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shinyredballoon

 

Since I have quite an appetite for music, film, and literature, I decided to devote a space for them. So, Shiny Red Balloon is born. Derived from Barbie's Cradle's song of the same title, this is a review/comment/feature blog of anything that would fall under the stated aesthetic landscapes. I am neither a music, film, and/or literature expert nor a certified reviewer/critic, but I would dare voice what I have to say. This is the Love, a shiny, red balloon.

 

+ Balloon Blower +

I am RJ Manguera. I read. I write. I listen. I watch. I started out from reading product labels (milk, multivitamins, and powdered juices are favorites) and pornographic magazines, from listening to Yano, Air Supply, Sinatra and his contemporaries, and my parents' industrious naggings, and from infinitely watching scratchy video tapes of Peter Pan, The Lady and the Tramp, The Wizard of Oz, and Living Daylights (a Bond movie). Detrimental.

 

+ Shiny and Red +

Airwaves

[radiohead]   [r.e.m.]  [coldplay]   [tori amos] [sarah mclachlan]  [björk]   [d'sound]   [bob marley]   [dido] [the cranberries]   [alanis morisette]    [new radicals]  [maksim]  [moby]  [enya]   [plumb]   [beyoncé knowles]  [outkast]   [black eyed peas]   [evanescence]  [incubus]   [norah jones]   [jars of clay] [matchbox twenty] [barbie's cradle] [rivermaya]   [kitchie nadal]   [freestyle] [bamboo]   [imago]  [nina]   [joey ayala] [moonstar 88]    [cynthia alexander]

Silver Screen

[y tu mama tambien]

[tuesdays with morrie]

[finding nemo]

[my best friend's wedding]

[the debut]

[homecoming]

[himala]

[tinimbang ka ngunit kulang]

[grease]

[the silence of the lambs]

[red dragon]

[bayaning third world]

[crouching tiger, hidden dragon]

[road home]

[citizen kane]

[the wizard of oz]

Paperback

[crime and punishment]

[the unbearable lightness of being]

[a portrait of the artist as a young man]

[misery]

[the waste land and other observations]

[sky rose and other stories]

[likhaan book of poetry and fiction anthologies]

[the shining]

[a time to kill]

[one hundred years of solitude]

[empire of memory]

[mga kagilagilalas na pakikipagsapalaran ni juan dela cruz at iba pang tula]

[a farewell to arms] 

[the old man and the sea]

 

 

+  They Burst  +

 why does it always rain
 on me? is it because i
 lied when i was 17?

.: Travis :.

 

 for me to take your

 word, i had to steal it

.: Tori Amos :.

 

 i wanna give you love
 but all i have is rain

.: Hungry Young Poets :.

 

 apology is futility
 destiny is not a friend

.: Hungry Young Poets :.

 

 you turn the TV on
 and tune me out again

.: Plumb :.

 

 she broke down
 and i broke down
 coz i was tired of lying

.: Ben Fold Five :.

 

 i don't have to pretend
 she doesn't expect it
 from me

.: Sarah Mclachlan :.

 

 kung wala ka nang

 gustong sabihin, huwag
 ka nang tumingin ng
 ganyan

.: Barbie's Cradle :.

 
 i want a perfect body
 i want a perfect soul
 i want you to notice
 when i'm not around
 you're so fuckin' special
 i wish i was special

.: Radiohead :.

 
 you don't have to speak
 i feel

.: Björk :.

 

 i can see the words
 dance across your lips

.: Plumb :.

 

 living here is bitter as

 dying and leaving me
 was easier than loving

.: Barbie's Cradle :.

 
 i'm keeping my affair
 with a book, my long
 and lonely compromise

.: Barbie's Cradle :.

 
 i don't wanna wait in
 vain for your love

.: Annie Lennox :.

 
 i desire to press in my
 arms the loveliness
 which has not yet come
 into the world.

.: James Joyce :.

 
 ...said i have a queer
 mind and have read too
 much. not true. have
 read little and
 understood less.

.: James Joyce :.

 
 what can life be worth if
 the first rehearsal for
 life is life itself?

.: Milan Kundera :.

 
 the longing for Paradise
 is man's longing not to
 be man.

.: Milan Kundera :.

 
 and if i could be who 
 you wanted 
 if i could be who you

 wanted all the time
 all the time

.: Radiohead:.

 

 

+  Helium  +

 And indeed there will be time

For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,

Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;

There will be time, there will be time

To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;

There will be time to murder and create,

And time for all the works and days of hands

That lift and drop a question on your plate;

Time for you and time for me,

And time yet for a hundred indecisions,

And for a hundred visions and revisions,

Before the taking of a toast and tea.

