Her boss Jack Crawford warns her not to let the man inside her head. The slimy Dr. Chilton tells her she must be a bait for the monster inside, since she is the kind of female who can turn him on. As the pretty woman, the young Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Academy trainee Clarice Starling enters the den, the high security prison cell a la the descent to modern hell, she comes face to face with a man who is about to change her life.
The man or the monster, depending on which side of the fence you are on, in question, is Dr. Hannibal Lecter, a psychiatrist and a psychopath, ambidextrous at both. He is courteous and wears his prison suit as proudly as a dandy would wear his dinner party dress. First, he is appalled and amused because Crawford has sent a trainee to try him on, but as he sizes her up, he sees a youthful resolve behind her expensive bag, cheap shoes, and the barely concealed West Virginia accent. He is not hostile, because he senses more than a plate of flesh and blood in her.
If you look at the legend of beauty and the beast, it’s the same setting. (Interestingly, it won the Best Picture trophy beating Disney’s Beauty and the Beast at the 64th Academy Awards ceremony in 1992) A woman enters the lair of someone the world perceives as a beast, but with her, he behaves differently. He proposes a deal, information against information, him prying into her memories against the clues that will lead her to Buffalo Bill, a serial killer. Quid pro quo. Hannibal slithers into her private world, with questions and answers, an act that both calms and terrifies her. In successive meetings, he lures her into being his dish symbolically, but to our surprise, we also see signs of him accepting her to affect him, only to the extent his personal ego can sanction. Despite a bulletproof glass in between, they talk, letting each other be analysed, sometimes as mentor and student, occasionally as father and daughter, and above all, as lovers. They metamorphose in each other’s eyes, but the wall remains.
Let your lover change you, said the great Greek philosopher Plato. Unlike the modern limited view of love where one lover seeks another just like what he/she is, Plato believed that the person you are in love with should have qualities you yourself lack, and by being with the person, you change for the better. We grow, to the fullest of our potential, while being seduced into becoming the better version of ourselves.
As Hannibal learns about Clarice’s childhood, her orphaned days, the screaming of the lambs that haunt her in dreams, we see a lot of resemblance between the two. Clarice is a woman dwarfed by the sea of men with questionable gaze for her choice of profession given her gender, Hannibal is banished for the very instinct of his eating choice, both judged and sentenced for something that essentially defines them in societal terms. He sees her on the same plateau. He becomes her guide helping her with hints, empathises with her nightmares, is touched by her unfortunate childhood, and above all, shows the gesture of protection, by making the man in the next cell choke on his own tongue because he dares to hiss at her, assault her.
If this is not love, what is? Look at Charu when she emerges out of her confinement of feelings in Charulata, or Bimala when she evolves into a confident woman in Ghare Baire. You always will have a lover who makes you change you for the better, raising the passionate flag. Clarice and Hannibal too, have a matchless romance going on, a transmutation only they are aware of.
When Hannibal is off-screen, you long for him, because he is smart and entertaining, and he cares for our Clarice. Finally, when she succeeds in solving the case and gets lauded, he is the first one to call her before having his old friend for dinner.
Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs turns 25 years old today, and it has been hailed as one of the modern masterpieces of cinema, very very rightfully. But calling it simply a horror or a thriller is just limiting the great beauty of the film. Yes, it is constructed as the hunt for Buffalo Bill, a thriller trope, but the heart of it belongs to Clarice and Hannibal, one enticing the other into a battle of wits, both armed with warmth and intelligence.
If vampires, beasts and mutants can inspire feelings of romance, then why not a cannibal? This Valentine’s Day, give Hannibal and Clarice a shot over Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy, you will see a love that is more than love.
(The writer is a journalist and a screenwriter who believes in the insanity of words, in print or otherwise. Follow him on Twitter: @RanjibMazumder)
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