“Did the rancher make you perform fellatio?” he leers. At the third, he drools over the thought of her being abused by her mother’s cousin. At his second, he asks whether Crawford “wants you sexually”. At his initial meeting with Starling, he speculates about her upbringing, and “all those tedious, sticky fumblings in the back seats of cars”. He is, of course, a snob who wants everyone to know about his taste in fine wines and expensive shoes, but he also has the grubby one-track mind of an adolescent schoolboy trying to shock his teacher. Lecter is so electrifying, in fact, that it’s easy to overlook what a preening, immature bore he soon reveals himself to be. The hospital’s slimy director, Dr Chilton (Anthony Heald), recounts the stomach-turning story of how Lecter ate a nurse’s tongue, and he and Starling descend from modern offices, via staircases and corridors, into a shadowy subterranean dungeon. In the process, Demme gives Lecter one of cinema’s all-time great introductions. When Jack Crawford (Scott Glenn), the head of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit, sends Starling to meet Lecter in his cell at the Baltimore Hospital for the Criminally Insane, Demme moves us from her ascetic domain to his rococo one, from meticulous authenticity to nightmarish fantasy, from detective thriller to horror movie.
How many other Hollywood heroines – or heroes – are anything like her? She is a clever, dedicated professional who succeeds by doing everything by the book and with the encouragement of her superiors. But Silence of the Lambs has a deep respect for the FBI’s methods, and so does Starling. Most films about law-enforcement agencies have maverick protagonists: agents who either break the rules (James Bond) or turn against their nefarious handlers (Jason Bourne). Demme goes on to stage several long scenes which were shot at the actual FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, so that we can see Starling’s colleagues doing their paperwork, practising their shooting, drinking their coffee. A trainee FBI agent, she pounds through the Bureau’s woodland assault course at the start of the film. One striking aspect of The Silence of the Lambs is the care taken by its director, Jonathan Demme, and its screenwriter, Ted Tally, to establish Starling and her well-ordered world.
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