+ T.S. Eliot +


+ i am becoming a bookshelf...well, not quiet +
05.10.04 (1:32 am)   [edit]
currently wrestling:
+ In Heaven As On Earth [i]by M. Scott Peck[/i]
+ The Metamorphosis and Other Stories [i]by Franz Kafka[/i]
+ Dubliners [i]by James Joyce[/i]


finished with:
+ One Hundred Years of Solitude [i]by Gabriel Garcia Marquez[/i]
+ Solitude and Seduction: Essays [i]by Danton Remoto[/i]
+ Empire of Memory [i]by Eric Gamalinda[/i]
+ Chronicles of a Death Foretold [i]by Gabriel Garcia Marquez[/i]


no reviews yet. couldn't get down to write. hehe. :P soon folks! :)
 
+ A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man +
04.20.04 (10:14 pm)   [edit]
These are some of the passages that have struck me while reading James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I’m still trying to digest them. It will be up to me whether I’ll absorb them or vomit them out.

The story reminds me of what I wish I could do and say and think about what I wanted to do with my life. There were events I am familiar with and ruminations that I also have thought of whenever I stare at the moon.

+ Lavender and cream and pink roses were beautiful to think of.

+ He wondered whether the scullion’s apron was damp too or whether all white things were cold and damp.

+ Why did people do that with their two faces? (kiss)

+ What was after the universe? Nothing. But was there anything round the universe to show where it stopped before the nothing place began? It could not be a wall; but there could be a thin thin line there all round everything.

+ It was queer that he would always be a brother. It was queer too that you could not call him sir because he was a brother and had a different kind of look. Was he not holy enough or why could he not catch up on the others?

+ For some time he had felt the slight change in his house; and those changes in what he had deemed unchangeable were so many slight shocks to his boyish conception of the world. The ambition which he felt astir at times in the darkness of his soul sought no outlet.

+ He wanted to meet in the real world the unsubstantial image which his soul so constantly beheld.

+ They would be alone, surrounded by darkness and silence: and in that moment of supreme tenderness he would be transfigured.

+ Weakness and timidity and inexperience would fall from him in that magic moment.

+ The causes of his embitterment were many, remote and near.

+ He gave them ear only for a time but he was happy only when he was far from them, beyond their call, alone, or in the company of phantasmal comrades.

+ By his monstrous way of life he seemed to have put himself beyond the limits of reality. Nothing moved him or spoke to him from the real world unless he heard in it an echo of the infuriated cries within him.

+ He had not died but he had faded out like a film in the sun. he had been lost or had wandered out of existence for he no longer existed. How strange to think of him passing out of existence in such way, not by death but by fading out in the sun or by being lost and forgotten somewhere in the universe!


+ Nothing stirred within his soul but a cold and cruel and loveless lust. His childhood was dead or lost and with it his soul capable of simple joys and he was drifting amid life like the barren shell of the moon.


+ Art thou pale for weariness
Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless . . .?

+ His lips would not bend to kiss her.

+ The vast cycle of starry life bore his weary mind outward to its verge and inward to its center, a distant music accompanying him outward and inward.

+ The stars began to crumble and a cloud of fine stardust fell through space.

+ At most, by an alms given to a beggar whose blessing he fled from, he might hope wearily to win for himself some measure of actual grace.

+ What did it avail to pray when he knew that his soul lusted after its own destruction?

+ The falsehood of his position (kneeling at the altar) did not pain him.

+ That was strange.

+ Time has gone on and brought with it its changes.

+ All else is worthless. One thing alone is needful, the salvation of one’s soul.

+ Death is certain. The time and manner are uncertain.

+ He had died.

+ He was destined to learn his own wisdom apart from others or to learn the wisdom of others himself wandering among the snares of the world.

+ All that had been denied them had been freely given to him.

+ Even before they set out on life’s journey they seemed weary already of the way.

+ Pride after satisfaction uplifted him like long slow waves.

+ He had refused.

+ …that the commandment of love bade us not to love our neighbour as ourselves with the same amount and intensity of love but to love him as ourselves with the same kind of love.

+ He would create proudly out of the freedom and power of his soul…

+ He was alone.

+ To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life!

+ I was not wearier where I lay. --- Ben Jonson

+ The object of the artist is the creation of the beautiful. What the beautiful is is another question.

+ Many go down into the depths and never come up.

+ I shall express myself as I am.

+ I was someone else then.

+ I was not myself as I am now, as I had to become.

+ And is that why you will not communicate…because you are not sure of that too, because you feel that the host, too, may be the body and blood of the son of God and not a wafer of bread? And because you fear that it may be?

+ I fear more than that the chemical action which would be set up in my soul by a false homage to a symbol behind which are massed twenty centuries of authority and veneration.

+ What kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illogical and incoherent?

+ To discover the mode of life or of art whereby your spirit could express itself in unfettered freedom.

+ I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for army defense the only arms I allow myself to use – silence, exile, and cunning.

+ I do not fear to be alone or to be spurned for another or to leave whatever I have to leave. And I am not afraid to make a mistake, even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake, and perhaps as long as eternity too.

+ Said I have a queer mind and have read too much. Not true. Have read little and understood less.

+ The past is consumed in the present and the present is living only because it brings forth the future.

+ I desire to press in my arms the loveliness which has not yet come into the world.

+ Vague words for a vague emotion.

+ Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.

