Daily Dialogue — August 11, 2016
Hannibal Lecter: No! I will listen now. After your father’s murder, you were orphaned. You were ten years old. You went to live with cousins on a sheep and horse ranch in Montana. And…?
Clarice Starling: And one morning, I just ran away.
Hannibal Lecter: No “just”, Clarice. What set you off? You started at what time?
Clarice Starling: Early, still dark.
Hannibal Lecter: Then something woke you, didn’t it? Was it a dream? What was it?
Clarice Starling: I heard a strange noise.
Hannibal Lecter: What was it?
Clarice Starling: It was… screaming. Some kind of screaming, like a child’s voice.
Hannibal Lecter: What did you do?
Clarice Starling: I went downstairs, outside. I crept up into the barn. I was so scared to look inside, but I had to.
Hannibal Lecter: And what did you see, Clarice? What did you see?
Clarice Starling: Lambs. The lambs were screaming.
Hannibal Lecter: They were slaughtering the spring lambs?
Clarice Starling: And they were screaming.
Hannibal Lecter: And you ran away?
Clarice Starling: No. First I tried to free them. I… I opened the gate to their pen, but they wouldn’t run. They just stood there, confused. They wouldn’t run.
Hannibal Lecter: But you could and you did, didn’t you?
Clarice Starling: Yes. I took one lamb, and I ran away as fast as I could.
Hannibal Lecter: Where were you going, Clarice?
Clarice Starling: I don’t know. I didn’t have any food, any water and it was very cold, very cold. I thought, I thought if I could save just one, but… he was so heavy. So heavy. I didn’t get more than a few miles when the sheriff’s car picked me up. The rancher was so angry he sent me to live at the Lutheran orphanage in Bozeman. I never saw the ranch again.
Hannibal Lecter: What became of your lamb, Clarice?
Clarice Starling: They killed him.
Hannibal Lecter: You still wake up sometimes, don’t you? You wake up in the dark and hear the screaming of the lambs.
Clarice Starling: Yes.
Hannibal Lecter: And you think if you save poor Catherine, you could make them stop, don’t you? You think if Catherine lives, you won’t wake up in the dark ever again to that awful screaming of the lambs.
Clarice Starling: I don’t know. I don’t know.
Hannibal Lecter: Thank you, Clarice. Thank you.
— The Silence of the Lambs (1991), screenplay by Ted Tally, novel by Thomas Harris
The Daily Dialogue theme for the week: Recollection, suggested by Will King.
Trivia: From an interview with screenwriter Ted Tally: “I could see that if we were going to have flashbacks, they should culminate, there should be some climactic thing, and we should see the child Clarice encountering the slaughter of the lambs and trying to save one of them. Jonathan was willing to shoot them, it was going to be the last thing we shot as we had to wait for the lambing season in spring, and it was going to cost a million dollars to set up the whole thing. Then Jonathan shot the scene where Clarice tells Lecter about the killing of the lambs. He sent the dailies to me and said to watch them and give him a call. So I watched these performances, and they were extraordinarily powerful, and Jonathan, said, ‘How can I cut away from these performances to a flashback? It’s all there : she’s [Jodi as Clarice] telling us the entire story in her face, in her words, we don’t need to see it as well.’ He said it’s just primary rule of filmmaking that if you can show it instead of telling it, you show it, but don’t show it and tell it. He was right, but it was scary to me.” They scrapped the entire Montana shoot and the third flashback.
Dialogue On Dialogue: From a Jungian perspective, this is the pivotal moment in the script because here is where Clarice finally acknowledges her shadow. Freed from its tyranny by having ‘named’ it, this moment where she recollects what happened on the Montana farm when she was ten years old sets the stage for her to confront Buffalo Bill and take him down.