In a canny act of inversion, we, the ones watching, are winked at and ogled alongside her. Repeatedly, Demme has the men Starling interacts with look directly at the camera, forcing the audience into the role of object. Moments later, Starling-the lone woman in an elevator with eight much larger men-gazes nervously up at the ceiling. Before the opening credits have wrapped, an older man in an FBI cap is shown staring after her as she jogs away from him. From the beginning, the movie shows its audience how exposed Starling (played by Jodie Foster) is to the world’s predations. Harris’s novel was a striking examination of institutionalized misogyny, but Jonathan Demme’s film adaptation, released in 1991, went further. When an inmate at an institution for the criminally insane throws his semen at her, the gesture is a cruder, more animalistic version of the asylum director’s propositioning of Starling only minutes earlier. Throughout the novel, Starling is dissected as a physical object and a psychological one, offered up as bait and leeringly scrutinized. Jame Gumb, the serial killer being pursued by the novice FBI agent Clarice Starling, takes this mission literally, stalking and skinning women in a macabre quest to turn them into “material.” The police, the media, and the FBI reduce victims to exploitative clichés or nameless bodies. The substance of the novel is how society ritualistically depersonalizes, objectifies, and consumes women. If metaphor is art, then consider Thomas Harris an old master: His finest work, 1988’s The Silence of the Lambs, is a Gothic carnival of symbolism and allusion.

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