Post by johnbc on Sept 16, 2020 16:51:47 GMT
I. Terror and Pity
The Silence of the Lambs is much more than the cleverly accomplished thriller or the passionate drama that american critics saw in it. If the audience’s heart is touched so intensely, it is less for the macabre fascination of the theme, for the almost mind-boggling dexterity of the direction or for the memorable interpretations of Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster than for the profound symbolism of his fable. Even when it passes unnoticed by the viewer’s awareness, this symbolism cannot fail to reach him at the heart of his human condition, by the force of a universal language. Its symbolic reach elevates Jonathan Demme’s film to the category of great work of art.
Like all great art, this film unleashes consequences that extend far beyond the immediate aesthetic enjoyment, and reverberate in long-lasting psychological benefits. Never before, since M, Fritz Lang’s Düsseldorf Vampire or Ingmar Bergman’s Shame, has cinema been so close to realizing an aim comparable to that of the Greek tragedy, which, in Aristotle’s words, was to inspire “terror and piety” or, more precisely, piety through terror: purifying man’s soul and inclining him to goodness through the view of the absurdity and evil inherent in the cosmic order.
But, to fully enjoy the gains that this work brings us, it is necessary to overcome the pure aesthetic impact of the first hour and deepen an intellectual awareness of its meaning. The educator who shows and warns, directing the viewer’s attention to the significant points and deep structures, thus prolongs and enhances the artist’s work, opening the channels for his encounter with the soul of the public.
This would be, strictly speaking, the task of criticism. I cannot conceive of the militant critic as anything more than an educator, in the line proposed by Mathew Arnold.
II. The Brain Behind Everything
The character Lecter is a bit showy, but that should not lead us to the mistake of hypertrophying the power that he has in the story. After all, everything that happens (except for road accidents that have no effect on the final result) was planned in advance by Clarice’s boss, Jack Crawford. He knew that Lecter was isolated in the basement and anxious for contact with the world; that Lecter had not seen a woman since eight years before; that Lecter had information about “Buffalo Bill”; and that Clarice, with skill, could get anything from the prisoner that she wanted. Crawford is the only one who, from the beginning, perceives the whole picture of possibilities and, with the ingenuity of a demiurge, sets the wheels of destiny in motion. Lecter has known him for a long time, and has reason to fear him, while he feels nothing but contempt for his other opponents. He knows that everything is Crawford’s plan and, even before someone asks him (as Clarice herself still ignored the project), he agrees to play his part. He seeks only to obtain a collateral advantage, which is not to eat Clarice (in any sense of the term), much less to offer resistance to Crawford, but, much more modestly, to find an opportunity to escape.
Crawford, like Patriarch Abraham of the Koranic narrative or Saint Bernard of medieval legend, made the devil work for him, evil serving good. He has something of the magician Prospero, from Shakespeare’s Storm, who manipulates the dark elements and, overcoming improbability, manages to bring everything to a happy ending with the victory of good and light. Lecter, for his part, could define himself as Goethe’s Mephistopheles:
I’m part of the Energy
that Evil always intends
and that Good always creates.
A French saying says that the devil carries stones; and, after all, someone has to do the dirty part of the job. Considering that Lecter does not create difficulties for Crawford, that he refrains from attacking Clarice and that all he kills in the course of the plot are his persecutors, and not innocent victims like those of “Buffalo Bill”, can be said that the price of his collaboration was even very modest. Lecter read in the minds of others, but Crawford read in Lecter’s, where he saw nothing himself. Behind the Clarice-Lecter and Clarice-Bill struggle, the distance duel between the two psychologists is the real reason for structuring the plot, and that it moreover echoes an ancient motive of the initiatic narratives: the “duel of the magicians”.
III. The Fascinated Fascinator
If Clarice is not fascinated by Lecter, he is fascinated by her (exactly as planned by Crawford); and, under the tough appearance of a brain scavenger who seeks to unmask and dominate her, deep down he is the one who idealizes and worships her, while she remains firm and strong on the floor of relentless realism. On his desk, in the cage set up to imprison him at the Shelby County Forum, one of his drawings shows Clarice, surrounded by a luminous halo, with a little lamb in her lap. It’s an icon. Having sought to probe the depths of Clarice’s mind, Lecter knows perfectly well what he found inside. How could a devil with a reputation fail to recognize the Holy Virgin? The outer identity of a professional woman was plucked by Lecter’s suspicious eye, which appears in Clarice’s background is not a bundle of banal Freudian desires and dreams of the social ascension of a young girl, but the weeping of the inert Virgin before the sacrifice of the Lamb. It is necessary to be blinded by anti-Christian fanaticism in order not to see in the film such an evident evangelical reference.
IV. Brave Clarice
But the “brave Clarice”, as he calls her, if she is able to recognize with such sincerity the human weaknesses that Lecter reveals in her, she ignores, however, the secret superior identity that he discovered behind them. That is why he can continue playing at despising and deceiving her in front of her, while secretly devoting veneration and service to her. The Devil is also a servant of God, albeit in his ambiguous and recalcitrant way; conscientious of his fame as a rebel, the old package seeks to save appearances. The ambiguity of serving the good with the worst of intentions is, in fact, one of its defining traits, and it traditionally does so as a character of farce rather than tragedy. Universal literature did not fail to explore this abundantly, from Marlowe to Goethe. It is from this same ambiguity that the subtle charm that we see in the monstrous Lecter emanates; as Anthony Hopkins well noted in his interview, “the devil has a sense of humor”: when the terrible goes beyond a certain measure, it becomes funny. It is a far-fetched pedantry to seek psychoanalytic reasons to explain the Devil’s appeal, when it is just a topos (a commonplace or repeatable scheme) of universal literature, which always works when used with art.
V. Essence and Accident
Clarice, for her part, is not deceived about Lecter. When an attendant asks her if he is a vampire, she replies that “there is no name for what he is”. What has no name has no essence, which is a way of saying that it is nothing. It is no coincidence that this speech immediately precedes the scene in which Lecter recommends Clarice “stick to the essential, ignoring the accidental”. According to an ancient theodicy, evil is not exactly a being, but something like the accidental effect of the unfortunate confluence of goods of different kinds (for example, it is good to love a woman and it is good to have a friend; but it can happen that we love the friend’s woman). Evil is a “relationship”, not a “substance”; a “shadow”, not a “body”. Studying a contemporary Satanist sect, an informed author compares evil to a sum of absences, which gives rise to a suction force that, not being able to survive in and of itself, clings to and supports itself on the dark or poorly known side of things. Socrates and Vedantism went further, decreeing that the only evil is ignorance. Fascination, subservience to evil arises precisely from those areas of the soul that are most unknown to us — from the “unconscious”, if you like, depositing, according to Dr. Freud, desires and images rejected by the conscious. Trying to avoid the malicious look that pierces conscious defenses, the frightened victim prostrates himself before the opponent, hoping to obtain his clemency. This is precisely the flank that Clarice does not offer to Lecter: when he tries to unmask her psychologically, she does not run away, does not hide behind vain defenses, nor does she try to soften the opponent to appease the harshness of his penetrating gaze; with simple candor, she recognizes the truth of the childish feelings that Lecter discerns in her heart; the transparency of her motives and the firm acceptance of the truth end up transmuting Lecter’s suspicious gaze, subduing and putting at her service all the malice of the perfidious doctor. Intending to disarm her, Lecter finds at the bottom of her the invincible fortress of right intention. And the devil, who despises those who worship him, surrenders with admiration to the heroine who loves the truth.
In his Logic lesson on the essence and the accident, Lecter quotes Marcus Aurelius. The Roman emperor was one of the great philosophers of stoicism, a school that preached abstine et sustine: detachment and firmness. This is not the only stoic reference in the film. Early on, Clarice appears training in the woods at the back of the FBI headquarters in Quantico. At the entrance to the forest, three wooden signs embedded in the trees urge the police apprentice to endure pain, agony and suffering. A fourth poster adds to the stoic message the Christian commandment: Love. Two drops of stoicism in one film are enough to arouse curiosity.
