Clarice has three daddies

excerpt from 'Tough Gynes: Violent Women in Film as Honorary Men'

Tough Gynes was published by Wipf and Stock in 2019. It never received much of an audience for whatever reason; and the truth is, since its publication, I’ve modified some of the beliefs I held when I wrote it. It’s a collection of short essays on films where women behave violently in once-traditionally male roles, as “honorary men,” a term I shamelessly cribbed from feminist scholars in reference to the “woman warrior” trope. I spun the book off from a reference to the “honorary men” trope I’d used four years earlier in Borderline—Reflections on War, Sex, and Church (also published by Wipf and Stock). In spite of my modified perspectives (in the case of the chapter I’m reproducing here, I’ve since become a bit more tolerant of Lacan), much of what I wrote I can still stand by, and because there’s been a renewed interest in the iconic 1991 film, Silence of the Lambs, which I attribute to the strange new(ish) phenomenon of reaction videos (about which I intend to write something one day), I’m reprinting it here, sans the copious footnotes. There will be cross-references to prior essays.

Hope you enjoy.

Peace.

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“Clarice Has Three Daddies: Clarice Starling”

Silence of the Lambs (1991), a film written by Thomas Harris as both novel and screenplay, and directed by Jonathan Demme, is going to take us back through the same psychosexual territory in some respects that we encountered in Alien. Freud and Lacan, to be precise. Before we start, I need to clarify my own position on both Freud and Lacan, both extremely influential European psychoanalysts, Lacan being a kind of theoretical Freudian stepchild.

I am neither a Freudian nor a Lacanian, and for the most part I find them both—in spite of some useful and quite important insights—to be dismissive of women and obsessed with their own male anatomies. But I am not doing a Freudian-Lacanian analysis of either Alien or Silence of the Lambs because I have a special affinity for this interpretive framework; I am doing “Freudian-Lacanian analysis” of these films because this interpretive framework is self-consciously already in the films themselves. We have to enter that framework to understand the inherent logic of the stories. Whether I like their phallus-this-phallus-that way of interpreting the psychodynamics of human beings or not, this way of “knowing” is and has been culturally influential for a very long time.

We already think that way, in many respects, because we have assimilated many of these assumptions, preoccupations, and myths—which is what most of their ideas are—reworked myths. Male gendered myths from the Western canon. This assimilation—as we said in the last chapter—makes patriarchal psychoanalysis a self-fulfilling theory. Euro-bourgeois-man forms phallus-obsessed psychoanalysis; phallus-obsessed psychanalysis forms man (and defines woman as for-man).

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In Alien, we had a male character that was switched at the last moment to female by simply changing the pronouns in the screenplay [true story, it was never written as “feminist” -SG], and we had the sexual confusion portrayed visually in the monster her-him-self—with the fanged vagina. In Silence of the Lambs, we have sexual confusion represented by a female character trying to become an honorary male, pitted against a (monstrous) male character who has a particularly ghastly way of trying to turn himself into a woman. This mirroring is the very superstructure of the unfolding plot.

Clarice Starling, played by Jodie Foster, is a woman student at the FBI Academy, recruited by psychological profiling honcho Jack Crawford, to approach the (now iconic) genius-gastronome-aesthete-serial-killer Hannibal Lecter, in order to identify and capture another serial killer nick named “Buffalo Bill”—who exclusively targets “size 14” women.

As we get to know “Bill,” we learn that he hates his male identity, and that after being refused transsexual surgery, he takes matters into his own hands by killing and skinning size 14 women, sewing their pelts together to make a “girl-suit” that he can don (changing himself into a “woman”) while he capers around, surrounded by moths, in his grisly basement, to the sound of Q Lazarus’s “Goodbye Horses,” and accompanied by his yappy toy poodle. In case we don’t get it yet and need to be hit over the head, “Bill” tucks his male gonads behind his closed thighs, and admires his “female” pseudo-mons in the mirror.

Clarice, for her part, is constantly set apart from men in the shots of the FBI Academy and elsewhere, seeking in every case to be as asexual as possible, even as she is subjected to the male gaze by other academy students again and again. A male fellow student turns to look at her behind as she runs. An elevator full of males overshadows her tiny, lone, female figure in an elevator. The insipid director of the psychiatric facility holding Lecter leers at her as he suggests she go on a hook-up date with him while she is visiting Baltimore. A psychiatric inmate masturbates as Clarice passes by and slings his semen into her hair as she passes. Lecter, played by Anthony Hopkins, himself constantly fixes her in a kind of hyper-voyeuristic gaze. The male policemen in West Virginia, who are on hand for a victim’s autopsy, are shown as a circle of staring eyes. The male gaze is almost a named character in Silence.

