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Maidens and monsters in modern popular culture: The Silence of the Lambs and Beauty and the Beast
Harriett Hawkins
a a

Linacre College , Oxford Published online: 30 Jun 2008.

To cite this article: Harriett Hawkins (1993) Maidens and monsters in modern popular culture: The Silence of the Lambs and Beauty and the Beast, Textual Practice, 7:2, 258-266, DOI: 10.1080/09502369308582169 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09502369308582169

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HARRIETT HAWKINS

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Maidens and monsters in modern popular culture: The Silence of the Lambs and Beauty and the Beast
Jonetta Johnson of WPIK was on coast-to-coast with the revelation that Starling had found the remains in the garage through an 'eerie bonding with a man authorities have branded . . . a monsterV Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs

The monster and the maiden. La Belle et La Bete. The star-maker Svengali and his Trilby. The Phantom of the Opera and Christine Daae. And now FBI trainee Clarice Starling and Dr Hannibal Lecter. Throughout his original novel, Thomas Harris evokes memories of social and professional bondings between a beautiful ingenue and a sinister monster/mentor who inhabits a subterranean domain. 72-point tabloid headlines underscore the novel's mythic associations: '"BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN!!" screamed the National Tattler from its supermarket racks' (p. 62).1 And comparably haunting references likewise pervade Jonathan Demme's phenomenally successful film adaptation of The Silence of the Lambs wherein Anthony Hopkins's burning eyes, spectral pallor and imperious demeanour are eerily reminiscent of Lon Chaney's make-up and mannerisms, as well as the bloated, blood-red lips and the white mask worn by Michael Crawford as the Phantom of the Opera. As the film's brilliant designer, Kristi Zea, intended, the demon Lecter's face and dungeon seem primal nightmare images, like a painting by Francis Bacon. Red Dragon, Harris's previous best-seller (Bodley Head, 1982) that introduced the fiendish psychiatrist, Hannibal ('The Cannibal') Lecter as a monstrous modern version of Professor Moriarty, was very intelligently filmed by Michael Mann. Like The Silence of the Lambs the earlier thriller is concerned with metamorphosis and myth, visually encapsulated in William Blake's The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun from which the book takes its title. But Manhunter (as Mann's film was prosaically titled) was not a mega-hit of comparable force, arguably because it lacks the single most distinctive component of The Silence of the Lambs. And that is the female agent without which Jonathan Demme's film would be engrossing entertainment, but not an unfor258

gettable thriller. Simply substitute a male detective in the place of Clarice Starling and the impact is gone. It is the relationship between Hannibal Lecter and Clarice Starling that, simultaneously, takes us into the twilight zone lying somewhere between symbolism and realism and, in its radical departure from the familiar Svengali/Trilby paradigm, dramatically breaks new ground. In marked contrast to his mythic precursors, the monster-genius Lecter (spectre? 'reader' lecteur of the psyche?) does not hold the pretty ingenue, Clarice Starling, in hypnotic or sexual thrall to his powers. Quite the contrary. He liberates her from her own class-resentments and past anxieties even as he enables her to save the life of Catherine Baker Martin through the application of her own arduously acquired professional skills and her own deductive, as well as uniquely feminine, insights. In the only physical contact between them that occurs in the novel, Dr Lecter passes Starling the file containing the information with which she solves the crime. He held the file 'through the bars, his forefinger along the spine'. 'She reached across the barrier and took it. For an instant the tip of her forefinger touched Dr Lecter's. The touch crackled in his eyes. "Thank you, Clarice," "Thank you, Dr Lecter." ' And 'that is how he remained in her mind' - and likewise remains etched in the mind of the reader 'Caught in the instant when he did not mock' (p. 222). From their first encounter to the last, their relationship is reciprocal: quid pro quo. In their parting scene, he thanks her before she thanks him. In his last communication to his protegee (by letter in the novel and by telephone in the film) he tells her that he has no plans to come after her ('the world being more interesting with you in it'), and respectfully requests her to extend 'the same courtesy' to him. 'Some of our stars are the same', he concludes. Offering psychological growth as well as professional advancement, her searing sessions with Lecter enable the upwardly-mobile young Starling (starlet? commonplace bird in flight to stardom?) to take pride and courage and strength from once painful memories of her working-class parents, and, simultaneously, to surmount her class-based but justifiable resentment of the privileged Senator Ruth Martin who initially suspects her of being a thief. Looked at historically, this positive, enabling and ultimately liberating relationship between Clarice Starling and her internal, as well as externalized, daemons of ambition could represent an important crossing of the bridge between pre-feminist and post-feminist portrayals of ambitious women in popular art. In The Silence of the Lambs the ambition of the heroine is equated with growth: with the cumulative acquisition of skills and strength, with virtue. By contrast, up to the day before yesterday it was taboo to portray an overtly ambitious woman either positively or sympathetically in a popular Hollywood movie. The title of the mid-century film classic, All About Eve, just about said it all. If a showgirl like the 'graduate of the Copacabana school of the theatre' (portrayed by the gorgeous young Marilyn Monroe) got a part in a Broadway play, she was patronized for having won it for her performance on the casting couch. At the same time,
