't make a half bad couple because there is a mutual respect, a tenderness even that is played out not only in Silence of the Lambs, but also in Hannibal (with Julianne Moore) and in Red Dragon (with Ed Norton as the agent). 

As with any good film, any classic, and I believe Silence of the Lambs has become such a film, there is a depth that is not to be found in other films in the genre.  Here, the depths exists between Clarice and Hannibal, who, if we look more closely, is more a mentor to Clarice than Jack Crawford ever was or could hope to be -- regardless of the fact that it is Crawford who brings about the introduction, he could never hope to have a relationship on the high level at which Clarice and Hannibal seem to operate. Here we are dealing with two likely genius-level IQ individuals who are both out to get a killer, but for different purposes perhaps, or perhaps not. There is a common goal and it is only Hannibal who shows any interest in Clarice's past and in fact, any empathy for the losses she has suffered in her life -- losing her father as a young girl, being raised on the sheep slaughter farm by her uncle -- all these hard things that she has endured and that cut to the core, only Hannibal asks about them, and only Hannibal seems to care. And though many times Hannibal has the opportunity to hurt or hinder Clarice, he does not. To the contrary, he offers her the clues and maintains a connection that could even put his own freedom at risk yet he does it nonetheless. This is civilized, this is caring, and this is all from a serial killer who is locked up. 

Don't get me wrong; I can't say Hannibal is totally sane. As Ed Norton says in Red Dragon, Hannibal has liabilities or weaknesses or <I>disadvantages</I>, I believe is the word he uses, that trip him up -- he is crazy, Norton says and he is right.  Still, at the end of the day, he strikes me as the most human and the person most concerned with the truth and what is right, alongside his sidekick, Clarice who because she is free, can follow his guidance and go about sorting out the clues given to her by Hannibal. Even when she is close, when she is right, when she sorts out where Jame Gumm, our Buffalo Bill lives, Jack Crawford tells her she is wrong when in fact, it is he who has the wrong house, he who is one step behind and Starling who is at the right house (or wrong house) with a serial killer and his basement with a victim and his suit of skin in his sewing room. 

This is not a film about women's rights by any stretch, but the issues here are worth mentioning as I have above. Above all, Silence of the Lambs is a horror movie but on a higher par than most others. It is smart without being to slick, and it is deep without being dull and without a doubt, much of this depth comes from the relationship between Hannibal and Clarice -- this lends the psychological thrill, and the horror, well that comes squarely from the incredibly creepy Ted Levine who plays Jame Gumm as Buffalo Bill. Never before has a serial killer been portrayed so seemingly accurately as Buffalo Bill, all alone in his house with his delusions and his sewing machine and his moth-raising cages, buried in the depths of a house that used to belong to "old Mrs. Littman" (and we don't' know what happened to her, though it seems likely that he killed her for her body is somewhere in the basement). The large dark house with its green tint and shadow is the perfect metaphor for the labyrinth of the mind with its odd twists and turns.

If you haven't seen Silence of the Lambs, then I am stunned and you must run out and get it right away because it is one of the best horror/psychological thrillers of all time and none of the trilogy that follow are anywhere near as good as the first, though they're not bad and are still satisfying. If you have seen the film, see it again, only this time pay attention to the things that are giving you the creeps and see if that green tint to the film affects you in the same way it affected me. No matter that I've seen this film and its sequels about twenty times. Once again, it left me cold, shivering, and scared, like a victim in a dry well waiting for the other shoe to drop.