Film Road to Halloween: The Silence of the Lambs (1991)

The road to Halloween is paved with good films. Wherein we countdown to the spirited season with a hundred doses of horror. 55 days to go.

The Silence of the Lambs is one of those films that gets better and better with each watch. The first time I watched it, I was very young, less than 10 years old. I remember because I was always captivated by the final sequence of the film, where our heroine Clarice Sterling (Jodie Foster) defeats our main foe, Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine). The fact that she was in the dark and how he played with her until he decided to shoot. And that she’s able to locate him – because of the sound of the glock – always made me think: “she’s very smart”.

At that young age I was able to realize that this film was no ordinary one and that it was smarter and more challenging than any kids film I was supposed to be watching. The version I saw though, was heavily censored and the cruelest parts were edited out just so it could air at a family-friendly time in local TV.

Go a few years later, this time I’m a little bit older, and you can see me watching this film again with new eyes, since I’m able to understand more things that I missed when I was a preteen. This time I watched the film at full-length and finally could say: “Yes, this is something else.” I realized how good this film is. On this occasion I understood more the level of high-quality performances our main actors gave.

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Jodie Foster as Clarice is such a vulnerable and strong character. She’s this kind of prodigy at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, and as such she’s very good at what she does. You can see her vulnerability when she’s exposed at an unknown situation for the first time (like the final sequence), but once she internalizes with what she’s dealing with, she takes full control.

Anthony Hopkins as the infamous Hannibal Lecter is amazing too. In his case his character is not as complex as Clarice nor Buffalo Bill (of whom I’ll talk later), but he surely is scary. One of the many reasons this film is considered rightfully a Horror film is because of Hopkins’s haunting performance as the cannibal psychiatrist.

The well-known sequence where he escapes from the authorities is such a masterpiece of horror that Hitchcock would be crying of happiness while seeing it. The music, the close-ups, his face while he’s hitting the guard, the way he waves his hand at the sound of the classical music he’s hearing while enjoying his mischief. This scene is the most revealing scene of Hannibal in the entire movie. This alone confirms the legends of the monster he is, and the danger lies in the cleverness to pull such a plan when everyone thinks they’re smarter than him. What a mistake from them, he demonstrates he’s always ahead.

With subsequent watches I’ve kept digging deeper and deeper at the greatness of this film. Thanks to this I have come to admire more Ted Levine’s performance as Buffalo Bill. I remember thinking he was a bad person in real life (reading comprehension wasn’t so good for me back then). This says a lot of his performance, when you confuse the actor with the character because he’s so immersed.

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Last re-watch I did, I paid attention more to what he was saying and how he was saying it. Right after Senator Ruth Martin pleas at him via TV to release her daughter Catherine, we cut to a scene where Bill is giving lotion in a basket to Catherine. The thing is that he doesn’t refer to her as a person, he says: “It rubs the lotion on its skin. It does this whenever it is told.” He uses the pronoun ‘it’, as if referring to an object. He doesn’t care for any of his victims (duh!).

But it is what happens near the end of this exchange that says a lot more about Buffalo Bill than anything. There’s a point where Catherine begs for her life so hard that we can see Bill’s eyes trying to cry, but when he realizes he’s feeling for a person again he turns back to reality and yells to hide his truth: “PUT THE FUCKING LOTION IN THE BASKET!”

We learn so much from him in little moments. The dance sequence near the end of the film is also very revealing of how he feels about his identity. This is contrasted with Lecter’s analysis of him, where he claims that he really isn’t transvestite nor transsexual, he just hates his identity because of years of systematic abuse. He hates being Jame Gumb, his real self, so he wants to become someone else altogether. His actions as psychopath, combined with Lecter’s, make this an untraditional horror film, where people think suspense is the main genre, but it is horror.

It might not have scary moments fantastic monsters, but if you ask me, there’s nothing more horrific than a person greeting me and then eating my liver with some fava beans and a glass of chianti. Don’t you see Clarice’s face when she realizes Jame Gumb, aka John Grant, aka Jack Gordon, is the “Buffalo Bill” she’s been hunting? And then he has the nerve to smirk when he knows she knows? This is horror.

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There’s also the concept of the lambs, something I understood fully in my last two watches. If you understand this, you understand Clarice as a person, and realize how tragic her story really is. In one of the many exchanges between Sterling and Lecter, she tells him of a moment of her life that somehow made her who she is today. She talks about how one day she tried to escape her uncle’s home after she moved there after her father’s death.

Clarice confesses to Lecter that she was scared because she saw how the lambs of her uncle’s farm were being killed and their scream haunted her. She says she wanted to save them, but they wouldn’t move, and, in the end, she escaped with only one of them. Then she was found and punished by moving her to an orphanage and by killing the lamb she tried to save.

Since then, she has been trying to silence the screaming of the lambs. This is more than an anecdote, it’s a metaphor of today’s Clarice. Her lambs are her parents, both dead and she couldn’t save them, so is the only lamb she tried to save. She feels like a failure, like a disappointment. Clarice thinks that by becoming an FBI agent and saving others she will be able to silence the lambs once and for all. We think she did in the end by saving Catherine and killing Bill (not that one), but does she? It takes one call from Lecter in the end to know she never will and that is her tragedy.

The success of this film lies a lot in late director Jonathan Demme. He gathered the perfect crew and cast to make this film the hit it is. In the beginning, he wasn’t even planning to direct it since it wasn’t his preferred genre, but after reading the book is based on, at the insistence of screenwriter Ted Tally, he decided it to give it a shot.

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What motivated him to finally work on it was the character of Clarice and how feminist the story is, something we can clearly see in the many moments Clarice has to deal with the men around her. At moments, we can feel her uncomfortableness, especially with Dr. Chilton. I think Demme wanted to show us how difficult it is for a woman to succeed in world ran by men and how her road to success is often blocked by mere insecurities of the opposite sex.

One of my favorite decisions Demme made in the film, was one that occurs before the climax of it. Demme decides to honor (unintentionally) Lev Kuleshov and Sergei Eisenstein by using the montage theory to misguide us from what’s really happening. He is clever enough to give us a shot of a house with a screen title that reads: Calumet City, IL.

After this shot, he shows us a scene with “Buffalo Bill”, making us think that the house shown before is his house. We see the police outside the house and a man that rings the doorbell. We have parallel cuts between outside and inside the house until it’s finally revealed that the police aren’t at his house, but Clarice is. This is brilliant direction and an amazing use of one of the best instruments film editing has to offer.

It’s no surprise the film won big come Oscar night. Not only it had the box office, but also the critical acclaim. It won the Big 5 (Screenplay, Director, Lead Actor, Lead Actress, Picture) something that wasn’t done since One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in 1975 and hasn’t been done since. The Silence of the Lambs will always have a place in cinema history because of that, plus the fact that it is the only Horror film to ever win the big prize. If we add to that the test of time, how great it still is after 28 years, this film deserves all the respect and admiration of cinephiles everywhere.