Twenty-five years later: The Silence of the Lambs

At this point, it might seem like there’s nothing new to say—at least by me—about The Silence of the Lambs. I’ve discussed both the book and the movie here at length, and I’ve devoted countless posts to unpacking Hannibal Lecter’s most recent televised incarnation. Yet like all lasting works of art, and I’d argue that both the novel and the film qualify, The Silence of the Lambs continues to reveal new aspects when seen from different angles, especially now that exactly a quarter of a century has gone by since the movie’s release. Watching it again today, for instance, it’s hard not to be struck by how young Clarice Starling really is: Jodie Foster was just twenty-eight when the film was shot, and when I look at Starling from the perspective of my middle thirties, she comes off as simultaneously more vulnerable and more extraordinary. (I have an uneasy feeling that it’s close to the way Jack Crawford, not to mention Lecter, might have seen her at the time.) And it only highlights her affinities to Buffalo Bill’s chosen prey. This isn’t exactly a revelation: that sense of a dark sisterhood is a pivotal plot point in the original story. But it’s one thing to grasp this intellectually and quite another to go back and see how cannily the movie casts actresses as Bill’s victims who subtly suggest Foster’s own facial features, just a little wider. And it’s more clear than ever how Foster’s early fame, her passage into movies like Taxi Driver, her strange historical linkage to a stalker and failed assassin, and her closely guarded personal life gave her the tools and aura to evoke Starling’s odd mixture of toughness and fragility.

What’s also obvious now, unfortunately, is the extent to which Starling was—and remains—an anomaly in the genre. Starling, as embodied by Foster, has inspired countless female leads in thrillers in the decades since. (When I found myself obliged to create a similar character for my own novels, my thoughts began and ended with her.) Yet aside from Dana Scully, the results have been less than memorable. Starling has always been eclipsed by the shadow of the monster in the cell beside her, but in many ways, she was a harder character to crack, and the fact that she works so well in her written and cinematic incarnations is the result of an invisible, all but miraculous balancing act. None of the later efforts in the same direction have done as well. Christopher McQuarrie, while discussing the characters played by Emily Blunt in Edge of Tomorrow and Rebecca Ferguson in Mission: Impossible—Rogue Nation, gets close to the heart of the challenge:

They’re not men. They’re women that are not trying to be men…To me, more than anything, Rebecca is mature, elegant, confident, and at peace. Her only vulnerability in the movie is she’s just as fucked as everybody else…Usually when you want to create vulnerability for a woman, it’s about giving her a neurosis—a fear or some emotional arc that, ultimately, gets the better of her, whether it’s a need for revenge or need for redemption. You know, “Her father was killed by a twister, so she has to defeat twisters no matter what,” and I wouldn’t have any of that either. It simply was: you’re here on your own terms and you’re in a shitty situation created by people in power above you. How do you escape this situation and maintain your dignity?

Which isn’t to say that Starling didn’t suffer from her share of father issues. But those last two sentences capture her appeal as well as any I’ve ever read.

Time also offers some surprising perspectives on Lecter himself, or at least the version of him we see here. The Silence of the Lambs, like Rocky, is one of those classic movies that has been diminished in certain respects by our knowledge of the sequels that followed it. Conventional wisdom holds that Anthony Hopkins’s take on Lecter became broader and more self-indulgent with every installment, and it’s fashionable to say that the best version of the character was really Brian Cox in Manhunter, or, more plausibly, Mads Mikkelsen on Hannibal. It’s a seductively contrarian argument, but it’s also inherently ridiculous. As great as the novel is, we probably wouldn’t be talking about Lecter or Thomas Harris or The Silence of the Lambs at all if it weren’t for Hopkins’s performance. And in many ways, it’s his facile, even superficial interpretation of the character that made the result so potent. Hopkins was discovered and mentored by Laurence Olivier, whom he understudied in August Strindberg’s Dance of Death, and it helps to view his approach to Lecter through the lens of the quote from Olivier that I cited here the other week: “I’m afraid I do work mostly from the outside in. I usually collect a lot of details, a lot of characteristics, and find a creature swimming about somewhere in the middle of them.” Hopkins’s creature is the finest example I know of a classically trained stage lion slumming it in a juicy genre part, and even if it wasn’t a particularly difficult performance once Hopkins figured out the voice, still—he figured out that voice.

And as soon as we acknowledge, or even embrace, the degree to which Lecter is a fantasy that barely survives twelve minutes onscreen, the more this approach seems like a perfectly valid solution to this dance of death. If Lecter seemed increasingly hammy and unconvincing in the movie versions of Hannibal and Red Dragon, that isn’t a failure on Hopkins’s part: making him the main attraction only brought out the artificiality and implausibility that had been there all along, and Hopkins just did what any smart actor would have done under the circumstances—take the money and try to salvage his own sense of fun. (As it happens, Ted Tally’s script for Red Dragon is surprisingly good, a thoughtful, inventive approach to tough material that was let down by the execution. If I had to choose, I’d say he did a better job on the page than Bryan Fuller ultimately did with the same story.) With the passage of time, it’s increasingly clear that Lecter falls apart even as you look at him, and that he’s a monster like the shark in Jaws or the dinosaurs that would follow two years later in Jurassic Park: they’re only convincing when glimpsed in flashes or in darkness, and half of the director’s art lies in knowing when to cut away. Put him front and center, as the sequels did, and the magic vanishes. Asking why Hopkins is so much more effective in The Silence of the Lambs than in the films that followed is like asking why the computer effects in Jurassic Park look better than their equivalents today: it isn’t about technology or technique, but about how the film deploys it to solve particular problems. Twelve minutes over twenty-five years is about as much scrutiny as Hopkins’s wonderful Lecter could sustain. And the rest, as they say, should have been silence.

