#13: The Silence of The Lambs
Hey bubs,
I’m still in Michigan. I really can’t tell you how hard it is to leave here and I guess I don’t have to because I just told you that this is my 3rd Monday here when I meant to stay for only one. The next time you hear from me I’ll be under a pile of cats, I swear.
8/25 FUND RACIAL JUSTICE/ACTION ITEM:
At this point, you’ve probably heard about the shooting of Jacob Blake by a police officer in Wisconsin. I encourage you not to watch or share the video of this shooting but to instead donate to and share his family’s GoFundMe and contact Wisconsin officials to hold the shooters responsible. It shouldn’t have to be said, but police shouldn’t be fucking shooting anyone for any reason. Not 7 times. Not in the back. Not when they’re unarmed. Not when their three kids are in the car. Not for being Black. Jacob is still living and let’s hope he can pull through.
You may d:
Kenosha District Attorney Michael D. Graveley: michael.graveley@da.wi.gov
Kenosha Mayor John Antaramian: mayor@ kenosha.org
Kenosha PD Chief of Police Daniel G. Miskinis: dgm398@kenoshapolice.ocom
And/or phone:
Kenosha District Attorney Michael D. Graveley: 262-653-2400
Kenosha Mayor John Antaramian: 262-653-4000
Kenosha PD: 262-656-1234
Wisconsin Department of Justice: 608-266-1221
8/25 MOVIE BY A BLACK FILMMAKER REC:
New show obsession alert! Have you seen Lovecraft Country yet? It is a sci-fi horror drama series from developer Misha Green, produced by Jordan Peele and J.J. Abrams. It’s about a Black man, Tic, traveling through the segregated South on a search for his father. There are two episodes so far and they are *chef’s kiss* SO GOOD. I’ve never seen anything like it. Available on HBO Max.
Title: The Silence of the Lambs
Director: Jonathan Demme
Country: United States
Year: 1991
Runtime: 118 minutes
Language: English
**As always, this post contains spoilers**
I got married last year, in November. It was the last big pre-pandemic party I, and I’m assuming many of our guests, attended. We got married in a little wooden chapel packed with 125 guests, insulated from the late fall chill. Then we had Thai food and cakes and champagne in another wooden building with high ceilings. I danced with my best friends all night, my feet aching, my cheeks tight from all the smiling. At 10:45, the last song of the night came on, a careful choice we’d made a month before, and I remembered. I swelled with excitement, grabbed my friend, Melissa (a fellow fan), and we, spinning, let it take us away.
Anyone who’s seen The Silence of the Lambs will recognize this song immediately from a…memorable scene. Those who haven’t may just hear a dark wave ballad. For me, it’s both and the last song I danced to with my friends. Anyway, the point is I’m a fan of this film. Not only because it’s a perfect film (it is) or a master class in acting (it is) but because to me it is a whisper of hope from the past about what is possible for the portrayal of women’s experiences in film.
The film begins with FBI Academy trainee, Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster), climbing up a hill with a rope. She’s sweaty as hell, running through the woods in a gray sweatsuit, climbing a net obstacle course. As she passes groups of other male trainees, they turn and look at her.
She enters the building, boarding an elevator with half a dozen more men in matching red shirts. She looks tiny in comparison.
As she exits, she’s called into Mr. Crawford’s (Scott Glenn) office, the head of the Behavioral Science Unit. On his bulletin board are gruesome crime scene photos and newspaper article clippings about a current serial killer on the loose. Classic FBI stuff. One of the headlines says “Bill Skins Fifth.”
You see, Clarice is a star student at the Academy and wants to work in the behavioral unit. Crawford knows this, and being impressed with her work so far, recruits her to interview an imprisoned former psychiatrist and cannibal/serial killer, Hannibal “The Cannibal” Lecter, (Anthony Hopkins) who might provide insight into a new case. A serial killer named “Buffalo Bill,” has been killing and skinning women. They can’t get Lecter to cooperate at all and they want her to give it a whirl.
Clarice arrives at the asylum in Baltimore. She meets the director, Dr. Chilton (Anthony Heald), who within .5 seconds of their meeting makes a terrible pass at her. He is a CREEPY CREEP and I get the vibe that the actor playing him knows he has a CREEPY CREEP face.
He takes her to Lecter’s cell in the basement. He is standing behind his glass cell (everyone else’s is standard bars) looking like he is basically levitating.
