Subject to Sacrifice: Ideology, Psychoanalysis, and the Discourse of Species in Jonathan Demme's Silence of the Lambs
1995; Duke University Press; Volume: 22; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/303726
ISSN1527-2141
Autores Tópico(s)Cinema and Media Studies
ResumoThe mixture of menace and aestheticism that distinguishes Jonathan Demme's Silence of the Lambs (1991) is evoked quite effectively by the film's publicity poster. Blossoming like an exotic fleur du mal from Jodie Foster's mouth is a moth (viewers of the film will recognize it as the death'shead moth that serves as Buffalo Bill's personal totem), which rather conventionally fixes the female icon at the point where her beauty and her helplessness converge. In its position over her mouth, the moth stands for that which threatens her, and it also sends us back to the film's title and its ominous key term, silence. But while the title says the silence of the lambs, the image conveys something more generic: the silence of the heroine. Most treatments of the film have followed the redirection of attention suggested by the poster, seeing the film as part of Hollywood's confused response to shifting norms of gender and sexuality, a response that answers the unabated depiction of guns pointed at women with portrayals of women pointing guns: The Silence of the Lambs might thus seem to be aligned with films such as Fatal Attraction, Blue Steel, La Femme Nikita, or Thelma and Louise. In this understanding, the film's ideological deep structure orga-
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