Students
Teachers & SchoolsStudents
Teachers & SchoolsIdentity
In some movies, you have to figure out the identity of the characters. Who is Keyser Soze? What's Rosebud? Who is afraid of Virginia Woolf? In The Silence of the Lambs the identity of the characters is established almost right away. We're told Hannibal Lecter is a cannibal, Buffalo Bill skins women, and Clarice Starling has a badge with her name on it. But this movie isn't about figuring out identities as much as it is defying our expectations of what these identities mean. Who knew cannibals could be almost loveable?
FBI profiling is all about figuring out identities, but as we'll see, identity is a slippery concept in this film.
Clarice's identity is heavily shaped by her past as an orphan, which Hannibal Lecter conveniently points out to us.
Buffalo Bill's identity crisis is about him hating himself for unexplained reasons. His gender has very little, if anything, to do with it.