VI. Stoicism and Christianity
The mix of Stoic and Christian commandments is not strange. From an early age, Christian philosophers realized the value of stoic ethics and tried to absorb it in Christianity. Marcus Aurelius said, for example, that the aspiring sage should not run away from evil, but get used to looking at it in the face to neutralize it, becoming immune to its fascination. From the height of his apatheia (“absence of emotions”), the accomplished sage will then be able to extinguish evil by the force of his objective and serene gaze, which calls things by their true names, without adding or removing anything (it is “simplicity” intellectual property, mentioned by Lecter). But, at the bottom of the apatheia, the sage must always maintain an attitude of “understanding clemency”. It is a kind of intellectual kindness or compassion, not emotional. It consists in being open to understanding everything, even what is vile and disgusting, but without letting yourself be emotionally influenced.
Apatheia and “understanding clemency” are precisely the most appropriate terms to describe Clarice’s attitude towards Hannibal Lecter; she doesn’t hate him, doesn’t fear him, doesn’t love him, doesn’t despise him; she watches and listens to him, without shutting herself up or allowing herself to be subdued by anything he says or does. It firmly maintains its position (sustine et abstine) before Lecter, without moving a single millimeter away from understanding clemency, on the one hand, and, on the other, from fidelity to duty. What balances the two stoic scales, in the end, is the compassion for the victims of Buffalo Bill: the lambs she wants to save. Clarice personifies the synthesis of stoicism and Christianity, announced by the posters of the forest.
VII. Masculine and Feminine
Some Christian thinkers disapproved of stoicism for the merely passive and reactive character of its ethics: it would emphasize patience, resistance, abstinence, and less active sacrifice and struggle for the good. The stoic virtues would, in short, be “feminine” exclusively, without the manly mark of the Christ-King. A true Christian stoicism, to exist, would have to inject some histamine in the tired old Marcus Aurelius.
But Christianity does not, as such, disregard “feminine” virtues. Its epitome, in the Christian view, is precisely the Holy Virgin. It “does nothing”, properly speaking, in the entire evangelical narrative. She just obeys, suffers, waits, and cries in the face of the inevitable. Clarice also suffers passively in the face of the impossibility of saving the lambs — of saving even if only one. She also suffers, astonished as the lambs, at the death of her father. It is from this inherent pain, however, that the vocation of the combatant Clarice is born, who faces Lecter in a psychological duel and shot Buffalo Bill; like the “passive” Virgin, Christ is born, the prototype of active sacrifice; and just as from the mother’s “useless” weeping at the foot of the cross, the innumerable multitude of the faithful are born. The ancient liturgy repeats the cycle, from which the Church that suffers is born the Church that fights, and from this the Church that triumphs.
VIII. Masters and Disciples
The same dialectic of the passive and the active is repeated in Clarice’s complementary character, Jack Crawford. Intellectually, he is the most active, in fact the only active, because he is the one who plans and directs everything, to the point that it could be said that the entire plot of events is nothing but an external projection of something that happened in Jack’s mind. But in practice, he does not participate directly in the action. His only attempt at personal intervention (when he invades Buffalo Bill’s home in Calumet City) is a mistake he regrets: he should have left everything in Clarice’s hands, as his initial intention seemed to be. But the gurus also fail, at least in the initiatory narrative, because then they only represent the Spirit and are not really, which in fact gives the measure of the differences between this narrative genre and the sacred and mythological epics, which constitute its model.
Here I must explain myself more carefully. Sacred and mythological epics are those narrative poems that, for an entire civilization, have the prestige of revealed truths; in the beginning of time, they fix the worldview, values, laws and educational principles that will guide men and shape customs while this civilization lasts. Initiatic narratives are stories invented at a later time, and which, without having the authority of primordial revelations, are admitted, by certain groups or individuals, as a kind of spiritual or religious teaching. Initiatic narratives generally deal with aspects or parts of sacred epics, which they extend, illustrate, comment on and specify, adapting the background of the spiritual message to the mentality and language of a new era. They invigorate and update certain spiritual potentialities contained in the revelation, which would risk weakening as the passage of time and language changes make it difficult for new generations to directly understand the sacred epic. Initiatic narratives are Dante’s Divine Comedy, Mozart’s Magic Flute, Goethe’s Faust, the Greek tragedy in its entirety, The Lusiads, by Camões, The Queen of the Fairies, by Spenser; and, in our time, Joseph and his Brothers, by Thomas Mann. Homeric poems, the Baghavad-Gita, the Koran, the Old Testament, the Gospels, etc, are sacred epics.
The difference between sacred epic and initiatic narrative is fundamentally that the heroes of the former are gods, demigods or, in a strict monotheistic framework, aspects of God or forces of divine origin. The heroes of the initiatory narrative, without having divine powers or speaking directly in the name of God, are human beings of exceptional scope, protected or closely guided by divine forces, whose presence and performance in the world they represent in a more or less subtle and indirect way.
Both in the sacred epic and in the initiatic narrative, the characters of masters or gurus always represent the divine Spirit, who knows everything beforehand and directs the journey of a disciple from above, who personifies the human Soul in the process of becoming spiritualized or divinized. A striking difference between the two genres is that, in the sacred epic, the master is the divine Spirit, literally and integrally (in Odyssey, Minds is Minerva, goddess of wisdom; in Baghavad Gita, Krishna is an aspect of Brahma, etc); whereas, in the initiatory narrative, the character of the master is just a human being more or less closely connected to divine knowledge; he is a priest, a magician, a sage, and not a divine being; therefore, “divinely” guiding the disciple, he is not without human flaws. For example, Merlin, on the Holy Grail, temporarily misses the stop to Morgana Le Fay; Sarastro is temporarily defeated by the Queen of the Night, etc.
The initiatory narrative, although having structural laws that define it, can be grafted into an infinity of narrative genres: in novelistic literature, in theater, in epic poetry or in cinema. Its deep structure is compatible with the most diverse coatings, from the fantastic to the “realistic”. The only indispensable elements are the master, the disciple, the adversary, and the adventures that purify the disciple’s soul or reveal knowledge. The opponent can be a person (as in the Magic Flute, the Queen of the Night) or an adverse and diabolical situation that defies the hero’s intelligence or tempts his soul, as in Jakob Wasserman’s Il caso Maurizius. The master can also be a flesh and blood character (like Sarastro), a mythological allusion (Venus in The Lusiads) or a simple superior aspect of the disciple’s own soul (the magical premonition that guides Etzel Andergast in Wasserman’s novel). The point that matters, the differential criterion that certifies that we are in the presence of such a narrative, is not the material content of the events, but the relationship between the forces, in short: the structure of the plot.
Many works of literature, cinema and theater call for the use of “esoteric” symbols and myths, without this making them initiatory narratives. On the contrary, the particular symbols contained in a narrative acquire perfect aesthetic functionality only when the deep structure of the work is that of an initiatory narrative; otherwise, symbols and myths become mere pedantic adornments. The total structure and the particular symbolisms must be coherent and tied to each other in an organic arrangement, reflecting one of the main laws of symbolic language, which is the correspondence between the part and the whole, the small and the large, the micro and the macrocosm. Only very skilled artists manage to obtain this fit, which is why much of the “esoteric” art in circulation is pure garbage.
As much for the structure as for the symbols to which it alludes or for the strict obedience to the principle of correspondence, The Silence of the Lambs reveals itself to be an initiatory narrative, and one of the most perfect that cinema has ever given us. There is not a single symbolic or mythological reference in it that does not fit with extreme adequacy and happiness in the total structure of the work, reflecting this whole in the scale of detail; and the global structure, in turn, has all the elements required: the master, the disciple, the diabolic adversary, the revealing and purifying adventures.
