The Silence of the Lambs Explained | Movie Mastery

Silencing the lambs

The film positions Clarice at this midpoint in her life. She’s out of college, an FBI trainee, who has her whole future ahead of her. But her future is tied to the Buffalo Bill case that’s very much unfolding in the present. If she does well, it could catapult her up the ranks of the FBI. And that’s important because this is the year 1990; while women were in the FBI, it was still a very male-focused place, meaning the opportunities to climb the ladder were less for women than for men. In fact, as recently as 2024, there was a lawsuit against the FBI for “unfairly dismissing [34 women] from its agent training program because of their gender…” 

So this case could make or break her entire career. But, to solve it, she has to acquire information from Hannibal Lecter. And Hannibal will only share what he knows if Clarice reveals her most traumatic life experience to him. That trauma happens to be rooted in Clarice’s childhood. 

Let’s look at the conversation. Notice, that right away Lecter sets time as a frame for the conversation. It’s in the context of solving the crime but the crime is a metaphor for working through your own trauma before it costs you opportunities in the present and future. 

The conversation with Lecter

• C: All right, yes. Now, please tell me how—
• L: No. It is your turn to tell me, Clarice. You don’t have any more vacations to sell. Why did you leave that ranch?
• C: Doctor, we don’t have any more time for any of this now. 
• L: But we don’t reckon time the same way, do we? This is all the time you’ll ever have. 
• C: Later! Listen to me, we’ve only got five—
• L: No! I will listen now. After your father’s murder, you were orphaned. You went to live with cousins on a sheep and horse ranch in Montana. And?
• C: And one morning I just ran away. 
• L: Not “just”, Clarice. What see you off? You started at what time?
• C: Early. Still dark. 
• L: Then something woke you, didn’t it? Was it a dream? What was it?
• C: I heard a strange noise. 
• L: What was it?
• C: It was screaming. Some kind of screaming. Like a child’s voice.
• L: What did you do?
• C: I went downstairs. Outside. I crept up into the barn. I was so scared to look inside, but I had to.
• L: What did you see, Clarice? What did you see?
• C: Lambs. They were screaming
• L: They were slaughtering the spring lambs?
• C: And they were screaming.
• L: And you ran away?
• C: No. First I tried to free them. I opened the gate to their pen, but they wouldn’t run. They just stood there, confused. They wouldn’t run.
• L: But you could. And you did, didn’t you?
• C: Yes. I took one lamb and I ran away as fast as I could. 
• L: Where were you going, Clarice?
• C: I don’t know. I didn’t have any food, any water, and it was very cold…very cold…I thought…I thought if I could save just one…but…he was so heavy…so heavy. I didn’t get more than a few miles when the sheriff’s car picked me up. The rancher was so angry, he sent me to live at the orphanage in Bozeman. I never saw the ranch again. 
• L: What became of the lamb, Clarice?
• C: He killed him.
• L: You still wake up, sometimes, don’t you? Wake up in the dark and hear the screaming of the lambs?
• C: Yes. 
• L: And you think, if you save poor Catherine, you could make them stop, don’t you? You think if Catherine lives, you won’t wake up in the dark ever again, to that awful screaming of the lambs. 

Lecter turns the subtext of the case, the metaphor of it, into text, exposition. Clarice’s dad was a night marshal who died trying to stop a robbery. He protected people, but no one was there to protect him. Clarice joined the FBI partially because it connects her to her father’s career. Partially because the power and authority of a federal organization makes her feel less powerless herself. She couldn’t help her dad. She couldn’t help the lambs. So she’s trying to position herself to have as many resources as possible to help someone, anyone. In this case: Catherine. If she saves Catherine, she takes the first step in feeling some sense of control regained. 

Catching Buffalo Bill

Once Clarice breaks that barrier of being able to look at her own past, she can turn her attention to Bill’s. We get that conversation between her and her friend, and fellow trainee, Ardeila, where they figure out Bill had to have known Frederika, that he had observed her, coveted her. Keep in mind, this is all metaphorical for Clarice’s relationship with her own unresolved trauma. Even though she goes to Frederika’s home and not her own, even though she looks through Frederika’s bedroom and not her own, it represents Clarice being in her own past. You can view Bill as symbolic of the robber who shot her father. Stopping Bill is, in her mind, proving she could have saved her father, saved the lamb, etc.  