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if an undeniably talented young actress (like ambitious Eve Harrington) or an older, established star (like Margo Channing) deservedly achieved triumphant success, she had to be shown to achieve it at the cost of true happiness and fulfilment 'as a woman': any 'real' woman would give up stardom for a man. This ubiquitous cultural propaganda against feminine ambition generally, and blonde ambition in particular, made it impossible for the era's ultimate megastar, Marilyn Monroe, to reconcile a 'sympathetic' sexual persona (emblematic of vulnerable, submissive femininity and childlike ingenuousness) with the driving ambition and artistic aspirations of a (pre-Madonna) prima donna. Ever since Eve, self-driving, selfdirected ambition in a woman has been, and to countless people still is, identified with monstrous, unwomanly insubordination, if not with essentially evil, satanic presumption. And so, in order to maintain audience approval for a fictional heroine who achieved supreme success, she had to be portrayed as an artless innocent, driven (if not hypnotized into stardom) by a tyrannical genius who dramatically personified her 'demonic' ambition. Obvious examples of comparably alien, abnormal, freakish, monster/mentors include Trilby O'Farrell's dread, powerful demon, the sinister Jewish megalomaniac, Svengali; the hideous Phantom of the Opera; and the egotistical impresario lethally opposed to the ballerina heroine's marriage in The Red Shoes.1 The artists who created and portrayed the figures were imaginatively if not morally on the side of their svengalis, but society generally cheered when the maiden was rescued from the monster by a virile young suitor with whom she would find true womanly happiness as a contented wife and mother, free from the demon of ambition. More recent cries of outrage, directed against the overtly ambitious personas of a Madonna or a Susan Street,3 demonstrate that a woman unapologetically determined to make it to the top in any field is still bound to be feared and reviled as a freak as fearsome as the Phantom of the Opera if not a maneater as monstrous as Hannibal Lecter himself. By contrast, in both the novel and the screenplay of The Silence of the Lambs the professional ambition of the heroine is unselfconsciously portrayed with unqualified approval, admiration and sympathy. This is why Jodie Foster so eagerly sought to establish Agent Starling as the cinema's first explicitly 'post-feminist' film heroine. As described by Foster (The Sunday Times magazine, 12 May 1991, pp. 6-9), Starling is one of the most true and progressive portrayals of a female hero ever . . . I feel proud that we didn't say, 'Here's a hero because we pumped her full of steroids so she would look like a guy' or 'Here's a hero because she is really sweet and nice and that's why we like her.' 'The truth is' that Starling is a hero because she has flaws, 'because she faces things about herself that are ugly, and while facing them she solves the crime'. This, Foster concluded, 'is hero mythology'. Before she can fulfil her own ambition and save the life of Catherine Baker Martin, Starling must, in the mythology of the novel (as visually
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realized in the descending-down-into-the-psychic-dungeon progression of the film), pass through gates that clash shut and bolt behind her, and summon the will to proceed on down to the isolation ward 'where there can be no windows' and 'no mixing' with any other visitors or inmates, then go down the dim corridor alone to reach the last cell (pp. 1112). The first thing she notices about Dr Lecter is not his death-like pallor, or the maroon eyes that reflect light in points of red, but that his arms and hands show a 'wiry strength like her own' (pp. 14-15). The erudite Thomas Harris constantly stresses dark mirror-relationships. 'One can only see what one observes, and one observes only things which are already in the mind.' These lines from Alphonse Bertillon that serve as an epigraph to Red Dragon are markedly comparable to the lines from John Donne that Harris uses as an epigraph to The Silence of the Lambs: 'Need I look upon a death's head in a ring, that have one in my face?' Does Lecter's name suggest the most famous line from Baudelaire's Fleurs de Mai, 'Hypocrite lecteur, tnon semblable, mon frere1} Revoltingly horrible though he may be to everyone else, Lecter fraternally helps Clarice. Indeed in an interview on the South Bank Show (broadcast on the eve of the American Academy Awards), Anthony Hopkins said he used Lecter's supportive pledge to Starling, 'I'll help you catch him, Clarry', as the spine-line of his Oscar-winning performance. In turn, Clarice admits that every harsh thing Lecter says about her is true: 'He sees very clearly - he damn sure sees through me" (p. 281). She unstintingly acknowledges the painful fears and buried resentments he calls to her conscious attention, and learns how to live with them, to find courage from them (p. 312), to outgrow them. The first thing he calls attention to is her combination of ambition and class-based insecurity. 