Thus, it is quite natural that we find the relationship between Soul and Spirit between Clarice and Crawford, that Crawford is inactive in appearance and active in the background, that Clarice is faithful to Crawford’s intention even when she apparently disobeys it, and that Crawford, finally, commits a mistake, when this mistake is already, miraculously, corrected by Providence. The Soul, in the initiatory narrative, is passive before the Spirit, but active before the world; she struggles, but her struggle is to remain faithful to the Spirit in a world where adversity, temptation and deception threaten to drag her away from her vocation.
That Jack Crawford, in the film, is Clarice’s master or guru, there is no doubt. One of her colleagues literally mentions him like this (“Your guru is on the phone”). Is Lecter, in addition, the guru of Buffalo Bill, the diabolical imitation of the Spirit, who so often appears in the initiatory narratives? We’ll see later. For the time being, what matters is to note that Crawford, in the role of guru, maintains a discreet performance, in the background, away from the center of physical action (except for a lapse), and in the end he withdraws modestly, leaving for his disciple the honors of the feast. Like Mozart’s Sarastro, who, at the end of the Magic Flute, after having articulated and directed Tamino’s struggle to free Pamina from afar, disappears in a halo of light, leaving the joy of victory to the disciples. It is also a topos, a repeatable scheme. But how it works!
IX. A Pair of Pairs
As for Jame Gumb (that’s Buffalo Bill’s name), it’s for Lecter as Clarice is for Crawford. It is its complementary opposite. The parallelism is rigorous and it is worth deepening it. Let’s look at the Lecter-Gumb pair first:
1st Lecter kills only his executioners; Gumb kills innocent victims.
2nd Lecter is cold and rational; Gumb is passionate, rapturous and out of control (decides to anticipate the death of Catherine, in a fit of rage).
3rd Lecter despises his victims; Gumb has, before his victims, admiration and greed.
4th Lecter eats his victims, and puts them inside; Gumb wants to enter them, wearing their skin.
5th Lecter is “superior” to his victims; is the accusing demon, who judges and punishes (thus making a type of “justice”). Gumb is “inferior”; it attacks precisely those who have what he lack.
6th Lecter extinguishes his victims to continue to exist; he asserts his identity at the expense of the extinction of others; Gumb, on the contrary, denies his own identity and wishes to transform himself, to die as an ugly man in order to be reborn as a beautiful girl.
The traditional figure of the double aspect of evil stands out from the comparison, which the Bible personifies in Lucifer and Satan, the “superior” demon, who perverts intelligence, and the “inferior” demon, who incites abyssal passions and destruction of the body. The devil as an adversary of the Spirit and an enemy of the Soul. In that sense, Lecter is Crawford’s opponent, as Gumb is Clarice’s. Master against master, disciple against disciple.
The parallelism between Lecter and Crawford is another: they are no longer two different planes of a force of equal tendency, but two equal of opposing forces. In other words: Lecter and Gumb are equal in meaning (evil), but different in strength. Lecter and Crawford are equivalent forces, but diverse in meaning:
1st Like Crawford, Lecter does not participate in most of the outside action. His contribution is purely intellectual. He remains “immobile” at the bottom of his basement, while Clarice’s investigations and Gumb’s crimes unfold on the surface.
2nd Like Crawford, he has a general view of what’s going on (which Clarice and Gumb don’t). The difference is that Crawford plans the whole action, and Lecter only a part.
3rd If Crawford is Clarice’s guru, Lecter tries to be too. He does not conform to the passive role of merely providing information: he wants to be Clarice’s analyst and master. The latter, knowing that this role flatters him, she takes advantage of his vanity (“I came to learn from you”). Crawford, for his part, as a former teacher, naturally has, so to speak, the role of master, which he plays with modesty. Lecter seeks to show his dominance over Clarice (when in fact it is he who is being driven from afar by Crawford’s plan), while Crawford directs Clarice from a distance, without showing that he does.
4th Both make a mistake, underestimating Clarice. Lecter, at first, by taking the girl only as a pretentious hick; then contempt turns to admiration, and admiration into service. Crawford, in the end, by unduly calling to himself a part of the burden that he had assigned to Clarice.
5th Crawford knows all of Clarice’s past (her childhood, her father’s death, her student life). Lecter knows all of Gumb’s past, and even preserves, in Miss Mofet’s warehouse, a living archive of Gumb’s early career as a murderer.
6th Both have known each other for a long time, and fear each other: Crawford knows that Lecter is capable of everything; Lecter is aware that Crawford is “an old fox”.
7th Finally, both have a partial failure: Lecter wants to dominate Clarice, and fails; Crawford wants to capture Gumb personally, and he also fails.
Parallelism, with the opposite positions, sets the stage for the “duel of the magicians”.
X. An Unsettling Partnership
The relationship between Lecter and Gumb is the most disturbing and enigmatic aspect of the story. The film implies that they had known each other for a long time; and in view of the difference in intelligence and psychological strength between the two, it is inconceivable that Lecter did not dominate Gumb. In this case it would be his guru, who started him on the path of crime. The Benjamin Raspail episode leaves a certain ambiguity in the air: it seems that it was Gumb who killed him, but it is evident that Lecter wished or was happy with this death; and if he did not consider it his work in any way, why would he keep its trophies in the sinister Miss Mofet museum?
On the other hand, why would a diabolical mind capable of inducing a criminal to suicide with a simple speech (which is what he does with Miggs) would also not be able to govern the mind of “a young murderer in mutation”? There is a certain nostalgic tone to Lecter’s voice when he says these enigmatic words. Everything suggests that he played a part in the “systematic abuse” that made Gumb a criminal. I emphasize the word “systematic”, which implies: intentional.
The film is perhaps purposefully obscure on this point; but this only reinforces its tremendous psychological impact, as it opens to our imagination the door to the most terrifying speculations.
But the mythological references, of which the film is full, speak in favor of the above hypothesis: Lecter is for Gumb just as Crawford is for Clarice. It is his guru, it is the mind that shapes, educates and directs him. It is the “spiritual” devil who acts in secret behind the diabolic “soul”.
First of all, it is impossible not to see in Lecter, at the bottom of his basement, a kind of lord of the underground. From his gloomy cell, he intellectually controls much of what goes on the surface (predicts the senator’s reaction, manipulates Shilton, outlines the escape). If Lecter is thus a Pluto on his shadow throne, who is Gumb?
The moths that he breeds are of the species Acherontia styx. They are the name of the two rivers that, in Greek myth, separated the world of the living from the world of the dead. In the Greek religion there was no “heaven”, no “paradise”, except for the rare heroes who managed, by extraordinary deeds, to rise above mortals and become demigods. All other humans were destined, after death, to an obscure and suffering existence in the shadow realm, Hades. A variant of the word “Acherontia” is “Charon” or “Charont”: the boatman serving hell, who crosses the dead, shouting at them, as in Dante’s poem:
Guai a voi, anime prave!
Non isperate mai veder lo cielo:
i’ vegno per menarvi all’altra riva
nelle tenebre eterne, in caldo e in gelo.
(Woe to you, prave souls!
Never hope to see the sky:
I am going to lead you to the other side
in eternal darkness, in heat and in frost.)
(Inferno, III: 84–87)
Charon is Pluto’s servant and disciple, who, on the other hand, was later obviously identified with the biblical demon. The Pluto-Lecter/Charon-Gumb parallelism becomes inevitable when we notice that Gumb, after sticking the cocoon of a moth with the names of the rivers of hell in the throat of its victims, takes them by boat to throw them at the bottom of a river. From the other side, from the bottom of his underground, the dark lord observes with satisfaction the progress of the “young murderer in transformation”.