You even get the symbolism of Clarice having to chase Bill down into the basement, into the lowest, darkest part of the house, which is the lowest, darkest part of her own heart and soul. Catherine in the pit is Clarice’s own younger, innocent self. When she confronts Bill, she confronts her own pain. And when she shoots him, she also hits the boarded up window so suddenly light fills the darkness. The metaphor there is pretty clear! 

Having conquered this embodiment of her past, we jump ahead to Clarice graduating from trainee to Special Agent. She’s ready to move forward without the baggage she had carried for so long. The film has positioned Crawford as a mentor. So it’s meaningful that he’s there to congratulate her—it’s a very parental moment. He even says, “Your father would’ve been proud today.” In the world of the film, there’s nothing special about that. But as a work of art, Crawford becomes a literary device. He becomes the embodiment of Clarice’s father and the closure she now feels. She couldn’t save him, but she’s now able to save others. So the handshake with Crawford is a way to externalize that sense of catharsis, without doing something silly like showing Clarice’s dad as a force ghost. 

When Hannibal Lecter calls Clarice, he asks if the lambs have stopped screaming. It’s a way to further  acknowledge her sense of closure. Which brings us to what Hannibal represents. 

Hannibal Lecter as a metaphor for all the bad stuff that awaits us

The film positions Bill as an embodiment of Clarice’s past. His case gained national attention because Catherine was the missing daughter of a U.S. Senator. But the truth of Bill was that he was a small town guy and a small town threat. Now think about Lecter. Lecter’s so much more sophisticated than Bill. And more dangerous. And, at the end, not “small town” but literally global, as he’s out of the country. 

Taking on Lecter, as Clarice says she’ll have to do, will be an entirely different ball game. So if Bill represents this childhood trauma, something personal that you experience early on and have to move past to enter into the adult world. Then Lecter represents the more elaborate fear, peril, and terror that awaits in the adult world.

One of the weird realities of being an adult is realizing how mortal you are, how dangerous and random the world is, whether from accidents, disease, random acts of violence, nature, etc. Lecter is that danger that’s out there, unrecognizable, unpredictable, and you’ll encounter it when you least expect it. That’s the thing Clarice will have to come to terms with: the existential dread of adulthood. That makes Silence of the Lambs quite the intense coming of age story.

The male gaze

As a narrative nerd, I find all the stuff Silence of the Lambs does with time and using Bill and Lecter as metaphors for past and future to be pretty fascinating. But I don’t know how much that interests you. Hopefully it does! But that’s not my favorite part of Silence of the Lambs. My favorite part is how the film builds up the motif of the male gaze and culminates it in such a charged, and compelling way. 

So, real fast, let’s talk about storytelling. It’s not really a story if a character goes to the store then comes home. But it’s a story if the character goes to the store with their significant other then comes home by themself. Or goes to the store alone but comes home with someone else. There’s a change that’s occurred. Story is the combination of what, why, and how change happens. 

Good storytellers, advanced storytellers, understand the power of escalation. You start with a flame, you end with an inferno. If you start with an inferno, where do you go from there? I mean, you could start with an inferno, put out the inferno, show recovery from the inferno, then build up the threat of a new inferno and have the characters struggle to make sure it doesn’t happen again. In that case, escalation still occurs. In Alien, you start with an egg, you move to a facehugger, then a chestburster, then end up with a full-blown Xenomorph. 

In Silence of the Lambs, Clarice begins at the FBI academy. It’s a place for training, where she’s safe from the consequences of the real world. Then she goes to talk to Lecter at the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. It’s her first step out of the protected world she had been a part of. While it’s certainly scary and has an element of danger, it’s still a supervised environment where no real harm could befall her. But Dr. Chilton does hit on Clarice almost immediately. And there’s what Miggs throws on her. As the movie goes on, Clarice is increasingly out in the world, unsupervised. A sense of vulnerability builds, especially given the context of Bill’s crime.  

