The Silence of the Lambs

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #13: Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs.

“Noth­ing is so fright­en­ing as what’s behind the closed door. The audi­ence holds its breath along with the pro­tag­o­nist as she/he (more often she) approaches that door…
-Stephen King in Danse Macabre and before that Val Lewton.

The Silence of the Lambs is all kinds of great. For a horror movie it offers rel­a­tively little gore, instead rely­ing on what is not seen to grow the fear. The film pretty much uses one cin­e­matic trick over and over through­out, but it never gets old. Demme’s choice to use a shal­low depth of field and straight-​on fram­ing of the char­ac­ters do much to strengthen the rela­tion­ships between char­ac­ter dia­logue and rela­tion­ship, the con­stant scopophilic gaze directed by almost every man to Agent Starlng cre­ates a delib­er­ate and con­stant sense of unease to her sub­jec­tiv­ity, and the myriad ref­er­ences to change and meta­mor­pho­sis ensure that no one thing we know can be seen as certain.

But time and time again what gives the movie its pep is the closed door, the reveal, the pas­sage through. The next time you see this film, count them. Door­ways are lim­i­nal sym­bols, inher­ently unpre­dictable and the con­stant action of open­ing, pas­sage and clos­ing taken by Clarice reflects her own growth as an FBI agent. The viewer grows along with her and grat­i­fi­ca­tion is delayed in almost every scene; when we think we are about to make a dis­cov­ery, only another door is revealed.

The cli­mac­tic sequence of the film [if only I could find it online!] has well over twenty doors that must be passed through or at least iden­ti­fied as a pos­si­ble source of terror for Clarice. Cou­pled with the unpre­dictabil­ity of Han­ni­bal Lector’s mind and the ease with which he manip­u­lates an entire inves­ti­ga­tion it should be no sur­prise that the viewer is just as easily manip­u­lated by the edit­ing in the lead-​up to the Starling’s con­fronta­tion with Buf­falo Bill. This is a film that has got our number, can fool us over and over with the same cin­e­matic parlor tricks and leave us want­ing more. Hitch­cock, who I had ini­tially thought of as the man who made the closed door quote, would have been proud.

The other main strength of the film is the acting. Just about every­one is superbly creepy. This might be due to the fact that just as nearly every­one is a man and we are often encased within Agent Starling’s world­view as the object of desire, but even the bit-​part actors are awash in uncan­ni­ness that is all the more effec­tive because it is so nat­ural. We all know people who are that sort of weird. The rela­tion­ship between Lector and Star­ling is often that of a snake hyp­no­tiz­ing a bird. Cer­tainly Anthony Hop­kins acting is makes the film extra extra­or­di­nary and the qual­ity of every­one else buoys his per­for­mance up even higher. I really have no crit­i­cisms of this film, it is so cruft­less, pol­ished and so effec­tive at what it does that I can’t think of much else to say.

• Cri­te­rion Essay by Amy Daubin.
• Roger Ebert review.
• *.wav clips from the film.
• Out­takes on YouTube.
• Jodie Foster on Inside the Actor’s Studio talk­ing about the film. [YouTube]
• The Cri­te­rion Contraption’s review.