She shows him her ID and this is where we learn that Hannibal Lecter is a total bitch from hell. He clocks Clarice for being a trainee just by looking at the expiration date on her ID, he clocks the brand of her lotion and perfume, calls her out for having a nice bag but cheap shoes, and her awkward attempt to get him to fill out the questionnaire the FBI sent her to give him. Most importantly, he calls out her attempt to hide her West Virginia accent and her “white trash” background.
Lecter is poised, articulate, smart, and clearly perceptive. Clarice matches him, asking him about his art, his background, and his insight into Buffalo Bill. Here we hear one of the most famous lines in film history: “A census taker once tried to test me. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti.” The more times I see this scene, the more I appreciate what a bold and weird choice that slurpy, breathy, lip move was after that line.
Lecter tells her that if she wants to know the rest of him, to find an old client of his, Miss Hester Mofet. As she passes Miggs’ cell, she notices he is masturbating and he yells, throwing semen on her face. On her way back to the car, Clarice cries. We see a flashback of her, a little girl, running into the arms of her dad, a cop, as he arrives home. Starling leaves, dazed and with no leads.
Clarice arrives at Miss Mofet’s storage unit at night. She can’t get the garage-style door open and cuts her leg wiggling under it. This Miss Mofet is a hoarrrderrrrrr. There’s a taxidermied owl, mannequins, a piano, lamps, an armoire, and an old timey car under a giant American flag. She opens the car to find a fully dressed-in -women’s clothes headless mannequin sitting in the back seat. She also finds floating in a jar of water a man’s severed head wearing makeup. Miss Mofet is a FREAK.
Clarice confronts Lecter, this time calling HIM out on HIS bullshit. The storage unit is his and Hester Mofet is an anagram for “the rest of me,” referencing what he said on their last visit.
Lecter reveals that the jarred head belongs to his former patient, Benjamin Raspail. He didn’t kill him, he just “tucked him away” after finding him dead. Lecter says he doesn’t know who killed his patient but of course he knows more than he’s letting on. Eventually, they agree on a deal: he will offer a psychological profile of Buffalo Bill in exchange for a room with a view in a federal institution. Turns out he hates Dr. Chilton (CREEPY CREEPER) more than I do.
A blonde with a perm, driving and listening to Tom Petty’s “American Girl” arrives home to her apartment. She is Catherine Martin (Brooke Smith).
A man, through night vision goggles, watches her get out of her car. This man, who we soon learn is Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine), wearing a cast, struggles to get a chair into the back of his van. Catherine hesitates but eventually stops to help, walking one end of the chair into the van. (Hi. It’s me, your friend. Never do this.) He asks her if she’s about a size 14 in a voice that can only be described as VERY LOW AND WEIRD. She says “huh?” and he knocks her out with his cast and closes the van doors, kidnapping her. (Hi. It’s me, your friend. Never fucking do this.)
Back at the Academy, Crawford and Starling take a helicopter to rural West Virginia as Buffalo Bill’s latest victim’s body has washed ashore there. Upon arrival, there are at least a dozen local police officers. Crawford whispers to the Sheriff that due to the “sexual nature” of the crimes, they should talk privately without Starling. Starling, the only woman in sight, is dwarfed by the officers surrounding her. Visibly annoyed and uncomfortable, she peeks into the funeral parlor and flashes back to her father’s funeral.
In the morgue with the body, she sends all of the cops out of the room because they’re #pointless. She examines the body and speaks into a tape recorder. She notes that the victim isn’t local because of her pierced ears and glitter nail polish. She says, “Looks like town to me.” They pull a cocoon of a Death’s Head Moth out of her throat and she has been skinned in two diamond patterns on her back.
In the car on the way home, Starling calls out Crawford for not talking to her about the case in front of the local cops. She tells him they look to him to know how to treat her. In one of my favorite lines of all time she says, simply: “It matters.”
In DC, Starling meets with entomologists to check out the moth cocoon. Before identifying it revealing that it’s only grown in Asia so someone is raising these things on purpose, one of them hits on her. Coooooollllll.
Cut to a room full of caged death’s head moths in a basement. Catherine Martin yells from inside a deep well in the foundation of the house.
