Jonathan Demme (1991)

Thomas Harris’s 1988 novel The Silence of the Lambs is about two serial killers.  One, known as Buffalo Bill, who flays the corpses of his female victims, is on the loose.  The other, Dr Hannibal (‘the Cannibal’) Lecter, has been incarcerated for his crimes.  The killer on the outside becomes increasingly pathetic.  The one inside is a more and more potent force.  Harris develops this theme both through the plotting of the story and in a double psychological sense.  It’s not just that Lecter can lead the police to their quarry (through a combination of intuition of the workings of a pathological mind and, even handier, personal acquaintance of the man who is Bill).  Harris leaves the reader with an inescapable sense that the unfathomable dark of the doctor’s psyche is more frightening than the grisly deeds of Buffalo Bill, which are expressions of personal weakness.  Bill is a somewhat garish variant on the modern public perception of the typical serial killer:  he’s an apparently unremarkable, violently frustrated blot on a grungy, anomic landscape and the victim of traumatising arrested development.  His misfit quality is made explicit in the fact that he is also a wannabe transsexual.  It’s all a bit much but Harris works Bill’s sexual peculiarity into the plot so ingeniously that it doesn’t seem a sensational flaw – not while you’re reading the book, anyway.

Dr Lecter, in contrast, doesn’t at all conform to the anonymous, aberrant no-hoper image of the multiple murderer.  He’s an eminent psychiatrist, a classical music lover and a gourmet.  He wines and dines the members of a top orchestra twenty-four hours after eating one of their colleagues.  Lecter is a striking conception precisely because he’s not a desperate, emotionally deprived outsider:  he made a highly successful living within cultured affluent society – yet he went way beyond biting the hand that fed him.  Thomas Harris seems to want Hannibal Lecter to symbolise an evil that’s inherent in human beings, however otherwise civilised they become.  (Lecter doesn’t lose his cordon bleu values even when the meal is human flesh.)  The book contains a wealth of detailed description of police procedure.  Harris adopts a measured, melancholy narrative voice (it’s as if he feels compelled to tell the tale though it pains him to do so).  His portrait of the pivotal character of the young FBI trainee special agent Clarice Starling is incisive and sympathetic.  (On the hunt for Buffalo Bill, Clarice, when she interviews Lecter, is made to feel, through his spooky psychological insights, that she’s the hunted one.)  These elements combine to give The Silence of the Lambs such an absorbing and substantial context that Lecter is not a safely stylised evil genius:  he’s linked, alarmingly, to a believable world.

The screen adaptation of Harris’s novel, although somewhat anomalous in Jonathan Demme’s filmography, is highly effective.  The skilful screenplay by Ted Tally is faithful to the book.  There are strong performances from Jodie Foster (as Clarice), Scott Glenn (as her FBI boss) and Ted Levine (as Buffalo Bill).  What’s most striking about the film, however, is that it has popularly established Hannibal Lecter as the scariest character to appear in a mainstream movie since Norman Bates, over thirty years ago.  This is remarkable largely because Lecter is much less disturbing on the screen than on the page.  There’s now an actor between the audience and the monster – a familiar and accomplished actor who, in this role, is having the entertaining time of his big-screen life.  Anthony Hopkins’s Lecter has insinuating charm all right but it’s less unnerving than the charm transmitted through the more elusive mediating sensibility of the novel’s narrative voice.  Hopkins is understandably grateful to the character for supplying him with a smash hit and a new level of prestige and celebrity.  By the time The Silence of the Lambs was released in Britain, we’d already seen him humorously impersonating Lecter on chat and awards shows – domesticating Hannibal the Cannibal.

[1990s]