Essay Questions

When introduced in Red Dragon—a prequel to The Silence of the Lambs published several years earlier-Hannibal Lector was also helping an FBI agent track down a serial killer, but he himself still remained mainly a kind of modern day boogey man. Explain how he transforms into what might be termed a “civilized serial killer” as opposed to Buffalo Bill being merely a monster.

The transformation of Hannibal Lecter from repulsive serial-killing cannibal into a figure of almost Dracula-level romance begins the moment Clarice Starling enters into the prison where he is being kept. Buffalo Bill—James Gumb—is dealing with the kind of sexual confusion and gender identity problems that not only make for easy jokes, but are also understandable. These two factors coalesce to make it seem deceptively simple to figure him out. He is the kind of sexual freak that took the place of werewolves, vampires and strangers with candy as suburban boogey men to be pointed out to kids as something to be avoided. By contrast, Hannibal Lecter is a great artist, an actual doctor with an actual Ph.D, speaks several language and, above all else, is charming. In other words, despite the cannibalism and the sociopathy, Lecter is a much easier for the average person to relate as someone who is not occupying a lower level on the evolutionary scale than the rest of us. The novel thus makes the point that when society chooses its monsters, it does not necessarily choose them on the basis of evil acts alone.

How might Lecter also be deemed politically less monstrous as a concept of the Other than Jame Gumb?

Gumb kills sad, overweight teenage girls and skins them. His modus operandi essentially confines him to the outer reaches of what society can ever deem acceptable in its very willing ability to accept acts of evil…when necessary. Gumb kills victims in every sense of the word. Lecter, by contrast, kills annoying and intrusive census takers, armed cops, a privileged Princeton student and, more likely than not, the his officious yet incompetent jailer, Chilton. All victims just a surely as Buffalo Bill’s sad fat girls, but not quite the same. Readers may not root for cops to be killed any more than they they would root for a teenage girl, but—like Chilton to a high degree and the census taker to a lesser degree—they are symbols of authority and the oppression they wield. This pattern will continue after Hannibal makes his escape; just as it somehow easier to at least want to identity with Lecter rather than Gumb, so it is just a little tougher to care quite as deeply about his victims as one would naturally care about the prey hunted by Buffalo Bill. Identifying with Lecter therefore becomes at some point a political decision, if only subconsciously.

What is Harris ultimately signifying to the audience about the relationship between the ancient concept of evil and modern science?

Strip away all the themes and complexities of character and The Silence of the Lambs is at its core an example of the crime fiction genre known as the police procedural. The procedure in this case being not just forensic examination of evidence, but psychological profiling of the mind of a serial killer. Scientific advancement both real—evidence gathering and identifying—and theoretical—psychological profiling—is essential not only to the procedure of solving the crime, but to the procedure of getting into Lecter’s mind. Where it really gets interesting is that it is necessary to get into Lecter’s mind in order to get into Buffalo Bill’s mind since they do know his identity. But Lecter is well aware of his part in this process and—being better at it than the cops—uses their own expectations and limitations of psychological profiling against them. Ultimately, everything would have been better off if they had just stuck to the concrete and left the theoretical well enough alone. Only by introducing the theoretical is Lecter given his chance to escape. The fact that Lecter does use the failures in the construction of psychological profiling to escape while Buffalo Bill ultimately dies as a result of fact-based forensic evidence gathering and analysis seems to suggest that modern science is getting closer to understanding prosaic incarnations of evil like Jame Gumb, but is still utterly unprepared to deal with pure evil—or even admit, perhaps, that it actually exists—like Hannibal Lecter.