They Were Screaming: The Silence of the Lambs
If the words “Hannibal Lecter” don’t already twist your stomach, they will after this story from Frederick Chilton, the doctor in charge of the hospital where he is incarcerated:
“On the evening of July 8th, 1981, he complained of chest pains and was taken to the dispensary. His mouthpiece and restraints were removed for an EKG. When the nurse leaned over him, he did this to her.”
He pulls out a photo. We don’t see it. We don’t need to.
“The doctors managed to reset her jaw more or less. Saved one of her eyes. His pulse never got above 85, even when he ate her tongue.”
That’s not half as bad as it gets. Welcome to Silence of the Lambs.
Training FBI agent Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) is sent to question the captured serial killer Dr. Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) to try and obtain his help with another case. That case is the attempted tracking of Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine) a killer currently on the loose, who was nicknamed for his habit of killing and skinning his victims. Despite every warning against it, Starling develops a chilling connection with Lecter that more than oversteps the line of professional relationship; all while racing against the clock to save Bill’s latest abducted victim before that girl is killed like the others. “Believe me,” says Starling’s supervisor Jack Crawford, “you don’t want Hannibal Lecter inside your head.” Woops. Fava beans, anyone?
Based on the novel by Thomas Harris and directed by Jonathan Demme, this is a concoction of thriller and horror to chill the blood in ways hardly matched. It swept the box office and the 1991 Academy Awards, picking up the much-coveted ‘Big Five’ – Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress, Best Actor and Best Screenplay (Adapted). It’s one of the few films that deserves such hype and near-overpraise, there are no others like it. It’s a very strange film; it could so easily not have worked, even one overdone performance or one too many flashbacks would have tipped it into irritating. Instead it’s a perfect balance of unease and classic horror.
You’ll be pleased to know Ted Tally earned that little golden man. His screenplay deals with many things, almost all of them handled with panache. Few people write a kidnapping victim’s desperate screams and the bizarre rules of scientists playing chess with living insects on their board, to be heard within minutes of each other. For a film remembered so much for horror, there is much of that black humour to be found: Starling in an elevator full of men at least a foot taller than her, the Midwest cops in brown jackets looking down their noses at the woman a hundred times closer to catching the killer than they will ever be and the murderer Bill himself chuckling while asking “Was she a great big fat person?” as he pretends not to know one of his former victims. You wouldn’t think a cut to a cheerful curly haired woman singing along to Tom Petty’s American Girl would make your blood curdle, but it does when you know she’s his next one. And that’s all before the cut to the guy with night vision goggles. By then your blood freezes solid. Moments (and moments and moments) of Starling’s strength are the loveliest of sucker punches to film’s continuous stereotyping of women as weak or one-dimensional. My heart sings as she gently admonishes Crawford for pretending to disregard her in front of other troopers in order to play along and gain their cooperation. “It matters. Guys look to you to see how to act. It matters.” Starling is a woman with her own story, making her own decisions. That matters. In other flawlessly written truth bombs, the Senator Martin’s televised plea to Bill for her daughter’s safe return is spine-tingling. “You have the power… you have a chance to show the whole world that you can be merciful as well as strong; that you can treat Catherine better than the world has treated you.” In a few minutes, there is more awareness of murderer’s past trauma and the way to appeal to them than in other entire films.
All the (surprisingly few) scenes between Starling and Lecter are as close to perfect as writing can be. Lecter has a little over sixteen minutes of screentime and every sentence he says is amazing. Emotional secrecy, psychopathological analysis and exchanges of barbed snark crash alongside each other in every scene of those two together. That’s how to write a screenplay, kiddies. Him giving her a towel to dry her hair after she comes in from a storm says more than a thousand words. The central compelling strength of Starling-and-Lecter holds the whole film together. What they hide from what each other, what they bring out. The other stories – the kidnapped senator’s daughter, Dr Chilton’s sadism, even Buffalo Bill’s killing itself - swirl around screaming like the lambs but in the centre of it all is that dead calm: “Good evening, Clarice.” They are the eye of the storm.
There’s a reason Anthony Hopkins’ Hannibal has gone down in history as the ultimate psychopath. He is. Him standing in a cell doing nothing is as intimidating as standing over you with an ice pick, and him saying “closer” is as terrifying as “I’m going to kill you” or indeed his own other line about fava beans. His ‘quid pro quo’ game might be a sign of sadism or madness, but you know it’s motivated by the loneliness of being locked up for so long. He wants to make a connection with another human being, and a way this psychotic is the only way he knows how. Notice how he looks away when she talks personal. That’s acting. Parrying opposite him is Jodie Foster, who is steel and snow, delicate and utterly fearless, whether in the face of Chilton’s simple stupidity or the terror of Lecter. Jodie Foster’s performance and the utter stark horror of every other thing in the films takes all hokeyness out of ‘the lamb story’. Yes, it will help you decipher the film’s strange title. Demme and editor Craig McKay use the gold she gives them to mold real treasure. Subtle flashbacks give a sense of Starling’s haunting without being syrupy; there’s no sense of forced “trauma” it just comes back to her without help, like all memories. As for the slow burning menace of Starling’s realisations, and the police work trailing behind; that’s how to wither the audience’s nerves. By the end, Foster’s simultaneous determination and terror will have shredded them completely. Two other compelling presences are often forgotten. Ted Levine manages to be a more villainous figure than a cannibal played by a knight. That sentence is completely true. And insane when you actually think about it. Case in point: the dance was his idea. The dance. Brooke Smith as his victim Catherine Martin gives herself entirely to a practically thankless role; she shrieks desperately and has the most realistic I-can’t-even-talk-because-I’m-crying-so-hard attack of grief I’ve ever seen.
Tak Fujimoto’s cinematography is cunning, it adds to the haze of unease without being audacious. It makes 1980s middle America seem somehow Gothic, and as for the maximum security cells… a veritable crypt. Every character save Clarice looks straight in the camera: both a clever mind trick and another subtle creep. They’re looking straight into the lens while they talk to her, because we are her. Characters rarely do that in mainstream film and you don’t notice until somebody does. When he brings out the night vision goggles you’ll just want to die. Kristi’s Zea’s production design triumphs with one locale of festering filth after another, from a storage facility to the eccentric house of a serial killer. The placeholder horror images (broken off bloody fingernails in the pit, a head in a jar, Hannibal unforgettably strapped in to the rack) stick out but aren’t overdone, that’s why they work. The hyperviolent bettering of some prison guards is like something out of the Bible or a surrealist painting… and you will never forget the ambulance-bound payoff as long as you live. It being so unrealistic doesn’t even matter, the melee of nightmares just works.
The film can really be summed up like that; with the realism of trauma, loss and psychological trouble blended with the nightmares of murder, sadism and other concepts too violently complex to be found in life, most often. The film has that kind of appeal; horrific fantasy alongside horrific truth. The abused can turn into the abusers, true, but thankfully few turn to flaying. One can only hope.
