In which a genre is codified and Thomas Harris-style psychological thrillers are established as my comfort genre.
The Silence of the Lambs has a complicated legacy. We’re 30 years out now since it absolutely rattled the hell out of people’s expectations, and the ensuing decades have seen everyone from Dick Wolf to Serial latch onto the story structure while missing the heart of the film. This is not surprising, as Thomas Harris is a singular author, and his best works (I say this sardonically, as he has written 6 books in 50 years, 3 of them under contractual duress) are horrific, titillating, and humanist simultaneously. While I’ve appreciated every minute of Lenny Briscoe’s gallows humor on Law & Order, that show cranked out 24 episodes a year for over 20 years, so production deadlines were more important than other considerations like pathos or deeper meaning.
I want to be clear that Silence isn’t the first movie about serial killers, or the hundredth. There were many iconic ones before it, from Psycho to Halloween to M, but The Silence of the Lambs had the most cultural cachet, the most awards season recognition, the most box office success, and the longest tail of relevance within pop culture.
This is because the movie is, unequivocally, a goddamned masterpiece. Jonathan Demme, with Tak Fujimoto as cinematographer, put us into the eyelines of bureaucrats, monsters, and idealists. This is not an easy place to be as an introvert, as nearly every one-on-one exchange in the film positions cameras so that we are moving back and forth between the perspectives of each character. Set pieces like Buffalo Bill’s basement and the Tennessee courthouse are the foundation upon which multiple decades of shitty thrillers have been built. People have Hannibal Lecter impressions that they probably got third-hand from some bottom-feeder of topical comedy like Family Guy: that’s a wild place to be, when the DNA of your film is so ubiquitous that people quote it without realizing they are quoting it.
And if you don’t come away from the film thinking about the ways that cultures and institutions devalue the lives of women, I don’t know what to say. Little Matt came away from this movie (and book) ready, 100% ready, to join the FBI and save the world. That was my legitimate goal for a little while there in the 1990s. If I had been able to sign up for some kind of agent-in-training program at twelve years old, I sure would have. The following years dulled and then killed that desire to be a Fed (interest in computers, music, girls, boys, movies, Magic: the Gathering, basketball, and city life have whipped me all over the place, career-wise), but I’ve never shaken my deep love for the movie.
One of the more obvious reasons for this is Clarice Starling and her father, a WV deputy sheriff. I am also the kid of a deputy in a rural WV county, and it was old hat to wonder when and if Dad would come home when he was working second or third shift. Clarice’s father dying after confronting two-bit thieves was too real. Silence also filmed in the Northern Panhandle of WV and in the Pittsburgh suburbs, which made it easier to identify with Clarice in the flashbacks, and with the victims and families of victims in the film. I’d recognize the grey skies, brown rivers, and drab homes of Appalachia anywhere. The most egregious place-as-another-place, for me, is not the current trend of filming Atlanta to be other cities, but it is when something films in pristine, crisp British Columbia and then expects a West Virginia boy to believe it is his soggy mountain home.
There are other reasons to latch onto the film. In junior high, I placed second-highest in the state on an pre-ACT test, and was subsequently recruited by Johns Hopkins University all the way through graduation (their zeal tapered off a little at the end there as my grades dipped). Lecter’s facility is in Baltimore, just like the college, and I always felt this random kinship with Charm City thanks to Johns Hopkins and Thomas Harris. I was also born in Maryland, so any time that kid me encountered a story set in places that I’d been or lived, it was more enticing. I also gravitated toward Clarice’s struggle to be valued and seen despite her accent and the fact that she looks, as Hannibal jabs, like “a well-scrubbed, hustling rube with a little good taste.”
The Criterion restoration of the film also showcases the incredible beauty that they mined out of horror and squalor. If you’ve not seen the restoration cut of the film, and your memory of it is from some long-forgotten afternoon on TNT, I suggest giving it another go.
Because again, it is easy to be dismissive because of decades of people stealing iconography established in this movie. True crime is big business: there is a comfort in learning of a crime and then seeing it solved within the hour. It can be calming for someone like myself with a country-sized dose of anxiety. But I often revisit Silence when I tire of the second-rate plotlines and gimmickry of other psychological thrillers. Thomas Harris, for whatever reason, has something for me that other writers in the genre lack. It may well be because his stories don’t end when the hero captures the villain: I am denied that burst of dopamine and calm that accompanies the clanging of a gavel on Law & Order. Silence of the Lambs, for instance, follows up the capture of Buffalo Bill with Clarice’s FBI graduation ceremony and a terrifying phone call from the escaped Lecter. Manhunter ends with Will Graham seeking out the Tooth Fairy’s next victim, just so he can see her: while Dolarhyde may be dead, the killer has lived on in Graham’s mind. Hannibal, a book that Harris wrote solely so that he could keep his contract and his rights to his characters (and which, to be crass, sucks shit), ends with Clarice drawn as a lover into the broken reality of Hannibal. The television series Hannibal is a psychedelic deconstruction of Harris’ characters and I marvel at some of its visuals and audacity, but often it feels like someone doing an acoustic cover set of another person’s songs: there are bits of brilliance in there, but most of it is coming through despite the intentions of the performer.
There are other parts of Silence’s legacy that have been talked about by others elsewhere, and you are welcome to seek them out. I’m too close to the movie and book to be anything but an apologist despite my best efforts. Perhaps alternate-dimension Special Agent Roberson would have felt differently about it. I’ll ask him if ever I meet him.
Other 1991 Candidates: Terminator 2: Judgment Day; Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves; Beauty and the Beast; Hook; Hot Shots; Prince of Tides; Thelma & Louise; LA Story; King Ralph; The Hard Way; Hudson Hawk; Dutch; Late for Dinner; City of Hope; My Girl; Fried Green Tomatoes
I turn 40 in December. To commemorate the milestone, I’m writing 40 short biographical essays pertaining to a movie per year of my life.