'Your handbag is lovely', he tells her. This was true. It was the best item she owned. 'It's much better than your shoes,' he adds. 'Maybe they'll catch up', she replies. 'I have no doubt of it,' he says encouragingly (p. 17). Likewise, after mercilessly calling attention to her points of shame: her 'rube' origins, her fear of being thought common and tacky (an all-too-ordinary starling), he acclaims her intelligence and ambition: 'You're far from common, Officer Starling. All you have is fear of it' (p. 22). And he then promises to give her what she 'loves the most'. 'What's that Dr Lecter?' 'Advancement, of course' (p. 24). And the advancement here is not just professional or social, it is psychic, in the way the caterpillar enters the chrysalis as a pupa and then 'comes out of its secret changing room' as a beautiful, winged, liberated imago (p. 157). Hers is the real, vital, metamorphosis in a parable about a serial killer attempting a horrific, artificial, impossible metamorphosis. The portrayal of Starling's ambition in The Silence of the Lambs seems remarkably positive in a post-feminist, even post-sexist way. But the coequal, co-starring relationship between Starling and Lecter/Foster and Hopkins is also reminiscent of the old Hollywood that, at its best, was populated by equally matched pairs of male and female characters (lovers, sleuths, partners in crime) and performers (singers, dancers) alike. Think
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of Scarlett and Rhett, Charlie and Rosie (in The African Queen), Nick and Nora Charles (popular co-sleuths in The Thin Man series as portrayed by Loy and Powell) and all those film noir partners in crime (Stanwyck and MacMurray in Double Indemnity, Turner and Garfield in The Postman Always Rings Twice) and so on (the list is legion): Garbo and Gilbert, Garland and Rooney, Tracy and Hepburn, Astaire and Rogers, Eddy and MacDonald, Bogart and Bacall. By contrast, in recent years up to The Silence of the Lambs and Disney's sparkling new Beauty and the Beast, characters and performers named, portrayed and billed as equals from Butch and the Kid, to Starsky and Hutch, to Willie and Phil, to Melvin and Howard and from Cagney and Lacey to Thelma and Louise - have all been same-sex (mostly male) buddies, with members of the opposite sex relegated to supporting roles or portrayed as members of an enemy tribe.4 There is obviously some metaphorical truth to these sexually-based marginalizations and hostilities. But past and present theories of genderdetermination to the contrary notwithstanding, The Silence of the Lambs is refreshingly lifelike in so far as the best professionals of both^sexes and all ages often do support and encourage each other independently of gender. Lecter's arch-enemy, FBI Section Chief Jack Crawford, is also supportive of Clarice: 'I level with you', he tells her. 'You'll do the same when you have a command.' He wants her to do well: 'For Starling, that beat courtesy any time' (p. 31). And when she asks him, on the basis of her unique qualifications, for the free rein she needs to solve the case, he gives it to her. 'I'm as good as anybody you've got at the cop stuff, better at some things,' she insists. 'The victims are all women and there aren't any women working this. I can walk in a woman's room and know three times as much about her as a man would know, and you know that's a fact. Send me.' 'Go, Starling,' he agrees (pp. 286-7). What has been noted by many British film critics is that, in contrast to Jack Crawford as portrayed by Scott Glenn (and indeed to everyone else in the film) the fiendish Hannibal Lecter, who is likewise an American in the book, is portrayed by the Welsh actor, Anthony Hopkins, just as the Scot Brian Cox played the part in Manhunter. This follows the rigid Hollywood convention whereby a cultivated, sophisticated, intellectual male villain of the type so often played by James Mason is traditionally un-American as well as traditionally wicked. Stereotypically (unhistorically) cultivated Nazis played by German refugees like suave Conrad Veidt, or by British actors like Cedric Hardwicke, abounded in Second World War films. Claude Rains and Basil Rathbone spoke with upperclass British accents when they played the odious Prince John and Sir Guy of Gisborne, as opposed to Errol Flynn and his merry men, who spoke with American accents in The Adventures of Robin Hood, even as the British Alan Rickman, as the Sheriff of Nottingham, was recently bested by all-American Kevin Costner as The Prince of Thieves. Even America's most famous archaeologist, Indiana Jones, is not likely to quote from Marcus Aurelius or John Donne (as Dr Lecter does): he is an action man at heart. If cultural sophistication, book-learning and
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intellectuality are traditionally deemed by Hollywood to be fundamentally foreign, they are also deemed unmanly and sissified, in so far as virility and sex-appeal are equated in American literature and films with frontier virtues as opposed to the effete urbanity of the city slicker. If it has hitherto been a cultural taboo to show a resolutely ambitious woman as a heroine, then to show a suave, brilliant, cultivated, intellectual American man - as opposed to a boyish hunk - as a hero who saves the day and wins the girl, would be to violate what is the most powerful of all Hollywood taboos. It is therefore salutary to have Anthony Hopkins's compelling portrayal of Hannibal Lecter to cite as conclusive evidence that intelligence, cultivation, sophistication may be very sexy. Although only their fingertips touch, the scenes between Starling and Lecter crackle with intellectually charged emotional and sexual energy. There is no reason to continue to associate this form of intellectual sex appeal with evil, and a Hollywood film that separates them will truly break new ground. 