Interpreting The Film 'Silence Of The Lambs'

Switch on the television, and more likely or not one would find themselves watching a police procedural. This is hardly surprising as detective fiction makes for popular TV shows and cinema, where the focus is on finding the face behind a series of unexplained events, who is often someone you would least expect - so much so that it’s now a rule in crime fiction. While the highlight of such films is the big reveal at the end, other more discerning ones detail the manner in which the perpetrator is brought to light in order to bring out the different themes on screen that the film deals with.

Consider the 1991 American film, ‘Silence of the Lambs’, where the identity of the kidnapper-murderer is secondary to other themes like - the relationship of convenience between a FBI trainee, Clarice Starling and a convicted psychopath named Hannibal Lecter, who once practiced as a psychiatrist, or the subtle sexism that Starling sometimes faces from her all-male team. The film presents us with the criminal Hannibal Lecter, an unexpectedly polite man with polished manners who maintains a chilling yet calm demeanour even as he describes the gruesome details of his cannibalistic exploits. This is a far cry from the more straightforward unhinged

Since the film draws from real life and has a highly publicized case at the centre of its plot, uncovering the identity of the culprits is no longer the primary goal. Instead, the focus is now on how the structural deficiencies of investigative agencies can mar an investigation from being objective and fact-based, and can put the wrong people behind bars. Although balanced and objective at the surface, where it presents different scenarios of what may have happened, the film quietly makes a case for the innocence of the dentist couple and a possible miscarriage of