Dr. Hannibal Lecter was an unfeeling psychopath who was known to kill and eat his patients; but was he a good psychiatrist? (Would you send your relatives to him?)This is the first in a series of articles (over the coming months) about films that demonstrate the psychoanalytic process and psychoanaltyic psychotherapy in unusual settings.
The film, The Silence of the Lambs, which follows closely the novel by Thomas Harris, is about a young woman in training with the FBI, Clarise Starling, who becomes involved in the pursuit of a serial killer who skins his female victims. In order to get ideas about the serial killer, she is sent to interrogate another serial killer in a state prison, Dr. Hannibal Lecter. He is a psychiatrist who was convicted of having killed and cannibalized patients. Dr. Lecter is kept under extraordinary security measures because of his inventive intelligence, strength and ferocity combined with his penchant for mutilating careless attendants with his teeth. The physical action of the film centers around the search for the serial killer, referred to as “Buffalo Bill,” but the emotional action centers around four face to face verbal confrontations between Clarise Starling and Dr. Lecter.
With a cannibalistic psychiatrist as its central character, it is not surprising that we should look to this film for fantasies about the earliest, oral phase of development, in which sucking and, later, biting are the central focus of the infant’s pleasure. Freud and other early psychoanalysts, particularly Melanie Klein, wrote about an infantile fantasy that by swallowing or eating another creature or person, we become like them (an early version of “you are what you eat”). In Totem and Taboo, (1913) he wrote about primitive tribes that worshipped an animal, the “totem”, and would eat the animal in a ritual meal in order to take on its powerful characteristics. In Mourning and Melancholia (1917), Freud suggested that mourners and some depressed patients unconsciously fantasize that they have taken in a valued person who has been lost to them through death or for some other reason. He pointed out that mourners frequently adopt some characteristics of the deceased and that depressed people often attack themselves with reproaches that would better fit a valued person who has been lost to them in some way. Freud speculated that one of the child’s earliest means of loving and holding onto a loved object was by incorporating the object, devouring it in fantasy in order to have the object and its desirable qualities inside itself.
There is nothing in The Silence of the Lambs that suggests that Hannibal Lecter’s cannibalism is motivated by a desire to become like his victims. But this fantasy is suggested in the delusion of the other serial killer that Starling and the FBI are pursuing. He has murdered a series of young women and cut off large portions of their skin. Starling explains to Lecter that he was popularly being called “Buffalo Bill” because someone in the Kansas City police had joked that “he skins his humps.” (Men’s insensitivity to women is an underlying theme that runs through the film.) In fact, Starling learns with Lecter’s help that “Buffalo Bill” is trying to make himself into a woman by enclosing himself in their skin.
Dr. Lecter, although he is portrayed as a vicious psychopathic murderer, acts as both a mentor and, as we shall see, psychoanalyst to Starling. As the film develops, he takes on the role of a teacher, helping to direct her detective work toward the finding of the serial killer, but never giving her the answers, although he knows from the beginning who the other serial killer is. At the end of their first meeting, Lecter gives Starling a clue that will lead her to evidence about the serial killer. By deciphering Lecter’s message, Starling is able to find the decapitated head of one of Lecter’s patients who was killed by this same serial killer. In their second meeting, Lecter explains that the serial killer is a seriously disturbed man who believes that he can find his comfort in transforming himself into a woman. The cocoon of an exotic Asian moth, the Death’s Head moth, had been found lodged in the throat of one of the victims as well as the throat of Lecter’s ex-patient. Lecter tells Starling that the moth fascinated the killer because of its wonderful ability to transform itself. What Starling ultimately realizes is that “Buffalo Bill” is killing women in order to use their skin. “He’s making himself a woman’s suit . . . out of real women—and he can sew, this guy, he’s real skilled. He’s a tailor or a dressmaker.”
Buffalo Bill, whose real name is Jame Gumb, believes that he can become a woman not by eating them, but by getting inside their skin, in effect being swallowed by them. This is reflected in his practice of placing the cocoon of a “Death’s Head” moth, valued by him as an example of transformation, into the throat of each victim’s corpse. By placing the cocoons of his beloved moths in the victims’ throats, he is symbolically being swallowed by his victims.
