Not until Clarice Starling, with her tenacity and resourcefulness, her West Virginia twang, and her good bag and cheap shoes. Not until Jonathan Demme\u2019s The Silence of the Lambs<\/em> swept the big five at the Oscars in 1992, securing wins for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay for Ted Tally\u2019s adaptation of Thomas Harris\u2019s novel, Best Actor for Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter, and Best Actress for Jodie Foster as Starling. And not until the film became such a cultural phenomenon that for years to come, female protagonists in Clarice\u2019s vein, like The X-Files<\/em>\u2019s Dana Scully and Mindhunter<\/em>\u2019s Wendy Carr, could trace the basis of their analytical, methodical selves back to Foster\u2019s FBI trainee with the pleasant smile and the fierce desire to prove herself. \u201cIt matters,\u201d Clarice had said to her boss when he diminished her work inside of a room full of male cops, when he used her youth and gender to make himself look better to a crew of good ol\u2019 boys. \u201cIt matters.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Perhaps years of reruns on cable, with the scariest bits of the film edited out, have dulled your memory of The Silence of the Lambs<\/em>. Maybe you remember the parodies better than the movie itself: Billy Crystal coming out as Hannibal Lecter, in full straitjacket and modified hockey goalie mask, to host the 1992 Oscars; or Jay and Silent Bob\u2019s parody of the \u201cGoodbye Horses\u201d dance in Kevin Smith\u2019s Clerks II<\/em>; or the mockeries in various comedies from The Office<\/em> to South Park<\/em> to The Simpsons<\/em> to Family Guy<\/em>. Demme\u2019s film so firmly latched onto our general pop cultural landscape that you might take The Silence of the Lambs<\/em>, its cold efficiency and its resolute heroine, for granted. But upon its release, The Silence of the Lambs<\/em> was singular\u2014for Hopkins\u2019s deeply charismatic villain, Foster\u2019s deft balance between trauma and ambition, and the film\u2019s dominance at the box office and at the Oscars, the latter a particularly striking achievement for a film that tiptoed between thriller and horror. <\/p>\n\n\n\n What stands out now, as it did then, is Demme\u2019s sense of moderation, and the deliberate choices regarding what we see and what we don\u2019t. Clarice examines crime-scene photographs that show the bodies of Buffalo Bill\u2019s victims, their remaining skin pruney from the rivers in which he dumps them. We only briefly glimpse those images, viewing them alongside Clarice as she stands in FBI Behavioral Sciences unit head Jack Crawford\u2019s (Scott Glenn) office. When accompanying Crawford to examine a body recently recovered in West Virginia, Clarice records her thoughts on what happened to the young woman\u2014including a bullet wound and flayed skin\u2014but Demme sobers us by showing us only her ripped-off fingernails, torn away while she tried to escape. And in the film\u2019s final confrontation between Clarice and Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine) in his basement dungeon, Demme roams through the space to capture its labyrinthine quality, but doesn\u2019t linger upon any particular room. The impact is in their existence at all: the autopsy table and medical tools, the decaying woman in the bathtub, the chopped-off limbs in the aquarium, the Nazi paraphernalia, the half-finished skin suit on a mannequin, with one breast and pubic hair exposed. \u201cThere\u2019s not a flash of blood that wasn\u2019t debated for hours,\u201d Tally told Janet Maslin in a February 1991 New York Times<\/em> profile<\/a>, and that preciseness is what helps build such an unshakably nightmarish world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Silence of the Lambs<\/em> is Clarice Starling\u2019s movie, and the film begins and ends with her. Our introduction to Clarice is an early indication of her determination and her ambition: Before dawn breaks, she\u2019s on the FBI Academy training course, sweating through her turtleneck and sweatshirt as she climbs up a hill, somersaults herself over a cargo net, and runs steadily through the woods to the next obstacle. Her first words in the film are \u201cYes, sir,\u201d and she is the picture of hierarchical deference\u2014to a point. Respect is not the same thing as obedience, and Clarice\u2019s very presence at the academy is a cause for raised eyebrows. When Demme captures her as the lone woman in an elevator full of men, their red polo shirts a uniformly impenetrable wall as they loom over her petite frame, he is making a deliberate point that links back to the opening climb on that training course: Clarice is facing an uphill battle, and the only person she can rely on is herself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That steadfastness comes through consistently, nearly every