YMMV / The Silence of the Lambs

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Whether Buffalo Bill is a psychopath, an emotionally-disturbed survivor of trauma, or somewhere between the two. While he's perfectly willing to abduct and kill women to make his skin suit, we're shown that he feels conflicted and remorseful. In particular, when Catherine is pleading for her life and begging to see her mother, Bill is shown struggling to hold back tears. Rather than glorifying in the suffering of his victims^note Though in the book, it's explicitly stated that he enjoyed stalking women through his darkened basement and he is clearly getting a thrill out of hunting Clarice the same way, he has to work hard to distance himself from them, avoiding eye contact and referring to them as "it", as he would otherwise not be able to kill them. He's less a sadist than a pragmatist. Likewise, the jury's out on whether he's deluded into believing he's transgender (as Lecter believes) or legitimately transgender and balls to the wall insane (director Jonathan Demme was harshly criticized for not making this last part clearer).
  • Is Lecter's expression when Clarice reveals her worst memory one of sympathy or arousal?
  • The motives behind many of Lecter's actions are up for debate, especially when it comes to Clarice. Is he forcing her to relive her childhood trauma as a form of therapy? Or is it for the pleasure of enjoying her pain? This is more evident in the novel, where Lecter's sadism is made much more explicit than in the film.
• Aluminum Christmas Trees: There really are a couple of types of moths that have skull-shaped patterns on them.
• Award Snub: It did remarkably well at the Oscars for an early release horror film, becoming one of only three pictures to sweep the top five categories. However, there was still the noticeable omission of Ted Levine's performance as Buffalo Bill.
• Catharsis Factor: Seeing Lecter stealthily track an unaware but paranoid Chilton down and knowing what awaits him after how much of an unbearable jerk he was is pretty satisfying—even though the one regrettable thing about it is not getting to actually see what Lecter does to him.
• Crack Ship: Given Will Graham's marriage has likely dissolved by this point, some have shipped him with Clarice. To say nothing of the One True Threesome of Will, Clarice, and Lecter that got stronger after the release of Hannibal.
• Creepy Awesome: Hannibal Lecter, a Wicked Cultured psychopath whose main appeal lies in just how unsettling of a figure he is, being able to get into people's heads with ease and manipulate them to fit his own agenda without a second thought.
• Crosses the Line Twice:
  • In the book only:
    Dr. Lecter: [showing Starling a letter] This is about my crucifixion watch. They won't give me a patent, but they advise me to copyright the face. ...You may have noticed that in most crucifixions the hands point to, say, a quarter to three, or ten till two at the earliest, while the feet are at six. On this watch face, Jesus is on the cross, as you see there, and the arms revolve to indicate the time, just like the arms on the popular Disney watches. The feet remain at six and at the top a small second hand revolves in the halo. What do you think?
  • In a bizarrely creepy way, some of Lecter's killings. In particular, the way he strings up the disemboweled guard to look like an angel during his escape in the movie. The books hint that part of the reason Lecter does this is to distract and shock investigators, tripping them up on the horrific details and giving him more time to cover his tracks or otherwise get clear.
• Evil Is Cool: He may be the villain, but Lecter's so interesting that you're more intrigued than disgusted.
• Fair for Its Day: The character of Buffalo Bill can be seen today (and even by some at the time) as a transphobic caricature. However, he's also specified to not technically be trans, but rather psychotic, and differentiating between those two things was decently progressive for the late 1980s/early 1990s. The book has characters outright spell this out, and the very fact he seeks gratification through serial murder and wearing the skin of others is taken as proof that he can't possibly be trans. And in the movie, Clarice explicitly points out that there's no correlation between being trans and violent behavior.
• Fanon Discontinuity: Thomas Harris intended to stop the story with Silence, until the publisher told him either he could write more, or they'd get someone else to do it. Naturally, a lot of fans prefer to stop there.
• Genius Bonus: Hannibal famously said of one victim that he "ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti." Liver, fava beans, and wine all contain a substance called tyramine, which can cause a severe reaction in any person taking an MAO inhibitor drug. MAO inhibitors, in turn, are one of the first antidepressants and were a regular part of the drug regimen given to people in insane asylums before safer antidepressants became available. Thus, anyone committed to an insane asylum— such as Hannibal Lecter himself— would have been forbidden from consuming liver, fava beans, or Chianti.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Clarice thinks that Hannibal's crimes are due to some sort of Freudian Excuse; Hannibal tells her that it's foolish thinking and that she's abandoning the concepts of good and evil for behaviorism. Twenty years later, Hannibal Rising, a book detailing Hannibal's origins and motivations, was released, although it's implied he was naturally evil to begin with, and the incidents in the book just showed him how to put it into horrifying use.