:wink:
 
+ The Woman and The Monster in The Silence of the Lambs: A Film Analysis +
04.16.04 (10:18 pm)   [edit]
+ this paper was a requirement for our Film class. this was the paper I had been ranting about in my past blog entries. we had to analyze a film or films using feminist-psychoanalytic, psychoanalytic, or cultural (Marxist) theories. it is 60% of our grades for the third grading. my paper was mainly a character analysis. i analyzed Jodie Foster's character Clarice Starling using feminist-psychoanalytic theories and Buffalo Bill's character played by Ted Levine using cultural and psychoanalytic theories. my encompassed the theories we’ve discussed in class. the movie’s complicated and so was the times i wrote the paper. it was so damn difficult. i do not know how I fared with the analysis, but one thing’s for sure…i passed the subject! :D +

.::.

The Woman and the Monster in The Silence of the Lambs
RJ Manguera
Humanities 3
2nd Semester, 2003-2004
Ateneo de Davao University


ABSTRACT

This paper will examine the power of the look or gaze in Jonathan Demme’s 1991 masterpiece The Silence of the Lambs especially of the female’s.

Since movie’s protagonist is female and its antagonists are male, this paper would like to find out if the female has the control of the gaze and what are its consequences.

The paper will observe how the female is projected in the movie and how the movie gives importance to the female’s look. It will prove or refute Laura Mulvey’s thesis that the female is passive and an object of visual pleasure in movies. Although most of the characters in the movie are male and seem to desire her, she is not solely posed as an object for pleasure. She also has control of her actions and is intelligent.

Furthermore, it will analyze the protagonist’s “active” gaze and her masculinity complex based on Helen Deustch’s article The “Active” Woman: The Masculinity Complex (Deustch, 1944). The protagonist grew up with his father and so much attached to him; her mother visually, emotionally, and psychologically absent when she was growing up. So this paper would find out if this attachment has affected the female’s character and psyche.

Although this film analysis is focused on the female protagonist’s gaze, it will also slightly touch Harry M. Benshoff’s thesis on the monster queer. The persons who are described as queer are those who identify themselves as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual, transvestite, among others. Even women are regarded as sexual Others along with the bisexuals and homosexuals.

Also, using Linda Williams’ thesis in her essay When the Woman Looks, this paper would find out how the female’s look is projected and consequently punished. The protagonist’s perspective was also included in the movie. And with her “looking”, this paper will analyze how she would look at the male characters, especially to the antagonist Buffalo Bill, and how she would respond to their gaze.


INTRODUCTION

There have been many movies that star women as protagonists; all of them survived in the denouement of the story. Yet part of the female protagonist’s success is the aid of a man, thus only becoming a “leading lady” or the ingénue. However in the 1991 hit The Silence of the Lambs this was not the case.

Jonathan Demme, the movie’s director, is not new to making films that present heroic central female characters challenging the patriarchal norms of society. Such films were “Something Wild” starring Melanie Griffith and “Married to the Mob” starring Michelle Pfeiffer, which gave him a reputation of a feminist filmmaker.

The Silence of the Lambs is an Oscar-winning masterpiece also presenting a heroic female protagonist, intelligent and brave, who single-handedly destroyed a serial killer. She exhibited traits that are stereotypically found in a man: intelligence, bravery, pride, among others. As a trainee in a male-dominated institution such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), she was subject to intimidating stares and discrimination, aside from the desiring gazes, for her physical beauty, of his contemporaries.

The film could not be confined in a specific genre classification though some could brand it as a cop movie or horror/slasher movie where the female is usually victimized. The Silence of the Lambs had a supposed feminist politics undercurrent. In Mark Jancovich’s article “Genre and The Audience” (2002), he cited Fred Schuber’s review in Premiere which quoted that Jonathan Demme “much rather see a strong story with a lead character as a woman that the lead as a man. Because the odds are stacked higher against the woman”. Likewise Jodie Foster, who played the heroic female protagonist in the movie, played this role because of “her personal and political commitment on feminism” (Jancovich, 2002). Foster also thought that the female character used her femininity to battle the devil and save the underdog and not by being “Rambo – Rambette – in underwear” (Schuber, as cited in Jancovich, 2002).

Also Jancovich cited Schuber’s article that contained Foster’s idea of her performance as an act of feminist struggle.

I realize that I play certain characters to redeem them. I think in some ways what my makeup is, and my lot in life is that I’ve used fiction to save women who otherwise would have been spat upon or passed off, not paid attention to, to reverse a certain negative history. That’s why I’ve always played those people, to make them human. It has reverberations in my life, how I feel about my family and how I feel about the literature I studied and the things that I do.

Sexual politics is one subtle current in The Silence of the Lambs.

Since the movie has a female protagonist, one could further ask or question why this woman acts such ways. The woman here is active and has masculinity complex. Helene Deustch (1944) proposed that a woman like that of the protagonist in The Silence of the Lambs is born out of her father’s head, and is an intellectual woman, thus masculinised. She also negates anything affective or emotional for this trait constitutes the feminine erotic woman. Yet, however she would try to disregard this, she constantly challenged by the psychological and historical delving of Dr. Hannibal Lecter.

