So I rewatched “The Silence of the Lambs” a few nights ago and it got me thinking…
That’s the scariest fucking movie there’s ever been. As I pointed out to my assistant, there aren’t Xenomorphs…there ARE guys like that.
Hannibal Lector essentially takes Clarice Starling back through her early years and gets her to confront the things that motivate her and have driven her to her job. In the end, she may be a better, more balanced and self-aware person that at the beginning of the film.
So my question is: was Lector intentionally treating Starling as if she were a patient in need of treatment? Was that why he took an interest in her and held those conversations with her?
I can think of a few angles, given what we know of the character:
It’s a power trip. Lector is about exerting power of others, depending on how others react his response can be violent or not. Starling didn’t elicit his violent tendencies but he could still dominate her through his use of psychoanalysis.
He saw a person in Starling who was emotionally crippled in some way, and determined that it would be useful for her to go through some quick work with him and therefore traded his information for her revelation.
I’m honestly unsure which one of those answers I would choose.
Recall that, at the end, he calls to follow up with her and see how she’s getting along. That, too, could be a last shot at establishing his power over her, as she’s clearly rattled by his call. But earlier she indicated that she understood him enough to know that he wouldn’t come for her because it would be ‘rude, somehow’. Still, in my experience, many doctors, both MD and Psy.D will follow up a while after finishing with a patient.
Lector was amusing himself, hardly unusual given his static living conditions. I mean, geez, you bite out one nurse’s tongue and they go all solitary confinement on you. No sense of humour, they.
It was the only form of intimacy he had as an option, to get inside her head. And he probably did help her a bit because he respected her, and she acted respectfully towards him.
He respected her because she act ed respectfully to him.
I don’t know what order the books were written, but the first movie was Michael Mann’s Manhunter, (1986), and Lector was still pissed at Graham for catching him and having him incarcerated. He published Graham’s address (in code) with instructions for the Tooth Fairy to kill the entire family.
Maybe all the time behind bars had softened Lector’s heart. I’m sure he figured that playing along would gain him an opportunity to escape. I think the fact that Clarice was young, pretty and female had something to do with Lector’s decision not to eat her.
Also, I wanted to point out how controlled Lector was in the movie…in every shot except one.
The shot where he’s beating the guard in Memphis (with his own nightstick)…Hopkins puts a dull mask on Lector’s face. As if, for once, he’d lost his calm and was reverting to some animal persona.
Jeremy Irons played Hannibal on SNL once, and did a fine job. I blame England.
As for the OP, it was both. Lecter saw helping Starling as a relief from the boredom he endured, but (IIRC–it’s been years) he also did not respect Buffalo Bill and wanted him caught.
If it’s any consolation, real serial killers are much less interesting and sexy than Hannibal Lecter. One of the most devastating critiques of the writer and character I ever read pointed out that sociopaths who are that far gone haven’t tapped into some alternate source of wisdom; they are damaged and deficient in some way that can’t be explained by “The Nazis made me eat my little sister back in Latvia!”
Real killers are also a lot less functional. The amount of effort required just to seem normal (let alone urbane and sophisticated and an infinitely relaxed, gentle and patient host of gourmet dinner parties, as seen in Red Dragon) is immense. John E. Douglas, the FBI profiling pioneer and loose basis for Harris’s “Jack Crawford” character, describes a number of killers in his books, and almost invariably the people around them notice they are “off” in some way, with strange obsessions or stalking patterns.
A better fictional treatment (for television, anyway) is Dexter, in which the title character, relentlessly trained in “normality” by his late stepfather, occasionally realizes he’s gone off on an unsettling tangent when he notices the reactions of the people around him, causing him to quickly shift gears. A telling scene happens during the season featuring John Lithgow as the Trinity Killer, when Lithgow casually sits down with a family of total strangers at a restaurant and begins telling them about the death of his sister - something the character sees as both necessary and edifying for them - and can’t pick up on or respond to their obvious discomfort and confusion, needing Dexter to pull him away.
The Hannibal series gets some of this, in the sense that Hannibal himself consults with his own therapist, played by Gillian Anderson, who comments on how practiced and extensive his facade of normality is. On other matters, though, the show is pure fantasy.
Irons’ Lecter was made a cellmate of ‘Mace’, the hardened convict played by Phil Hartman.
Mace (who IIRC debuted in a sketch with Rob Lowe as his insider trader cellmate) had a hard persona that would comically crack to reveal a total marshmallow underneath. He was reduced to tears by Lecter’s sinister delving into the early formative events that turned Mace into a crook.