    Dr. Lecter: Nothing happened to me, Officer Starling. I happened. You can't reduce me to a set of influences.
  • The FBI using Johns Hopkins as a source for a list of people applying for sex changes. This means the book has several people, including Lecter, talking about "Hopkins". Lecter is, later, most famously played by one Anthony Hopkins.
• Iron Woobie:
  • Catherine defies Gumb at every opportunity, and is depicted less as helpless than simply overpowered. She's almost an Action Girl, and despite using Gumb's beloved poodle as a hostage against him, she quietly whispers to the dog that she'd never hurt it. She even keeps the dog in the end of the movie, taking it with her into the ambulance.
  • Clarice, for all her power and intelligence, breaks down crying in her car, and in stories of her childhood.
• It Was His Sled: Buffalo Bill's modus operandi is kidnapping heavyset women, starving them, killing them, and skinning them to make a woman suit. Clarice realizing this is the "Eureka!" Moment that starts the final act, but it's so well known at this point because it's integral to the discussion of whether the story and Buffalo Bill are transphobic, plus it's relation to the memetic "tucking" scene, and just being horrific in general.
• Jerks Are Worse Than Villains: Hannibal Lecter is a serial killer and a cannibal, while the worst Dr. Chilton has done is to be a smug, manipulative jerk who first obstructs and then takes credit for an investigation to boost his own reputation and ego. Most viewers were pleased to hear Lecter say that he's "having an old friend for dinner" when he sees Chilton walk by at the Caribbean resort.
• Les Yay: In a discussion of motivation, Hannibal tells Starling, "We start by coveting the things we see every day." Starling repeats this observation to her FBI room-mate and closest friend Ardelia, and they smile at each other.
• Memetic Mutation: "Hello, Clarice," a misquotation of Lecter's initial greeting to Clarice, has become a popular way to establish a character as serpentine in nature.
• Mind Game Ship: The interactions that Clarice has with Hannibal himself seems to trick the audience into thinking that they will fall in love with each other. Then again, in the books, they do.
• Nausea Fuel:
  • Buffalo Bill's bathtub, filled with the hardened sludge of a long-decomposed woman, can make more squeamish viewers retch.
  • Most of the forensic photos of Bill's victims are pretty sickening to look at, but the rotting corpse in the funeral home just drives it home with how long it lingers on the remnants of his deeds.
  • Buffalo Bill's woman suit, seen briefly in one shot. This is made even more repulsive if you think about Ed Gein, on whom the Bill character is based. He wanted to make a woman suit so he could crawl inside his mother!
  • Miggs flinging his semen at Clarice, shown in graphic detail. It's nauseating not just to the viewer, but also in-universe, to the point where Lecter, after immediately talking down to and shooing away Clarice, immediately screams for her to come back and sets her on the first steps down the path to Buffalo Bill.
• Out of the Ghetto: In spite of being a horror movie with plenty of blood and sexual themes, not only was the movie a critical success, it became one of only three movies in history to sweep the Big 5 Oscars (Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, and Screenplay)^note The other two are It Happened One Night and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
• Realism-Induced Horror: What makes Buffalo Bill such a terrifying and memorable villain is that, unlike Hannibal Lecter, he isn't an eloquent, charismatic or grandiose villain, but a chillingly realistic depiction of a psychotic killer who kidnaps women, locks them in a hole, and tortures them unless they cooperate with his murder preparations. The horror is amplified by the fact that many aspects of his disturbing behavior and methods are based on real life serial killers such as Ed Gein and Ted Bundy.
• Retroactive Recognition: One of the Smithsonian entomologists is Bulldog Briscoe.
• Signature Scene: Buffalo Bill reciting his mantra "Would you fuck me? I'd fuck me. I'd fuck me hard." The scene ended up ingraining itself so heavily into popular memory that there's now a huge portion of people who don't know that it came from this film, leading many to recite it for genuine sex appeal rather than the film's use of it as part of Bill's lengthy Fan Disservice sequence.
  • Arguably even more famous is the 'fava beans and a nice chianti' scene. The "it rubs the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again" scene is also a strong contender.
• Tough Act to Follow: It is generally agreed that this movie is by far the best of the series, with Hannibal and Hannibal Rising in particular falling very short in comparison. Red Dragon was better received, but still not on par with The Silence of the Lambs.
• The Woobie: Precious, Buffalo Bill's dog. The poor thing has her leg broken and in general spends her screentime having the dickens scared out of her, simply because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. It can be hard to listen to her whimper in pain/fear, although in real life none of the animals featured in the film were harmed. Fortunately, Precious lives to tell the tale, and is rescued along with Catherine, who is implied to have adopted her.

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