By being active, the woman exercised the act of looking. However, “the woman’s exercise of an active investigating gaze can only be simultaneous with her victimization” (Doane, as cited in Williams, 2002). Looking at or seeing the monster (Buffalo Bill in the movie’s case) was like looking at or seeing her self’s doubly castrated other; the monster’s or the Other’s difference was similar to her difference. Despite all of these, the woman prevailed and was vindicated in the end.


SUMMARY OF FILM

An adaptation of Thomas Harris’ novel, The Silence of the Lambs is about a Federal Bureau of Investigation trainee Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) tasked to track down a serial killer who skins his victims known only as Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine). But before she could identify the demented killer, she must first seek clues from a psychiatrist imprisoned for eight years, the brilliant and murderous cannibal Dr. Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins). Buffalo Bill whose real name is Jame Gumb and a transsexual who dislikes himself, was Dr. Lecter’s former patient.

To understand Buffalo Bill’s psyche, Starling had to face her own disturbing past: her father’s death and a childhood desire to comfort the agitated lambs in her uncle’s ranch. This is despite of Agent Jack Crawford’s warning not to get Hannibal Lecter inside her head.

After Lecter and Starling’s last meeting, the former escaped from tight security. As Starling is getting closer to the identity of Buffalo Bill, the FBI is already hunting down the suspect in a wrong direction however.

On her way to the suspect’s identification, she has already come face to face with him. After a “dark” search, she killed him single-handedly and was honored and awarded as special agent. As she celebrates, Dr. Lecter is already in Jamaica, prospecting Dr. Frederich Chilton as his dinner.


NARRATIVE ANALYSIS

The movie The Silence of the Lambs started establishing the female protagonist, Agent Clarice Starling, as a no-nonsense character. She then was acquainted to the antagonist, the serial killer known as Buffalo Bill, whom she would defeat eventually in the end. In the process of getting to know the killer, she had to seek insights from an equally, if not more, demented psychopath and murderer, the cannibal Dr. Hannibal Lecter. Unfortunately after their last meeting, the latter escaped, looming more terror to the situation and other people who were searching for him.
The audience knew that the protagonist would defeat the serial killer in the end. But it was not expected that Lecter would and could escape from maximum security and Starling would find her way to the killer the way she did. It was thought that the FBI would finally capture him but Starling unexpectedly found Buffalo Bill using her instincts and some insights from Lecter.

FBI agent Clarice Starling grew up with her father until he died on duty when Starling was ten. Her mother died at childbirth. Then lived with his uncle and aunt in a ranch for two months before she fled.

Intelligent, brave, and skilled, she was assigned to track down serial killer Buffalo Bill’s true identity and whereabouts through imprisoned psychiatrist and murderous cannibal Dr. Hannibal Lecter. She was independent; knew what she wanted to do with her career and life. She strived to be respected and be treated equal in the male-dominated line of work in the FBI because she is female and branded as “one generation from poor white trash” by Lecter during their first meeting.

Starling’s intelligence and bravery did not hide her sexual attractiveness. She was subject to malicious and underestimating stares from her colleagues in the institution including her boss, Agent Jack Crawford and from Dr. Fredierich Chilton. She got uncomfortable with this but she did not get intimidated. She would either look back or avert her gaze. She knew that being a woman in the male dominated FBI and police would be subject to these. Also, despite her conservative outfit and masculine characteristics, her physical beauty especially her face would still exude.

Because she grew up with her father, she has become emotionally attached to him. He and his work inspired her to excel in all her work and involvements. Her father’s death has left a mark on her; it changed her life. Episodes from her childhood with her father until the latter’s death are considerably shown by use of flashbacks. When these happened, Starling got emotional and seemed to transport and experience again the incident.

Her desire to capture the serial killer was rooted from a childhood experience that still haunts her. She though if she could run away and save even just one screaming lamb from her uncle’s ranch (capturing or killing Buffalo Bill), she could give peace, comfort, and freedom to the lamb (stop Buffalo Bill’s killing and the terror it caused). If she could do this, she would not wake-up in the middle of her sleep and hear haunting screams of the lambs and she could find peace to herself as well.

As the main protagonist in the story and a female at that, she was unlike other women in the horror/slasher movie genre who are the ones getting or being victimized. She is the one who pursues the villain, locating and killing him eventually in the end. She was the hero.

And the hero’s antagonist was Buffalo Bill, the serial killer who skins his victims (all female, which according to Lecter was only incidental) first before dumping their dead bodies. Buffalo Bill, whose real name was Jame Gumb, was Lecter’s patient together with a lover. Now that he secluded himself from the world, he lived underground, sewing womanish clothes, listening to grunge-rock music, raising moths, and keeping victims in a dry well together with his beloved poodle named Precious.
Buffalo Bill was a transsexual assuming a different identity for he disliked himself. He represented the stereotypical queer: a pierced nipple, a bleeding wound tattoo, a penis tucked between his thighs and dressing women suits.

