Desperately Random

On "The Silence of the Lambs"

The Silence of the Lambs has a great ugliness at its center, and although many have tried, it’s ultimately not something that can be excised or ignored or rehabilitated. Just as white supremacy is fundamental to Birth of a Nation, transphobia is fundamental to Lambs, in that its thesis is structurally dependent on the concept of a man (I’m going to be using masculine language to refer to Buffalo Bill throughout this piece because that’s what the film does and he’s not a real person; if you fight the text on this point you’ll never get anywhere with it) literally, viscerally displacing women by murdering them and wearing their skin – the ultimate embodiment of the patriarchal violence thrumming beneath almost every other scene in the film. If this were all, if the film were simply transphobic it would actually be fine, or, not fine, but not something worth worrying about; the world is full of vile films expressing vile sentiments. They can be ignored or protested as one wishes, but ultimately they’re just tools, blunt and stupid. The problem, though, is that Lambs isn’t a stupid film, it’s a great film, despite and because of its ugliness – and, furthermore, most importantly, the film is almost right about gender, about patriarchy, about how these things get constructed socially, about how they affect the operations of large institutions and inform the development of professional relationships (if not personal ones; we never see Clarice “off the job”, no doubt by design). It gets these things right in, often, very striking ways, ways that are clearly not flukes – the movie’s thesis is correct except in its very core, where it is wrong in a profound, evil way. This is the problem, and it’s why, I’ve noticed, even particularly tedious and self-righteous social progressives often find it difficult to just write the film off: how does it arrive at, essentially, the correct conclusion from such a wrong premise? This is the sort of thing that sticks in a person’s craw, that makes them restless and irritable – the pieces don’t fit, the parts don’t add up to the whole. Now, I’m going to offer some thoughts on the subject, and put forward something like a theory of my own, but don’t expect to be satisfied. This is not a film that satisfies anyone, just chokes you on dust and broken fingernails.

The first thing that must be recognized, I think, is that the film is a masterpiece of Hollywood continuity editing. Like Chinatown (also a work borne out of unspeakable misogynistic violence, albeit real rather than phantastical), it flows from scene to scene, beat to beat, with the sort of confidence and clarity that makes one forget time is passing, that cuts are happening, that an argument is being constructed (because all narratives are arguments) at all, except, of course, when it wants you to for one of its big set-piece images. More than enough has already been written about the ideology of this kind of imagestream, the sort of subject it aims to construct, the tricks it’s capable of playing, so suffice it to say this is very, very dangerous territory.

You can see this danger in how the film manipulates your opinion Dr. Chilton: first smug, then lecherous, growing more stupid and contemptible with each passing scene, until all his idiot bluster has made you forget his very first line, which just happens to be the only wholly accurate assessment of Dr. Lector made in the whole movie, and the key to the easy half of its bifurcated mystery: “Oh, he’s a monster.” Not a “serial killer”, or a “psychopath”, or a “criminal mastermind” – all these things are secondary traits. What Lector is, in himself, is a capital-M Monster in the classic Universal Pictures tradition, and Dr. Chilton is an inverted Dr. Frankenstein who keeps, locked deep in his abyssal laboratory, a horrible creature that is smarter than he could imagine. The conversations between Clarice and Lector are conversations between Jonathan Harker and Dracula. He escapes prison by becoming the Invisible Man, wrapped not in bandages but in flesh. These scenes strike a similar balance of tragedy and absurdity as the great Universal pictures do, and like the great Universal pictures are in some sense comforting as much as they are frightening and alien. As much as the first visit with Lector is built up as a descent into Hades, it is stable ground. Hell is a known quantity. Which is important, if the film wishes to remain tolerable to mainstream tastes, because the other half of the mystery has nothing but an abyss beneath it.

“Clarice, doesn’t this random scattering of sites seem desperately random?” These words, written by Lector on a map dotted with circles and arrows, are the key that unlocks the door to Buffalo Bill’s lair. They reveal the secret necessary to his capture, a secret which Lector knew all along, but which the FBI was blind to. Much earlier in the film, enough that it will have been half carried-away by the smooth stream of narrative incident by now, Lector tells Agent Starling that Buffalo Bill “thinks he’s a transsexual, but he’s not, he’s something far more savage.” We have already “met” Buffalo Bill at this point in the film, begun to form our own understanding of him, and thus it’s easy for this line to do what it’s supposed to do (especially in the sexually fascist American ’90s): cement in the viewer’s head a link between Bill’s violence and his gender “confusion” – he is “wrong” about who he is but can’t accept it, can’t accept his true, “savage” nature as a damaged man (who of course could not be a woman; such things are determined by medical professionals, and he doesn’t meet their standards), and that this is, ultimately, why he kills. This is what you’re supposed to think, just as you are supposed to think the FBI team is about to break down Bill’s door, when really it’s only Clarice ringing his loud and awful bell. But look at bit more closely: Bill, according to Lector, is “something far more savage” – but what? Lector doesn’t say, and neither, in fact, does the movie. Look at what the movie does say about him: Buffalo Bill is a man (of sorts) who has covered his body in strange tattoos, who wears rings in his nipples, who raises exotic insects. He is large, strong, but effeminate. He speaks in big, rounded syllables and wears night vision goggles. He dances to mournful synthpop and has a large American flag hung over is sewing table, opposite a blanket covered in swastikas with a gun underneath. The only living thing he seems to really care about is a yipping poodle named Precious. This is too much information. There are too many signifiers, going in too many directions. In terms of movie serial killer behavior, this is the definition of “overdetermined” – or, perhaps, of desperately random. Bill’s undoing is the moment Clarice sees through what didn’t matter in his actions to what did – equally, Lambs, insofar as it can function as a sexually paranoid reactionary project, is undone when we see through everything that it say, to what it doesn’t. This moment comes, for the attentive viewer, when Bill lies twitching and dying on the grimy floor, dust spinning whorls in the sudden shaft of sunlight from a bullet-pierced window, and we realize we still have not been told what he actually is. This is what the movie does not want you to notice. It gives you a blank, and invites you to fill it in with “gender deviancy”, but it doesn’t actually do it for you. It isn’t willing to pull the trigger. The blank, in reality, is still there. This blank is the difficult half of the mystery – “something far more savage”, but what? What is his secret?

I don’t know. Sorry. Perhaps, as in the case of the mass shooter in Bogdanovich’s Targets (released in 1968, as it always must have been), who in taking aim at Boris Karloff killed all that had come before and set the stage for all that would come after, there isn’t really an answer, just a set of more or less agreeable possibilities that all ultimately dissolve in the acid bath of dehumanizing violence. Or perhaps there is one, a single and definite truth buried in the noise like a girl’s corpse weighted down at the bottom of a river. Search long enough and you might find it. Personally, I’m not keen to spend so long in such an ugly world, because, ultimately, it’s besides the point. The mere fact that the secret exists is enough to explode the film’s ideological matrix. The Hollywood continuity style remains suitably invisible and transparent only so long as it remains sovereign over its own ambiguities. Once you notice something you weren’t supposed to, the whole system breaks down: the puppet, cut loose from its strings, begins to walk on its own. The thing is, though, this very breakdown is also why the film still works – were that blank space filled in, were there nothing for the film to hide, there would be nothing to see, either, but its own stupid ugliness. It would be simply a relic of a time slightly worse than our own, a historical document preserved for dissection. And relics can be instructive, but they don’t keep anyone up at night. The Silence of the Lambs does.