silence of the lambs

What is so creepy about Silence of the Lambs? Of course, the story or rather, multiple stories within are pretty creepy. There is our friend Hannibal the Cannibal, the famous and brilliant psychiatrist who had a penchant for eating people he didn’t quite like, but had a taste for nonetheless. But Hannibal doesn’t frighten us that much. OR at least, he doesn’t frighten me. I wouldn’t want to be on his bad side, but I’m not a rude person and I think we’d likely agree on who should be eaten and who not. They may not taste good, but ridding the world of people who leave a bad taste in your mouth in any way is not such a bad mission. The world would be a better place with fewer rude people. No, the real creep and monster of the film is Buffalo Bill. The man on the fringe in every sense, for not only is he a serial killer, he’s some kind of transsexual who is just a bit too carried away. Rejected by every respectable clinic that refuses to surgically make him a woman, Bill decides to make himself a woman out of other women, skinning the bits he needs to make a kind of woman suit that he can wear to real sub-culture parties on weird summer cruises off the cape or god knows where, all decked out in his dead girl suit.

Buffalo bill is the one who scares us most, and it is he who carries us through the film. Jodi Foster as the perfect willing FBI agent, eager to make her mark and with a slight schoolgirl crush on her superior Jack Crawford is flawless in her role of, as Hannibal says, “Poor West Virginia white-trash” and a “rube” eager to make good and go “all the way to the FBI.” All true, but she’s smart and her background only makes her all the more eager to prove that she is just as smart if not smarter, than many of the white-collar superiors that surround her. Yet despite her smarts, Clarice Starling, FBI agent soon to be, is still treated to more than a fair share of sexism as she makes her way through the states in pursuit of Buffalo Bill. There is the way she is treated among men by other men. The way Jack Crawford won’t discuss “this type of sex crime” in front of Starling even though she is, in short, the agent in charge of the case and the one who will be processing the body of the first of Buffalo Bill’s skinned victims. Poor Starling is subject to Multiple Miggs, another nut-job who shares a cellblock with Hannibal and who not only makes rude remarks (the an smell your cunt line that became famous) and who later masturbates and throws a handful of semen in her ace as she walks by. Multiple Miggs maybe e crazy, but his physical behavior is not better or worse than the way Starling is treated by other men, only their treatment is less obvious – less overt – but it is just as insulting. Starling proves that she can stand up to this kind of treatment again and again, and in fact, the only man who does seem o be fully on her side and who recognizes her smarts in the way that they should be recognized is our old friend Hannibal who is, as he says courteous, notices that she is “courteous and responsive to courtesy.” That Starling may be “poor, white trash” as he says, but she has an IQ that can and will drive out any competition and it does. It will be Starling who will in the end find our killer, our Buffalo Bill, and she alone will face him in his dark, dank basement where he keeps his prisoner’s in a dried-well in the basement.

Article Author: Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti

Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti is a published writer in both the United States and Europe. She is widely known for her music commentary, particularly her writings about Bob Dylan about whom she runs a highly-trafficked site. …

Visit Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti's author page — Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti's Blog