There is a scene in which Lecter adopts Gumb’s technique of entering into his victim’s skin. Late in the film, Lecter makes a daring and brutal escape by disguising himself as a policeman he has attacked. He bites and cuts the skin off the face of the policeman he has killed, then uses the mutilated mask and the officer’s uniform to impersonate him so that he can be carried off in an ambulance from which he makes his escape. Like Gumb, he has taken on the identity of his victim by getting inside his skin.
Oral desire and pleasure can be expressed in many ways other than literally swallowing or biting. As this film demonstrates, the act of looking and observing may carry secret oral gratifications. Early on, we are made subtly aware that Starling is the object of men’s eyes. On her way to meet Jack Crawford, who heads the FBI Behavioral Science section, Starling enters an elevator filled with male students. They look at her, a small feminine figure amidst a sea of men. This is repeated later when Starling is surrounded by a group of police officers in a small town where the body of a murdered girl has been found. Throughout the film, men turn to look at her. Lecter will later use that to make a point about the relationship between orality and voyeurism.
Crawford sends Starling to a maximum security prison for the criminally insane to try to get Lecter to fill out a psychological profile. There, we begin to see a link between looking, sexuality, and devouring. The psychologist in charge, Dr. Chilton, who tries to pick Starling up himself, tells her, “I don’t believe Lecter’s even seen a woman in eight years, and boy, are you ever his taste—so to speak.”
The sight of her clearly excites his fellow inmates, who have been held in this special isolation cellblock for years. As Starling walks down the cellblock, one inmate leers at her and a second gets very excited and hisses at her, “I can smell your cunt.” The act of looking has been sexualized.
Dr. Lecter is at the end of the cellblock behind a glass wall. He stares at Starling with large, penetrating eyes, averting his gaze only momentarily to look down at the protocol she has brought him. The camera frequently focuses on his eyes, nose, and mouth. He is superhumanly observant and perceptive.
Lecter: “Good Morning.”
Starling: “Dr. Lecter, my name is Clarise Starling. May I speak with you?”
Lecter: “You’re one of Jack Crawford’s, aren’t you?”
He asks to see her credentials, and as she holds them up, he says, “Closer, please” and then in a more demanding tone, “Closer,” as she nervously edges towards the glass between them. Lecter picks up from her temporary credentials that she is not a full fledged FBI agent. He then begins to set a pattern of intense curiosity about Starling.
Lecter: “Now then, tell me what did Miggs say to you? Multiple Miggs, in the next cell, he hissed at you. What did he say?”
Starling: “He said, ‘I can smell your cunt’.”
Lecter: “I see. I myself cannot.” Lecter sniffs the air coming through breathing holes in the upper part of the partition. “You use Evian skin cream and sometimes you wear L’Air du Temps, but not today.”
Lecter’s sniffing the air lends an atavistic sense to his acute observations. His interest in her odor reminds us of his cannibalism. It connects his masterful power of observation with his perverted desire to eat his victims’ flesh. As the interview develops, he demonstrates that he can use those powers to verbally chew up Starling. Earlier, Jack Crawford had warned her, “Be very careful with Hannibal Lecter . . . You’re to tell him nothing personal, Starling. You don’t want Hannibal Lecter inside your head.” Now we get a sense of the danger, as Lecter rejects the psychological profile Starling passes in for him to fill out.
Lecter, with a West Virginia drawl that carries sarcasm: “You thought you could dissect me with this blunt little instrument.”
Starling: “No, I thought that your knowledge–”
Lecter: “You’re so ambitious, aren’t you? You know what you look like to me with your good bag and your cheap shoes? You look like a rube—a well scrubbed hustling rube with a little taste. A good nutritionist has given you some length of bone, but you aren’t more than one generation from poor white trash, are you, Agent Starling? And that accent you tried so hard to shed, pure West Virginia. What is your father, dear, a coal miner? Does he stink of the land? You know how quickly the boys found you—all those sticky, tedious fumblings in the back seats of cars while you could only dream of getting out, getting anywhere, getting all the way to the F-B-I.”
