The Practice and Politics of "Freeing the Look": Jonathan Demme's The Silence of the Lambs

Much of the initial reaction to Jonathan Demme's film adaptation of The Silence of the Lambs (US, 1991) ¹ centered on the film's problematic depiction of serial killer Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine), as this depiction participated in a history of representing "deviant" sexuality and/or gender slippage as monstrous. Critics have either configured Buffalo Bill's monstrousness in terms of his potential transvestism and his links to "homophobic images of gay men," ² or they have located the monstrous in the depiction of Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) as deviant therapist. ³ Carol Watts complicates the "Bill-as-monster" model by asserting that his play at gender symbolizes the question "What does it mean to be a woman?" and she claims that he functions as a parody, demonizing postmodern concepts of self-fashioning and of performative gender. ⁴ In contrast, Diane Negra and Stephanie Wardrop explore the film's representations of gender and gender slippage as depictions that themselves constitute sites of potential monstrosity. ⁵ Wardrop, for example, effectively illustrates the problems associated with reading either Bill or the film's heroine, Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster), as figures interrogating contemporary gender crises. And for Judith Halberstam, the film's monster is everywhere and everyone. Lecter and Bill again function as the primary sites of monstrosity, although in Bill's case, this is precisely because he foregrounds the fact that "horror resides at the level of skin itself." ⁶

However, Buffalo Bill and Hannibal Lecter function in this film as, at best, superficial sites of monstrosity. From the film's opening shots, in which a predatory gaze follows Clarice Starling, this film posits sight, seeing, and the gaze as the greatest threats to safety and self. The unidentified gaze that initially follows Clarice appears throughout the film, though it becomes variously identified as that of Hannibal Lecter, of county policemen, and of Buffalo Bill, who uses infrared lenses to follow Clarice as she wanders blindly in the catacombs of his basement. This gaze is not one but many, even if Silence most often identifies this gaze as "male."

A decade later, the recent releases of Ridley Scott's Hannibal (US, 2001) and Brett Ratner's Red Dragon (US/Germany, 2002), compel a critical reassessment of the first, and far more significant, film in what is coming to be known as the "Hannibal Lecter Trilogy." On the one hand, that the two latter films focus so intently on Lecter complicates the question of who or what functions as the primary "monster" in all three films: the trilogy's very title suggests that the answer is clearly Lecter, yet this purported monster evolves into the trilogy's protagonist since he supplants Clarice Starling and becomes, perversely enough, the trilogy's hero—despite, or perhaps because of, his cannibalism, a point to which I will return. More significantly, however, the two recent films also make Silence's emphasis on the gaze seem that much more meaningful, primarily because the latter two films' approach to sight, seeing, and the gaze comes across as superficial and rather empty in comparison. Hannibal, in fact, effectively replaces the gaze with the voice—Lecter and Clarice engage in dialogues that echo, at times literally, their famous quid pro quo exchanges from the first film, but they do so via telephone and tape recorder, thereby impeding the possibility for the kind of visual exchange that signified so much in Silence. At the same time, Scott's film provides excessively lush visuals, a feast for the audience's eyes, including numerous images of downtown Florence and beautiful, misty establishing shots of Mason Verger's estate—coupled with excessively graphic representations of Hannibal's monstrous acts, including the grotesque spectacle in which he removes the crown of nemesis Paul Krendler's (Ray Liotta) head in order to serve the brain to Clarice (portrayed...