Books are usually better than their film adaptations, and this may even apply to the cinema version of “The Silence of the Lambs”, which rightly but surprisingly won the five most important Oscars in 1992 (Best Film, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Actress, Best Actor ) was awarded.
Director Jonathan Demme and actor Anthony Hopkins understood the character of Hannibal Lecter in a way that perhaps no reader could see in their head: the serial killer was not classically beautiful, nor did he wear glasses. He was level-headed, he was at the erotic age of a fifty-year-old who had not yet gained any fat, and above all he was impenetrable. When he smiled, the cord of his lips bent only slightly. Nobody would have thought that he could look like Anthony Hopkins in the cinema, who wasn’t an A-star back then.
He wasn’t a little puppet who wanted to play tricks on everyone, like Brian Cox in the role of Lecter from Michael Mann’s “Red Dragon” film adaptation from 1986. Jodie Foster turned her character Clarice Starling into an FBI student wasn’t quite as much of a dorm student as the one in Harris’ novel (“Mr. Crawford, please don’t send me back to school”). She also had a lot of question marks on her face, but she was smarter than all the other cops.
“The Silence of the Lambs” is no better, but is more famous today than its literary source. And yet Thomas Harris’ story, published 30 years ago, is essential reading. In it, Lecter is, much more concretely than on the screen, a father. Starling a daughter. Only in the novel do we understand the abomination of the prison director, Dr. Chiltons, we understand the melancholy of the civil servant and soon-to-be widower Jack Crawford, for which there was less space in the 138 minutes of the film. It’s just a shame that the fleeing Dr. Chilton is allowed to successfully remain hidden in the sequel “Hannibal”, and in his place of the monster is the FBI man Krendler. Krendler didn’t appear that bad in “Lammen”.
And the cage, the steel cube in which Lecter is held captive in the middle of a room, that perfectly lit cage decorated like an altar, then known from countless serial killer films (or in the Bond vehicle “Skyfall”) – from This was also read for the first time in this work. The enclosure became a prototype for film spaces that were intended to make it uncompromisingly clear that the prisoner inside was the most dangerous villain in the world.
The Silence of the Lambs: Revenge for the Father
“Clarice sleeps deeply, in the silence of the lambs,” it says at the end. Jame Gumb aka Buffalo Bill is dead, she got him, Hannibal Lecter provided the crucial clue. With the case closed, the FBI agent initially appears to have put aside her childhood trauma. That’s when her father, a security guard who didn’t make it as a cop, was shot by junkies on his patrol. He didn’t draw fast enough; the gun got tangled. A sad death, an embarrassing death in Hannibal’s opinion.
When Starling killed Buffalo Bill years later, it was because she wished her father had done it.
The novel and film engage in superficial psychoanalysis (psychoanalysis is a “dead religion,” Lecter believes). That’s probably true, because research into the causes destroys the magic of evil. If “Hannibal” is the Italian adventurer story and “Hannibal Rising” is the pulp drama with the SS werewolves, this book is a chamber play. It’s the research that leads the investigators to the trail, the many conversations. The “Silence” deals with “How do we get to the solution?” – the two subsequent novels deal with “How do we get out of the mess?”
Hannibal Lecter loves Clarice
“The Silence of the Lambs” also provides a note that is often pushed into the background when it comes to the novel and film: that the title itself focuses on the search for peace, where silence no longer poses a threat. Because the silence of the animals on Clarice’s father’s farm is not due to their sleep, but to their slaughter. The title describes a calm that preceded the killing.
The love story that begins eleven years later in the next Harris novel, “Hannibal,” is already hinted at here. After his escape, he doesn’t tell Starling where he is, he just writes: “Some of our stars are the same.” Starling still resists, thinking that her survival is due to the fact that Hannibal doesn’t find her boring enough yet.
On the contrary, she finds his interest in her perverse. It is difficult to accept that someone who, she believes, is not well-disposed toward you understands you.
She doesn’t know how Hannibal feels about her because he initially wants to hurt her, the “farmer’s oaf”. “Quid Pro Quo”, the famous line of dialogue from the film that does not exist in the novel: I tell you something about me, you tell me something about yourself. But the last words the two say to each other before they never see each other, Lecter is still sitting in his cell, are: “Thank you, Clarice” – “Thank you, Dr. Lecter.” Harris certainly couldn’t have foreseen the worldwide success of this relationship in 1988, the year the novel was written – and that the agent and killer would see each other again for the sequel novel “Hannibal”.