Back at FBI headquarters, Starling watches TV coverage of Catherine’s kidnapping. It turns out she’s the daughter of Senator Ruth Martin (Diane Baker), so it’s a high profile case. Senator Martin pleads for her release, repeating Catherine’s name several times. Starling says this is a smart move and then, stoically, “If he sees Catherine as a person and not just an object, it’s harder to tear her up.”
Starling visits Lecter again and tells him that if he can help them save Catherine her mother, the Senator, will help get him a transfer to a prison where one week per year he gets to go to a tropical island and walk the beach. If Catherine dies, he gets nothing.
Lecter is unimpressed with the offer. Instead, he wants to know personal things about Starling. In a dizzyingly fast exchange, she complies:
Lecter:“What is your worst memory of childhood?”
Sterling: “The death of my father.”
Lecter: “Tell me about it and don’t lie or I’ll know.”
She tells him he was shot by burglars.
Lecter: “After your father’s murder, you were orphaned. What happened next?”
She was sent to live with relatives on a farm, she says.
Lecter reveals that Buffalo Bill is not a transsexual (a term that is now considered by some in the trans community to be outdated and offensive) but thinks he is simply because he hates his own identity. He has been turned down for sex reassignment surgery from three clinics and may live near one of them.
Buffalo Bill lowers a bottle of lotion into the pit holding Catherine. “It rubs the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again,” he commands, dehumanizing her. Watching her cry, he starts to tear up, but winds up just screaming at her.
Lecter is restrained in his cell with a cage on his face. Chilton taunts him, telling him the deal with Senator Martin is fake. Lecter tells him Buffalo Bill’s first name is Louis. Chilton, as if being an asshole weren’t enough, is also a ding dong, and leaves an ink pen in Lecter’s cell. Lecter demands an in-person meeting with Senator Martin in Memphis. We hear Crawford confess that the Martin deal was just a ploy to get Lecter to talk.
Lecter is wheeled off the plane in an airplane hangar in Memphis, restrained and wearing the famous face mask. He tells Senator Martin that Buffalo Bill’s real name is Louis Friend, a man he met him once. Lecter asks her if she breastfed Catherine. She says yes. “Toughens your nipples, doesn’t it? When a man’s arm is amputated he can still feel it tingling. When Catherine is on the slab, where will it tickle you?” Senator Martin is, like literally everyone watching this exchange, horrified. Lecter gives them a brief physical description of Louis Friend and Martin says, “take that thing away.”
As she walks away, he says: “Oh, and Senator, just one more thing. Love your suit.” and winks! He’s such a BITCH omg!!
Lecter, for a reason that is either never explained or I have missed every time, is being held in a fancy cage in a massive empty ballroom in a luxury hotel in Memphis. Starling visits him and he immediately calls her out on the Senator Martin deal lie. She, in turn, calls him out on his lie: another anagram. Louis Friend = Iron Sulfide. Also known as fool’s gold. He challenges Starling to get to the root of Buffalo Bill’s needs. “He covets. That’s his nature. And how do we begin to covet, Clarice? Do we seek out things to covet? No. We begin by coveting what we see every day. Don’t you feel eyes moving over your body, Clarice? And don’t your eyes seek out the things you want?” She struggles to answer him.
Lecter wants to hear more about her traumatic childhood. She reveals that one night while living on her aunt’s sheep farm, she was woken by the sound of the lambs screaming as they were being slaughtered. She tried to free them, but they wouldn’t run. Out of shock, they just stood there. She took one lamb and ran away, but made it only a few miles before she was picked up by the sheriff. She was sent to live in an orphanage and the lamb she tried to save was killed.
Lecter probes her: “You think if you save Catherine Martin you won’t wake up to the sound of the screaming lambs ever again.” Miiiiind gaaaaaammmesss. She tears up and leaves because what else is there to do when a psychopathic serial killer cannibal in a cage is also kind of a good therapist.
Two guards prepare to serve Lecter his dinner, but Lecter has used Chilton’s pen to create a handcuff pick. In a stunning scene, he kills both cops with their own baton and a pocket knife as classical music plays.
In the lobby of the hotel, a bunch of cops see that the elevator is moving between floors and hear gunshots, so they go to investigate. On the outside of Lecter’s cage, they find one of the cops disemboweled and hung up with his arms out. They also find that Lecter is gone and the other cop has a bloodied face, but is still breathing.
Cops cops cops cops cops all over the place.