Gumb is not just any killer. He works with the aesthetic coherence of those who have something more in mind: he concludes crimes with a halo of symbols that gives them the regularity and perfection of a magical rite. If he wanted the skin of the victims only as raw material, why would he insert a symbol in their throats? And why did this symbol represent, in his own words, something “beautiful and powerful”? To the merely physical and utilitarian aspect of the criminal operation, he added symbolic support, destined, of course, to enlist the help of the dark powers for the success of the desired mutation. Who had taught him these things? Who had made the “young killer in mutation” a mix of sorcerer and executioner? Who had initiated him into the dark art? And why is there a Nazi flag in his house, which evokes, under the figure of the human fur seamstress, that of the executioners who, also moved by sinister “esoteric” motives, removed the skin of Jewish prisoners and with it ordered artistic domes to be sewn with lampshade? Gumb’s crimes thus move away from the most obvious and utilitarian psychological motivation, to acquire a tenebrous symbolic reverberation, which, in Dr. Lecter’s own words of warning, conceal something “much more disturbing”.
XI. Angels and Demons
There is no escape at this point: this mere “well-built thriller” that critics saw in it, this vulgar “fable of desire”, hides nothing less than a fight between the devas and the asuras, the cosmic war between the luminous powers and the tenebrous ones who dispute the human soul and decide its destiny. At this point, the reader must have already been warned that this is not a simple police and psychological drama, that one can see in distance in the tranquility of a simple spectator. At this point, the “spectator”, trapped in the armchair by a mixture of pain and panic, already knows that he was moved to the core: te fabula narratur — “the story is about you”.
Even the names of the characters seem significant. Clarice Starling, of course, evokes starlight. In Greek myth, the souls of heroes turn into stars. Lecter is a variant of lector: he reads in books and in souls. Gumb is a corruption of gumbe, a type of Sudanese drum made… of skin. Finally, Crawford, a banal name that could mean nothing, is made up of craw, and ford, “to cross”. It clearly forms the idea of “swallowing”. Why “swallow”? It may have been chosen haphazardly, but isn’t it a suggestive coincidence that the most important clue to the solution of the mystery is found precisely in the victims’ throat? In addition, it may seem crazy, but I can’t help thinking that Crawford dominates Clarice, who dominates Lecter, who dominates Gumb: a fish swallows another fish, it swallows another fish, it swallows another fish. In the end the bigger fish withdraws, alone.
It is also significant that there is a kitten in the home of the first victim of Gumb, and another in the home of the last. A kitten meows from Catherine’s window while Gumb kidnaps her; a kitten meows in Frederika Bimmel’s room while Clarice scans it for clues. A cat at the beginning and another at the end of the girl skinner career. Like the two ends of a snake. The cat was in fact assimilated to the serpent, in Egyptian myth; and in Japan, the shinto sees him as an evil being, a creature of darkness, capable of killing a woman and putting on her form. Like Gumb. And he was connected to Japanese things, like the mobile with the butterfly that rotates in his room.
What has been said about names and cats is only secondary evidence to confirm a hypothesis that, moreover, by itself, remains perfectly solid without it. It also happens sometimes that, when the structure of the initiatic narrative is firm, as in this case, even symbolic details accidentally found by the artist acquire a deeper reverberation: when the essential is right, the accidental collaborates, or: help yourself, that heaven will help you. When, on the contrary, the deep structure is loose or defective, all the esoteric symbols of the world won’t save a work from being lost in banality.
XII. Sheeps and Goats
What is by no means accidental is the parallelism between the victims of Lecter and those of Gumb. Lecter’s are all people from the police or other servants of the repressive apparatus. His death “makes sense”, and is thus an aspect of “justice”, albeit monstrous and twisted. Gumb’s are innocent girls: their only fault is being fat, having too much skin. His death is “absurd”, “unjust”, and for this reason they are openly compared to lambs, traditional symbols of the innocent sacrificial victim. Is it not significant then that on the night of his escape Lecter asks for rare lamb chops for dinner, and that, instead of eating them, he eats the guards, that is: that instead of the symbol of innocent victims, eat the guilty ones? In this apocalyptic image, as in the Last Judgment, the innocent and the guilty are separated: the sheep and the goats. Who kills sheep is Gumb — the irrational, the absurd. Lecter knows what he does: he prefers goats.
Gumb became a murderer through suffering. Kill the lambs in a desperate attempt to save himself from a hateful identity that overwhelms him. Perhaps the most interesting parallelism of the film is the one which is formed, in this sense, between him and Catherine. It is a structural element, not accidental. Catherine, in the depths of despair and terror, seizes Gumb’s poodle puppy and threatens to kill her. The little dog, white and curly, is a perfect lamb. The larger scheme of the plot, reproduced on a small scale in this detail, gives it the strength and reach of a universal symbol uniting the micro and the macrocosm: persecuted and mistreated by demons, man chases and mistreats an innocent animal. But Catherine is saved, and she saves the little dog with her: the “useless” gesture of the girl Clarice, when trying to rescue the lamb, finally finds a satisfactory answer. Nothing was in vain.
XIII. Until the End of the World
Clarice’s victory, which is also Crawford’s, is just not complete, it seems, because Lecter escapes. But there is no literary tradition in the initiatory narrative world that ends with the final extinction of all demons. The initiatic narrative may “announce” the apocalypse, but not “carry it out”: there is always an opening for the continuation of the story (in the epic genre, this is indeed a constitutive law). Lecter simply couldn’t die. But his flight, if it is a victory before the world, is a confession of defeat before Clarice. After idealizing and serving her, Lecter now confesses that he fears her: over the phone, he asks her not to look for him. She replies, “You know, I can’t promise that.” Of course: it would be against all rules. The woman’s struggle with the serpent, initiated in the creation of the world, must continue until the end of time. From Genesis to Revelation. Started with advantage for the serpent, in the Garden of Eden, it can only end, with the final victory of the woman, when the consummation of the centuries.
XIV. A Tip from Aristotle
The genre is defined by structure. In this sense, The Silence of the Lambs has nothing in common with other police films and novels but the subject. The structure is diverse. Nor are comparisons with the Hitchcockian thriller, which flowed into the mouth of the critics at the first examination, makes any sense. Hitchcock’s stories always follow the same scheme: a banal hero who happens to be involved in complex and adverse circumstances. Clarice and Crawford’s war against Lecter and Gumb is at least a confrontation between armies of equal power, with a small but significant advantage on the bright side.
Aristotle may help us here. He devised a classification of narratives, which was never used until Northrop Frye decided to apply it to the whole of Western literature, with impressive results. He divided them into five modalities, according to the degree of power of the characters:
1st Mythic modality: the hero is a god, demigod or aspect of God.
2nd Legendary modality: the hero is a simple human being, but closely watched by transcendent powers.
3rd High imitative modality: the hero is a human being of exceptional scope, so that, without the explicit competition of extraterrestrial forces (which may, however, be implied), he can perform extraordinary actions.
4th Low imitative mode: the hero is an ordinary human being, without powers greater than the reader’s nor any divine assistance.
5th Ironic modality: the hero has less power than the reader; he is incapable or a victim of circumstances.
From the comparison between the Hitchcockian thriller and The Silence of the Lambs, the difference stands out: this one belongs to the high imitative modality, the former, to the low imitative modality. Clarice is, as Jodie Foster pointed out, a true heroine.
XV. Imago Mundi
In short: The Silence of the Lambs is a narrative of the high imitative modality, structured according to a model that suggests that of the medieval Autos (Christ, Devil and Soul), and which here is enhanced by the dialectical resource of the unfolding of the characters, forming a septenary structure similar to that of space directions; it is an initiatory narrative, carried out with full means and extreme happiness in the use of traditional symbols of religion and mythologies. It is an authentic imago hominis, or imago mundi. It’s great art. Its vision inspires terror and piety, predisposes us to an in-depth awareness of the forces that preside over destiny, and, in this sense, makes us more human. Its hermeneutics, here only provisionally outlined, is an exercise in self-awareness that requires from us (in addition to the necessary scientific knowledge) firmness of purpose and willingness to find the truth, that is, an inner attitude whose symbol the work itself provides us, in the person of Clarice Starling. This exercise is also the occasion to remember something that is out of fashion: the moral and pedagogical sense of all great art.
