Silence of the Lambs the

Silence of the Lambs The Brilliantly Disquieting Visuals and Creepy but Enlightening Text of Jonathan Demme's Feature Film Silence of the Lambs (1991) Jonathan Demme's Academy (and other) Award-sweeping; enormously disturbing (artfully so); surprisingly, quietly brilliant horror film, The Silence of the Lambs (1991), achieves its eerily powerful, deeply memorable impact(s) on the psyche of the viewer in several different and indelible ways. Each of these is distinctly, brilliantly, artful, moreover; that is, visually; textually; musically; and in terms of deeply and progressively impression-building visual and psychological mise-en-scene combined.

Further, the profound; seamless, and ever-increasing, as the film progresses, overall brilliance of Jonathan Demme's masterful horror flick unfolds along the lines of a (curiously surprising) feminist plot motif:, i.e., the coming-of-age of the psychologically-wounded (as is the film's deeply disturbed but ingenious antagonist himself, Hannibal Lector, Clarice's most unlikely mentor for her own unexpected process of finding, and then beginning, to psychically heal herself.

The young female heroine-protagonist of Demme's Silence of the Lambs, Clarice, a once-abused and therefore permanently-scarred woman-child, grown up now (chronologically, at least, and certainly in possession of a razor-sharp mind, but without genuinely knowing herself) meets, based on Clarice's fascination and keen capabilities to understand the profoundly disturbed criminal minds of the worst possible human beings within that group, a killer-cannibal in a cage, whom she desires (for society's sake) to come to know and understand, particularly in terms of what must be his most unusual thought processes.

Clarice herself is almost preternaturally perceptive, sharp-thinking psychological investigator of seriously-disturbed criminal minds (the mind of Lector in particular being an irresistible specimen of this for her) especially vis-a-vis (and with the astonishingly-rendered help, moreover, deep within the bowels of a super-maximum security prison basement) the idea of what she (and we) consider humanly normal, and holistically though erroneously so.

During Clarice's quest to better understand the workings of the mind of super-murderer Hannibal Lector, the flesh-eating Lector, a most unlikely mentor but as it turns out, a perfect one for Clarice herself pushes Clarice, also, toward understanding herself: in the same time and space within which she slowly learns to understand him. Before any of that happens, though, Clarice arrives (protectively escorted at first) into the (now) caged and locked-down world of Hannibal the Cannibal.

She brings with her, at first and always, lots of youthful curiosity about him that soon enough dwarfs whatever fears she might have had at first of being anywhere in his presence, even with him locked down. Also, Clarice, as Lector seems instantly to know, well ahead of our own knowing similarly, has plenty of her own psychic scars that she totes along on her always, until near the end, at least slightly-unnerved but always fascinated interviews with the world's most infamous flesh-eater.

In these interview scenes, the camera shows her looking up at Lector, and shows the man (and possibly woman)-swallower, gazing down at her: taller, bigger, visually looming; by implication (though the camera makes us believe it) able to swallow her up. But he does not. Slowly within the film the camera brings them face-to-face. Toward the end of the movie, when they talk together now, their eyes are even (and at times Clarice even looks down at Hannibal now).

The camera tells us here that Lector once was frightening but now, recognizably human to Clarice and us, is not so now. Hannibal has also now guided Clarice toward the essential humanness within herself she does not recognize at all early on (and neither do we, then).

Hannibal himself illuminates (with the camera's brilliant help, visually speaking, what is human about both of them, and (by inevitable association, and uncomfortable at first but much less so as the movie concludes) all that is human, the good and the bad of it, about ourselves.

Further, it is this same chained madman in a cage, Hannibal Lector, who, ultimately, as Demme director and Demme auteur implies through a series of chillingly rendered ironies within ironies caught by the camera, who finally points Clarice toward conditions of possibility for freeing herself from her own old and awful prisons within prisons, psychically, professionally, and personally speaking.

Thus Clarice and Hannibal's respective psychological conditions within this film are in a sense corollaries of one-another: Hannibal's confinement is external, very much so in fact, and one deemed extremely necessary by society in order to keep society safe. Such oppositions-within-parallelisms are continually rendered and/or underscored, cinematically. In this same sense, though, Hannibal the Cannibal and Clarice of the Cannibalized Psyche are magnetically-attracted (although most unlikely, or so it seems at first but that soon enough makes perfect sense) soul mates.

[Yes, even human monsters that could and would eat us alive have souls.]. And it is this cannibal in a cage that slowly makes it possible for the true Clarice who is still locked-down inside her own labyrinth of psychological cages, to begin to give birth to her own scar-swaddled yet still fully authentically self. This is Hannibal's human love and his self-regeneration at once. Here in particular, Demme's implication is a feminist one. But it is also a universal one. A woman may give birth to her true self.

But sometimes a man, and even the most unlikely among them at that, can help in that process, and in some cases (this is one, Demme insists) himself create the very conditions of possibility for this to take place at all.

Demme's exquisitely sensitive (perhaps even equivalent in that sense to the director) cinematographer, Tak Fujimoto shows us, especially when his camera closing in tight and still at key intervals in the plot (part of Demme's genius here is that we never see these moments coming) on Hannibal's light blue, liquid-looking eyes - beautifully luminous yet almost childish-appearing inner oceans containing (I hesitate here, but this is how I read Demme's intention for this character) love and profound human recognition of another badly tortured but still healable soul.

This is a would-be daughter, grown now but with scars that parallel Lector's own. Further, this penetratingly intelligent but non-self-reflective young woman could, despite Lector's past destructiveness, have been much akin to someone of his own flesh: springing from him instead of being destroyed by him, as so many others have been. In Clarice's own case, though, Lector need not take her into himself; his self is already, for better or worse, within her and always has been.

Hannibal's light blue eyes, especially when Fujimoto's now-gentle camera peeks shyly upward toward them and catches unawares, leveling itself off now, their soft, watery, fatherly expression as he gazes down (but less so than before), for both are now more equal and both know this) at Clarice, his eyes practically shouting, now: I SEE YOU EVEN IF YOU STILL CANNOT SEE YOURSELF AND I LOVE YOU - YOU CAN SEE AND LOVE WHAT I DO!!! - say we are Hannibal and Hannibal is us - all the good and bad of that, and (yes) there is some good, at least potentially, even in that since that.