time Clarice finds herself opposite a person of greater authority or power. Against Crawford, who is coaching her in her career, but who still essentially uses her for the \u201cerrand\u201d of meeting with Lecter. Against Dr. Frederick Chilton (Anthony Heald), Lecter\u2019s leering, egomaniacal warden, who considers Clarice an enemy as soon as she turns down his sexual advances. Against Senator Ruth Martin (Diane Baker), who bristles at Clarice\u2019s closeness to Lecter. And, of course, against Lecter himself, who through his combination of precise politeness, smug self-confidence, cruel taunting, and acute intelligence goads, and then guides, Clarice into opening up about herself and cracking the Buffalo Bill case. Their \u201cquid pro quo\u201d scene is styled by Demme as a sort of confession-cum-duel, with his preference for extreme close-ups communicating Lecter\u2019s dominance of the situation, his face entirely filling up the frame. Although Foster\u2019s Starling warily holds back, Demme\u2019s composition of her slightly looser than Hopkins\u2019s visual omnipresence, she doesn\u2019t crumble under his questioning. Her admission regarding her formative childhood experience hearing the screaming of slaughtered lambs, and her decision to save one life, no matter how difficult that task might be, is a moment of fragility surrounded by a cage of steeliness. Starling is the kind of believably nuanced, thrillingly capable, deeply human female protagonist who didn\u2019t star in their own movies very often 30 years ago, and still doesn\u2019t now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But no discussion of The Silence of the Lambs<\/em> would be complete without an acknowledgment of the controversy that it sparked immediately upon release regarding the characterization of Buffalo Bill, and his desire to \u201ctransform\u201d\u2014manifested as his kidnapping and murder of women for their skin. Both Harris\u2019s novel and Demme\u2019s film adaptation are very deliberate in their insistence that Buffalo Bill, inspired only by the abuse he suffered in his childhood, is not a \u201creal\u201d transsexual: think of how Lecter nods along to Clarice\u2019s \u201cThere\u2019s no correlation between transsexualism and violence.\u201d Take the film\u2019s recurring symbol of the death\u2019s head moth, which is rooted in macabre creepiness, not the glamor of transformation, and think too of Harris\u2019s novel Red Dragon<\/em>, in which another serial killer believes he can transform into the image from William Blake\u2019s paintings. The theme of reinvention through violence is one that Harris explored over and over again, and The Silence of the Lambs<\/em> clearly tries to make the claim that Buffalo Bill\u2019s coveting of female skin is not tied to a legitimate questioning of his own gender identity. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Sometimes, though, what a film intends<\/em> to do is not exactly what it does<\/em>, and it\u2019s inarguable that our common cultural understanding of The Silence of the Lambs<\/em> ignores some of the nuance Demme attempted to build into his film. Buffalo Bill lines his vanity with snapshots of himself and female strippers, but that detail is given less attention in the narrative than his relationship with his first murder victim, Benjamin Raspail, whose decapitated head is one of the film\u2019s first scary reveals. The \u201cGoodbye Horses\u201d dance is a grotesque mimicry of what Buffalo Bill believes being a woman will be like, but you can understand why countless imitators have honed in on his his guttural delivery of the lines, \u201cWould you fuck me? I\u2019d fuck me\u201d\u2014the moment is so disturbing that it becomes ripe for parody. The Silence of the Lambs<\/em> relies on these grand moments of depravity and violence to prove Buffalo Bill\u2019s danger and menace, but then attempts to balance them with details that aren\u2019t imbued with as much importance; there is a fundamental disparity there. To be fair, as a film produced during a time when our conversations about gender identity and sexual preference were less nuanced than they are now, The Silence of the Lambs<\/em> is certainly a more even-keeled effort than, say, 1994\u2019s Ace Ventura: Pet Detective<\/em>, in which a transsexual character is used as a staggeringly offensive narrative gag. But perhaps it\u2019s worth remembering that for as much as the film gave us a feminist icon in Clarice Starling, it also spawned a flattened understanding of the transsexual experience that the film\u2019s legacy has found impossible to shake. <\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/silence2-1024x687.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/silence3-1024x576.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"\/](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/crookedc-01.svg\")
<\/p>\n\n\n\n