The starlet’s dilemma

Over the past week or so, while spending a lot of quality time with our newborn on the living room couch, my wife has burned through the entire first season of Revenge on Netflix. It’s a great, trashy show that moves swiftly and doles out surprises at a satisfying rate, and it benefits enormously from the presence of Madeleine Stowe. Stowe, as those of us old enough to remember can attest, is talented, charismatic, and still a knockout, and although she was never quite a major star, she was notable enough to be granted an entry in David Thomson’s Biographical Dictionary of Film. Then, for close to a decade, she disappeared. And as tempting as it is to wonder where she’s been all this time, her long absence isn’t hard to figure out: it’s simply one of countless illustrations of the fact that an attractive woman’s options for starring roles in Hollywood dry up sometime before she turns forty. Stowe is currently lucky enough to be anchoring a hit series, but she’s a notable exception. As a glance at her fellow cast members in Bad Girls is enough to confirm, it’s far more common for promising young actresses to simply disappear, unless they’re smart or fortunate enough to make good, hard career choices at a time when they’re most vulnerable to being thrown away.

This, in a word, is the starlet’s dilemma—the complicated series of obstacles that an actress needs to navigate if she wants to have a career past her early thirties. And although it may not seem to hold many lessons for the rest of us, it fascinates me largely because it’s only the most visible example of a predicament that every artist faces sooner or later. Even the most successful and prolific career in the arts boils down to a finite number of choices: you can’t take more than one starring part or write more than one novel at a time. We make these decisions using all the information available to us at the moment, but it’s often not until after years have passed and we look back at our body of work that we start to see what the real shape of our lives has been. Throughout it all, we’re haunted by the fact that our work may cease to be marketable overnight, and that there are plenty of bright young things eager to take our place. Making the kinds of choices that result in a sustainable career requires a maturity and tactical intelligence that few of us have at twenty, thirty, or even forty. And as Stephen Rodrick’s wonderful New York Times piece on Lindsay Lohan and Paul Schrader reminds us, even beauty, talent, and early luck can’t prevent a promising career from being derailed beyond hope of return.

Which brings us to Jennifer Lawrence. At first glance, Lawrence is in an enviable position: she occupies the center of one enormous franchise, serves a valued supporting player in another, and has the talent to take on a wide range of projects. At twenty-two, she’s made all the right choices. Yet her career over the next ten years is likely to resemble a sort of Hunger Games in itself, as she accepts or turns down roles while fending off the incursions of the next wave of talented newcomers. Personally, I can’t help but wonder how she felt watching Jodie Foster at the Golden Globes on Sunday, shortly after claiming an award of her own. Foster’s speech—the most riveting I’ve ever seen at an awards ceremony—stands as a reminder of the tremendous odds against any actress, Lawrence included, having the chance to occupy such a podium under similar circumstances. A few have carped at the fact that Foster, at fifty, seems too young to be receiving a lifetime achievement award, which ignores the fact that any actress who is still bankable at such an age deserves a prize. Actresses face the same pressures that all creative professionals do, except at a drastically accelerated rate, and in public, and the fact that so few make it this far only underlines the impossibility of the task. And even for someone as talented as Lawrence, the clock is already ticking.

Faced with this situation, young actresses have three possible options. They can trust in their talent and continue to seek out challenging lead and supporting parts, potentially in smaller movies or television; they can move into producing or directing; or they can extend their viability for a few years by engaging in various forms of cosmetic enhancement. Given the daunting odds against the first two courses of action, it isn’t surprising that most choose the third. It’s the same choice any artist makes when he or she decides to stick with the safe and familiar—the only difference is that starlets wear their decisions on their faces. And while trading away their looks in the long term for a few extra seasons of bankability may seem shortsighted, it takes an exceptionally resourceful personality to take the harder road. Which is part of the reason why our best actresses tend to age more gracefully. You can say that Meryl Streep has continued to look great well into her sixties because it was clear that she had the talent to remain a commanding actress without resorting to desperate cosmetic measures, but I’d like to think that the causal arrow runs in the other direction: a woman so smart in her acting is likely to be wise enough to avoid plastic surgery, or at least intelligent enough to be subtle about it. In any case, I don’t think it’s an accident that Hollywood’s smartest women tend to age almost preternaturally well—call it the Kathryn Bigelow effect. And it’s a reminder to the rest of us, as if we needed it, that in the long run, smart is the only kind of sexy that counts.