The Silence of the Lambs is much more than the cleverly accomplished thriller or the passionate drama that american critics saw in it. If the audience’s heart is touched so intensely, it is less for the macabre fascination of the theme, for the almost mind-boggling dexterity of the direction or for the memorable interpretations of Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster than for the profound symbolism of his fable. Even when it passes unnoticed by the viewer’s awareness, this symbolism cannot fail to reach him at the heart of his human condition, by the force of a universal language. Its symbolic reach elevates Jonathan Demme’s film to the category of great work of art.
Like all great art, this film unleashes consequences that extend far beyond the immediate aesthetic enjoyment, and reverberate in long-lasting psychological benefits. Never before, since M, Fritz Lang’s Düsseldorf Vampire or Ingmar Bergman’s Shame, has cinema been so close to realizing an aim comparable to that of the Greek tragedy, which, in Aristotle’s words, was to inspire “terror and piety” or, more precisely, piety through terror: purifying man’s soul and inclining him to goodness through the view of the absurdity and evil inherent in the cosmic order.
But, to fully enjoy the gains that this work brings us, it is necessary to overcome the pure aesthetic impact of the first hour and deepen an intellectual awareness of its meaning. The educator who shows and warns, directing the viewer’s attention to the significant points and deep structures, thus prolongs and enhances the artist’s work, opening the channels for his encounter with the soul of the public.
This would be, strictly speaking, the task of criticism. I cannot conceive of the militant critic as anything more than an educator, in the line proposed by Mathew Arnold.
II. The Brain Behind Everything
The character Lecter is a bit showy, but that should not lead us to the mistake of hypertrophying the power that he has in the story. After all, everything that happens (except for road accidents that have no effect on the final result) was planned in advance by Clarice’s boss, Jack Crawford. He knew that Lecter was isolated in the basement and anxious for contact with the world; that Lecter had not seen a woman since eight years before; that Lecter had information about “Buffalo Bill”; and that Clarice, with skill, could get anything from the prisoner that she wanted. Crawford is the only one who, from the beginning, perceives the whole picture of possibilities and, with the ingenuity of a demiurge, sets the wheels of destiny in motion. Lecter has known him for a long time, and has reason to fear him, while he feels nothing but contempt for his other opponents. He knows that everything is Crawford’s plan and, even before someone asks him (as Clarice herself still ignored the project), he agrees to play his part. He seeks only to obtain a collateral advantage, which is not to eat Clarice (in any sense of the term), much less to offer resistance to Crawford, but, much more modestly, to find an opportunity to escape.
Crawford, like Patriarch Abraham of the Koranic narrative or Saint Bernard of medieval legend, made the devil work for him, evil serving good. He has something of the magician Prospero, from Shakespeare’s Storm, who manipulates the dark elements and, overcoming improbability, manages to bring everything to a happy ending with the victory of good and light. Lecter, for his part, could define himself as Goethe’s Mephistopheles:
I’m part of the Energy
that Evil always intends
and that Good always creates.
A French saying says that the devil carries stones; and, after all, someone has to do the dirty part of the job. Considering that Lecter does not create difficulties for Crawford, that he refrains from attacking Clarice and that all he kills in the course of the plot are his persecutors, and not innocent victims like those of “Buffalo Bill”, can be said that the price of his collaboration was even very modest. Lecter read in the minds of others, but Crawford read in Lecter’s, where he saw nothing himself. Behind the Clarice-Lecter and Clarice-Bill struggle, the distance duel between the two psychologists is the real reason for structuring the plot, and that it moreover echoes an ancient motive of the initiatic narratives: the “duel of the magicians”.
III. The Fascinated Fascinator
If Clarice is not fascinated by Lecter, he is fascinated by her (exactly as planned by Crawford); and, under the tough appearance of a brain scavenger who seeks to unmask and dominate her, deep down he is the one who idealizes and worships her, while she remains firm and strong on the floor of relentless realism. On his desk, in the cage set up to imprison him at the Shelby County Forum, one of his drawings shows Clarice, surrounded by a luminous halo, with a little lamb in her lap. It’s an icon. Having sought to probe the depths of Clarice’s mind, Lecter knows perfectly well what he found inside. How could a devil with a reputation fail to recognize the Holy Virgin? The outer identity of a professional woman was plucked by Lecter’s suspicious eye, which appears in Clarice’s background is not a bundle of banal Freudian desires and dreams of the social ascension of a young girl, but the weeping of the inert Virgin before the sacrifice of the Lamb. It is necessary to be blinded by anti-Christian fanaticism in order not to see in the film such an evident evangelical reference.
IV. Brave Clarice
But the “brave Clarice”, as he calls her, if she is able to recognize with such sincerity the human weaknesses that Lecter reveals in her, she ignores, however, the secret superior identity that he discovered behind them. That is why he can continue playing at despising and deceiving her in front of her, while secretly devoting veneration and service to her. The Devil is also a servant of God, albeit in his ambiguous and recalcitrant way; conscientious of his fame as a rebel, the old package seeks to save appearances. The ambiguity of serving the good with the worst of intentions is, in fact, one of its defining traits, and it traditionally does so as a character of farce rather than tragedy. Universal literature did not fail to explore this abundantly, from Marlowe to Goethe. It is from this same ambiguity that the subtle charm that we see in the monstrous Lecter emanates; as Anthony Hopkins well noted in his interview, “the devil has a sense of humor”: when the terrible goes beyond a certain measure, it becomes funny. It is a far-fetched pedantry to seek psychoanalytic reasons to explain the Devil’s appeal, when it is just a topos (a commonplace or repeatable scheme) of universal literature, which always works when used with art.
V. Essence and Accident
Clarice, for her part, is not deceived about Lecter. When an attendant asks her if he is a vampire, she replies that “there is no name for what he is”. What has no name has no essence, which is a way of saying that it is nothing. It is no coincidence that this speech immediately precedes the scene in which Lecter recommends Clarice “stick to the essential, ignoring the accidental”. According to an ancient theodicy, evil is not exactly a being, but something like the accidental effect of the unfortunate confluence of goods of different kinds (for example, it is good to love a woman and it is good to have a friend; but it can happen that we love the friend’s woman). Evil is a “relationship”, not a “substance”; a “shadow”, not a “body”. Studying a contemporary Satanist sect, an informed author compares evil to a sum of absences, which gives rise to a suction force that, not being able to survive in and of itself, clings to and supports itself on the dark or poorly known side of things. Socrates and Vedantism went further, decreeing that the only evil is ignorance. Fascination, subservience to evil arises precisely from those areas of the soul that are most unknown to us — from the “unconscious”, if you like, depositing, according to Dr. Freud, desires and images rejected by the conscious. Trying to avoid the malicious look that pierces conscious defenses, the frightened victim prostrates himself before the opponent, hoping to obtain his clemency. This is precisely the flank that Clarice does not offer to Lecter: when he tries to unmask her psychologically, she does not run away, does not hide behind vain defenses, nor does she try to soften the opponent to appease the harshness of his penetrating gaze; with simple candor, she recognizes the truth of the childish feelings that Lecter discerns in her heart; the transparency of her motives and the firm acceptance of the truth end up transmuting Lecter’s suspicious gaze, subduing and putting at her service all the malice of the perfidious doctor. Intending to disarm her, Lecter finds at the bottom of her the invincible fortress of right intention. And the devil, who despises those who worship him, surrenders with admiration to the heroine who loves the truth.
In his Logic lesson on the essence and the accident, Lecter quotes Marcus Aurelius. The Roman emperor was one of the great philosophers of stoicism, a school that preached abstine et sustine: detachment and firmness. This is not the only stoic reference in the film. Early on, Clarice appears training in the woods at the back of the FBI headquarters in Quantico. At the entrance to the forest, three wooden signs embedded in the trees urge the police apprentice to endure pain, agony and suffering. A fourth poster adds to the stoic message the Christian commandment: Love. Two drops of stoicism in one film are enough to arouse curiosity.