He seemed to be the antithesis that deviants or criminals are products of hereditary or genetic imperfection or imbalance. His deviancy was socially conditioned and/or influenced by society. Lecter even said, “he wasn’t born a criminal, he was made one through years of systematic abuse”. He must have had a traumatic childhood that provoked him to abhor everything about himself. That was why he made new suits out of his victims’ skins for him to create a new personality, image or physical appearance and shield his true identity from the mocking society.

Buffalo Bill’s making suits out of his victims’ skins is his total objectification of women, his source of perverse pleasure. In his last captive Catherine, a senator’s daughter, he constantly referred her as “it”. In a scene, he ordered Catherine, “It rubs the lotion on its skin. It does whenever it’s told…it rubs the lotion on its skin on else it gets the holes again.” This signified Catherine’s objectification.

He also had an attachment and gave importance to his poodle, the one which he truly own and a constant companion. It was something that would accept him with no complaints for what or who he is or wanted to be.

On the other hand, there was Dr. Hannibal Lecter, a renowned psychiatrist imprisoned for eight years for murder and cannibalism and Buffalo Bill’s former doctor. Agent Clarice Starling sought his help by knowing Buffalo Bill’s background and possible whereabouts for her and the FBI to track down and capture him.

Lecter was called a “psychopath” and a “monster” not only because he eats his victims, but also for delving into other person’s lives causing emotional disturbance and making them uncomfortable. Through this, he would know the person’s vulnerabilities. Despite his chilling association with danger and death, one could not imagine without him in the story. Although he was a challenging mentor to Starling, he was not like the other “sexist” characters who, as the narrative subtly depicted, deserve to be destroyed like Miggs (he made him swallow his tongue), Dr. Chilton (“I’m having an old friend for dinner”), and Buffalo Bill.

Moreover, his menacing gaze to Agent Starling makes her uncomfortable and feel inferior. The way he talks and stands has an aura of intellectual superiority and danger. During their first meeting, for example, he stood in the middle of his cell, stiff and straight, and greeting Agent Starling with a tune of anticipation and knowledge of her purpose. Also in the said meeting, he called Agent Starling as a “rube---one generation up from white trash”. Agent Starling was in tension as he said this with condemnation; her facial expression mirrors this emotion. She responded that Lecter is very perceptive and added “…but can you turn that high-powered perception of yours inward on yourself, Dr. Lecter?” At this time, Lecter realized that he was not dealing with an ordinary woman out to use him solely for career purposes. Julian Hill (2000) noted that Starling is trying to communicate with him on a personal level. Lecter now sees Starling as a person, and is the only male who does.

The Silence of the Lambs followed an ABACA formal expectation. Everything seemed to run smoothly, Starling picking up clues one by one. Unfortunately, Lecter escaped after their final meeting. Then she tried to search Buffalo Bill’s whereabouts using people trail all by herself. When she thought she was on a right track, her boss told her the FBI had found where the killer was hiding only to discover late that they wrong, and that Starling may have really found Buffalo Bill.

Starling did not know she had come face-to-face with the killer until she saw a moth landing on a pool of thread. In the end, she prevailed and was awarded as special agent and Lecter having leisure in the Bahamas.

The film’s story seemed to be more of psychological drama than that of a horror or cop movie earlier movie reviews have indicated. It was Lecter’s subplot that made the story rise from the latter classification. Lecter provided the tension and intellect that would challenge not only Starling’s skill but also her fear and desire to “silence the lambs”.

The story only happened within week, from Agent Crawford’s issuance of an FBI special ID to Starling until she was declared special agent. Also it was eight years since Hannibal Lecter was imprisoned.

TECHNICAL ANALYSIS

The story, its message, and its perspective could not stand alone without the aid of technology as films always are. The camera movements, sound effects, lighting, among others help convey the movie’s message properly in a way it should be delivered. Technological communication could make the viewers feel involved and become absorbed in the movie. They also help in making meanings out of the movie’s scenes or shots.

CINEMATOGRAPHY

The Silence of the Lambs’ cinematography facilitated the characters’ portrayal of their emotion to be felt by the viewers: the tension, danger, horror, and even desire.

Close-ups were dominant in the movie especially to the main characters, Hannibal Lecter and Clarice Starling. They are applied if a certain scene wanted to emphasize the other characters. Through this, the audience could also feel and understand the characters’ emotion and give importance to these characters.

In scenes where Lecter and Starling converse, most of the shots were close-ups, body close-ups, and over-the-shoulder shots. These are done to emphasize tension or camaraderie between them. Whenever Starling would listen to Lecter’s psychological explanations or Starling would narrate her childhood and psychological demons, her expressions were too obvious because of close-ups. Her averted gazes, restless eye movements, and quivering voice did not escape from the audiences’ notice. One could also identify with Starling because the audiences feel that they are close with her, as if face-to-face.

Lecter’s menacing look was greatly emphasized in almost extreme close-ups, thus establishing him as someone more dangerous than we ever knew. The camera was placed right in front of him so he seemed to be looking directly to the camera. This would give the audience a notion that he is looking at them. But not only this, the audience could also imagine how he would stare intently at Starling.

Perhaps why Lecter was the more sculpted villain was because his whole face was seen in all his close-ups and his close-ups are frequent while in Buffalo Bill’s case, only portions of his face were shot in extreme close-ups. The latter was fragmented while the former was intact.

