The Silence of the Lambs, 1991

Nov. 12, 2022 | KACIE CENTINEO

Silence of the Lambs directed by Johnathan Demme is a very influential movie that has multiple messages about ethics presented throughout the film. It is a very popular horror film that made over $272,000,000 worldwide with Anthony Hopkins. The film begins with introducing the main character named Clarice Starling. She is an FBI trainee, a top student there, who is trying to hunt down a serial killer named “Buffalo Bill”. Jack Crawford is the Agent-in-Charge of the Behavioral Science Unit of the FBI and he sends Clarice on this case, and he thinks that having her being an attractive young woman, may be just the bait to draw him out. In order to attempt to try to find the serial killer, Clarice visits another serial killer Dr. Hannibal Lecter. She thinks that he might have some insight on the case. Dr. Letcher is a psychiatrist who is also a psychopath that is in jail for life for murder and cannibalism, and he believes that she will be able to find him because she is a young female. When she went to interview him, she had a very traumatic experience. Semen was flicked at her by one of the inmates, and she found one of the serial killer’s victims in a storage facility where she found a severed man’s head. Buffalo Bill is a very scary killer and skins his victims and is very violent, and his victims are only women. Later on, she finds another victim of Buffalo Bill which is a woman’s head along with a moth down her throat.

Buffalo Bill continues on his terrible acts, kidnapping the daughter of a United States senator, and Clarice continues on her hunt for him. She continues to go and interview the other serial killer and he tries to get a prison transfer in exchange for him giving her more information and clues about Buffalo Bill. She begins to tell Lecter about her father dying and he deceives her and secretly records it so that he can get his deal that he wanted, and he is flown to Memphis and proceeds to give false information about the serial killer. He is moved again into a unit in Tennessee and she continues to request the truth about Buffalo Bill. She tells him a significant event in her life about how she used to be on a relative’s farm and the lambs would be slaughtered and she would not be able to listen to the lambs being slaughtered because of the screams that she would hear. She did this in hopes to try to save the girl Catherine who is kidnapped by Buffalo Bill. Lecter returns the Buffalo Bill case files to Starling as Chilton comes and has the police escort her from the building. Later on, Lecter kills the guards in his cell and escapes.

Clarice Starling looks at Lecter's file annotations and figures out that Buffalo Bill knew his first victim, Frederika Bimmel. She travels to her old Ohio hometown and finds out that Buffalo Bill was a tailor. She then visits the victim Freerika’s home, and she notices unfinished dresses and dress patterns which were the same size as the skin removed from the victims. Starling continues interviewing Frederika's friends, while Crawford and an FBI Hostage Rescue Team storm Gumb's address in Illinois, finding the house empty. Starling goes to interview another person who knew the victim and at the house, she meets "Jack Gordon", but realizes he is Gumb (Buffalo Bill) after spotting a death's head moth flying loose. She is led into his basement and finds Buffalo Bill’s most recent victim Catherine trapped in a well where Buffalo Bill is holding her captive.

Gumb stalks Starling with his night-vision goggles in a dark room, and she is waiting to see if it is really him or not. He revealed who he was, and Starling reacted quickly and shot Gumb dead. Along with him revealing who he is, it is also revealed that he wanted to undergo changing genders, him being bisexual and transgender, but he was too disturbed to qualify for gender reassignment surgery. The reason as to why he is skinning the women is so that he can make a suit for himself because he hates his own identity. Although Buffalo Bill was shot dead by her, she still had to worry about Lecter. He assures her that he has no intention of following her and requests that she return the favor, which she says she cannot.

Subjectivism, relativism, and perspectivism are all challenges to ethics. The definition of subjectivism is the idea that our moral opinions are based on our feelings and nothing more. Dr. Hannibal Lecter is a man that lacks ethical and moral stability, as to the fact that he is a murderer. This connects to subjectivism because he is just basing the fact that he can just murder people off of his own ideas and opinions. Another person in this Film that definitely

exemplifies the ideas of subjectivism is the ultimate serial killer, Buffalo Bill. His actions are also based on his own feelings and they are terrible, because that means killing and skinning women. The film did a very good job as two contrasting a person with the worst beliefs versus someone with very good ethical beliefs. You can see how different they are psychologically and how everyone has different ethical decisions. The most influential scene in the entire movie was when Clarice was telling the doctor about how she did not like hearing the screaming of the lambs. which represents the suffering of others. This goes to show that she was trying to help the doctor, but he is so into his own opinions and feelings, that it did not even phase him.

In the movie Clarice has good ethical values because she is trying to help her community and catch the serial killers that have terrible ethical beliefs.

Throughout the movie, we can see that Lecter did not believe that there was an absolute truth in anything, so he just chose to keep believing what he

was believing, and was basically blindsided as to the fact that he is a terrible person. When Clarice finds the victims of Buffalo Bill, there are moths in their throats. Buffalo Bill was fascinated by the insects' metamorphosis, and this is the process that he wants to undergo by becoming a woman. He is trying to make a suit for himself so that he can finally be the gender that he has always wanted to be. Again, these are subjectivist ethical beliefs, he thinks that because he wants to be a woman it is ethically okay that he does this to others because that is the truth that he happens to believe. He had a lot of psychological damage and the fact that he was killing women just for the fact that he was so insecure about himself and what he identified as, portrays the serious ethical issues that he has. Towards the end, we see Buffalo Bill with his night vision glasses. This is not just to show that he is a psycho, it is also to show his ethical beliefs and how he tends to see the world. His truth could be that the world is just dark and that he is scared of it. He does not believe in truth and is just hiding behind all of his bad moral decisions.

Clarice was a major ethical character in the movie. She was sent out to try to figure out this case purely because she was an attractive woman, although she was still topping her class at the FBI Academy. With her being a woman, it shows how there is a belief in ethics that women are less than men. We can see that the serial killer obviously believes that because he decides to murder them possibly because he sees them as less than him and decides to take action on that. We have a major ethical issue in our world and this film shows it. Women are not believed in as much as men, and if Clarice was actually a man and not a woman in this movie, then everything will be different. The first time that she visited Lecher, she had semen flicked onto her, and this shows how women are objectified in the workplace and that if this was a man that was going into the prison cell to interview the serial killer, then it would be very different because they would take them more seriously.

The silence of the lambs was a very influential film because there is a lot of symbolism and ethical values that are portrayed throughout the film. We can use this to study ethics and the theories that it relates to.