The Dark Fate of Clarice Starling

Part of the brilliance of Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs is its ability to insinuate rather than spell things out, more gracefully even than the source material. “She don’t look half as good as she thinks she does,” a male colleague sneers about Starling in the novel. “I’d put her on like a Mark Five gas mask,” another replies. In the movie, you don’t hear this kind of denigration so much as feel it. When Starling arrives at a morgue to assist with the autopsy of one of Gumb’s victims, she walks into a room filled with male cops, all dressed identically, all staring her down. Clarice isn’t so subtle. It tells instead of shows, maybe because its visuals are consumed with the stylistic tics of network procedurals: a saturated color palette, recurring images slowed down to a nightmarish crawl, exterior shots so gloomy, they’re almost Stygian. This is storytelling that feels the need to constantly regain its audience’s attention after each commercial break.

More troubling, though, is the show’s tenuous conception of its central character. Starling is difficult to define, because so much of her is drawn in opposition to—and later, in parallel with—Lecter. In contrast with the casually evaluative glances thrown her way, Lecter’s gaze aims for a deeper reading. “Do you know what you look like to me, with your good bag and your cheap shoes?” he tells her in the book. “You look like a rube. You’re a well-scrubbed, hustling rube with a little taste. Your eyes are like cheap birthstones—all surface shine when you stalk some little answer.” Later, Starling can’t tell whether he’s truly seen her or simply sketched her in a way that pleases him. The assessment is an act of invasion, almost an assault. “For a few seconds she had felt an alien consciousness loose in her head, slapping things off the shelves like a bear in a camper.”

As a character, Lecter leaves the more indelible mark. Which is maybe why he’s occupied more space in culture than Starling has, including a starring role in Hannibal, Bryan Fuller’s baroque, thrilling NBC series, a much more fully conceived show than Clarice. On her own, Starling is a challenge, shaped as she is in response to the men around her: their mentorship, their interest, their harassment, their eyes. With Lecter in particular, she’s sharpened as his antithesis. He brutalizes; she protects. He inflicts; she endures. He’s an aesthete and a hedonist; she’s a spartan and an empath. Demme, who once said that he found Starling more interesting than Lecter, saw the potential in a character whose essence is forces in conflict: vulnerability and strength, impotence and power.

Read: Jonathan Demme’s legacy of eclectic, humane filmmaking

Clarice, though, mostly defines its central character through the stickiness of her trauma. She has flashbacks to Gumb’s basement; she sees imaginary moths (creatures Gumb harvested and deposited in the throats of his victims) around her; she’s plagued by phone calls from Catherine Martin (Marnee Carpenter), the woman she saved from Gumb. “Can you sleep?” Catherine asks her. “Or do moths wake you up? How are you out there in the world?” The show, like the novel, draws much of Starling’s texture from her childhood: her father’s violent death in a robbery gone wrong, her desperate mission as a kid to save lambs from slaughter. In the movie, these moments function as suspenseful breakthroughs that help the viewer understand Starling’s drive; as recurring images trotted out across episodes of Clarice, they lose all meaning. Apart from her backstory, the show gives Starling one main characteristic, which Lecter might describe insultingly as “gumption”: She’s tough enough to withstand the nonsensically hostile treatment of Krendler (played by Michael Cudlitz) and savvy when it comes to saving victims. But who is she, really?