'Seeing the Female Body Differently': Gender issues in The Silence of the Lambs

Abstract

In this paper it is argued that the habitual representation of women in film has played a considerable part in constructing ideas of femininity, which contemporary filmmaking can deconstruct. The Silence of the Lambs deconstructs femininity as it has been constructed in four classic genres: the serial killer movie, the horror or monster movie, the 'pupil and mentor' movie and the 'psychiatrist and patient' movie. The Silence of the Lambs can be shown to deconstruct the generic amalgam of voyeurism, the 'male gaze' of the camera, castration anxiety and the confused and reinstated gender identities typical of the serial killer movie. The empathy between Doctor Hannibal 'the cannibal' Lecter and young FBI agent Clarice Starling criticises the encoding strategies of the classic monster movie wherein both woman and monster are feared objects within patriarchal orders of seeing. Starling's appetite for success coincides with Lecter's more obviously worrying appetite; the film deconstructs those films wherein the ambition of the female pupil is personified by a demonic mentor. Starling, unlike most female pupils, is not punished for her ambition and strength, qualities partially created through the iconographic meanings of actor Jodie Foster. In psychiatrist and patient films, the heroine's behaviour is explainable when located within the patriarchal metanarrative of psychoanalysis, towards which The Silence of the Lambs is deeply ambivalent.