Moreover, close-ups and sometimes medium close-ups could make the audience feel that Lecter and Starling were not separated by a prison. The glass that separates them had not become obvious. Also in Lecter and Starling’s conversations, over-the-shoulder shots were used to see how each would look at the other on their standpoint.

As the female protagonist, it is good to know and see that the filmmaker gave importance to Starling’s character. Tilt up shots were used to give her the sense of authority, superiority, or power, but would sometimes lose these in her encounters with Hannibal Lecter. On the other hand, Lecter was always projected as superior; challenging the protagonist how vulnerable she was even if she projects a kind of toughness and composure on the outside.

Furthermore, another technique that gave an impression that the protagonist was important was that her perspective was highlighted; there were pans left and right (whenever Starling searches or looks for and on something) and numerous flashbacks of her troubled childhood. This is to show not only how other people in the diegesis would look at her but also how she would look and perceive the people around her. Likewise through camera movements that emphasize Starling’s perspective, the audience can identify with the other characters on how they would look at her and with the protagonist on how she would look at others.

On the scene when Starling went to Agent Jack Crawford’s office, she looked around the room accompanied by the camera panning around it, until pictures and newspaper clippings of skinned bodies caught her attention and focused on them. This was to acquaint her with what she may be involved sooner or later.

Another notable scene would be when she entered the basement where terminal psychopaths are kept and where she would finally meet Dr. Hannibal Lecter. She passed through several prison cells with prisoners shouting obscenities at her until she finally arrived at the psychiatrist’s cell. The camera’s movement was with accordance to what and how she sees the place and her movement as well.

Likewise when deputies surrounded Starling as she waited for her boss to call her to examine a dead body, the camera panned left as she surveyed the deputies looking at her maliciously; throwing a look questioning why there is a woman investigating for the FBI. As the camera panned left, it was also slightly tilted up making the police officers (all men) superior and intimidating, just like in a patriarchal society.

Also regarding camera positioning that could speak of who has the power, this was also used when Buffalo Bill ordered his last victim Catherine to put lotion on her skin. Catherine was inside a dry well and Buffalo Bill was sitting on its brim. Since the well was several feet deep, Catherine had to look up while Buffalo Bill had to look down. Their positions symbolized who had the power over whom with the aid of the camera. Buffalo Bill could kill Catherine anytime he wanted to.

Not only that the camera positions power, it also is the eye of the audience to the world he/she is looking into. The audience sees what the characters in the diegesis see or look into. One example of an extradiegetic gaze (yet in this scene it is not a person who is looking at another person or situation, it is an equipment) was when Buffalo Bill exhibited his transsexual tendency. In that scene he was recording his exhibition (lips with pink lipstick, a woman’s clothes, messy hair, penis tucked between thighs while dancing against a background of grunge-rock music) through a video camera. The video camera was not shown yet the audience knew it is such because Buffalo Bill would adjust something from it. There is video camera-audience juxtaposition. Thus, the audience “act” as if they were the video camera and “see” what it was recording.

Moreover, in a scene where Agent Starling stumbled through a dark room searching for Buffalo Bill near the finale, the audience could see her frightened, shaken, and fumbling through darkness by “using” the latter’s infra-red goggles. As Buffalo Bill silently follow her, it was also as if the audience are following her and witnessing her vulnerability. Here there is an identification of spectators to Buffalo Bill; the shot linked the spectators’ gaze to that of the serial killer. The relay of looks within the fim thus duplicates the voyeuristic pleasure of the cinematic apparatus itself (Williams, 2002)

SOUND

Sound effects are present in movies yet they are not designed to be as noticeable as possible. They aid the audiences’ reactions on certain scenes, exciting or not, without them recognizing it.

In The Silence of the Lambs, sound effects are present in every action and emotion the characters take and feel. Background music is heightened when there is discovery, tension, emotional high (repressed or otherwise), or encounter with the “evil”. On the other hand, it is faded down or in normal volume yet still seemingly unnoticeable when the characters’ actions are laid down.

LIGHTING

Light and darkness connote good and evil. Yet, in The Silence of the Lambs it is not always so. One of its antagonists, Dr. Hannibal Lecter was oftentimes brightly lighted. There seemed to have a light directly over him. This illumination gave hima ghost-like effect. He is death incarnate (Vorndam, 1999). Yet some parts of his body were in shadows, especially his eyes; the eyes that gazes upon Starling so menacingly, the eyes that made him more evil.

If Lecter was almost always photographed in bright lighting, Buffalo Bill was photographed otherwise. He was always bathed with darkness, which gave a perception that he was hiding himself from society and that he has been lurking in the dark all his life, that he was equally dangerous.

Although darkness is associated with Buffalo Bill as he was the serial killer, it was still Lecter who was the more pronounced villain. His ghostly image gave a chilling effect making him associated with death.