VI. Stoicism and Christianity
The mix of Stoic and Christian commandments is not strange. From an early age, Christian philosophers realized the value of stoic ethics and tried to absorb it in Christianity. Marcus Aurelius said, for example, that the aspiring sage should not run away from evil, but get used to looking at it in the face to neutralize it, becoming immune to its fascination. From the height of his apatheia (“absence of emotions”), the accomplished sage will then be able to extinguish evil by the force of his objective and serene gaze, which calls things by their true names, without adding or removing anything (it is “simplicity” intellectual property, mentioned by Lecter). But, at the bottom of the apatheia, the sage must always maintain an attitude of “understanding clemency”. It is a kind of intellectual kindness or compassion, not emotional. It consists in being open to understanding everything, even what is vile and disgusting, but without letting yourself be emotionally influenced.
Apatheia and “understanding clemency” are precisely the most appropriate terms to describe Clarice’s attitude towards Hannibal Lecter; she doesn’t hate him, doesn’t fear him, doesn’t love him, doesn’t despise him; she watches and listens to him, without shutting herself up or allowing herself to be subdued by anything he says or does. It firmly maintains its position (sustine et abstine) before Lecter, without moving a single millimeter away from understanding clemency, on the one hand, and, on the other, from fidelity to duty. What balances the two stoic scales, in the end, is the compassion for the victims of Buffalo Bill: the lambs she wants to save. Clarice personifies the synthesis of stoicism and Christianity, announced by the posters of the forest.
VII. Masculine and Feminine
Some Christian thinkers disapproved of stoicism for the merely passive and reactive character of its ethics: it would emphasize patience, resistance, abstinence, and less active sacrifice and struggle for the good. The stoic virtues would, in short, be “feminine” exclusively, without the manly mark of the Christ-King. A true Christian stoicism, to exist, would have to inject some histamine in the tired old Marcus Aurelius.
But Christianity does not, as such, disregard “feminine” virtues. Its epitome, in the Christian view, is precisely the Holy Virgin. It “does nothing”, properly speaking, in the entire evangelical narrative. She just obeys, suffers, waits, and cries in the face of the inevitable. Clarice also suffers passively in the face of the impossibility of saving the lambs — of saving even if only one. She also suffers, astonished as the lambs, at the death of her father. It is from this inherent pain, however, that the vocation of the combatant Clarice is born, who faces Lecter in a psychological duel and shot Buffalo Bill; like the “passive” Virgin, Christ is born, the prototype of active sacrifice; and just as from the mother’s “useless” weeping at the foot of the cross, the innumerable multitude of the faithful are born. The ancient liturgy repeats the cycle, from which the Church that suffers is born the Church that fights, and from this the Church that triumphs.
VIII. Masters and Disciples
The same dialectic of the passive and the active is repeated in Clarice’s complementary character, Jack Crawford. Intellectually, he is the most active, in fact the only active, because he is the one who plans and directs everything, to the point that it could be said that the entire plot of events is nothing but an external projection of something that happened in Jack’s mind. But in practice, he does not participate directly in the action. His only attempt at personal intervention (when he invades Buffalo Bill’s home in Calumet City) is a mistake he regrets: he should have left everything in Clarice’s hands, as his initial intention seemed to be. But the gurus also fail, at least in the initiatory narrative, because then they only represent the Spirit and are not really, which in fact gives the measure of the differences between this narrative genre and the sacred and mythological epics, which constitute its model.
Here I must explain myself more carefully. Sacred and mythological epics are those narrative poems that, for an entire civilization, have the prestige of revealed truths; in the beginning of time, they fix the worldview, values, laws and educational principles that will guide men and shape customs while this civilization lasts. Initiatic narratives are stories invented at a later time, and which, without having the authority of primordial revelations, are admitted, by certain groups or individuals, as a kind of spiritual or religious teaching. Initiatic narratives generally deal with aspects or parts of sacred epics, which they extend, illustrate, comment on and specify, adapting the background of the spiritual message to the mentality and language of a new era. They invigorate and update certain spiritual potentialities contained in the revelation, which would risk weakening as the passage of time and language changes make it difficult for new generations to directly understand the sacred epic. Initiatic narratives are Dante’s Divine Comedy, Mozart’s Magic Flute, Goethe’s Faust, the Greek tragedy in its entirety, The Lusiads, by Camões, The Queen of the Fairies, by Spenser; and, in our time, Joseph and his Brothers, by Thomas Mann. Homeric poems, the Baghavad-Gita, the Koran, the Old Testament, the Gospels, etc, are sacred epics.
The difference between sacred epic and initiatic narrative is fundamentally that the heroes of the former are gods, demigods or, in a strict monotheistic framework, aspects of God or forces of divine origin. The heroes of the initiatory narrative, without having divine powers or speaking directly in the name of God, are human beings of exceptional scope, protected or closely guided by divine forces, whose presence and performance in the world they represent in a more or less subtle and indirect way.
Both in the sacred epic and in the initiatic narrative, the characters of masters or gurus always represent the divine Spirit, who knows everything beforehand and directs the journey of a disciple from above, who personifies the human Soul in the process of becoming spiritualized or divinized. A striking difference between the two genres is that, in the sacred epic, the master is the divine Spirit, literally and integrally (in Odyssey, Minds is Minerva, goddess of wisdom; in Baghavad Gita, Krishna is an aspect of Brahma, etc); whereas, in the initiatory narrative, the character of the master is just a human being more or less closely connected to divine knowledge; he is a priest, a magician, a sage, and not a divine being; therefore, “divinely” guiding the disciple, he is not without human flaws. For example, Merlin, on the Holy Grail, temporarily misses the stop to Morgana Le Fay; Sarastro is temporarily defeated by the Queen of the Night, etc.
The initiatory narrative, although having structural laws that define it, can be grafted into an infinity of narrative genres: in novelistic literature, in theater, in epic poetry or in cinema. Its deep structure is compatible with the most diverse coatings, from the fantastic to the “realistic”. The only indispensable elements are the master, the disciple, the adversary, and the adventures that purify the disciple’s soul or reveal knowledge. The opponent can be a person (as in the Magic Flute, the Queen of the Night) or an adverse and diabolical situation that defies the hero’s intelligence or tempts his soul, as in Jakob Wasserman’s Il caso Maurizius. The master can also be a flesh and blood character (like Sarastro), a mythological allusion (Venus in The Lusiads) or a simple superior aspect of the disciple’s own soul (the magical premonition that guides Etzel Andergast in Wasserman’s novel). The point that matters, the differential criterion that certifies that we are in the presence of such a narrative, is not the material content of the events, but the relationship between the forces, in short: the structure of the plot.
Many works of literature, cinema and theater call for the use of “esoteric” symbols and myths, without this making them initiatory narratives. On the contrary, the particular symbols contained in a narrative acquire perfect aesthetic functionality only when the deep structure of the work is that of an initiatory narrative; otherwise, symbols and myths become mere pedantic adornments. The total structure and the particular symbolisms must be coherent and tied to each other in an organic arrangement, reflecting one of the main laws of symbolic language, which is the correspondence between the part and the whole, the small and the large, the micro and the macrocosm. Only very skilled artists manage to obtain this fit, which is why much of the “esoteric” art in circulation is pure garbage.
As much for the structure as for the symbols to which it alludes or for the strict obedience to the principle of correspondence, The Silence of the Lambs reveals itself to be an initiatory narrative, and one of the most perfect that cinema has ever given us. There is not a single symbolic or mythological reference in it that does not fit with extreme adequacy and happiness in the total structure of the work, reflecting this whole in the scale of detail; and the global structure, in turn, has all the elements required: the master, the disciple, the diabolic adversary, the revealing and purifying adventures.