There is little research into how Thomas Harris, 77, feels about psychiatry. He hasn’t given an interview in decades. Maybe Dr. Lecter from him when he expresses his dislike of research. This is even clearer in the novel than in the film. Lecter is a man for whom individual evaluation counts, that much is certain, especially if he is to be examined himself: Anyone who wants to make him a mere measurement data will have a problem. Qualitative analysis yes, quantitative analysis no.
His take on the research method became, in a modified form, one of the most famous quotes in cinema: “Once a census taker tried to quantify me. I ate his liver with Faba beans and a large Amarone. Go back to school, little Starling.” For Clarice, psychological divisions of people are fundamental, but of course simplistic for him.
Lecter hates behaviorism, the basic assumption that behavior is learned. He believes in the given good and the given evil. Anyone who gets to know the young Hannibal Lecter from Harris’ last book “Hannibal Rising” can hardly understand his belief in determinism. There is no question that his terrible experiences in the Second World War shaped him. Thomas Harris has either rewrote the story of the later cannibal – or the figure of his murderous psychiatrist has been suppressed here. But what the war orphan learned early on: There is no God. As an adult, Lecter collects reports of church collapses in which believers are buried under rubble. The perfect irony for him.
Harris seduced his readers like few authors before him, he created sympathy for a beast because the beast helped take down another beast. Lecter supports Starling. But our sympathy for Hannibal Lecter also depended on his incredible intelligence. One catches oneself thinking unpleasantly about what a shame it is that a genius is locked away (even if he is occasionally allowed to write one or two scientific articles while locked away).
Penis trapped
Harris’ serial killers are often people with a sexuality that differs from that of the majority. He was rightly criticized for his occasionally sensationalistic depictions (sometimes the German publisher screws up, in “Red Dragon” the murderer’s nickname “Tooth Fairy” became “Zahnfaggot”). In The Silence of the Lambs, Jame Gumb is a man who wants a sex change. He kills and skins women because he was denied surgery.
The most memorable scene from Jonathan Demme’s film adaptation is in which Gumb (Ted Levine) stands in front of the mirror, hiding his penis between his pressed legs, pretending to see only a vulva, and to the sounds of ” Goodbye, Horses” dances (“Clerks 2” later shows a parody of this, and Tarantino and Fincher later used the disturbing effect of contrasting a harmless pop song with violence).
Harris tries hard not to stigmatize transgender people. In the end he lets doctors speak, scientific journals report on Gumb, and no words like “crazy” or “evil” appear in any specialist articles.
A doctor discusses with Starling his objections to associating Gumb’s disturbed psyche with transsexuality; he fears a witch hunt. Somewhat stiffly, almost to the point of taking notes, he formulates research results: “These are decent people with a real problem. I have never come across a connection between transsexuality and violence.”
The house as a structure of the psyche
Jame Gumb remains somewhat hidden, in the novel as in the film, Harris and director Demme knew that the character of Hannibal Lecter offered the greater spectacle. The dying Gumb’s final words are as fascinating as they are uncomfortable, as he whispers to Starling, “What does it feel like to be so beautiful?”
Gumb has set himself up in a dark, labyrinth-like house where he can hunt his victims for hours. The property is decorated like a Freudian creation, similar to Hitchcock’s “Psycho”. There is the upper floor (“superego”, the mother), the ground floor (“I”) and the basement, where the corpses literally lie (“unconscious”). With each murder his confidence grows. At some point he no longer wants to satisfy his needs in the remote areas of his basement.
In this day and age of the Deep Web or Dark Net, there are forums for every type of criminal activity, but in 1988 secret societies were probably more difficult to organize. It’s an art, as Thomas Harris reports, almost casually, of Gumb’s like-minded people who admire his skin costumes: “He knows of places, circles, where his efforts would be greatly admired – there are certain yachts on which he could dress up. “
As a model for Hannibal Lecter, Harris wrote in a foreword to the new edition of “The Silence of the Lambs” in 2013, his first written note on his own work in many years, a doctor named Dr. who was imprisoned in Mexico served as a model for Hannibal Lecter. Salazar. Harris met him in prison while working as a court reporter. He noted a beautiful observation about Salazar, which was also incorporated into the description of Lecter: his “eyes are chestnut brown, and they reflect light in needlepoints of red. Sometimes the points of light seem to fly into his innermost being like sparks.” He takes everything into account Open eyes.
It is unclear how far Thomas Harris intended to plan his Hannibal, but the purpose of his escape is perhaps revealed very early in the novel, in the first chapter. The doctor wants to go to his longing place.
In his cell he leafed through Vogue, the Italian edition.