If the male gaze weren’t apparent enough from these scenes, when we first meet “Bill,” he is lurking outside a parking lot, lying in wait for his next victim, with a pair of night vision goggles, through which we, the audience, can also project the appropriating gaze in green, night-vision monochrome. Capturing her with his eyes is preamble to her physical capture. Lecter, says to Clarice, explaining covetousness: “Don’t you feel eyes moving over your body, Clarice?” This, during that crucial interview when he manages to give her an erotic stroke of the finger. As we reach the climax of the film, Clarice herself is caught in the dark in “Bill’s” home, as “Bill” tracks her with the male-gaze-goggles and his phallic pistol.

With these highlights, which most readers know by heart from this immensely popular film, we can orient ourselves on the psychoanalytic subtexts, and on the way sexual confusion is deployed by Harris and Demme to gain and maintain the dramatic tension. Within this psychoanalytic framework, we can see fairly well into the character of Clarice.

Silence of the Lambs began its life as a novel by Harris. In terms of its basic plot convention, the book and film are “slashers,” horror stories in which women are serially and terrifyingly murdered by a relentless and monstrous killer. One of the tropes in the slasher film genre is the Final Girl. One by one, the (often skimpily clad and/or promiscuous) female characters are bumped off, leaving the lone surviving “final girl,” who is less sexualized and more conservatively dressed, often even bookish. In Halloween, that was Laurie (played by Jamie Lee Curtis); in Texas Chain Saw Massacre, it was Sally (played by Marilyn Burns); in Nightmare on Elm Street, the Final Girl was Heather (played by Nancy Thompson). The Final Girl is the one who finally defeats the monster. In Silence of the Lambs— which does depart in several ways from typical slasher fare, but without leaving the genre—Clarice Starling is technically, though not thematically, rescued from being the Final Girl by her rescue of . . . Damsel in Distress trope [rescued by honorary man Clarice Starling]. . . Catherine Martin, played convincingly by Brooke Smith.

The departures from the Final Girl trope in this film are important, even if they don’t fundamentally subvert the trope, because they make Silence of the Lambs a far more sophisticated piece of filmmaking than most slashers, and because they set up the story to plunge deeper into that atmosphere of Lacanesque sexual confusion that defines Clarice as the reverse image of her adversary, Buffalo Bill (played very creepily by Ted Levine).

The victims in Silence are not directly sexualized by the male gaze of the director (the shot of Catherine through the goggles is fairly asexual, though in the book she has just had sex with her boyfriend). These women are not set up (in the film, at least) to pay the wages of (sexual) sin with ghastly deaths. We discover them through grisly crime scene photos on Jack Crawford’s office wall, then through an autopsy, and only late in the film when semi-nude photos of the first victim are found hidden in her bedroom.

Clarice herself is pursuing an asexual identity for a socially conservative purpose. Clarice is certainly vulnerable to sexualization and the male gaze, as is emphasized in scene after scene in the film; but her resistance to that sexualization is the point of view of the director and audience. This is different from most slasher films that sadistically eroticize victimization.

Clarice overcomes her own vulnerabilities by becoming an honorary man. This “reversal” is what allowed many people to see a feminist thread running through the narrative. I will challenge that, even as it makes a certain sense, in part by pointing out (a book spoiler here) that Harris himself, in the final Starling-Lecter encounter with the novel Hannibal, has Clarice become Lecter’s lover and new killer companion who will dine with him on the “free-range rude.” This final book scene in which she reaches feminine adulthood by being for-the-phallus was dramatically altered for the film version to conceal this disturbingly anti-feminist development in the written series from the film audience.

T his is not that surprising, however, when one begins to tug at the threads of sexual confusion in Silence with Lacanian tweezers. No less a Lacan acolyte than Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek has claimed that Lecter himself is a Lacanian, and that Silence of the Lambs is really a dramatization of Lecter’s psychoanalytical intervention with Clarice, Lecter helping her work out her own symbolic impasse with regard to her recurring fantasy about saving the lamb, so that she can move on and become identified (as she finally does) with the Father/Phallus/symbolic authority. Hey, Lecter is, after all, a European psychiatrist.

With regard to The Father, note that Clarice’s character loses her mother before she has an organized memory of her. “My father was everything to me.” Raised by her father, she then takes on two more father figures/mentors during the film, Jack Crawford and Hannibal Lecter. What do they help her to do? Catch the monster, who is monstrous because he is a man trying to become a woman . . . by disguising himself in skinned women.

