If I'm making this all sound like some hamfisted attempt to adapt Laura Mulvey's theories on the male gaze whole-cloth, I'm doing something wrong. The points being made here are specific ones, tied into the plot, and not just reflexive pseudofeminist wonkery. Clarice Starling is a woman in a governmental agency dominated almost entirely by men. The very first time we see her, she's climbing uphill; and before long we discover that she's running an obstacle course. Her boss slights her in order to curry favor with local authorities; a psychiatrist hits on her, then dismisses her reason for being sent in to see Lecter as simply "to turn him on." Meanwhile, Buffalo Bill, though on the surface a transsexual, is (as Lecter assures us) nothing of the sort; rather, he began killing women because he apparently couldn't have the one he wanted. His behavior is littered with signs of pathological misogyny and homophobia. Those who criticized the movie as homophobic itself apparently missed the fact that his lisping limp-wristed routine is a mockery of gays, that as a serial killer of women he can reliably be presumed to be a heterosexuality, that there are even pictures on his wall of him cavorting with strippers. Lecter spots these manifestations of misogyny and works them for all they're worth, repeatedly suggesting that the men in Starling's life have sexual designs on her, and ruthlessly mocking the maternal actions (and power suit) of Senator Martin, the mother of Buffalo Bill's latest kidnap victim. The thorough contempt for women is made plainest by Bill himself, when he mocks the screams of his victim, pulling at his shirt to simulate breasts. To me, this is as grotesque as the famous scene in which Bill tucks his penis between his legs to ape the body of a woman. In both cases, what's being condemned by the filmmakers is not inappropriately feminine behavior, but raw hatred of women--which is nothing more or less than a socially acceptable form of hatred itself.

If I seem to be ignoring the most commonly discussed aspects of this film--the thrills and the performances--I apologize, because in both cases it's as good as everyone says. The garage sequence, the escape sequence, and of course the big switcheroo and visit to Bill's basement at the end of the film are as riveting and pulse-pounding as thrillers can get. Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins simply disappear into their roles. Foster gives a performance of excruciating melancholy. Hopkins delivers each line so well one can hardly imagine them being spoken any other way--if his subsequent scenery devouring in movie after movie were to put him on the path to thespian Hell, this role insures he won't go any lower than Purgatory, methinks. And please don't forget the criminally overlooked Ted Levine, whose pathetic mania is both skin-crawling and, in a weird way, heartbreaking.