• She goes out at night, by herself, to Lecter’s old storage unit, and it’s just her and the strange old man who owns the business and his silent driver. Some viewers probably never consider that something bad could happen to her. But others might be aware of the situation she’s in.
  • The film juxtaposes Clarice being out at night with someone she doesn’t know with Catherine arriving home in the middle of the night and finding this man who can’t lift his couch into his van. She offers to help him and this turns out to be Bill and he kidnaps her. 
• The next time Clarice leaves the safety of the academy, she’s off with Crawford, her FBI father figure. They attend the funeral for a recent Bill victim. Crawford doesn’t want to talk about details of the case in front of Clarice so heads into an office with the sheriff. So she’s treated like a child. Outside the office, the town’s local police surround her. All men who are older than her, who stare directly at her. We even get a POV shot where she looks from one group to another, and all of them eye her up. 
• Clarice goes off on her own again, this time to the museum, where she talks with some moth/butterfly experts. it’s just her and the two men. Like the previous times, it doesn’t seem like she’s in any danger. But one guy does get personal. He stares at her then asks “What do you do when you’re not detecting, Agent Starling?” Then asks “Ever go out for cheeseburgers and beer?” When she asks if he’s hitting on her, he says “Yes.” It doesn’t go further than that, but the subtext of so many of Clarice’s other interactions with men is finally text. They look at her, they desire her. And often she has to ignore it. 
• When Clarice goes back to Lecter, he doesn’t want to look at her like other men do. He wants to know her. It’s a different kind of coveting. And she has to essentially “undress” for Lecter to get the information she wants. In the midst of this interrogation, we get that line from Lecter—Don’t you feel eyes moving over your body, Clarice?—that is supposed to make us think back to all the times we’ve seen in the movie where men look at Clarice. We should start thinking about what it means thematically. 
• Clarice then goes to Ohio, to see where Frederika lived, because she’s discovered Bill had to have known Frederika and seen her often enough to “covet”. She finds the private photos of Frederika posing in her bra and underwear—photos for the male gaze. The movie initially makes us think Clarice is far away from the FBI raiding Bill’s house, only to reveal that, no, the FBI had the wrong house and Clarice is at the right one. She’s one on one with Bill, with no backup available. The viewer suddenly realizes the danger she’s in, how vulnerable she is. 

That sudden vulnerability is what the movie had been building up to this entire time. Even at the academy, in the opening, when Clarice runs from the academy training course back to a main building, we see male trainees glance over at her. It’s quick and isn’t something anyone would probably pay attention to, but once you know the movie has this motif of the male gaze, you notice it. Same with her getting on an elevator full of men. And then when she encounters some agents outside Crawford’s office, they advise her to wait for Crawford, then let their gaze linger on her as she drifts across the room. This motif has been present, and consistent, from the very beginning, but always with the caveat of “No one will actually do anything, though.” But for every 1,000 who won’t do anything, there’s one who will. That’s what Bill represents. 

Clarice and Bill finally move past the pretense and put their cards on the table. Clarice tries to command him and he doesn’t listen the way other men had throughout the film. The culmination of everything is when Clarice is in the basement and Bill cuts the power. He has on those night vision goggles. The imagery at this point switches back and forth from his perspective of Clarice, witnessed through the goggles, to reverse shots of him in the goggles. It’s the culmination of the male gaze motif. What had been mostly subtle, at other times overt, is now represented in this monstrous way via the goggles and the tension of being in Bill’s perspective as he reaches out a hand toward Clarice then raises the gun. 

It’s through this male gaze motif that Silence of the Lambs makes a larger statement about what it’s like to be a woman in a world where men see you and covet you. With Bill being the extreme end of that, where he doesn’t just want to be with a woman but wants to claim a woman’s skin, her body, as his own. It’s an exaggeration of the desire the moth guy had when he couldn’t help but flirt with Clarice. That Chilton had when he tried to ask Clarice out. That’s what fiction often does. It takes something normal, like desire, and escalates it from “a guy simply asking a girl out because she’s pretty and it will make him feel powerful if she says yes” to “a guy trying to make a skin suit from women because he wants to own that beauty and feel powerful”. The exaggeration is unrealistic but at the same time captures the truth of how possessive some men can be, the lengths they will go to feel ownership of a woman, to hold her in their gaze. 

I would argue it’s this use of motif and escalation that makes Silence of the Lambs such a classic. The story itself is great and memorable. But it becomes a work of art because it says something about the female experience, and does so in a way that men may understand. Don’t be the guy who stares, who covets.

Silence of the Lambs frequently asked questions

• Clarice Starling – Jodie Foster
• Dr. Hannibal Lecter – Anthony Hopkins
• Jame Gumb/Buffalo Bill – Ted Levine
• Precious – Darla
• Jack Crawford – Scott Glenn
• Dr. Chilton – Anthony Heald
• Ardelia Mapp – Kasi Lemmons
• Catherine Martin – Brooke Smith
• Senator Ruth Martin – Diane Baker
• Barney – Frankie Faison
• Pilcher – Paul Lazar
• Jailer – George A. Romero
• Based on – The Silence of the Lambs, a novel by Thomas Harris
• Written by – Ted Tally
• Directed by – Jonathan Demme