In a mirror image, Clarice is a woman trying to make it in a man’s world . . . which she accomplishes by becoming like-a-man, a combination of her three alternative-father figures, her Dad the All-American police man (her first model), and the antagonists, Crawford (teaching her their trade) and Lecter (giving her self-knowledge and therefore insight). How does she accomplish her transformation? Ultimately, with a gun (penis) that destroys her antagonist/mirror who is gazing at her through the night goggles, getting ready to shoot her with his gun (penis).

The Last Girl meets High Noon—Gary Cooper with a modestly ignored vagina. And lest we forget, Clarice, the honorary man, is rescuing the female victim, Catherine Martin, trapped in the basement. Substitute a male for Clarice, and you have a classic Damsel in Distress/Slasher trope. Clarice advances as an honorary male, and redeems the world by killing— redemptive violence, once again and too often, being the standard male trope in suspense/action films.

In the same year, another blockbuster film, hailed by some as feminist, featured women coming into their own with guns—Thelma and Louise, written by Callie Khouri (who also wrote Mad Money, another story of women coming into their own through armed robbery) and directed by none other than Ridley Scott. In this case, the liberated women characters “found themselves” by using guns, then fulfilled themselves through suicide.

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Silence of the Lambs’ basic storyline, fascinating as it is for all audiences, is still male, still a slasher, still about the serial slaughter of women. If that isn’t enough to put the film’s feminist bona fides into question, then the final novel should. Add to that the Lecter novel before Silence—Red Dragon—where we find the crazed killer is made into what he is by an evil, castrating grandmother. Phillip Ellis notes that Harris’s female characters tend to be “either victims or villains.” Clarice escapes this fate, at least when Silence was written and produced, by becoming an honorary man (refusing to be a victim, though in the final novel, she becomes Lecter’s victim then Nietzschean co-villain).

The honorary male is a female character who succeeds in the context of the story by becoming more like men, as men are according to the gender norms of the day, without fundamentally questioning those power structures within which gender—as a social structure that divides power between men and women—is nested. In other words, nothing else changes except that a woman does what only men had done before. Bear in mind that Clarice’s sexual-confusion “mirror,”—“Buffalo Bill”—is fully revealed in his own “monstrosity” during that genital-tuck scene wherein he dresses up as an ethereal woman (an honorary woman). To become an honorary man is to succeed (and identify with the Phallus/Law). To become an honorary woman is monstrous.

In Lacanian terms, maturity is achieved through identification with the phallus/father/symbolic order. In Silence of the Lambs, Clarice’s de velopment skips the psychoanalytically purported “problem” of having a mother. Her mother dies when Clarice is young, and Clarice is raised by her father—a law-enforcement officer. Her next father figure is Jack Crawford, who is schooling her in the finer points of law enforcement. Clarice gets a Lacanian leg up, so to speak, by jumping over that “primordial real” of early identification with the Mother, which stands her in good stead—even under the constant and diminishing male gaze of fellow students at the FBI Academy, where she is an asexual “good student.” Her final father figure, the one who is also the psychoanalyst who brings her to the full identification with the Father, is Lecter.

And Lecter’s preparation, then, to commit murder in the final scene is welcomed by the audience. We have come to identify with Lecter and celebrate his violence—because his victims are rude, dislikeable, or whatever—making Lecter himself a male engaged in the business, albeit beyond the law, of aesthetically redeeming the world by ridding it of unpleasant but savory people.

“Bill,” on the other hand, has had his development disrupted. “In one of Clarice’s meetings with Dr. Lecter,” writes Meghan Evans, “Lecter explains that as a child Bill was sexually abused by a male figure (whether it is the father is not known), which explains why Bill covets the female form. [Female] is the gender that has not harmed him, and therefore, one that he would rather embrace . . . Lecter also says in the same scene that Bill ‘hates his own identity . . . and he thinks that makes him a transsexual. But his pathology is a thousand times more savage.’”

In the final scene of Silence of the Lambs, Clarice is graduating from the FBI Academy, dressed in a suit, whereupon Crawford shakes her hand (a man-to-man gesture of recognition, signaling to the audience that Clarice has achieved equality), and tells her that her father would be proud. Surrogate institutional father speaks for biological father, whereupon Clarice gets a phone call from her psychiatric father, Lecter, who congratulates her then heads off to make a meal of the boorish Dr. Chilton.

Lacan applauds. So does liberal feminism. Clarice is now a killer, an enforcer of the law, successfully integrated into the otherwise status quo Establishment. Little do we know, in Harris’s most pseudo-Nietzschean flourish, Clarice will leave that status quo, one book later (film sanitation notwithstanding), to join Lecter as a re-feminized, sexually appealing lover, after eating her own future nemesis, another FBI agent. Therapy complete, she is now herself beyond the Law, existing finally for the phallus.