IT’S TIME TO SILENCE THE LAMBS ONCE AND FOR ALL
THE Silence of the Lambs is 30 years old this year – and remains the bane of my life.
The film, based on Thomas Harris’s novel and starring Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins, was released on Valentine’s Day in 1991 and would go on to become only the third film to win all top five Academy Awards – Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress, Best Actor and Best Adapted Screenplay.
Why does it annoy me so? It helped to cement in the public’s imagination a number of cliches about the phenomenon of serial murder and the character of serial killers that circulate to this day.
These cliches include the idea that serial killers are incredibly charismatic and clever and, just like Dr Hannibal Lecter, able to discuss Italian architecture, Renaissance art, and appreciate the music of Bach – or that the best way to understand serial murder more generally is to somehow get inside the head of the killer, so as to work out why he is motivated to repeatedly kill – forensic work that needed to be left to specialist agents of the FBI.
I have never worked with a serial killer who could hold a conversation about anything remotely cultural – although Dennis Nilsen did enjoy talking about the music of Laurie
Anderson, and Ian Brady had read some Nietzsche – and it always seemed to me to be more important to concentrate on who it was that serial killers were able to kill, rather than endlessly debate what might have motivated them to do so.
As entertaining as the film was, it seemed to focus on solutions based on individuals – discovering the motivation of Lecter (or Jame Gumb), or the profiling skills of trainee FBI agent Clarice Starling – rather than those solutions which might emerge from broader changes to the structure of society that could have prioritised helping the usual targets of American serial killers, who are overwhelmingly poor, female and black.
Of course we like to focus on the especially bad men who kill and those people who will bring them to justice, as that makes for more interesting drama, but I think that it also creates the impression that those people who are capable of doing evil things are solely responsible for their offending, rather than the need to share that responsibility more widely.
By all means we should punish the offender but let’s not fool ourselves that in doing so we are
Scotland’s leading crime expert’s take on the warped world inhabited by crimelords, killers and creeps
Cliches include the idea serial killers are very clever
solving the problem of who will be the victims of violence and in some circumstances murder and serial murder.
There is a more welcome consequence of the success of The Silence of the Lambs.
Clarice Starling, played by Foster, was a compelling and extraordinary character – a young woman, criminology graduate, training at the FBI and determined to get ahead in what had been viewed as a “man’s world”.
I suspect a number of girls and women who saw the film and read the book were inspired to copy her journey in real life and perhaps this partly helps to explain why female students in criminology continue to outnumber men by a ratio of three to one. I call this the “Clarice effect”.
I SPENT all of last week filming in Scotland for the new series of Crime Files – including filming outside of Carstairs State Hospital. We were denied permission to film inside, no doubt because of Covid-19 restrictions, but I do hope that when the pandemic is over we might at last be given access to Scotland’s State Hospital to record what happens there in our names, and hear the testimonies of both staff and inmates.