1991
Jonathan Demme
Some terms
Serial killer: a person who kills people, generally for complex psycho-sexual reasons. One of the earliest may have been Jack the Ripper. Psychologists say that they are “like the person next door” and show no outward signs of their violent activities.
Profiling: a method by which some law enforcement people make up a psychological profile of a person who is likely to be a serial killer.
Mass murderer: A person who kills a number of people at one time, and is often killed themselves by law enforcement arriving at the scene.
Before the Film
Some Serial Killers about whom films have been made:
Ed Gein (In the Light of the Moon (a.k.a. Ed Gein))
Jeffrey Dahmer (Dahmer)
Jack the Ripper (Jack the Ripper, The Lodger, From Hell)
David Berkowitz (Out of the Darkness)
Albert DeSalvo (Boston Strangler)
Henry Lee Lucas (Henry Portrait of a Serial Killer)
Angelo Buono and Kenneth Bianchi (The Atlanta Child Murders)
Aileen Wurnos (Citizen X)
Other serial killer films include
Most films about serial killers come after Psycho (for which Ed Gein is at least a partial model). Psycho also seems to spawn the genre of films known as “Slasher films” although it in and of itself is not one. The amount of “blood” in Pyscho is in fact remarkably small.
Serial killers are believed to be a rather modern phenomenon. To some degree a certain amount of traveling and anonymity are required. There are both psychological (how the child was raised vs. genetics) and sociological (Leyton, Elliot 1986 Hunting Humans Pocket Books, NY) explanations for serials killers
There is additionally, the interesting question about America’s preoccupation with serial killers. It is believed that there have been more films about serial killers than there are serial killers!
Theories about serial killers abound but there are few on why people are fascinated by them
Silence of the Lambs is a film about a serial killer – two in fact – the now infamous (an incarcerated Hannibal Lechter (Anthony Hopkins) and Jame Gumb (a.k.a Buffalo Bill) (Ted Levine)
After the Film
Techniques for building tension etc.
Narrative Structure
Use of Flashbacks (psychoanalytical approach) Lechter wants to know why Clarise Starling turned out as she did – we want to know why Lechter did. We are also told that Hannibal knows why Buffalo Bill did (his etiology was far more savage)
Psychoanalytic flashbacks are looking at the factors that go into Starlings life.
Editing
Involved in Flashbacks.
Scene in garage looking for and finding head of Benjanim Rathspell.
Compare psycho with ever shortening shots
Photography
How are Jodie Foster (Starling) and Hopkins (Hannibal) presented in frames
Light and darkness
Foster’s walk to Lechter
Music
How is music used?
Compare Psycho
Use of all string orchestra to provide the starkness of black and white
Underscores monotonous driving; shower scenes
Performances
Hopkins: Does he play the role in accordance with the psychological description? Pleasant, polite etc. but when aroused personality is quite different
He approaches destruction of people even verbally quite calmly: talking about Benjamin Rathspell he says about this death that he was “a garden variety manic depressive. Best thing that could have happened to him, his analysis was going nowhere.
He is certainly not politically correct something which the film tries to be with Jodie Foster (i.e. pro feminist using Foster for the hero and having a black woman as here “pal” FBI agent – who basically solves the case. This in part accounts for the stream of protest from gays about the film)
Places that show his disregard of PC are places where he is annoyed and his façade breaks a bit. When he asks Agent Starling what Bill does she replies
“What does he do?"
He kills women
No that is incidental.
WHO SOLVES THE MURDER?
Ultimately, Lechter’s info is checked by Jack Crawford (Scott Glenn) with centers for sexual reassignment, and they match him to importer of butterflies.
What about Ardelia Mapp (Kasi Lemmons) the black woman agent in training who actually makes the break by pointing out that the order in which they were found is not the order they were killed in which causes Starling to suspect Buffalo Bill knew the girl.
How does the film work visually?
The film opens in a foggy wooded area. Things are hidden by both fog and trees. Frames are broken by trees, nets to be climbed, and so on.
Off screen voice calls. The person enters the frame and talks to agent Starling and turns revealing a hat with F.B.I. on it. The visuals begin a sense of things hidden and fragmented and give us the information that we are dealing with FBI.
As Starling goes to the buildings, there is no fog, sun and shadow dapple the landscape and there is less an air of mystery.
As Sterling arrives at the office, the plot is advanced by visually letting the audience know through Newspaper clippings and photos that there have been a series of murders (five at least) of women and that the bodies appear to have some mutilation on them,
Starling leaves to interview Lechter. The transition is verbal. She asks Crawford what kind of person Lechter is and Dr. Chilton response “He’s monster”
As the film progresses, Starling goes down long hallways, through barred gates that are opening and closing. We see guards and inmates being moved around. Surveillance cameras and screen are visible implying high security for dangerous criminals. A large figure suddenly appears in the frame, who turns out to be a worker.