They load the living but super bloody cop into the elevator, his face bandaged. Blood drips from the elevator ceiling as they exit and load him into the ambulance. The cops look into the elevator shaft and see what looks to be Lecter in his white prison uniform laying on his belly, a gun by his hand. When they shoot him in the leg, he doesn’t move, so they assume he’s died by suicide. In the elevator, they open the hatch and the body falls out. Cut to the moving ambulance where the cop sits up, removes the bandage AND his face…to reveal that he is Lecter. Classic switcheroo!
I know that was a very spicy scene, but things get exponentially spicier from here.
Starling’s only female classmate/colleague, Ardelia (Kasi Lemmons), tells Starling that the ambulance was found at the airport with the whole crew dead. Starling thinks about what Lecter told her…we covet what we see every day…and realizes the Buffalo Bill must have known his first victim, Fredrica Bimmel.
Meanwhile, Buffalo Bill is just casually sewing skin on his sewing machine.
Starling goes to Fredrica’s house in WV. She meets her parents and gets to poke around her room. She sees that Frederica was a tailor and finds a dress in her closet with pattern outlines on it that match the pieces of skin removed from the victim Starling previously examined at the morgue. Having made a huge and WILD connection, she bolts out of the house. Buffalo Bill is a seamstress. He keeps the women alive for awhile so he can starve them, loosen their skin, and (given his desire to change his identity and his rejection from sex reassigment surgery) make a woman suit out of it. Starling calls Crawford with the news. He basically tells her to chill because they’ve found Buffalo Bill from looking over Lecter’s notes: a man named Jame Gumb who lives in Chicago. They’re taking SWAT to arrest him and Starling should continue to interview Fredrica’s friends.
In the basement, Buffalo Bill wears a robe and puts makeup on in a mirror. That Goodbye Horses song (that I played at my wedding) plays in the background. He wears a curly blonde wig that, if you look closely, is actually just one of his victim’s scalps. In front of a set up camera, he tucks in his dick, backs up and, dancing, says in the deepest voice you’ve ever heard: “Would you fuck me? I’d fuck me.” Iconic. Meanwhile, Catherine lures his small white dog, Precious, into the well.
Starling meets with one of Fredrica’s friends in a diner. She says she’s never heard of Jame Gumb. The friend says that she and Fredrica used to do alterations for an old woman named Mrs. Lipman and gives Starling her address.
As he’s admiring his moths, Buffalo Bill hears Precious whining in the well. Catherine has the dog down there with her and Bill is worked UP. She threatens to kill Precious if he doesn’t let her use the phone.
A SWAT team surrounds the house, using an undercover cop as a flower delivery person as a cover so that Bill will answer the door.
Bill gets his gun to presumably shoot Catherine, but is interrupted by the doorbell.
But guess who’s on the other side of the house! It’s not the SWAT, it’s Starling! The FBI got suckered by Lecter again and found themselves at an empty house. As the team tears up the empty house looking for Buffalo Bill, Crawford realizes that Starling might be in trouble in WV.
Buffalo Bill tells Starling his name is Jack Gordon and that he bought the house from the Lipmans a couple of years before. She asks him if he knew Fredrica and he says not really. But he invites her in while he looks for the Lipman’s son’s business card so that she may talk to him about Fredrica. She has no idea who she is talking to and the tension is XTREME until she enters the house and it starts to click. Possibly because she sees moths everywhere, possible because it just looks like total shit in there. She unclicks that click part on her holstered gun and says, very calmly, “Mr. Gordon may I use your phone, please?”
He starts to laugh and says “sure you can use my phone.” She draws her gun and he pauses for a moment, letting the business cards rain down and then runs away into the basement. She is scaaaared but she throws off her coat like a total boss and goes down into the basement to find him. In the basement, she sees the beginnings of a full woman’s skin suit on a mannequin and hears Catherine screaming and Precious barking. She enters the room with the well and confirms it is Catherine. As she tells Catherine she is safe and backup is on the way, but she has to leave her for a moment, Catherine freaks out and calls her a fucking bitch, which is sort of rude but I GET IT. There are so many dark, terrible rooms in this basement and she searches all of them. There are moths everywhere and then she enters a room where there’s a bathtub with a VERY rotting person in it which I’ve always assumed is Mrs. Lipman.
