The Silence of the Lambs

The title of The Silence of the Lambs is about the darkest fear of Clarice Starling. It's a movie about a woman and her career ambition played by an extremely talented actress and the franchise is about the bad guy Hannibal Lecter, even though I believe the movie was so compelling because it's about a woman with career ambition being dismissed constantly by everyone around her except Hannibal Lecter.

All other men in that movie are predators of women. Hannibal Lecter is her ally and he's a serial killer who preys upon men, not women.

And I think that hit a nerve with the public for reasons no one could put their finger on and that's why it's a big, big movie. And the following franchise about Hannibal Lecter did relatively poorly because it missed the entire point of what gripped the subconscious fears of the public.

That's from a previous post on this site called Hannibal Lecter and Other Female Allies. I've just finished a piece about my belief that Mileva Einstein was the primary author of Einstein's Theory of Relativity and most of his scientific papers generally.

I came up with my hypothesis about the movie The Silence of the Lambs because it came on one day and my aspie kid was like "Everyone says this is such a creepy movie and I just don't get it at all. I mean there's a serial killer and a cannibal, but I just don't understand why people act like this is a big deal.

So we watched it together and I gave him running commentary on the stuff in the movie and how it's really about Clarice Starling and her career. Even the title is about Clarice Starling's deepest fear.

The title of the movie suggests the movie is about a woman facing her darkest fears and trying to put them to rest. And the movie goes to some trouble to establish that Clarice Starling is not a victim of sex crimes and is not a woman who simply hates men because of trauma of that sort.

Her parents both die while she's still a child. Her father dies in the line of duty in law enforcement.

He didn't molest her. He wasn't a bad man who died because of being a career criminal.

She goes to live with an uncle and I believe Hannibal Lecter explicitly asks her if he molested her and she says no. But he was a sheep farmer and as a girl, it disturbed her to hear the screams of the lambs -- the baby sheep -- being slaughtered. So one night she steals one and runs away.

It's a feminine coded fear. It's rooted in maternal instinct. But the film goes to pains to establish Clarice Starling hasn't suffered sexual trauma.

Her boss tells her to go talk to Hannibal Lecter expecting her to fail. And when she succeeds, he tries to claim credit for her accomplishments.

At every turn, she's hit on by men she needs to interview or needs expert opinions from, she gives quiet pushback about "Please don't say it's because I'm a woman...it matter. Please don't." 

The absolute only man in the entire film not behaving towards her in a predatory fashion is Hannibal Lecter who is explicitly a predator of men. He's a serial killer who kills men.

And he's literally a psychologist and literally in the last cell in the basement of a mental health facility for the criminally insane. He's metaphorically the voice of the deepest, darkest corners of the collective subconscious who can and does speak the unspeakable, like "Do you think your boss fantasizes about fucking you?"

I never really had a career. I had a corporate job for five years and I was a homemaker and I have done freelance work in recent years. 

There are posts on this site and on Witness to Destruction and Eclogiselle that talk about my experiences with applying for a serious job with a spiffy title of Executive Director and then things getting very weird after they hired someone less qualified than I was and didn't fire him and refused to do right by me.

And frankly I think the man they did hire, Wil Russoul, is a MORON because I didn't WANT his job and went to great pains to tell his bosses that and make it clear I really wanted a part-time job or freelance work that helped me pay my bills.

I'm medically handicapped and I wanted stability and something approaching a middle class lifestyle and I was willing to attend public meetings and give ideas away for free in hopes of networking and improving my income and helping people in power to improve the town I lived in.

If he weren't a MORON, he could have hired me as a part-time assistant, given me credit for a few things to get people to accept me and make me like him, then taken credit for most of my work and looked brilliant while I got credited as the unimportant, easily replaced secretary.

And even I would have had trouble figuring out exactly how much I was contributing and how much he was contributing while he got all the credit. 

Women have more trouble than men anyway with getting taken seriously and getting credit for their work. Men also struggle with that, especially if they are doing something innovative. The father of genetics got recognition only decades after his death.

And that is part of what is so scary about The Silence of the Lambs: A talented, hardworking, ambitious career woman can do good work that makes a difference and get nothing but sexual harassment while men take credit for her ideas, men get promotions and pay raises based on her work and she languishes in some underpaid job with no recognition.