In setting, the smooth walls of the hospital give way after the last gate to rough stone walls, in a starkly lit hallway with barred prison cells on one side and a lone chair sitting in the center of the hall near the end.
As Startling passes the cells, one inmate is very agitated a moves animal like along the bars. Starling finally confronts Lechter who is in a kind of glass box appearing almost less confined than the others.. We see him – the monster - almost at attention, full length in the cell extremely formal and polite.
The two start to converse and the shots of each person fill the frame, with Lechter being shot in even greater close up. These shots link the two in some way.
When Starling starts to leave she gets called back to Lechter and for the first time the two are seen in the same frame, with the two practically against each other.
Starling leave and on her way to the car there is a flashback to her being with her father. Starling’s image and the image of Starling at a child are paralleled.
Starling goes to the garage and the door does not fully open. We see her slide in under the door after joking that the owner should call the FBI is he door slips shut or something happens. As she slides under, the shot show a screen almost completely black from the top to the slightly open door. The storage room she has entered is dark and the light from her flashlight is the only light, isolating images suddenly in the darkness – a decapitated mannequin appears suddenly and the we see a car which Starling has entered. There is a cloth over an object which Starling regards and starts to remove the cloth. The camera shifts behind the jar looking at Starling who sees the object in the jar, and the camera suddenly shifts in front of the jar and we see a head in the jar.
The scene has dark menacing non diagetic music in the background. There is suddenly the sound of a door sliding.
A radio in a care blares and a young woman sings along with the radio.
We now meet Buffalo Bill for the first time. He has night goggles on and the screen is complete his point of view. We see him finally with long blonde hair, a baseball cap and jacket and his arm in a sling. He is the only male in the film thus far (and will remain so) with long hair, indicating a gender blending approach. He appears to have tattoos and later we will see that he also has one nipple pierced. The body is clearly marked for body modification, which of course is what he is interested in.
Starling and Jack Crawford go to examine yet another body. The preparation for the medical examination involves putting salve under the nose to kill the smell of the dead body, bringing an “olfactory” sense to the film at this point. A man slowly opens the body bag and then suddenly rips it off. An photographer who is an agent is taking pictures and Starling realizes from the photo something is in the vixtim’s throat which is a cocoon
After leaving, Crawford and Starling ride in the car together, she in the back and he in thee front. Crawford talks to her over his shoulder and then turns his head to the window where we see the rear view mirror reflecting the entrance to the tunnel they have entered. The mirror is for a second bright and the become black as the small circle of light which is the tunnel entrance vanishes in the distance in the mirror.
At the house were Bill has taken the woman he kidnapped, we see a stone well, the walls reminiscent of those in the hospital in the hallway where the cells are, linking graphically the two places of imprisonment.
Starling looks at TV focusing hard on the senator who is making a plea about her daughter. Close ups of Starling now reveal the same part of the face that was shown of Lechter when he looked at her from his cell. There is a linking of Lechter again with Starling implying there is something between the two.
Starling comes back to visit Lechter and make an offer. She talks about an island where terns nest which allows Lechter to pun about them telling each other information by “turns”. Nesting activity again underscores a relationship developing Lechter and Starling. Starling, of course, has a name which is a bird. Later a bird cage will be built on the top floor of the courthouse to house Lechter. Animals figure in the movie and are basically pleasant. Hannibal and Bill are “animals” that are not so pleasant.
The taking of turns merges the two stories – Lechter’s about Bill and Starling’s about her childhood, both of whom are heavily traumatized by something in their lives. This allows an equation between Bill and Starling as well.
Close ups more and more intense, and Lechter’s face now appears next to Starling’s as a reflection.
We can go on like this through the rest of the film but this should give you some ideas of how the story is being advanced by the film. In addition to the dialog which gives details, the film manages to advance the plot visually; breaks linear narration in order to deal with flashbacks into Starling’s background and is a kind of retrospective analysis. The equation of Starling with Bill questions her gender identity which has been visually obviously made to be significant (a woman in a man’s job that all the men look at) is equated with a man who believes (however erroneously) he is a transsexual and wants to be a woman.
His death is followed almost immediately by Starling’s graduation and the appearance of the two men from the museum (one of whom was “hitting on her”) at her graduation party, indicating that her gender ambiguity may also be resolved.
Are mental illness and desire to change gender being equated here?