Silence of the Lambs is one of those films which I seem to watch every few years — always on a rainy day — because it’s showing on free-to-air TV. I first saw it as a teenager. (I was making Japanese flashcards in the living room and my mother was knitting, I think. It was raining outside.)
WILL THIS FILM ANNOY A FEMINIST?
For me, the annoyance was offset by the pleasure derived from a perfect response.
Clarice Starling is left out of a discussion between detectives and agents — all male — because her superior says he doesn’t want to discuss grisly details (in front of a woman). Rather than speak up at the time, Starling takes the opportunity to creep around a house and look for telling clues. Later, on the way back to head office, the guy who excluded Starling has noticed that she may have been put out, and explains that he was only trying to get the men out of there (or something). He says it doesn’t matter — tells her not to take it to heart.
Clarice Starling replies that indeed it does matter. The men look to him in order to know how to act, and so it very much matters. This is a feminist line if ever I heard one, and a satisfying one, too. Don’t we all love hearing fictional characters deliver great comebacks at exactly the right time? The kind we wish we’d been able to give…
The ending is significant in any story because of its positioning, and I’m noticing that a number of films which are otherwise feminist in tone don’t take the risk of leaving an audience thinking the message is too feminist friendly, because they almost take back any messages that might have been absorbed earlier.
In this film I made a gagging sound when Clarice is congratulated by her male mentor, who tells her that her father would be proud. Clarice Starling is thereby accepted into the world of men, but more significantly, the assumption is that she has been after male approval this whole time, and that her worth as a human being is dependent on acceptance of father figures. A father’s approval is indeed significant. But why not her mother’s approval, as a counter example?
Let’s not forget that in the story it is mainly young women being killed. (As usual.) A feminist may well be sick and tired of that. And no, the fact that several men are killed also is really no consolation.
There is also a variation on street harassment, from Miggs and also Hannibal Lecter, and although Miggs gets his punishment, Lecter walks free, which is necessary of course, otherwise there’d be no sequel.
Less believable to me is that almost the whole world seem against Clarice Starling. Obviously this is to build empathy in the audience, but it’s just a bit much that even the head of the prison is so lascivious. Sometimes I feel in stories that conflict is ratcheted right up and surpasses its effectiveness. The clumsy flirtations of the lab scientists have Clarice Starling in yet another sexually charged situation — do male writers think it even possible that a man does not interact in this way with a young woman? — but their efforts are less intimidating because of their nerd-cred. In real life, of course, a guy with nerd-cred is no more or less intimidating — this is a slightly annoying trope.
DOES IT PASS THE BECHDEL TEST?
Given that the baddies are both men and Clarice Starling is as monomoniacal as the men she works alongside in regards to catching Buffalo Bill, no, Clarice never does talk to another woman about something other than a man. There is a scene in which she bounces ideas off her friend who is a woman, but they’re talking about work.
Is this a problem? Probably not.
AND IS IT ANY GOOD?
Very good, though looks slightly low budget by today’s standards.
The ending is problematic.
A few years ago I happened across the paperback in a secondhand book store and decided to actually read it in order to find out just how, exactly, Clarice ends up at the right house while the other police ends up at the wrong one. This is one weakness of the film, at least for dimwits such as me. Caught up in the action, I never did understand how they got the guy at exactly the right time. When I read the novel I worked it out but I’ve already forgotten the answer.
Needless to say — that old cliche — the novel is better than the film, though the two can exist quite happily in the world. It’s easy to forget that this was a bit of a groundbreaking novel, because so many similar have come out since.