Scopophilia or voyeurism is also found in the diegesis of The Silence of the Lambs. The division of light and darkness materialized or enabled this pleasure, and the female protagonist was subject to this. There was a scene where Starling was sitting outside and facing Lecter’s prison cell while the latter was also sitting and looking at the female in the darkened room. It was like an experience of watching in a moviehouse; the spectator’s place is darkened and the spectacle’s world is lighted. This division of light and darkness gave Lecter the power over her since he could look at her the way he wanted to without being reprimanded.

On the other hand, Starling was aware that somewhere in the dark prison there sat or stood Lecter. Yet, she did not have the power to avert Lecter’s gaze away from her. All that she could do was to listen to his voice, answer him, and search for him in the dark.

Furthermore, Starling had also been a subject of voyeurism to Buffalo Bill when she was searching for him in his darkened room. Buffalo Bill used an infrared goggles to look at her stumbling in the darkness. This goggles had become the audiences’ eye on Starling. This time she did not know she was being followed and watched not only by Buffalo Bill in the diegesis but also by the viewers/spectators. Buffalo Bill and the audience desire her and knew that she would definitely be in danger (for Buffalo Bill could shot her at any time and that the audience knew this). Although they are both in a dark room, Buffalo Bill’s infrared goggles “illuminated” her and thus become watched.

The movie’s message and emotion were strongly shown and emphasized with the use of technical equipment. They let the audience “see” through the characters and the situations and let convey the message it wanted to say.


THEORETICAL DISCUSSION

The Silence of the Lambs’ main protagonist is female who became a positive image of the woman, and empowering them, in a patriarchal society. She is skilled, intelligent, and courageous. However, it would still be good to look at what constitute(s) this empowered and “active” woman.

Clarice Starling grew up with his father when her mother died in childbirth. According to Helene Deustch (1944), one form that bears woman’s activity is her “active identification with her father, in which she renounces her feminine-erotic role, and achieves a satisfactory sublimation”. Activity, according to Deutsch (1944), a man’s share while passivity is of a woman’s. Starling had high regard to his father and eventually emulating him of becoming a law enforcer. While growing up, she did not have any person to be identified with except her father. She even did not a hint of having a love life or romantic relations and inclinations.

Deutsch theorized that at a certain stage of a girl’s life, she was both feminine and masculine. Yet because of biological, psychological, and environmental forces (and assuming she has a mother), she develops the femininity more. As in the case of Starling, she may be feminine in certain cases but she was not subjected to inhibition and had stronger aggressive tendencies. This made her to have masculinity complex.

Masculinity complex is characterized by the “predominance of active and aggressive tendencies that lead to conflicts with the woman’s environment and above all with the remaining feminine inner world” (Deutsch, 1944). Deutsch also said “women use activity as a mechanism of defense against the fear of their passivity”. Starling’s father’s influence to her made her become active and aim and achieve things for herself. Because of these, she tends to be more logical and not emotional or affective, one characteristic that is biologically and psychologically determined as feminine.

Starling is intelligent as shown in the movie. However Deutsch (1944) theorizes that an intellectual woman is masculinized for everything related to exploration and cognition and any human aspirations that require objective approaches are of man’s domain. So, an intellectual woman is not one who uses her intuition and emotion, which is a woman’s domain. The intellectual woman who is unfeminine has identified herself with her father because of the elimination of her mother. Because of this, she tries to eliminate “every feminine gesture or emotional expression and do everything they can to appear masculine” (Deutsch, 1944).

As for Starling, she tried to repress her emotions and even escape from Lecter’s digging of her psychological and emotional demons. She did not even cry when she entirely told him what had happened that fateful attempt to escape and save a lamb from her uncle’s ranch.

However, Starling’s intellectual (masculine; turned toward work and real life) part of her personality seems to dominate from her emotional (feminine) side.

Although Starling was an empowered woman in the film, she could still not escape from the “look” of the viewers and of the males in the diegesis. According to Laura Mulvey (1992) in her influential essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema that women are objects of visual pleasure, objects of sadistic-voyeuristic pleasure, and the bearer of the man’s gaze and could not transcend from them.

Starling’s (or Jodie Foster’s) beauty was apparent even if she dresses conservatively and as Laura Mulvey pointed out that woman’s objectification and being desired is inevitable. Dr. Chilton, Miggs, among others may have desired Starling using malicious stares but she was able to rise up beyond being a mere object of erotic desire or pleasure. Starling was presented as a strong woman from the start to the end of the film although she was a potential object of the male gaze in the diegesis and of the viewers. During her ultimate confrontation with Buffalo Bill near the ending, for example, she was vulnerable as she trembled and stumbled in the pitch-dark room. She was unaware that Buffalo Bill (and the viewers, by virtue of the infrared goggles) was looking at and following her; he could just shoot her anytime.

In that scene, Starling was desired and an object of scopophilia. As Buffalo Bill reaches out to her almost touching her face, it was as if the viewers desired to touch or possess her as well just like any woman they see on screen. Also in this scene, she bore the man’s (Buffalo Bill and the viewers’) gaze. According to Mulvey (1992), a woman performs within the narrative, the gaze of the spectator and that of the male characters in the film are neatly combined without breaking narrative verisimilitude.

