D11 – Silence of the Lambs

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Discussion  11 – Silence of the Lambs (1991)

Director

Jonathan Demme

Genre

Police Procedure or Horror

Theme

Looking and Seeking

Noted for

Parallel Editing 

Strong Female Protagonist in a Man’s World

According to Laura Mulvey in her essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, the audience is supposed to take pleasure in watching a woman in danger, who lacks the resources to help herself. The audience members view the heroine through the male gaze of the camera, and so take on any or all of the traditional male roles of sympathetic rescuer, conquering rapist/killer, or ogling voyeur. All three positions regarding the heroine require our superiority to her. We see her in the scene, so we know more than her, and know what she should be doing. So, for example, in the murder scene, we ‘enjoy’ watching her stray into the villain’s lair towards her fate.

In The Silence of the Lambs the opening shots of young FBI agent Clarice Starling—a woman, alone, running breathlessly through the woods—are read as convention instructs us: that she is about to become a victim. However, as the title sequence proceeds, the Ž film turns our convention fueled expectations around, as Starling’s strength, determination and ability begin to impress us. We see her as an isolated female in the FBI academy—literally, patriarchal ‘law’—surrounded by tall, uniformly dressed men in an elevator as she heads towards the office of her paternal boss, Jack Crawford. By the time she has been dispatched by Crawford to interview the incarcerated Doctor Hannibal Lecter, she has been established as impressively able and ambitious; we want her to succeed, despite, and not because of, the patriarchal institution which contains her. In a Ž film which constantly emphasises the subtle and insidious pressures men put upon women with their gaze Starling is constantly ogled, chatted up, towered over, sexually harassed, and made to feel like a freak when she does not respond in the preferred, coyly ‘feminine’ manner. To emphasise this, Demme deliberately chooses to give the audience shots that correspond with Starling’s point of view. One example occurs when Crawford, in an effort to clear a room of bystanders, makes the excuse that there are ‘some things that cannot be discussed in front of a woman.’ He leaves Starling surrounded by a group of male deputies, who stare at her with a mixture of desire and sneering superiority. Because we are treated to Starling’s point of view, the audience is forced to experience how it feels to be stared at, rather than simply do the staring.

This gaze happens throughout the film. List at least three times the “male gaze” was accentuated in the film, and then explain how these scenes either challenged or reinforced Clarice’s character.