'People will say we're in love,' Lecter slyly suggests to Clarice in a wonderfully incongruous quotation from the musical Oklahoma (p. 216). They won't, but they might like to, because it would be so good to have a popular film portray love between equally strong, equally intelligent, equally matched male and female characters. There is certainly no valid ideological - or commercial reason why they should not make them that way any more. Indeed the recent success of The Silence of the Lambs and Beauty and the Beast suggests that there is every reason why they should. For however much Demme's dark nightmare and Disney's bright dream-come-true may otherwise differ, their markedly comparable portrayals of equally strong male and female characters, and their comparably dramatic departures from the formula whereby the maiden is rescued from the monster by a hunky hero, may, likewise, help to account for their box-office triumphs. If Jodie Foster could describe Clarice as a postfeminist heroine, the same can be said of Disney's Belle, who is comparably independent, adventure-seeking, unconventional, province-hating, and hunk-despising. And also a bookworm. Indeed, instead of offering her candy and flowers, the Beast woos her by showing her his magnificent library. Moreover, Disney's film likewise challenges popular myths about macho virility in which a softening by beauty (the 'feminine' principle) is emasculating, if not lethal: King Kong, for instance, ends with the line, 'it was beauty killed the beast' and begins with the 'Old Arabian Proverb': 'And the beast looked upon the face of the beauty/And it stayed his hand from killing/And from that day, it was as one dead.' In Disney's film, the reverse is true. The Beast literally and metaphorically saves Belle's life in rescuing her from a life of ordinary 'feminine' conformity. In a rescue comparable to saving her from the wolf-pack, the Beast's love rescues her from the macho Gaston. And quid pro quo her love rescues the Beast from his own arrogant and heartless earlier self and in doing so saves his life.
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From the beginning of Disney's film (contrast the earlier Cocteau version), Belle is utterly repelled by the smirky, male-supremacist Gaston who is determined to marry her. Indeed, Beauty and the Beast is the first blockbuster film in modern memory in which the villain is a conventionally handsome, macho jock of the Schwarzenegger/Bruce Willis type who is likewise adored by a trio of bimbos as well as a cohort of admiring male buddies in short, Gaston personifies the type Hollywood most commonly extols to modern audiences as the masculine ideal. By contrast, at the end of the Disney film, far from cheering the rescue of the maiden from the monster by a hunky hero, audiences cheer the rescue of the beautiful maiden from a tyrannically, conventionally malesupremacist suitor (and the conformist forces that he represents) whose goal is to 'put a lid on her', to force her, as his 'little wife', into subordination. They likewise cheer Belle's reciprocal liberation of the Beast from the curse previously (and rightly) imposed on his conceited (Gaston-like) earlier self by an old hag who offered the young prince a rose if he would allow her to stay for the night in his castle. When he spurned her offer, she magically turned into the beautiful, all-powerful sorceress who turned him into a beast who could only be redeemed by learning to love and be loved by a woman who would not judge him by appearances. In giving 'The Force' (of salvation and destruction) to its female characters (the Old Hag and Belle), Beauty and the Beast is reminiscent of Chaucer's 'The Wife of Bath's Tale' as well as the classic Hollywood fantasies, The Wizard of Oz, Pinocchio and Snow White wherein the real power is wielded by the Wicked Witch of the West, Glinda the Good (the male Wizard turns out to be a humbug with no magical power at all), the Blue Fairy, the Wicked Queen and the lovable virgins Dorothy and Snow White, and not primarily by men as in today's fantasies such as the Star Wars trilogy. But the transforming forces in Beauty and the Beast as in The Silence of the Lambs operate internally as well as externally. In their final combat, having defeated the arrogant Gaston-force (within as without) the redeemed Beast first simply banishes him, orders him to go away. And that would seem one way to end the conflict. But it doesn't. It is as if the force Gaston represents has to be both externally and internally and irrevocably destroyed. If not, Gaston might rise again (within and without) to sneak up and stab the reformed Beast in the back, just as he does before he finally plunges to his death, in exactly the same way the Wicked Queen falls off the precipice in Snow White, to the literal as well as the metaphorical relief and satisfaction of the audience. The film thus suggests that the Gaston-persona must finally be killed off and so exorcised for ever, in order to assure that Belle and the Beast can live happily ever after as equals. Which is a wonderfully satisfying reversal of the ending of Fatal Attraction (as released in mainstream cinemas) where it was as if the single career woman had to be killed off ('Kill the Bitch!) to ensure that the hero and his cereal-box wife and children could live happily ever after in domestic conformity.
