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Clarice Starling first appeared on screen in 1991 Thesilenceofthelambs; the feature film 2001 Hannibal follow-up, and the CBS Series Clarice debuts this week. The immediate association of the manager has always been with the killers she pursues for the FBI – but meet again Lambs offers a reminder of another formidable antagonist.
Thesilenceofthelambs, which swept through the top five Oscar categories and is the only horror film to win the Best Picture award, still stands as an expertly directed, acted, and edited film – with one weak point being the characterization of Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine), as problematic 30 years ago as it is today. Overall, however, the highlights are still very effective. Even when you know it is happening, Hannibal Lecter’s (Anthony Hopkins) escape plan involving a freshly harvested face mask – an astonishing display of how he really is the “monster” everyone told him about. ‘to be – is shocking every time.
It’s the little details that can’t help but stay with you: the “American Girl” introduction by Buffalo Bill’s potential victim Catherine Martin (Brooke Smith); the moment Catherine’s mother, Senator Ruth Martin (Diane Baker), gasps: “Take this thing back to Baltimore! when Lecter, strapped to a stretcher in his now iconic mask, crudely crosses a line of etiquette.
But there is a subtext that runs throughout the film that completely envelops Clarice (Jodie Foster). If you are looking for it, you can’t miss it. She’s still just an FBI intern when she’s tasked with interrogating an imprisoned Lecter to help catch the rampaging Buffalo Bill, but despite her youth and inexperience, we see how smart and capable she is. She keeps her cool even under the crudest and terrifying circumstances (and yet she’s not over a well-earned parking lot crying afterward, if the situation calls for it).
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But Clarice is a woman. And Thesilenceofthelambs, who is about a serial killer who targets women so he can make a costume out of their skin, is very careful to establish that Clarice exists in a world where men –all men, not just those who happen to be maniacs, unquestionably have the upper hand.
Given the context (law enforcement, early 1990s), this is partly due to the circumstances. But Thesilenceofthelambs finds so many ways to remind the viewer, both subtly and incredibly overtly, that Clarice’s instincts are all the more remarkable as she finds herself in a realm where the male gaze is frequently armed – and just as often radiates directly on her. We see this from the start of the film; in the opening scene, Clarice is summoned to meet her FBI mentor, Jack Crawford (Scott Glenn), and her trip to her office sees her sneak into an elevator full of dominating men. She casts her gaze upward in a well-honed display of forced nonchalance, and the implication is clear: Clarice has grown accustomed to weaving her way through spaces filled with men and behaving accordingly.
Ignoring the occasional sexism is just part of her day at this point. There’s another moment at FBI Headquarters, later in the movie, when Clarice and her best friend Ardelia (Candyman’s Kasi Lemmons) are jogging and a whole bunch of guys turn around to ogle them. Women, who throw study questions at each other while they exercise, don’t even notice it. It’s when misogyny compromises her ability to do her job that Clarice is keen enough to bristle. Even Crawford, who apparently respects her otherwise, is not immune to the Impulse, ostensibly excluding Clarice from a private conversation with a West Virginia cop about one of Buffalo Bill’s victims.
“Starling, when I told that sheriff we shouldn’t be speaking in front of a woman – that really burned you, didn’t it?” he said later in semi-apology. “It was just smoke, Starling. I had to get rid of him.
“This is important, Mr. Crawford. The cops are watching you to see how to act, ”she replies, mentally reliving the uncomfortable after-effects of her actions: In a small room filled with uniformed cops dressed in identical hats, the camera moves and we can see the men measuring her. with a mixture of curiosity and hostility. And she doesn’t just have to deal with stares and glares. Despite being an FBI intern working on an extremely sensitive case, she is beaten up in several professional settings, whether it’s by Dr. Lecter’s smarmy prison psychiatrist, Dr. Chilton (Anthony Heald), or one insect experts she consults about Buffalo Bill. moth fetish. She gracefully hijacks both offers, and you get a feeling that it has happened before and will happen again.
The most frustrating part of it all is that Clarice is so well suited to follow Buffalo Bill – and she’s ultimately the one who draws him in the end – precisely. because it’s a woman. She’s roughly the same age as Bill’s victims, and she comes from a small town, working class just like them, and discovers details that a male agent might miss. During the autopsy in West Virginia, she notices the victim’s sparkly nail polish and triple ear piercings, deducing the girl does not look like a local. Later, she explores the room once occupied by Buffalo Bill’s first victim – left untouched since her murder – and instinctively discovers a mine of racy Polaroids hidden in the girl’s jewelry box. This implies, perhaps, that Clarice once had her own similar private hiding place.
After seeing the dress model that makes her make Buffalo Bill’s ‘Woman’s Costume’ motif, her intuition leads her to the house where he starves and robs his victims – while the rest of the FBI follows a red herring to hundreds. of kilometers. The reason Clarice was even in the right town in the first place is because she shot one of the threads that Lecter was hanging in front of her. With Ardelia, she talks about it, and the two women realize that Buffalo Bill actually knew his first victim: “What is this guy doing? He covets. How do we start to covet? We covet what we see every day. “
The male gaze doesn’t always lead to murder, of course. But this is the case in Thesilenceofthelambs-and finally, a woman who is so used to being scrutinized by her taps into that experience to catch a killer. We all remember Lecter’s line about The Enumerator and Buffalo Bill dancing to “Goodbye Horses,” but the most insidious horror in the whole movie might just be the one that doesn’t jump off the screen at first.
It will be interesting to see if Clarice, which resumes a year after the events of Thesilenceofthelambs, continues to explore this theme and to deepen this too relatable aspect of the world of Clarice. The new series will debut February 11 on CBS.
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