A bright young woman walks tentatively into the inner sanctum of an infamous man. Their initial meeting is caustic, but sparks fly, and soon they get to know each other on a profoundly intimate level.
That’s a scene from last year’s Valentine’s Day hit Fifty Shades of Grey. And also from 1991’s Valentine’s Day hit, The Silence of the Lambs.
It’s the 25th anniversary of the latter—a blockbuster film that swept all five major Oscar awards by teaming Jodie Foster’s plucky intelligence with Anthony Hopkins’s ferocious insanity. The romantic holiday release date may seem like a head-scratcher at first, but it makes a lot of sense when you consider the film’s liberal use and subversion of classic romantic comedy tropes. Girl meets boy, opposites attract, both leads spend the movie denying obvious chemistry, and the third act reveals the boy’s been lying since the beginning (“Tell me I wasn’t a bet!”). They don’t get together in the end, but the boy still makes a Grand Romantic Gesture by phoning up the girl on her graduation day to ask her not to hunt him down and slap cuffs on him (yet another departure from Fifty Shades).
Silence of the Lambs delights in perverting rom-com tropes, none more so than the “meet-cute.” Instead of reaching for the same pair of gloves at Bloomingdale’s [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePU2Ux9JIMM], Clarice and Hannibal’s meet-cute becomes a disgusting exercise in humiliation (and, ultimately, perseverance) when a prison inmate sexually taunts Clarice and another flings semen into her hair. Lecter is appalled by the behavior and, like a true gentleman, agrees from then on to help with her case. It turns the trope on its head, but it also beautifully cements their partnership.
Yet even before then, and consistently throughout, Lecter is a shameless flirt who’s undeniably magnetic. It’s a trait the character often uses to lure victims to his pantry—and a presence brought to life in a twisted, debonair way by Hopkins. He’s the double-entendre-happy wolf hunting a grandma to eat. He’s Kenickie from Grease with better (worse?) table manners. And if there were any doubt about Lecter’s sexual allure, it was definitively quashed when the TV version, Hannibal, evolved Hopkins’s rakish niceties into Mads Mikkelsen’s suave intensity and pornographic culinary abilities.
It’s a character designed by author Thomas Harris to be infinitely fascinating, and in Silence of the Lambs we want to spend more time with the murderer who’s still picking patients out of his teeth than the non-serial-cannibal men in Clarice’s life. That includes Lecter’s foil, the old-school Men’s Rights Activist and insane-asylum chief Dr. Chilton (Anthony Heald).
In fact, all of the men in Clarice’s orbit are heinous. She’s exploited as bait by her boss, sexually propositioned by the smarmtastic Chilton, regularly reminded of her status as a petite minority, and purposefully excluded after her breakthroughs lead to the killer. She’s hunting down a man who literally skins women alive while excelling in a professional world dominated by men who would figuratively do the same to her.
If Clarice—like all decent rom-com heroines—is looking for a man who gets her, Hannibal is it. He appreciates her layers from the onset, not as the precious plaything her boss envisions but as a complex trauma victim who comes as close to an intellectual equal as his ego allows. She, in turn, simultaneously gets a therapist’s shoulder to cry on while proving herself better at solving a deplorable crime than all the old white men in the F.B.I. She’s Watson to Hannibal’s Sherlock Holmes—another pairing whose romantic subtext has blossomed into blatant tension now that Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman are on the case).
To reach for an even better pop culture mirror, Silence of the Lambs is a bit like The X-Files if Mulder were barred by court order from ever leaving his basement office. It’s no big surprise that there’s Hannibal/Clarice romantic fanfic.
It’s well known that Sean Connery was offered the Lecter role first, but—fortunately for us—turned it down. It’s easy to imagine him pulling off the schexy-bravado half of the character with his Bond-era swagger, but less easy to envision him delivering the monstrous half necessary for creating nightmares and challenging our attraction. Consider, too, that Michelle Pfeiffer was Demme’s first pick for Clarice Starling, and you’ll see how the balance could have been tilted all the way into date-night territory. Luckily, we got the unrequited perfection of Foster and Hopkins.
It’s a deft balancing act. The Silence of the Lambs expertly taps into a host of specific fears: insects, darkness, abduction, violent death, cannibalism, dancing with your penis tucked between your legs. It also taps into the pleasurable draw of danger and the tingly thrill of psychosexual drama. Since it’s a thriller instead of a rom-com, the sexual politics ultimately allow for Clarice to redefine “finding her man,” and the middle-aged cad doesn’t end up bedding the young ingenue (which makes it significantly less creepy than some of the romantic comedies out there).
When it swept the Oscars, the only other movies to win all five major awards were the screwball rom-com It Happened One Night and mental-ward drama One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. If you squint just right this Valentine’s Day, The Silence of the Lambs winds up landing somewhere in between.
