Clarice Starling first appeared on screen in 1991 The silence of the lambs; feature since 2001 Hannibal followed and It would be CBS Clarice starts this week. The immediate association of the leader has always been with the killers he’s after for the FBI – but reviewing Miei provides a reminder of another formidable antagonist.
The silence of the lambs, which won the top five Oscars and is the only horror film to win the best picture, still remains a film directed, performed and edited by experts – with a weakness being the characterization of Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine) , as problematic 30 years ago, as it is today. However, the big moments are still extremely effective. Even when you know he’s coming, Hannibal Lecter’s (Anthony Hopkins) escape plan involves a freshly harvested human face mask – an amazing demonstration of how he’s really the “monster” everyone’s been talking about. – It’s shocking every time.
Here are the little details that just can’t stay with you: the introduction of “American Girl” by Buffalo’s future victim Bill Catherine Martin (Brooke Smith); the moment Catherine’s mother, Senator Ruth Martin (Diane Baker), gasps thing back to Baltimore! ”When Lecter, tied to a small room in his face mask, now iconic, roughly crosses a line of etiquette.
But there is a subtext that runs throughout the film that wraps Clarice (Jodie Foster). If you look for it, you can’t miss it. She’s still just an FBI intern when she’s tasked with questioning a closed Lecter as a way to help catch Buffalo Bill, but despite her youth and inexperience, we see how smart and capable she is. She stays calm even in the most terrible and terrifying circumstances (and yet she is no better off crying over a well-earned parking lot after that, if the situation demands it).
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But Clarice is a woman. And The silence of the lambs, which refers to a serial killer who targets women so that they can make a suit out of their skin, is very careful to establish that Clarice exists in a world where men …all men, not just those who happen to be maniacs – no doubt have mastery.
Given the framework (law enforcement, early 1990s), some of these are due to circumstances. But The silence of the lambs finds so many ways to remind the viewer, both subtly and incredibly openly, that Clarice’s instincts are all the more remarkable as she is in a realm where the male gaze is frequently armed – and just as radiant. directly to her. We see this right from the beginning of the film; In the opening scene, Clarice is summoned to meet her FBI mentor, Jack Crawford (Scott Glenn), and her journey to his office sees her slipping into an elevator filled with men approaching her. She looks up at a well-perfected display of forced nonchalance, and the implication is clear: Clarice has grown accustomed to pushing herself into spaces full of men and behaving accordingly.
Ignoring casual sexism is only part of her day right now. There is another moment at the FBI headquarters later in the film, when Clarice and her BFF Ardelia (Candyman’s Kasi Lemmons) are jogging and a whole pack of boys are heading towards them. Women, who ask each other study questions while exercising, don’t even notice. When misogyny compromises her ability to do her job, Clarice thinks hard enough to get bogged down. Even Crawford, who otherwise apparently respects her, is not immune to impulse, clearly excluding Clarice from a private conversation with a West Virginia police officer about one of Buffalo Bill’s victims.
“Starling, when I told the sheriff we shouldn’t talk in front of a woman – that really burned you, didn’t it?” he says later as a semi-apology. “It was just smoke, Starling. I had to get rid of him. ”
“It matters, Mr. Crawford.” The cops look at you to see how to act, ”she replies, mentally reliving the awkward consequences of her actions: in a small room full of uniformed cops dressed in identical hats, the camera spins around and we can see how the men magnify it. with a mixture of curiosity and hostility. And you don’t just have to deal with the looks and the looks. Despite a trainee FBI is working on a highly sensitive case, she is hit in several professional situations, whether it’s fucking psychiatrist dr. Lecter, Dr. Chilton (Anthony Heald), or one of the experts in insects he consults about Buffalo Bill moth fetish. She gracefully diverts both offers and you get the impression that it happened before and will happen again.
The most frustrating part of all of this is that Clarice is so apt to follow Buffalo Bill – and, in the end, is the one who finally catches him – just because she is a woman. He’s about the same age as Bill’s victims and comes from a small, working-class town like them, and he notices details that a male agent might miss. During the autopsy in West Virginia, he noticed the victim’s glittering nail polish and triple piercings, deducing that the girl did not look like a local. Later, she explores the bedroom once occupied by Buffalo Bill’s first victim – left untouched since her murder – and instinctively discovers a lot of loving Polaroids tucked into the girl’s jewelry box. Clarice is thought to have once had her own private hiding place.
After seeing the clothing pattern that makes her realize Buffalo Bill’s “woman’s suit” motif, her intuition leads her to the house where he starves and skins his victims – while the rest of the FBI pursues a red herring hundreds of miles away. The reason Clarice was in the right city is because she pulled on one of the wires Lecter hung in front of her. With Ardelia, she talks to her, and the two women realize that Buffalo Bill met her first victim: “What is this guy doing? He covets. How do we begin to covet first? We crave what we see every day. ”
The male gaze does not always lead to murder, of course. But it happens in The silence of the lambs-and finally, a woman who is so accustomed to being examined by it, accesses that experience to catch a killer. We all remember Lecter’s lines about the reviewer and Buffalo Bill dancing to “Goodbye Horses,” but the most insidious horror in the entire film might be the one that doesn’t jump off the screen at first.
It will be interesting to see if Clarice, which plays a year after the events of The silence of the lambs, continues to explore this theme and delve into this overly relatable aspect of Clarice’s world. The new series will debut on February 11 on CBS.
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