Another instance would be when Starling visited Lecter one night when she was sitting outside Lecter’s unlit prison cell, in a brightly lit hallway. She was projected and framed as if she was on a movie screen while Lecter looked at her in the dark. At this time, Lecter had the power over her; she was subject to his gaze, which she had no control. It was like she had been the object on screen and Lecter was the viewer.

Fortunately, Starling was not objectified in the entire film for her actions drove the story to her benefit. Although she was beautiful, especially her face, she was a strong-willed woman. And because of this, it led her to her encounter with Buffalo Bill, the main hunted person. As what has been stated, he had transsexual tendencies who wanted to change his physical appearance.

Since The Silence of the Lambs could also be somewhat related to the horror genre, there are characters in the movie who are considered as “monsters” or the “queer”. According to Robin Wood as cited by Harry M. Benshoff (2002), there are three interrelated variables in the thematic core of the horror genre: normality (as defined chiefly by a heterosexual patriarchal capitalism), the Other (embodied in the figure of the monster), and the relationship between the two. Also according to Wood (Wood, as cited in Benshoff, 2002), these monsters are racial, ethnic, and/or political/ideological Others, or “more frequently…construc ted primarily as sexual Others (women, bisexuals, and homosexuals)”.

Jeff Vorndam (1999) calls Hannibal Lecter as “asexual” for seeing the female protagonist as more than an object of desire, which gives him a notion of being a monster or queer (sexual and political Others) just like Clarice Starling and Buffalo Bill. These kinds of people “disrupt heterosexual status quo” (Benshoff, 2002).

Moreover, Williams (2002) states that the monster’s power is one of sexual difference from the normal male. The monster is like the woman: “a biological freak with impossible and threatening appetites that suggest a frightening potency precisely where the normal male would perceive a lack” (Williams, 2002). So when the woman looks at the monster, she is dealing with her own victimization for the monster is seen as her double. When a man looks at the monster, his look would only express the usual fear of something unlike himself. But as of the female’s, while she shares the male’s horror to the monster’s freakishness, she also “recognizes the sense in which this freakishness is similar to her own difference” (Williams, 2002). Since Starling was permitted to look, she did not only see a monster (Buffalo Bill and/or Hannibal Lecter), she saw a monster that reflects her own distorted or mutilated image.

Williams (2002) also adds:

The woman’s look at the monster is more than a punishment for looking, or a narcissistic fascination with the distortion of her own image in the mirror that patriarchy holds up to her; it is also a recognition of their similar status as potent threats to a vulnerable male power. (p. 65)

Starling was subject to discrimination by the patriarchal hierarchy in the FBI.


CONCLUSION

The paper concludes that the woman in the movie The Silence of the Lambs was more than an object of visual pleasure although she could not escape from the male’s objectification of her. She was an active-masculine female who had difficulty in purging her emotions. Since she was forced to face her fears because of Hannibal Lecter, it became an advantage that she got in touch with her femininity for her to understand Buffalo Bill’s nature. Also, her encounter with Buffalo Bill was not only a confrontation of her demons but also a “looking” of her own distorted image.

Buffalo Bill served as a symbol of Starling’s desire to “silence the lambs”, of her mirror as a mutilated image, and of her entry to the patriarchal society and make men as her equal. Meanwhile, Hannibal Lecter was her key to Buffalo Bill’s destruction and eventually achieve Buffalo Bill’s latter representation, her key to her entry to the patriarchy.

Clarice Starling, Hannibal Lecter, and Buffalo Bill are deemed sexually and political Others or queers. But only Starling is able to rise above from that classification; Lecter remain the “monster” while Buffalo Bill is destroyed.

With Jodie Foster’s inclination to feminism and director Jonathan Demme’s reputation as a feminist filmmaker, one would not wonder that in the story’s denouement, the female is victorious and was able to rise above her discriminated classification.


BIBLIOGRAPHY:


Benshoff, Harry M. (2002). The Monster and the Homosexual. In M. Jancovich (Ed.), Horror: The Film Reader (pp. 91-99). London: Routledge.

Deutsch, Helene (1944). The Psychology of Women: A Psychoanalytic Interpretation Volume I: Girlhood. New York: Grune & Stratton.

Hill, Julian (2000). The Silence of the Lambs (1991) Mystery/Thriller. Retrieved March 8, 2004 from the World Wide Web: http://www.un-reel.co.uk/sile...

Jancovich, Mark (2002). Genre and the audience: Genre classifications and cultural distinctions in the mediation of The Silence of the Lambs. In M. Jancovich (Ed.), Horror: The Film Reader (pp. 151-159). London: Routledge.

Mulvey, Laura (1992). Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. In L. Braudy, M. Cohen, & G. Mast (Eds.), Film Theory and Criticism (pp. 833-844). New York: Oxford University Press.

Vorndam, Jeff (1999). The Silence of the Lambs (1991). Retrieved March 8, 2004 from the World Wide Web: http://www.aboutfilm.com/movi...

Williams, Linda (2002). When The Woman Looks. In M. Jancovich (Ed.), Horror: The Film Reader (pp. 61-65). London: Routledge.

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