Who Is Clarice Without Hannibal?

If metaphor is art, then consider Thomas Harris an old master: His finest work, 1988’s The Silence of the Lambs, is a Gothic carnival of symbolism and allusion. The substance of the novel is how society ritualistically depersonalizes, objectifies, and consumes women. Jame Gumb, the serial killer being pursued by the novice FBI agent Clarice Starling, takes this mission literally, stalking and skinning women in a macabre quest to turn them into “material.” The police, the media, and the FBI reduce victims to exploitative clichés or nameless bodies. Throughout the novel, Starling is dissected as a physical object and a psychological one, offered up as bait and leeringly scrutinized. When an inmate at an institution for the criminally insane throws his semen at her, the gesture is a cruder, more animalistic version of the asylum director’s propositioning of Starling only minutes earlier.

Harris’s novel was a striking examination of institutionalized misogyny, but Jonathan Demme’s film adaptation, released in 1991, went further. From the beginning, the movie shows its audience how exposed Starling (played