Thus, it is quite natural that we find the relationship between Soul and Spirit between Clarice and Crawford, that Crawford is inactive in appearance and active in the background, that Clarice is faithful to Crawford’s intention even when she apparently disobeys it, and that Crawford, finally, commits a mistake, when this mistake is already, miraculously, corrected by Providence. The Soul, in the initiatory narrative, is passive before the Spirit, but active before the world; she struggles, but her struggle is to remain faithful to the Spirit in a world where adversity, temptation and deception threaten to drag her away from her vocation.
That Jack Crawford, in the film, is Clarice’s master or guru, there is no doubt. One of her colleagues literally mentions him like this (“Your guru is on the phone”). Is Lecter, in addition, the guru of Buffalo Bill, the diabolical imitation of the Spirit, who so often appears in the initiatory narratives? We’ll see later. For the time being, what matters is to note that Crawford, in the role of guru, maintains a discreet performance, in the background, away from the center of physical action (except for a lapse), and in the end he withdraws modestly, leaving for his disciple the honors of the feast. Like Mozart’s Sarastro, who, at the end of the Magic Flute, after having articulated and directed Tamino’s struggle to free Pamina from afar, disappears in a halo of light, leaving the joy of victory to the disciples. It is also a topos, a repeatable scheme. But how it works!
IX. A Pair of Pairs
As for Jame Gumb (that’s Buffalo Bill’s name), it’s for Lecter as Clarice is for Crawford. It is its complementary opposite. The parallelism is rigorous and it is worth deepening it. Let’s look at the Lecter-Gumb pair first:
1st Lecter kills only his executioners; Gumb kills innocent victims.
2nd Lecter is cold and rational; Gumb is passionate, rapturous and out of control (decides to anticipate the death of Catherine, in a fit of rage).
3rd Lecter despises his victims; Gumb has, before his victims, admiration and greed.
4th Lecter eats his victims, and puts them inside; Gumb wants to enter them, wearing their skin.
5th Lecter is “superior” to his victims; is the accusing demon, who judges and punishes (thus making a type of “justice”). Gumb is “inferior”; it attacks precisely those who have what he lack.
6th Lecter extinguishes his victims to continue to exist; he asserts his identity at the expense of the extinction of others; Gumb, on the contrary, denies his own identity and wishes to transform himself, to die as an ugly man in order to be reborn as a beautiful girl.
The traditional figure of the double aspect of evil stands out from the comparison, which the Bible personifies in Lucifer and Satan, the “superior” demon, who perverts intelligence, and the “inferior” demon, who incites abyssal passions and destruction of the body. The devil as an adversary of the Spirit and an enemy of the Soul. In that sense, Lecter is Crawford’s opponent, as Gumb is Clarice’s. Master against master, disciple against disciple.
The parallelism between Lecter and Crawford is another: they are no longer two different planes of a force of equal tendency, but two equal of opposing forces. In other words: Lecter and Gumb are equal in meaning (evil), but different in strength. Lecter and Crawford are equivalent forces, but diverse in meaning:
1st Like Crawford, Lecter does not participate in most of the outside action. His contribution is purely intellectual. He remains “immobile” at the bottom of his basement, while Clarice’s investigations and Gumb’s crimes unfold on the surface.
2nd Like Crawford, he has a general view of what’s going on (which Clarice and Gumb don’t). The difference is that Crawford plans the whole action, and Lecter only a part.
3rd If Crawford is Clarice’s guru, Lecter tries to be too. He does not conform to the passive role of merely providing information: he wants to be Clarice’s analyst and master. The latter, knowing that this role flatters him, she takes advantage of his vanity (“I came to learn from you”). Crawford, for his part, as a former teacher, naturally has, so to speak, the role of master, which he plays with modesty. Lecter seeks to show his dominance over Clarice (when in fact it is he who is being driven from afar by Crawford’s plan), while Crawford directs Clarice from a distance, without showing that he does.
4th Both make a mistake, underestimating Clarice. Lecter, at first, by taking the girl only as a pretentious hick; then contempt turns to admiration, and admiration into service. Crawford, in the end, by unduly calling to himself a part of the burden that he had assigned to Clarice.
5th Crawford knows all of Clarice’s past (her childhood, her father’s death, her student life). Lecter knows all of Gumb’s past, and even preserves, in Miss Mofet’s warehouse, a living archive of Gumb’s early career as a murderer.
6th Both have known each other for a long time, and fear each other: Crawford knows that Lecter is capable of everything; Lecter is aware that Crawford is “an old fox”.
7th Finally, both have a partial failure: Lecter wants to dominate Clarice, and fails; Crawford wants to capture Gumb personally, and he also fails.
Parallelism, with the opposite positions, sets the stage for the “duel of the magicians”.
X. An Unsettling Partnership
The relationship between Lecter and Gumb is the most disturbing and enigmatic aspect of the story. The film implies that they had known each other for a long time; and in view of the difference in intelligence and psychological strength between the two, it is inconceivable that Lecter did not dominate Gumb. In this case it would be his guru, who started him on the path of crime. The Benjamin Raspail episode leaves a certain ambiguity in the air: it seems that it was Gumb who killed him, but it is evident that Lecter wished or was happy with this death; and if he did not consider it his work in any way, why would he keep its trophies in the sinister Miss Mofet museum?
On the other hand, why would a diabolical mind capable of inducing a criminal to suicide with a simple speech (which is what he does with Miggs) would also not be able to govern the mind of “a young murderer in mutation”? There is a certain nostalgic tone to Lecter’s voice when he says these enigmatic words. Everything suggests that he played a part in the “systematic abuse” that made Gumb a criminal. I emphasize the word “systematic”, which implies: intentional.
The film is perhaps purposefully obscure on this point; but this only reinforces its tremendous psychological impact, as it opens to our imagination the door to the most terrifying speculations.
But the mythological references, of which the film is full, speak in favor of the above hypothesis: Lecter is for Gumb just as Crawford is for Clarice. It is his guru, it is the mind that shapes, educates and directs him. It is the “spiritual” devil who acts in secret behind the diabolic “soul”.
First of all, it is impossible not to see in Lecter, at the bottom of his basement, a kind of lord of the underground. From his gloomy cell, he intellectually controls much of what goes on the surface (predicts the senator’s reaction, manipulates Shilton, outlines the escape). If Lecter is thus a Pluto on his shadow throne, who is Gumb?
The moths that he breeds are of the species Acherontia styx. They are the name of the two rivers that, in Greek myth, separated the world of the living from the world of the dead. In the Greek religion there was no “heaven”, no “paradise”, except for the rare heroes who managed, by extraordinary deeds, to rise above mortals and become demigods. All other humans were destined, after death, to an obscure and suffering existence in the shadow realm, Hades. A variant of the word “Acherontia” is “Charon” or “Charont”: the boatman serving hell, who crosses the dead, shouting at them, as in Dante’s poem:
Guai a voi, anime prave!
Non isperate mai veder lo cielo:
i’ vegno per menarvi all’altra riva
nelle tenebre eterne, in caldo e in gelo.
(Woe to you, prave souls!
Never hope to see the sky:
I am going to lead you to the other side
in eternal darkness, in heat and in frost.)
(Inferno, III: 84–87)
Charon is Pluto’s servant and disciple, who, on the other hand, was later obviously identified with the biblical demon. The Pluto-Lecter/Charon-Gumb parallelism becomes inevitable when we notice that Gumb, after sticking the cocoon of a moth with the names of the rivers of hell in the throat of its victims, takes them by boat to throw them at the bottom of a river. From the other side, from the bottom of his underground, the dark lord observes with satisfaction the progress of the “young murderer in transformation”.
