Character Analysis
Our heroic FBI trainee and stalker-stalker Clarice Ann Starling is direct, honest, determined—and smart enough to know when she should be scared spitless. She agrees to tangle with one of the most violent, brilliant, and dangerous criminals ever to practice psychiatry.
Yeah, he's behind bars for now, but he's still a nightmare-worthy scary guy.
Clarice isn't quite sure of herself at first, but she seems to know how to manage her insecurities in order to do what she has to do to get Lecter's cooperation and track down Buffalo Bill. Jodie Foster's Oscar-winning performance shows us both Clarice's vulnerabilities and her substantial strength.
While most people don't typically encounter severed heads and otherwise mutilated bodies in their job, we all face struggles similar to what Clarice deals with. She wants to succeed in a world where the odds are stacked against her. She's a trainee. A fantastic one, but still a trainee, in a position where she has to work extra hard to earn respect. She's also a woman in a male-driven world, a small-town girl in a big-town job.
These things, complicated with a tragedy in her past, complicate Starling's journey more than your average girl-meets-boy-serial killer, girl-uses-boy-serial-killer-to-find-another-boy-serial-killer tale.
Star Student
Clarice is smart. Very smart—a magna cum laude graduate of the University of Virginia and obviously doing very well in her FBI training. But there are pros and cons to being really good at what you do. On the pro side, you get respect (not-so-coincidentally, respect is one of the major themes of the movie). On the con side, sometimes your instructors or superiors assign you a lot of more work. You might be called on to lead a group discussion, write extra papers, or interview a known serial killer who might bite your face off.
That's where Clarice finds herself at the beginning of The Silence of the Lambs. The head of the Behavior Science Unit, Jack Crawford, gives her a job. "More of an interesting errand," he says. She's a stellar student, and Crawford knows she's up to the task. And she manages to figure it out—with Lecter's help, sure, but she does a bang-up job of piecing together clues and intuition to track down Buffalo Bill and rescue his surviving captive. When she graduates from the Academy, everyone, including Lecter, is proud of her.
The Brave One
Crawford knows that Clarice isn't only smart, but he trusts her grit enough to assign her to a case involving two of the most deranged and dangerous men imaginable (three if you count the dirtbag Dr. Chilton). "Do you spook easily, Starling?" he asks her. She's nervous, yes, but if she gets spooked, she hides it well. Later, when finding a severed head, she describes her feelings as "Scared at first, then, exhilarated." She likes what she does, even when it involves finding body parts in jars.
It's not like Clarice doesn't experience fear—in fact, she looks uneasy much of the time—but her curiosity makes her push through it. Just thinking about Hannibal Lecter is enough to keep most of us awake nights. He intimidates her, but she manages to stay on her feet.
LECTER: Why do you think he takes their skins, Officer Starling? Thrill me with your acumen.
CLARICE: It excites him. Most serial killers keep some sort of trophies.
DR. LECTER: I didn't.
CLARICE: No. No, you ate yours.
Even after Lecter zings Clarice with his uncanny insights about her rural West Virginia background ("You're not more than one generation from poor white trash, are you, Officer Starling?"), she doesn't wilt even though you can see her wince.
Big Girls Don't Cry
It's not completely clear why—maybe because her dad was a cop and she wanted to please him—but Clarice has chosen a traditionally male profession. She's the only important woman in the film, and she's surrounded by male psychiatrists, instructors, and cops. She puts up with a lot of condescension and intimidation and tries her best to deal with it. When the sleazy Dr. Chilton unsuccessfully tries to hit on her, then suggests that her instructor was clever to send a pretty young woman to get Lecter's sexual interest, she retorts,
CLARICE: I graduated magna from UVA, Doctor. It's not a charm school.
Oh, snap.
She also decides that she'd rather not have to deal with Dr. Chilton any more than absolutely necessary:
CLARICE: Dr. Chilton, if Lecter feels you're his enemy as you've said, then maybe I'll have more luck by myself. What do you think?
CHILTON: (annoyed) You might have suggested that in my office, and saved me the time.
CLARICE: But then I would've missed the pleasure of your company.
Even when meeting the terrifying Lecter for the first time, she manages not to fall apart in the face of his challenges:
CLARICE: I'm still in training at the Academy.
LECTER: Jack Crawford sent a trainee to me?
CLARICE: We're talking about psychology, Doctor, not the Bureau. Can you decide for yourself whether or not I'm qualified?
Clarice endures a lot from the men around her. She gets hit on by everyone from psychotic killers to psychiatrists and entomologists. (You know those entomologists—always bugging people.) We see her in an elevator looking small as she's surrounded by tall guys in uniforms, and we're constantly aware of men looking at her. As she walks down the corridor of the state hospital, an inmate shouts obscenities and flings semen at her. In her first meeting with Lecter, she's sitting and he's standing, looking slightly down at her and gazing intently with his creepy, intimidating stare. (Source)
Clarice comes into her own during the course of the film; one of her big moments is when she finds her authoritative voice and kicks the guys out of the autopsy room when they're staring at a victim's corpse:
CLARICE: Excuse me! Excuse me, gentlemen! You officers and gentlemen, listen here now. Uh, there's things we need to do for her. I know that y'all brought her this far and that her folks would thank you if they could for your kindness and your sensitivity. And now please, go on now and lets us take care of her. Go on now. Thank you.
You go, girl.
Lambs, Chopped
A brief scene in The Silence of the Lambs shows Clarice engaging in a practice FBI operation. She bursts into a room to save a captive, but someone pulls a fake gun on her and fake shoots her. The instructor asks her,
INSTRUCTOR: "Starling, where's your danger area?"
CLARICE "In the corner, sir."
INSTRUCTOR: "Did you check the corner?"
CLARICE: "No, sir."
INSTRUCTOR: "That's the reason you're dead."
Clarice's "corner" is her family history. Raised by a single father, Clarice idolized her daddy, a sheriff. He was killed when Clarice was a young girl, and she was sent to live with relatives on a farm. When they slaughtered lambs, the screaming of the lambs drove Clarice crazy, and she tried to run away, but not without trying to save the lambs first.
Even at this age, young Clarice didn't spook easily. "I was so scared to look inside, but I had to," she said, a skill which serves her well as an FBI agent. She couldn't save her lamb, though:
CLARICE: "I thought if I could save just one, I thought… but… he was so heavy. He was so heavy."
We learn all this this when Dr. Hannibal Lecter learns it in a bit of quid pro quo with Clarice Starling. Quid pro quo being Latin for "most uncomfortable OKCupid profile survey ever." But by grilling Clarice like a lamb chop, he forces her to look into this dark corner of her past. "You think if you save poor Catherine, you can make them stop, don't you?" Lecter says.
Lecter also susses out early on that even though she's smart and polished, she didn't come from a "good" family—he notes her cheap shoes and the hint of a rural West Virginia accent. He tells her that she ran far away from home, all the way to the FBI. You can see these comments strike home. It's these initial hints that make him probe Clarice for more of her stories and eventually reveals the episode with the lambs.
We're meant to understand that Clarice's insecurities about coming from a small-town West Virginia drive her ambition to succeed at the Academy where she's an outsider because of her gender and her social class. Maybe she identifies with Bill's victim Frederika Bimmel, who left her own small town to look for work in Chicago. And by saving Catherine, Clarice can also save herself. Catherine's not the only damsel in peril in this film.
Clarice's Timeline