Team Experience tag-teams a revisit of 1991's Best Picture The Silence of the Lambs for its 25th anniversary. And now... the finale.
Part 1 The case. The players. An FBI "errand"
Part 2 Buffalo Bill's next "Special Lady"
Part 3 Clarice & Lecter's "Quid Pro Quo"
Part 4 Monstrous escape. Gruesome realizations.
pt. 5 by Timothy Brayton
Jose left us in the wake of a most repulsive discovery, and Agent Starling is beside herself with ragehorror.
01:31:55 "And he c- he can sew, this guy, he's very skilled-" Jodie Foster is so amazing in this brief little exchange. Pacing back and forth jabbing her hands in the air with anxious fury. It's such a perfect extension of the arc she's built all movie: she's horrified and disgusted, but funnels all of that into hyper-professionalism.
01:32:09 Starling's frenzy in the homey little suburban bedroom is sharply contrasted with the Tom Clancy-thriller interior of an FBI plane, a sleek masculine space that is one of the conspicuously "lit" spaces in the film. Here is where Jack Crawford informs her that all is well, and the boys are riding in to save the day. He is, of course, wrong.
01:33:11 Ah, the famed mountain valleys of Calumet City, just outside of Chicago.
01:33:26 In the pit of horrors, Catherine Martin has struck upon an idea: using food scraps to trap Buffalo Bill's – make that Jame Gumb's – precious pet dog. It's a great reminder that the film would rather give its primary victim strength to draw on than just make her a bundle of nerves. [More...]
01:33:56 Doggie reaction shots are just the best.
01:34:00 Close-ups of psychos with bloody human scalp-wigs are not the best.
Time for some absolutely top-notch cross-cutting. A sweaty, filthy Catherine whistles hoarse, calls for Precious, and moans curses, while Buffalo Bill makes himself up as a woman, as the Q Lazzarus song "Goodbye Horses" pounds away, connecting the two sequences (and a terrific song choice it is; but then, Demme films always have great music. Kudos to him and music supervisor Sharon Doyle).
The close-ups on Catherine's face and her feeble POV shots of the lip of the pit are harshly contrasted with striking, inhuman shots of pieces of Bill's body, divorced from context or meaning. It's as tense as hell, with the young woman in the bit cut against the monster, in a tremendously unpredictable moment.
Then, we get to the full-body shot of Bill gyrating to the music, and an image that I just do not know what to do with. We've already spent some time in this tag-team talking about the film's problems with transgender representations, but none of that prepares us for the prurient, creepy shot of Bill's ad hoc sex change.
What do we do with this one, readers? Vivid psychological horror in the flesh, or exploitative and off-putting in all the wrong ways? I am open to all arguments.
01:36:50 While the FBI boys rush off to save the day, Starling patiently interviews locals. A terrific shift in the film's energy when we least expect it, and good for keeping us on our toes in the endgame.
01:37:37 And now the film engages in the sneakiest lying-through-editing since I don't know when.
So much going on here the FBI sets up a sting outside Jame Gumb's house in Calumet City, Catherine threatens the dog, Gumb runs around sputtering, and some hideous doorbell rig starts ringing as the FBI stands pushing the button outside.
This is all scrupulously honest, and completely misleading. The scene is tense on its own, now that Catherine has gotten her captor real mad, and the cockeyed shot of the doorbell somehow is what always pushes it into the stratosphere for me. And everything gets wound tighter and tighter, until-
01:39:58 After being copied God knows how many times, this shocking twist has lost a lot of its edge, and can't help but feel dishonest. But oh, the audacity! When The Silence of the Lambs was new, this gesture of pure audience-manipulating cruelty was like a lightning bolt. Plus, it means that we get to see Our Jodie square off against the bad guy, and surely that's the right development?
01:40:29 Crawford realizes what's going on with a horrified "Clarice…" Nice to see Scott Glenn get a top-notch close-up of his very own.
01:40:50 Foster's stone-faced response to Ted Levine's slurry "was she a great big fat person?" is so great. The absolute banality of their interaction is another great interjection of momentum-shifting weirdness that heightens the tension – this is Hitchcock's "bomb under the table" approach to thriller-making done to perfection. Or "woman in the pit", same principles apply.
01:42:53 Starling messily fumbles for her gun, all without taking her eyes off Gumb. A great character beat, a great way to amp up the tension yet again.
01:44:28 After chasing Gumb into the basement, Starling stalks him all the way to the super-creepy basement.
01:45:08 Gotta love the precision with which Starling still remembers to secure the area.
Note how shots of the dog and Clarice at the lip of the pit do not include all the negative shadow space as when Bill leaned over it.
Catherine, the other officers will be here any minute now!"
01:46:10 Oh Clarice, you are a liar.
01:47:09 Dutch angles in a freaky wooden hallway with a bare bulb! Oscar or not, we are fully in horror movie territory.
01:47:37 For the climax, Starling fumbles in the dark, as Bill stares at her with night-vision goggles, letting her get freakishly close as he just watches and watches. Hey, so this is the first time that a night-vision scene was used in a horror/thriller movie, right?
01:48:47 SONOFABITCH THAT'S CREEPY AS HELL. It didn't occur to me until just now breaking it down for this article, but it's kind of amazing that The Silence of the Lambs has no fewer than three protracted thriller sequences in its last 25 minutes, all of them different, and all of them absolutely stomach-churning.
01:49:30 In comes the purifying daylight to make all the nightmares go away. The animalistic frenzy on Foster's face is so perfect and so earned.
01:50:15 Despite it being symbolic of the tormenting monster who kidnapped her, Catherine wants the dog.
01:50:43 And so Clarice M. Starling graduates from Quantico and can be a full FBI agent, so she can do fun stuff like this all the time!
01:51:04 As our reward for all the grueling terror of so much of the movie to this point, I'm really grateful to the production design team for the frivolous, playful gesture of the FBI Cake.
01:52:03 "Well, Clarice, have the lambs stopped screaming?"
The way Foster's expression simply goes blank when she hears Lecter's voice is the cherry on top of an amazing, amazing performance.
Dr. Lecter? Dr. Lecter? Dr. Lecter?"
01:52:45 As the strength creeps back into Foster's voice and the music starts to gradually shift louder, the film prepares to leave us with one last punch in the gut. Leavened with morbid humor, but still, this is pretty bleak stuff. Evil's out there, and if you knock down one bad guy, another bad guy just pops right up.
01:53:28 And with that, the shark swims away into the sea of humanity, looking to have an old friend for dinner.
The End. We hope you enjoyed our 25th anniversary revisit. Thanks again to Tim, Angelica, Jose, and Kieran for joining me in this illuminating descent into horror greatness. The film has aged well despite losing a bit of its sick punch due to pop culture saturation / influence. Please unleash all your leftover thoughts on Bill's dance, Clarice's bravery, its Oscar haul, and the future of Catherine and Precious in the comments. Thank you for reading. - Nathaniel
Tim Brayton Tim discovered he was a cinephile after accidentally watching all three and a half hours of Seven Samurai in one sitting a the delicate age of 14. Many years later, he spends all his time devouring everything from trashy horror to glossy Hollywood classics to, of course, animation past and present, which he writes about for the Film Experience. He also reviews films most days at his inexplicably-named blog, Antagony & Ecstasy. [All Tim TFE articles]