Then, the lights go out and thus commences what is still, to me, one of the scariest sequences in any movie. We see Starling through the POV of Buffalo Bill’s night vision goggles. She can’t see or hear him but he’s right in front of her and she is terrified. He reaches out to almost touch her hair and face. As he cocks his gun (that little clicky part again), she hears him, turns around and shoots. In the shoot out, a window is broken so we can see that she’s killed him. In this sequence and after, all you hear for a few minutes is her heavy breathing.
Catherine, holding Precious, is escorted out of the house by EMTs. Starling, with her arms around herself, clearly stunned, is escorted out of the house by Crawford.
Starling graduates from the Academy. At the reception, Crawford congratulates her and they have an ODD handshake that makes you wonder if Lecter was right, that Crawford really did want to sleep with her. Starling is told she has a phone call. It’s Lecter.
“Have the lambs stopped screaming?” He asks her, which is soooooo fucking rude! She is startled and asks him where he is. He tells her not to worry, he won’t hurt her because the world is more interesting with her in it. Lecter is in the Bahamas. He’s wearing an insane disguise: a blond wig, a straw hat, a tan, and sunglasses. Does Queer Eye have a Bahamaian chapter bc gf needs help. In the background, we see Chilton get off an airplane. Lecter tells Starling that he’s “...having an old friend for dinner.”
He hangs up and as she repeats his name into the receiver, we see Lecter, in a breezy ass tan linen suit, saunter after Chilton like the absolute c u next tuesday that he is.
What I see in this movie and what I saw as I wrote this is a woman up against what every woman has always been up against: the patriarchy. The patriarchy, in fact, has become such a cultural talking point recently that writing the word here feels trendy, superficial, somehow flat. But the reality is that the reality of the patriarchy is that it is tall, strong, sturdy. For women, it is a building full of locked doors, of two-way mirrors, eyes around every corner. And for 118 minutes during The Silence of the Lambs, we get to see this building from a woman’s point of view, all of its nasty crooks and crevices on FULL display, rather than the status quo on film: through the eyes of a straight cis man, where it’s all good, all pristine, nothing to see here, folks. Director Jonathan Demme achieves this, in part, with his close-up shots of men. Their head takes up the frame and they look directly in the camera, as you’ll see in some of the stills above. This is what Starling sees, so we are forced to take her POV. When we see close-ups of her, she is looking away from the camera. This is incredibly powerful.
Starling, as the character is written, is a well-rounded person. With self-suredness, she navigates a male-dominated world: from the asylum to the FBI headquarters. She isn’t fearless in the face of danger and violence, but brave. She shows great emotional vulnerability and roundness: she is not immune to Lecter’s emotional games about her childhood trauma, she is terrified in Buffalo Bill’s basement, and she is almost moved to tears at the autopsy of one of his victims. But it is precisely this humanness that allows her to see these other women as people and not objects (something everyone else in the film struggles to do), which ultimately leads to Buffalo Bill’s demise.
Finally, this movie is not without super flaws. The entire storyline of Buffalo Bill kidnapping plus sized women and then starving them so their skin loosens is...not great. It lacks a sense of critical self awareness in this regard, bending to the pervasive and evergreen fatphobia in our culture. When Bill asks Clarice if Fredrica was “a great big fat person,” she says “She was a big girl, sir,” essentially agreeing with him. Even though the word “fat” is being reclaimed as at least a neutral term, it was still widely pejorative in 1991 and no one in the film pushes back on it.
And then the portrayal of trans identity. Buffalo Bill, according to Lecter, who is apparently our professional here, is not a trans woman. He is a delusional man with violent psychological issues. Assuming that is true, we see an intimate scene of Bill conflating “trying on” being a woman with violence: tucking his penis and putting on a “wig” made of a woman’s scalp. In addition, Benjamin Raspail (the head in the jar) was another “illegitimate” trans person...just a manic man trying on makeup. I can see how for a trans person this portrayal could be offensive and delegitimizing as it plays up the idea that trans women are just confused men in dresses and nothing more. I think the film tries to stand steady on the narrative that Buffalo Bill’s pathology is indeed that he is a cis man with a majorly violent issue with women, not a trans person grappling with their identity. But again, the execution of this could very well be problematic.
Despite its flaws, I love this movie and how it legitimizes, in part, what it feels like to be a woman in a male dominated world.
Next up we begin a samurai trilogy, with a Japanese film from 1954 called Samurai I: Musashi Miyamoto. Remember how good Seven Samurai was?? I’m ready!
XOXO,
Steph