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If characters in Beauty and the Beast and The Silence of the Lambs, as in all violent fictions from fairy tales to horror movies, do but poison in jest, murder in metaphor (no offence in the world), and their sources are likewise extant in classic and popular texts, there's no reason we need be unduly upset by Hannibal Lecter's grim jest at the end of Jonathan Demme's film. The line 'I'm having an old friend for dinner' does not appear in the novel but most effectively expresses Hannibal the Cannibal's laudable desire to devour Thomas Harris's equivalent to Gaston, the pompous, knowing, patronizing male supremacist, Dr Chilton. If Hopkins' Lecter metaphorically gobbles up Chilton, then good for him the cinema could do with far fewer Bruce Willis/Jack Nicholsontype sexists. Surely post-pubescent male cinemagoers must by now be just as bored with smirky macho film stars as women are. Indeed, Clarice and Belle, in giving the brush-off to Chilton and Gaston, stand for untold millions of women turned off, not on, by Hollywood's hunks. By the same metaphorical token, one can only applaud Starling's/Jodie Foster's determination to gun down the serial killer who preys on women. Too many serial film-makers nowadays are out to strip and flay them. Rumour has it that Dr Lecter himself may be threatened in a sequel dealing with a serial killer who preys on other serial killers. And one wonders if Clarice Starling will come to his aid even as Disney's Beauty saved the life of her Beast. The ultimate quid pro quo? If so, more power to her: 'Go, Starling.' Linacre College, Oxford
NOTES

1 Quotations are from Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs (London: Mandarin Books, 1989). 2 I have discussed the 'Svengali' paradigm with reference to various other works in Classics and Trash: Traditions and Taboos in 'High' Literature and Popular Modern Genres (Brighton: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990). 3 In Ambition (London: Corgi Books, 1989), Julie Burchill boldly defied two major cultural taboos by portraying Susan Street, who is not only without any sexual inhibitions or sexual guilt, but is also unapologetically ambitious, as an entirely laudable heroine. As was observed in the Literary Review (quoted on the first page inside), 'Civilization will not lightly forgive her.' 4 The tradition of portraying male and female characters as equal in passion, heroism, virtue and vice so far as I can track it back historically entered the popular dramatic (and literary) tradition with Shakespeare. Before Shakespeare created Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, Troilus and Cressida, Othello and Desdemona, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, Kate and Petruchio and Beatrice and Benedick, Western European drama tended to focus, primarily, on either a male or a female protagonist: Medea, Antigone, Tamburlaine, Dr Faustus. After Shakespeare, you get a host of matched pairs. For instance: a direct line of sparring lovers who move from conflict to kisses runs from Beatrice and Benedick to
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Mirabell and Millamant to Elizabeth and Darcy to Spencer Tracey and Katherine Hepburn and Bogart and Bacall (who met with a veritable love song of wisecracks in To Have and Have Not). Heirs apparent of the Macbeths are those film noir partners in crime who jointly kill an older man to collect his insurance in The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity. As made-for-each-other body- and soul-mates ('she was his kind of woman and he was her kind of man'), Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra are succeeded by equally passionate lovers from Cathy and Heathcliff to Scarlett and Rhett. The Shakespearean tradition of co-starring male and female roles subsequently (in his day female parts were played by male actors) called for co-starring male and female performers ranging from Garbo and Gilbert to the matched pairs and singing, dancing, mixed-doubles cited above until it was replaced by today's same-sex 'buddy' formula. Which is one reason why female film stars today have so few opportunities to twinkle except in the occasional female buddy movie such as Thelma and Louise. Even if there were equal numbers of male and female buddy movies, could this gender-based segregation of co-starring roles in the cinema possibly be rationalized as
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