The Silence of the Lambs: A Macabre Masterpiece

Though it's not hard to see that psychopathic killers aren't right in the head, something in us needs to rationalize their actions to avoid having to comprehend the depths the human mind can sink to. We want to know why these people are drawn to such horrible things as murder, sort of like why we step into the dark, scary room to see what’s there despite our fear of what – or who – could be lurking inside. This is a big reason why I think Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs has had such a profound impact on pop culture. It is the most thorough and precise examination of a psychopath I’ve ever seen, and it preys on our naive need to know even the darkest of secrets. The other reason for its huge impact is a craft that is utterly undeniable on every level; this is one of the best movies I’ve seen this year.

By now, you've certainly heard of Hannibal and Clarice, an imprisoned serial killer and the woman tasked with probing his disturbed mind. I’ll spare you most of the details of the case to avoid either tedium or spoilers, but this movie works wonderfully because of its concentrated effort to trap both Clarice and us in a cage of our thoughts and fears. If anyone could solve this mystery while keeping Dr. Lecter out of her head, it’s the overachieving Clarice. And yet, it's obvious she's not the one holding the cards when the two of them interact. We’re audibly told everything we need to know about the type of man Hannibal is before we even meet him, regaled with macabre gossip of his horrible traits and feats. You’ll be anxious to meet the man, whether to see if his legend is justified or to get away from him sooner. It is no overstatement to say that he is one of the greatest villains ever put to screen, and even Clarice's best efforts to keep this cunning man from locking her inside a prison of her own mind might not be enough.

In so many ways, Silence of the Lambs is a fish-out-of-water story, not because Clarice is different from her peers, but rather because even someone as proficient as her is unprepared to go head-to-head with a man like Hannibal Lecter. I cannot think of a single better portrayal of psychopathy ever put to screen. Anthony Hopkins’s performance is sinister and commanding, placing him firmly in emotional control of every encounter between him and Clarice, even though he is in a prison cell. Lecter is technically helpless for much of the film, yet he holds all the power in every scene he’s in by consistently staying one step ahead of Clarice in their mental chess game, steering every exchange between the two of them away from police procedural work and towards Clarice's deep-seated fears and insecurities; he’s terrifying.

Another fish-out-of-water tendency of this movie is its surprisingly restrained story about a female detective trying to make her way in a male-dominated world. Mercifully, it has more on its mind than easy moralizing about gender roles, but the subtle and satisfying undertones of competition between her and her mostly male peers are unmistakable. Clarice is smart, but she’s in over her head when it comes to a case like this. Silence of the Lambs is technically about her and her investigation into Buffalo Bill, a serial killer with a fondness for skinning his victims, but the villains actually run the show. You never feel as though Clarice is in control, and that is a huge part of what makes her character likable and her movie terrifying.

One of the movie's strongest moments features Clarice's first meeting with Hannibal in prison, where she passes a long row of obviously mentally-deranged inmates who proudly flaunt their deranged, depraved habits for her with twisted confidence. When Clarice reaches the end of the row, she finds not a subhuman clambering around its cage like an animal, but an upstanding-looking man with a clean cell and an unsettlingly calm demeanor. Again, I do not have enough words to praise Hopkins’s powerhouse of a performance. It is an understated yet ever-so-intense, disturbing, and distinctly timeless tour de force, down to an unwavering gaze that seems like it could cut through your very soul if it chose to. Clarice is a good foil for him, both similar to Hannibal in some surprising ways and different in others; this movie takes the you and I aren’t so different cliché and gives it teeth.

One of my favorite aspects of Lambs is how it uses dialogue to fill us in on morbid details of a crime and the reactions of its more righteous characters to a crime scene to attack our imagination. It lets our minds fill in the awful details of both Hannibal’s past crimes and Bill’s current ones, using actual gore sparingly. My skin crawled watching this movie. Its use of the show-don’t-tell rule is also precise; its utilization of newspaper clippings about the murders of Buffalo Bill tells us everything we need to know about this sick man, again without a single word of dialogue. This movie uses exposition as a tool, not a lifeline. What it does tell us is disturbing in a way I’ve rarely ever seen a movie be.

On the most encompassing scale, this movie is split into two parts. In the first, we are taught to fear Hannibal, though he is in custody. In the second, the movie's stakes change and become more sinister than before. We are told what Hannibal is capable of and forced to run the gauntlet of his mind games, and because we know what he can do, the idea of him having any level of freedom at all is sickening. This movie is about a horrible man, a capable woman, and the complicated dance of necessity they will have to perform together for the sake of the greater good, not that Hannibal really cares about such a thing more than he does the thrill of a mind game. You'll know from the start that he will turn the tables on Clarice and the law, but he makes you feel helpless to the point where all you can do is sit there and watch his machinations unfold.

The Silence of the Lambs is a movie about its characters, and they absolutely steal the show. They exist in a strange, almost-symbiotic relationship, where one can’t exist in the legendary way we remember them without the other. This bond is fragile and volatile, a pseudo-alliance of necessity that either party can choose to break as soon as it no longer benefits them, and when someone as depraved as Buffalo Bill is involved, there’s no telling what horrible floodgates such a breach of fragile trust could loose. This is more than a mystery movie. It is an unstable crisis put firmly into the hands of people who are not equipped to handle such a terrifyingly inhumane ordeal.

This movie knows you know it won’t end well, and instead of doing something as cowardly as pretending it will, it embraces that inevitability and turns it into an emotional weapon to be leveraged against the audience instead.

The Silence of the Lambs - 10/10

Proverbs 2:6-15