I break the silence

It has been close to thirty years since I watched the film The Silence of the Lambs.  It is a day I shall never forget.

What led to it was a sequence of events, beginning twenty years before, when as a student searching for what I’m still not quite sure, I made contact with my former school study mate.  He was very bright, a whole year too young for his grade which resulted, upon finishing school, in his not being old enough for military conscription.  He opted to attend Stellenbosch University where initiation, cultural difference and kragdadigheid of the institution totally alienated him.  There were a few others like him, disaffected, iconoclastic, smokers of weed and plugged into Frank Zappa.  My campus experience in Cape Town was different but, as he and I were good friends, I fell in with them over the weekends. 

There was, though, one person in that Stellenbosch establishment that he respected greatly, a professor of philosophy the brilliance of whose lectures quietened his rebellious spirit and appealed to his intellect.

Some twenty years later, as an English teacher faced with the introduction of Film Study to the syllabus, I saw that this professor was presenting some lectures at the University of Cape Town’s Summer School.  One of these dealt with elements of deconstruction in film, a topic I knew nothing about but reckoned would be of value going forward.  With lectures happening in the evening after sport I could attend and did.

I came away from that lecture impressed by the sweep of his knowledge and the lucidity of explanation. In its course he had referred to The Silence of the Lambs, a film from some years previous which I had not heard of, and mentioned the three crosses in the cell of Hannibal Lecter, together with the Christian sacrament of Communion where believers partake in bread and wine, symbols of Jesus Christ’s sacrifice of his body and blood, as part of a deconstructivist interpretation.  How this was deconstruction in action required my seeing this film.

Luckily for me, the school had set up an A-V Room with black-out blinds and soundproofing for Film Study and other subjects which used films.  The Media Library did have a copy of the film, possibly a pirated edition as it was some years after its release, so on an afternoon when neither a sports match nor practice intruded and my piles of marking would not leave the building unaccompanied, I collected the copy and wandered off to the A-V Room.

That afternoon changed my life.  Indelible images, a nice man battling to lug his couch into the back of a panel van, a nicer young woman coming to assist him, a sudden thrust and him driving away with her in the back – such a simple plan, such a diabolical end.  A man in a cage, muzzled; the palpable fear of the armed soldiers surrounding him; a woman in the pitch-black, infra-red in the eyes of the man who stalks her. 

As the plot of “Lambs” moved on the complexities of the killers’ craft and mind made the words good and evil meaningless.  In most horror films the killing is the bad; here it was what happens after the killing, skinning the victim to make a garment of her for the him who wants to feel a her; eating a man in an epicurean exercise of power.  The power of most horror films lies in images: the images gone, the horror’s over.  In Lambs, a mind eats into your own and you leave with it.   

The film gave me no nightmares, nor did the scenes sketchily described here even send a shudder of recollection through me; they were, after all, just celluloid.  What lodged in my gut is that, surround a man with every armed guard, his evil will eviscerate them all.  In this film, though the innocent protagonist is not taken, it is not transcendent goodness that prevents it, simply the antagonist’s choice.  There is no moral design in the world, no judgement, no karma, no heaven, no hell.  What happens in this world, stays in this world.

No film before or since has disturbed me in any way.  On that day, alone and in the dark I experienced what nothing in my imagination could have prepared me for.  I did not eat for days after.