Starling is clearly stung by the insults, and implies that at least some of it has been accurate, when she says, “You see a lot, doctor, but are you strong enough to point that high powered perception at yourself? What about it? Why don’t you look at yourself and write down what you see? Or are you afraid to?”
Lecter: “A census taker once tried to test me. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.”
Although it is not made explicit, a connection is being made between knowing about someone and cannibalizing them. Lecter has used his powers of observation for his own sadistic pleasure. The simultaneous focus on his eyes and mouth underlines a connection between orality and voyeurism. Starling is small and feminine, tough but vulnerable under his gaze.
Towards the end of the film, we will see Starling being taken in by the gaze of the other serial killer, “Buffalo Bill”, who spies at her through infrared lenses while she gropes in the dark. He is getting ready to shoot her, but first he reaches out a hand as if to touch. Earlier, we have seen him use these infrared lenses to spot his prey, a young girl he was planning to kidnap.
In the last of their interviews, Lecter makes a clear statement of the role of orality in observing. In this part of the interview, he is in his role as teacher and mentor, and he speaks in his best professorial tone.
Lecter: “First principle, Clarise, simplicity. Read Marcus Aurelius: ‘Of each particular thing ask what is it in itself. What is its nature?’ What does he do, this man you seek?”
Starling: “He kills women.”
Lecter: “No, that is incidental. What is the first and principal thing he does? What needs does he serve by killing?”
Starling: “Anger, um, social acceptance, sexual frustration–”
Lecter: “No, he covets. That is his nature. And how do we begin to covet, Clarise? Do we seek out things to covet? Make an effort to answer now.”
Starling: “No, we just–”
Lecter: “No. We begin by coveting what we see every day. Don’t you feel eyes moving over your body, Clarice, and don’t your eyes seek out the things you want?”
Lecter connects the act of looking with the act of taking and claiming something as your own. This is only a hair’s breadth from saying that the function of observation may gratify a wish to devour and make a desired object part of ourselves.
Shortly after the film opened in New York, a woman patient in group therapy told me with trembling excitement about having seen The Silence of the Lambs that weekend. With a smile that I took to be both nervous and a little inviting, she told me that the film was about “a psychiatrist who eats his patients.” Laughingly, she wanted my reassurance that I wouldn’t do anything like that.
Hannibal Lecter is not described specifically as being a psychoanalyst, but he is depicted as having those psychiatric traits that we associate with psychoanalysts. He is not a mad psycho-biologist who kills his patients with medication or electroshock. On the contrary, he devours his patients, both literally and by getting them to talk about themselves. He is presented as having incredible powers of observation and verbal (i.e. oral) persuasion. His preference is for the talking cure.
I said earlier that Lecter takes on for Starling not only the role of mentor, but also the role of psychoanalyst. There is no doubt that in reality, these functions are combined in a psychoanalysis. It is well established that patients adopt some of the traits and functions of their analyst, most importantly the ability to analyze their own conflicts after their treatment is completed. Nevertheless, there are certain features that are uniquely psychoanalytic that we can see in Lecter, particularly his desire to uncover the truth about Starling and to understand her. We will even see that he has some wish to cure her. Because of the unusual nature of Lecter and of the film, we can gain some insight into the role that oral fantasies can play in the psychoanalyst’s functions of curiosity and observation
As we have seen, in their first meeting, Lecter points his “high powered perception” at Starling, calling her a “rube”, interpreting her wish to rise up from her poor background, asking about her father in a denigrating tone, and even reconstructing scenes in which she has to fight off boys’ sexual attacks. Outside the prison, Starling’s thoughts turn to a childhood memory of greeting her father, a police officer, as he comes home. As the memory ends, she weeps. Starling’s first meeting with Lecter has stimulated something from her past. We are given an additional piece of her memory with another flashback that occurs as she stands in a funeral parlor, waiting for the autopsy of one of the girls murdered by Buffalo Bill. We see her as a little girl approaching the coffin of her father.