Gumb is not just any killer. He works with the aesthetic coherence of those who have something more in mind: he concludes crimes with a halo of symbols that gives them the regularity and perfection of a magical rite. If he wanted the skin of the victims only as raw material, why would he insert a symbol in their throats? And why did this symbol represent, in his own words, something “beautiful and powerful”? To the merely physical and utilitarian aspect of the criminal operation, he added symbolic support, destined, of course, to enlist the help of the dark powers for the success of the desired mutation. Who had taught him these things? Who had made the “young killer in mutation” a mix of sorcerer and executioner? Who had initiated him into the dark art? And why is there a Nazi flag in his house, which evokes, under the figure of the human fur seamstress, that of the executioners who, also moved by sinister “esoteric” motives, removed the skin of Jewish prisoners and with it ordered artistic domes to be sewn with lampshade? Gumb’s crimes thus move away from the most obvious and utilitarian psychological motivation, to acquire a tenebrous symbolic reverberation, which, in Dr. Lecter’s own words of warning, conceal something “much more disturbing”.
XI. Angels and Demons
There is no escape at this point: this mere “well-built thriller” that critics saw in it, this vulgar “fable of desire”, hides nothing less than a fight between the devas and the asuras, the cosmic war between the luminous powers and the tenebrous ones who dispute the human soul and decide its destiny. At this point, the reader must have already been warned that this is not a simple police and psychological drama, that one can see in distance in the tranquility of a simple spectator. At this point, the “spectator”, trapped in the armchair by a mixture of pain and panic, already knows that he was moved to the core: te fabula narratur — “the story is about you”.
Even the names of the characters seem significant. Clarice Starling, of course, evokes starlight. In Greek myth, the souls of heroes turn into stars. Lecter is a variant of lector: he reads in books and in souls. Gumb is a corruption of gumbe, a type of Sudanese drum made… of skin. Finally, Crawford, a banal name that could mean nothing, is made up of craw, and ford, “to cross”. It clearly forms the idea of “swallowing”. Why “swallow”? It may have been chosen haphazardly, but isn’t it a suggestive coincidence that the most important clue to the solution of the mystery is found precisely in the victims’ throat? In addition, it may seem crazy, but I can’t help thinking that Crawford dominates Clarice, who dominates Lecter, who dominates Gumb: a fish swallows another fish, it swallows another fish, it swallows another fish. In the end the bigger fish withdraws, alone.
It is also significant that there is a kitten in the home of the first victim of Gumb, and another in the home of the last. A kitten meows from Catherine’s window while Gumb kidnaps her; a kitten meows in Frederika Bimmel’s room while Clarice scans it for clues. A cat at the beginning and another at the end of the girl skinner career. Like the two ends of a snake. The cat was in fact assimilated to the serpent, in Egyptian myth; and in Japan, the shinto sees him as an evil being, a creature of darkness, capable of killing a woman and putting on her form. Like Gumb. And he was connected to Japanese things, like the mobile with the butterfly that rotates in his room.
What has been said about names and cats is only secondary evidence to confirm a hypothesis that, moreover, by itself, remains perfectly solid without it. It also happens sometimes that, when the structure of the initiatic narrative is firm, as in this case, even symbolic details accidentally found by the artist acquire a deeper reverberation: when the essential is right, the accidental collaborates, or: help yourself, that heaven will help you. When, on the contrary, the deep structure is loose or defective, all the esoteric symbols of the world won’t save a work from being lost in banality.
XII. Sheeps and Goats
What is by no means accidental is the parallelism between the victims of Lecter and those of Gumb. Lecter’s are all people from the police or other servants of the repressive apparatus. His death “makes sense”, and is thus an aspect of “justice”, albeit monstrous and twisted. Gumb’s are innocent girls: their only fault is being fat, having too much skin. His death is “absurd”, “unjust”, and for this reason they are openly compared to lambs, traditional symbols of the innocent sacrificial victim. Is it not significant then that on the night of his escape Lecter asks for rare lamb chops for dinner, and that, instead of eating them, he eats the guards, that is: that instead of the symbol of innocent victims, eat the guilty ones? In this apocalyptic image, as in the Last Judgment, the innocent and the guilty are separated: the sheep and the goats. Who kills sheep is Gumb — the irrational, the absurd. Lecter knows what he does: he prefers goats.
Gumb became a murderer through suffering. Kill the lambs in a desperate attempt to save himself from a hateful identity that overwhelms him. Perhaps the most interesting parallelism of the film is the one which is formed, in this sense, between him and Catherine. It is a structural element, not accidental. Catherine, in the depths of despair and terror, seizes Gumb’s poodle puppy and threatens to kill her. The little dog, white and curly, is a perfect lamb. The larger scheme of the plot, reproduced on a small scale in this detail, gives it the strength and reach of a universal symbol uniting the micro and the macrocosm: persecuted and mistreated by demons, man chases and mistreats an innocent animal. But Catherine is saved, and she saves the little dog with her: the “useless” gesture of the girl Clarice, when trying to rescue the lamb, finally finds a satisfactory answer. Nothing was in vain.
XIII. Until the End of the World
Clarice’s victory, which is also Crawford’s, is just not complete, it seems, because Lecter escapes. But there is no literary tradition in the initiatory narrative world that ends with the final extinction of all demons. The initiatic narrative may “announce” the apocalypse, but not “carry it out”: there is always an opening for the continuation of the story (in the epic genre, this is indeed a constitutive law). Lecter simply couldn’t die. But his flight, if it is a victory before the world, is a confession of defeat before Clarice. After idealizing and serving her, Lecter now confesses that he fears her: over the phone, he asks her not to look for him. She replies, “You know, I can’t promise that.” Of course: it would be against all rules. The woman’s struggle with the serpent, initiated in the creation of the world, must continue until the end of time. From Genesis to Revelation. Started with advantage for the serpent, in the Garden of Eden, it can only end, with the final victory of the woman, when the consummation of the centuries.
XIV. A Tip from Aristotle
The genre is defined by structure. In this sense, The Silence of the Lambs has nothing in common with other police films and novels but the subject. The structure is diverse. Nor are comparisons with the Hitchcockian thriller, which flowed into the mouth of the critics at the first examination, makes any sense. Hitchcock’s stories always follow the same scheme: a banal hero who happens to be involved in complex and adverse circumstances. Clarice and Crawford’s war against Lecter and Gumb is at least a confrontation between armies of equal power, with a small but significant advantage on the bright side.
Aristotle may help us here. He devised a classification of narratives, which was never used until Northrop Frye decided to apply it to the whole of Western literature, with impressive results. He divided them into five modalities, according to the degree of power of the characters:
1st Mythic modality: the hero is a god, demigod or aspect of God.
2nd Legendary modality: the hero is a simple human being, but closely watched by transcendent powers.
3rd High imitative modality: the hero is a human being of exceptional scope, so that, without the explicit competition of extraterrestrial forces (which may, however, be implied), he can perform extraordinary actions.
4th Low imitative mode: the hero is an ordinary human being, without powers greater than the reader’s nor any divine assistance.
5th Ironic modality: the hero has less power than the reader; he is incapable or a victim of circumstances.
From the comparison between the Hitchcockian thriller and The Silence of the Lambs, the difference stands out: this one belongs to the high imitative modality, the former, to the low imitative modality. Clarice is, as Jodie Foster pointed out, a true heroine.
XV. Imago Mundi
In short: The Silence of the Lambs is a narrative of the high imitative modality, structured according to a model that suggests that of the medieval Autos (Christ, Devil and Soul), and which here is enhanced by the dialectical resource of the unfolding of the characters, forming a septenary structure similar to that of space directions; it is an initiatory narrative, carried out with full means and extreme happiness in the use of traditional symbols of religion and mythologies. It is an authentic imago hominis, or imago mundi. It’s great art. Its vision inspires terror and piety, predisposes us to an in-depth awareness of the forces that preside over destiny, and, in this sense, makes us more human. Its hermeneutics, here only provisionally outlined, is an exercise in self-awareness that requires from us (in addition to the necessary scientific knowledge) firmness of purpose and willingness to find the truth, that is, an inner attitude whose symbol the work itself provides us, in the person of Clarice Starling. This exercise is also the occasion to remember something that is out of fashion: the moral and pedagogical sense of all great art.