Silence of the Lambs
Apr. 15th, 2014 06:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ivyficI watched Silence of the Lambs last night for the first time. It has a bit of a Casablanca problem--I watch so many procedurals, and so many of them draw a straight line back to Silence of the Lambs, in format, in characters, and often in plot, that the original has left me...meh.
It has been rightly criticised as being transphobic (and how). I was also noticing just how much it disempowers Clarice. Throughout the movie, her vulnerability is front and center. From a shot of her in an elevator at the beginning, being towered over by other (male) recruits, to showing her with wet hair sitting on the floor like a little girl, to showing her freshly showered. The one thing I'm grateful for is that she's always fully clothed (even in the after shower scene). She is in this movie to be threatened. That is her purpose. It is a horror film--and you always need a frightened woman for a horror film.
What really surprised me, though, is just how much she does not solve this case. I have seen a ton of episodes of TV that steal their plot straight from this, and in those, the dynamic is: killer demands personal information in return for help, main character aquiesces against their better judgment, killer takes advantage of them, main character outwits/outguns them though remaining emotionally battered.
That's not actually what happens in Silence of the Lambs. What happens is Clarice barely even hesitates before emotionally prostituting herself to Lecter, which she does because of her ambition. There's that scene in the courthouse where she repeatedly refuses to solve it herself and demands that he tell her exactly what to do. Which he does. He then escapes and decides not to pursue her because it would be bad form or something. That means Clarice remains Lecter's pawn. She never out anythings him. She never actually has a confrontation with him. Which makes Lecter the hero of the film, despite us watching him brutally murder people. He stands up for Clarice. murdering a man who sexually threatened her; he solves the case; and we only ever see him victimise men--all of which leave him as the character we uncomfortably root for. There's a reason that the last shot is of him.
Beyond this, when Clarice has an a-ha moment, its significance is completely undermined because Crawford has already figured it out. Crawford has figured it out by doing actual police work--once they had the pupa, his investigation uncovered the killer's identity. So Lecter's help, and Clarice's relationship with him, is entirely unnecessary. Furthermore, she ends up at the killer's house by dumb fucking luck, pursuing an avenue of investigation that she didn't want to pursue. It's not like she realized Crawford was on the wrong track and figured out where the killer really was. She just happened to stumble upon him. She also defeats him by dumb fucking luck. The whole climactic sequence is about her fear and her stumbling ineptitude. You can't really embody the male gaze more succinctly than the killer's night vision goggles trained on her shaking body as he repeatedly reaches out. In the end, it's only reflexes that win her the day. Compare this to, say, the end of Alien. While that also foregrounds Ripley's fear (as it is also a horror film), she manages to successfully execute a genius plan to defeat the alien, despite her fear. Clarice, on the other hand, stumbles around and shoots the killer more or less by chance.
Though we see Clarice being clever on several occasions, as pointed out above, her cleverness is never actually necessary to the resolution of the case. Her superpower is not her smarts, or her nerves of steel, but her ability to make herself vulnerable.
When I think about the episodes based on this, that moment when the hero (and it's always the male hero, in the episodes I can remember) makes himself vulnerable to the killer is always a mistake. Look at The X-Files' "Paper Hearts." The final confrontation is between Mulder and the serial killer he is being manipulated by. That episode is far more powerful, to me, than this movie was, because this movie never delivers on the threat that Clarice letting Lecter into her head is a mistake. She's not even the one who sets into motion the events that lead to his escape. Nothing she does with him has any consequences.
Tl;dr: what a disappointment, and not a great movie for portraying women.
Also, could they have been any more looking for a Jodi Foster lookalike when they cast Gillian Anderson as Dana Scully? She even has the same hair.
It has been rightly criticised as being transphobic (and how). I was also noticing just how much it disempowers Clarice. Throughout the movie, her vulnerability is front and center. From a shot of her in an elevator at the beginning, being towered over by other (male) recruits, to showing her with wet hair sitting on the floor like a little girl, to showing her freshly showered. The one thing I'm grateful for is that she's always fully clothed (even in the after shower scene). She is in this movie to be threatened. That is her purpose. It is a horror film--and you always need a frightened woman for a horror film.
What really surprised me, though, is just how much she does not solve this case. I have seen a ton of episodes of TV that steal their plot straight from this, and in those, the dynamic is: killer demands personal information in return for help, main character aquiesces against their better judgment, killer takes advantage of them, main character outwits/outguns them though remaining emotionally battered.
That's not actually what happens in Silence of the Lambs. What happens is Clarice barely even hesitates before emotionally prostituting herself to Lecter, which she does because of her ambition. There's that scene in the courthouse where she repeatedly refuses to solve it herself and demands that he tell her exactly what to do. Which he does. He then escapes and decides not to pursue her because it would be bad form or something. That means Clarice remains Lecter's pawn. She never out anythings him. She never actually has a confrontation with him. Which makes Lecter the hero of the film, despite us watching him brutally murder people. He stands up for Clarice. murdering a man who sexually threatened her; he solves the case; and we only ever see him victimise men--all of which leave him as the character we uncomfortably root for. There's a reason that the last shot is of him.
Beyond this, when Clarice has an a-ha moment, its significance is completely undermined because Crawford has already figured it out. Crawford has figured it out by doing actual police work--once they had the pupa, his investigation uncovered the killer's identity. So Lecter's help, and Clarice's relationship with him, is entirely unnecessary. Furthermore, she ends up at the killer's house by dumb fucking luck, pursuing an avenue of investigation that she didn't want to pursue. It's not like she realized Crawford was on the wrong track and figured out where the killer really was. She just happened to stumble upon him. She also defeats him by dumb fucking luck. The whole climactic sequence is about her fear and her stumbling ineptitude. You can't really embody the male gaze more succinctly than the killer's night vision goggles trained on her shaking body as he repeatedly reaches out. In the end, it's only reflexes that win her the day. Compare this to, say, the end of Alien. While that also foregrounds Ripley's fear (as it is also a horror film), she manages to successfully execute a genius plan to defeat the alien, despite her fear. Clarice, on the other hand, stumbles around and shoots the killer more or less by chance.
Though we see Clarice being clever on several occasions, as pointed out above, her cleverness is never actually necessary to the resolution of the case. Her superpower is not her smarts, or her nerves of steel, but her ability to make herself vulnerable.
When I think about the episodes based on this, that moment when the hero (and it's always the male hero, in the episodes I can remember) makes himself vulnerable to the killer is always a mistake. Look at The X-Files' "Paper Hearts." The final confrontation is between Mulder and the serial killer he is being manipulated by. That episode is far more powerful, to me, than this movie was, because this movie never delivers on the threat that Clarice letting Lecter into her head is a mistake. She's not even the one who sets into motion the events that lead to his escape. Nothing she does with him has any consequences.
Tl;dr: what a disappointment, and not a great movie for portraying women.
Also, could they have been any more looking for a Jodi Foster lookalike when they cast Gillian Anderson as Dana Scully? She even has the same hair.