In their second meeting, Starling senses that Lecter knows the identity of the serial killer. He implies that he will bargain his information for a cell with a view. Starling returns to him for their third meeting with an offer of a transfer to another facility with a window plus a week each year on an isolated island with swat team surveillance. By this time, Buffalo Bill has kidnapped another girl, this one named Catherine, a senator’s daughter.
Lecter, reading the material she has brought him: “Plum Island Animal Disease Research Center—sounds charming.”
Starling: “That’s only part of the island, there’s a very, very nice beach, there’s terns’ nests there, there’s beautiful–”
Lecter: “Terns, hmm! If I help you, Clarise, it will be turns with us, too. Quid pro quo—I tell you things, you tell me things—not about this case, though, about yourself. Quid pro quo, yes or no. Yes or no, Clarise, poor little Catherine is waiting.”
Lecter has already bargained for the relative freedom he sought, but he wants something else. He wants to know about Clarise. Starling has been warned not to let the cannibalistic psychiatrist inside her head, but she feels compelled to go on.
Starling: “Go, Doctor!”
Lecter (his head is turned away from Starling throughout this questioning, with a look of anticipation and satisfaction on his face): “What is your worst memory of childhood?”
Starling: “The death of my father.”
Lecter: “Tell me about it and don’t lie, or I’ll know.”
(Lecter has a somewhat authoritarian psychoanalytic approach.)
Starling: “He was a town marshal and one night he surprised two burglars coming out of the back of a drug store. They shot him.”
Lecter: “Was he killed outright?”
Starling: “No, he was very strong. He lasted more than a month. My mother died when I was very young, so my father had become the whole world to me. When he left me, I had nothing. I was ten years old.”
Lecter: “You’re very frank, Clarise. I think it would be quite something to know you in private life.”
He rolls his eyes and head towards her.
Starling: “Quid pro quo, Doctor.”
Lecter turns to his role as teacher: “So tell me about Miss West Virginia (the last victim found). Was she a large girl?”
Starling: “Yes.”
Lecter: “Big through the hips, roomy.”
Starling: “They all were.”
Lecter: “What else?”
Starling: “She had an object deliberately inserted into her throat. Now, that hasn’t been made public, yet. We don’t know what it means.”
Lecter: “Was it a butterfly?”
Starling: “Yes, a moth. Just like the one we found in Benjamin Raspail’s head an hour ago (the head of Lecter’s ex-patient, found by Starling with the clue he’d given her). Why does he place them there, Doctor?”
Lecter: “The significance of the moth is change—caterpillar into chrysalis or pupa, from thence into beauty. Our Billy wants to change, too.”
Starling: “There’s no correlation in the literature between transsexualism and violence. Transsexuals are very passive–”
Lecter: “Clever girl. You’re so close to the way you’re going to catch him. Do you realize that?”
Starling: “No, tell me why.”
Starling is tense with anticipation. Lecter has whetted her appetite by promising that she is close to finding out what she wants to know. Now he turns away again and pursues his own quest for knowledge.
Lecter: “After your father’s murder, you were orphaned. What happened next?” Starling looks down, and without looking back at her Lecter displays his uncanny acumen. “I don’t imagine the answer is on those second rate shoes, Clarise.”
Starling: “I went to live with my mother’s cousin and her husband in Montana. They had a ranch.”
Lecter: “Was it a cattle ranch?”
Starling: “Sheep and horses.”
Lecter: “How long did you live there?”
Starling: “Two months.”
Lecter: “Why so briefly?”
Starling: “I ran away.”
Lecter: “Why, Clarise? Did the rancher make you perform fellatio? Did he sodomize you?”
Starling: “No. He was a very decent man. Quid pro quo, Doctor.”
Lecter tells her that the killer is not a transsexual, but thinks he is. He suggests she look for him in the files of applicants who have been turned down for transsexual operations, adding that he has been severely abused as a child.
