It Puts the Lotion on It's Skin, or It Gets the Hose Again

As I am in a self-reverential, navel-gazing mode (a habit of writers) I’ve been thinking about the year 1991, and my Netflix queue is made up of the key films from that year. I begin my trip back to 1991 with the Oscar-winning Best Picture of that year, Silence of the Lambs. It’s one of the few times I agree with the Academy, as it was my favorite film of that year as well. I own the DVD (unfortunately, the first release, not the Criterion Collection), and looked at it again the other day, so I have at seen it at least three times. The first time I saw it was on a cold, sunny February day at Loews Astor Plaza on Times Square, which was one of the few large houses left in Manhattan (I think it has been since carved up or done away with completely). I was with a girl whose response to scary movies was to bury her head into my arm; by the end of this film she was practically in my lap.

I regard Silence of the Lambs as a classic of its genre, and in fact, a film that rises above its genre. Even on my third viewing, it manages to create tension and suspense, and the performance by Anthony Hopkins will endure as one of the great depictions of evil in cinema history. He does this, intriguingly, by making Hannibal Lecter, dare I say, likeable. He’s witty, sophisticated, and even has a splinter of humanity, as his affection for Clarice Starling is evident. As Roger Ebert points out in his review, you’d love to have him as a dinner companion, as long as he didn’t eat you.

The credit can be spread around liberally. Jonathan Demme, who hasn’t made nearly as good a film since then, masterfully creates a sense of dread almost from the very beginning, and Ted Tally’s screenplay is economical without being dumbed down (I have not read the source novel). The editing is particularly brilliant, as the film contains one of the great head-fakes I’ve ever seen (the scene involving the ringing of doorbells at two different houses).

As for Jodie Foster as Starling, who also won the Oscar, I noticed a few things about her role that hadn’t sunk in before. She is playing a woman in a man’s world, which is reinforced many times, such as when she steps into an elevator at the FBI and is a petite woman surrounded by tall men, or the scene at the funeral home in West Virginia, where she musters the courage to politely tell all the local cops to get out. This ties in with the performance of Scott Glenn as her boss, Jack Crawford. At first glance this seems to be a matter-of-fact role, the kind that exists to give exposition and further the plot. But every scene he is with Starling there is a palpable awkwardness, as if he is containing something. When Lecter first meets Starling, he asks her whether Crawford lusts after her, and she shrugs the question off, but the question hangs there for the rest of the film. Crawford has used Starling because she is a young woman, will he ever think of her as just an agent?

When the film came out, there was some expression of dismay in the gay community that the killer, Jamie Gumb (aka Buffalo Bill) was a homosexual and gender-disoriented individual. I remember that there was a particularly angry article in the Village Voice. I can sort of see the point, because especially back then there weren’t that many characterizations of gay people in mainstream cinema—so when there is one, he’s a sadistic and twisted serial killer. On the other hand, every group has its bad apples, and artists can’t be forever looking over their shoulder, afraid they are going to offend someone. I believe it was Jean-Luc Godard who said that the most effective criticism of a film was to make another film, and hopefully there will be continue to be more films about gay people that portray them in the myriad ways that they are, good, bad and in-between.