See, I feel exactly the opposite about Silence, which, if anything, felt very human to me. As much as Harris held up the flaws and foibles of rural America to critical examination in Silence - the row of sheriff's deputies giving Clarice an appraisingly sexist once-over, and the dirt-poor dead-end lives of victim Frederica Bimmel's family and friends - both the novel and the movie nonetheless showed a moving empathy for those country folk, from Clarice discovering the panty-shots of Frederica (which made Clarice "root for her," since she was a "fat girl" who was trying to assert her own sexuality) to the kindness and sensitivity of the morticians who examined her body, all the way up to the cops caring steadfastly for their own in the wake of Lecter's escape ("THAT'S JIM PEMBRY, DAMMIT!!! NOW TALK TO HIM!!!").
Indeed, if anything, the contrast between Silence and Hannibal (the novel version) is like the moral reverse of the contrast between The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgement Day - whereas Cameron went from showing the machines' victory as inevitable to giving humanity a second chance (and even grafting a humanity onto one of the machines), Harris went from showing Lecter as gaining respect for Clarice's integrity (and staying away from her because he didn't want to spoil it with his own monstrousness) in Silence, to Lecter brainwashing Clarice into renouncing all her old morals and believing that cannibalism was morally a-okay in Hannibal.
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Date: 2010-08-10 06:46 am (UTC)Indeed, if anything, the contrast between Silence and Hannibal (the novel version) is like the moral reverse of the contrast between The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgement Day - whereas Cameron went from showing the machines' victory as inevitable to giving humanity a second chance (and even grafting a humanity onto one of the machines), Harris went from showing Lecter as gaining respect for Clarice's integrity (and staying away from her because he didn't want to spoil it with his own monstrousness) in Silence, to Lecter brainwashing Clarice into renouncing all her old morals and believing that cannibalism was morally a-okay in Hannibal.