In this beautifully paced dialogue, Starling and Lecter each eagerly pursue knowledge—she about the serial killer, and he about Starling. Each one is interrupted for the “quid pro quo” when the desire becomes too intense. This is clearest with Lecter, who cannot wait to hear what Starling will say, but allows his own fantasy (about oral sex) to interrupt the dialogue. As a psychoanalyst, he has made an error in allowing his personal needs to interfere with his objectivity and sensitivity to his “patient.” He does something similar in an interview with the senator whose daughter is Bill’s latest captive. He gives some information about the kidnapper, and when he is about to reveal his identity, he senses her anticipation and asks if she had breast fed Catherine.
In their next and final meeting, Starling makes a last desperate attempt to get information from Lecter that can save the life of the serial killer’s captive. Lecter asks Starling whether Crawford has sent her. When she says she came on her own, he says, “People will say we’re in love.” She points out that the name he has given the senator is an anagram for iron sulfite, “fools gold,” and asks for his help. He tells her she should get more fun out of life, then says that all she needs is in the case file. He lectures her about Marcus Aurelius, tells her that the killer’s nature is to “covet” and that “we covet what we see.”
Lecter: “Don’t you feel eyes moving over your body, Clarice, and don’t your eyes seek out the things you want?” (He has shifted the focus from the search for the killer, Starling’s quest, to Starling, herself, his own quest.)
Starling: “Yes, now please tell me how.”
Lecter: “No, it’s your turn to tell me Clarise. You don’t have any more vacations to sell. Why did you leave that ranch?”
Starling: “Doctor, we don’t have any more time for any of this, now.” (How many times have I had a patient tell me that the work of analysis must wait while we deal with a pressing issue in their life.)
Lecter: “But we don’t reckon time the same way, do we, Clarise? This is all the time you’ll ever have.” (In the context of the film, he is sadistically holding back information, but he is also telling her that this is her only opportunity to analyze this important piece of her life.)
Starling: “Later, now, please, listen to me! We’ve only got five– “
Lecter: “No! I will listen now.”
Is Lecter being a good psychoanalyst forcing his patient to work on herself, or is he simply once again expressing his greed to know about her, and in that way to devour her? I think the answer is that the two roles converge as Lecter demonstrates that the oral need to take someone in by knowing and understanding the intimate details of their life contributes to the pleasure and success of being a good psychoanalyst.
Lecter: “After your father’s murder, you were orphaned, you were ten years old. You went to live with cousins in a sheep and horse ranch in Montana. And?”
Starling: “And one morning I just ran away.”
Lecter: “Not just, Clarise, what set you off? You started at what time?”
This time, Lecter does not give in to his lust for lurid detail. He wants to know the truth. As the “analysis” continues, the camera closes in on Lecter’s face, so that it fills the entire screen, like the large disembodied face in the Wizard of Oz. We see only his eyes, nose, and mouth filling the screen.
Starling: “Early, still dark.”
Lecter: “Then something woke you, didn’t it? Was it a dream? What was it?”
Starling: “I heard a strange noise.”
Lecter: “What was it?”
Starling: “Screaming, some kind of screaming. Like a child’s voice.”
Lecter: “What did you do?”
Starling: “I went downstairs, outside. I crept up into the barn. I was so scared to look inside, but I had to.” (She, too, was drawn to look, despite her fears.)
Lecter: “What did you see, Clarise? What did you see?”
Starling: “Lambs—they were screaming.”
Lecter: “They were slaughtering the spring lambs?”
Starling: “They were screaming.”
Lecter: “And you ran away?”
Starling: “No. First I tried to free them. I opened the gate to their pen, but they wouldn’t run, they just stood there, confused, they wouldn’t run.”
Lecter: “But you could and you did, didn’t you?”
Starling: “Yes. I took one lamb and I ran away as fast as I could.”
Lecter: “Where were you going, Clarise?”
Starling: “I don’t know. I didn’t have any food, any water, and it was very cold. I thought, I thought if I could save just one, but he was so heavy, so heavy. I didn’t get more than a few miles. The sheriff’s car picked me up. The rancher was so angry he sent me to live at the Lutheran orphanage in Boseman. I never saw the ranch again.”
Lecter: “What became of your lamb, Clarise?”
Starling: “They killed him.”
Lecter, now a huge disembodied face, all eyes and mouth staring down from the screen, makes an interpretation:
“You still wake up sometimes, don’t you, wake up in the dark, and hear the screaming of the lambs?”
“Yes.”
“And you think if you save poor Catherine you could make them stop, don’t you? You think if Catherine lives you won’t wake up in the dark ever again with that awful screaming of the lambs.”
“I don’t know. I don’t know.”
“Thank you, Clarise. Thank you.” Lecter looks deeply satisfied.
This is good psychoanalytic work. It revolves around a traumatic memory and a recurring dream (the screaming of the lambs). Starling, who has lost both her mother and her father, hears her own cries in the screaming of the lambs and attempts to save a lamb just as she wishes someone would save her. Lecter connects the memory with a current struggle, Starling’s desperate attempt to save another lamb, the serial killer’s captive. Although Lecter makes no interpretation concerning Clarise’s relationship to him, there is a clear implication that this young woman who has not fully recovered from the death of her father may benefit from this special relationship with the powerful, malevolent and yet helpful psychiatrist. This time, Lecter does not let his oral greed get out of control and interfere. Although I am not recommending Hannibal Lecter as a model for psychoanalysts, I do think that this sequence provides the best depiction of psychoanalytic work that I have ever seen in a commercial film.
It is clear that Lecter’s interrogation of Starling is out of pure desire. He has no other ulterior motive. He has made false disclosures to the authorities in exchange for a new prison arrangement that eventually allows for his escape. He gives valuable honest clues to Starling in exchange for information about herself. He desires her disclosures. She had been warned against telling him about herself. In fact, he shows a greed for such information. He devours people not only with his mouth and his eyes, but also by finding out about them. As if to cement the relationship between his cannibalism and his wish to devour people by knowing and understanding them, Lecter orders a second dinner, “lamb chops, extra rare.”
The psychoanalytic function of knowing and understanding provides valuable oral gratification for Lecter. Knowing Starling’s secrets is deeply satisfying, and, by implication, being able to help her change further gratifies his need to not only take her in, but also to digest her and transform her. By depicting the perverse extreme, Harris and the filmmakers have isolated important oral gratifications in psychoanalytic work.
In psychoanalytic terms, Starling’s “therapy” is a success in every way. She learns to use the tools that Dr. Lecter has shown her. Following Lecter’s lesson that we begin by coveting what we see every day, she goes to the home of his first victim and closely examines her pictures and belongings. She immerses herself in the images of the dead girl’s life. Like Lecter, she indulges her desire to know about the girl who has been killed, finding out all she can until she can begin to feel her way through the girl’s life. We might say that she develops empathy for the girl. Empathy is the ability to understand how someone else feels. The film points out its roots in the oral pleasures of taking someone in and being devoured by them. By empathizing with the dead girl and identifying with her, Starling is able to trace her way through the remnants of her life and her contacts. As she does this, she develops insight into the killer’s motives in skinning his victims. Finally, the trail of the girl’s contacts leads Starling unwittingly to the killer’s den while the rest of the FBI is pursuing another lead that becomes a dead end. Once confronted with the killer, Starling uses the skills that her FBI mentors have taught her to overcome him and save Catherine, her lamb.
The film ends with Starling’s graduation from the FBI. She shakes hands with Crawford, then is called to the phone. It is Lecter. He inquires about the success of her analysis.
“Well, Clarise, have the lambs stopped screaming?”
Although the film gives no direct answer to Lecter’s question, there is a suggestion that Lecter’s interpretation has effected a change in Starling and that the screaming of the lambs has stopped.
During Starling’s brief analysis, Lecter never interprets the role he has taken in her life beyond the quip, “people will say we’re in love,” but here at the end of the film, he betrays an ambivalently expressed paternal interest in her. He says, “I have no plans to call on you, Clarise. The world’s more interesting with you in it.” He hangs up with a joke about having an old friend for dinner and walks off in pursuit of his old warden, Dr. Chilton.
Published previously in the PANY Bulletin and in Double Feature: Discovering our Hidden Fantasies in Films by Herbert H. Stein (EReads, 2002)