Great Scene: “The Silence of the Lambs”

Two flashbacks to Clarice as a young girl are critical to the narrative.

The 1991 movie The Silence of the Lambs won all 5 major Academy Awards: Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Picture. For good reason. It’s a tremendous movie.

IMDb plot summary: A young F.B.I. cadet must confide in an incarcerated and manipulative killer to receive his help on catching another serial killer who skins his victims.

There are two flashbacks which provide a deep insight into Clarice’s psyche. The first one is right after she has had her initial meeting with Lecter and had a disturbing experience with the prisoner in the next cell Miggs. As Clarice leaves the prison and heads toward her car, she revisits a moment in her past: Her father, dressed in his sheriff’s outfit, coming home from work, Clarice, then 11 years old, surprising him, then as he swoops her up into his arms, she asks, “Did you catch any bad guys today, Daddy?”

The second flashback occurs at a funeral parlor where the body of one of Buffalo Bill’s victims has been laid out for an autopsy. Here is the scene in the screenplay written by Ted Tally:

EXT. SIDEWALK OF THE FUNERAL HOME — POTTER, WEST VA. — DAY

SOUND of organ music, as Clarice, carrying her fingerprint 
kit, mounts some steps to the sidewalk. She stops, seeing -

COUNTRY PEOPLE

in their somber best, filing into the mortuary for a service. 
The music — “Shall We Gather At The River?” — is issuing 
from the open double doors. Several of the mourners glance 
over at her curiously.

ANGLE ON CLARICE

staring back at the mourners, hearing the music, as a sense 
memory is triggered in her…

IN FLASHBACK — LOW ANGLE, MOVING

as we approach, down the aisle of a country chapel, an open 
wooden coffin. Sad country faces turn, looking at us from 
the flanking pews. The b.g. organ hymn is “Shall We 
Gather…?”

THE SAD, 10 YEAR-OLD CLARICE

in her best dress, is reluctantly approaching the casket. 
Her hands are held by the plump hands of unseen matrons.

CHILD’S POV

on the looming coffin… closer and closer… until finally 
she can see, lying inside it… her dead father, arms folded, 
his marshal’s badge still pinned to his lapel.

CRAWFORD (V.O.)
Starling…?

NEW ANGLE (PRESENT DAY)

as the grownup Clarice turns towards the impatient Crawford. 
Like her, he carries a large case.

CRAWFORD
We’re around back.

CUT TO:

Here is the movie version of the scene:

This flashback reveals that her father died when Clarice was a young girl, but also demonstrates how Clarice’s issues about her father’s death lie close to the surface of her consciousness. It drives home a key point: She has never recovered from the loss of her father. His death dictated her choice of vocations (he was in law enforcement, she followed in his footsteps). His death has haunted her as she has subconsciously equated his ‘slaughter’ with the slaughter of the lambs in Montana she witnessed (with horror) as a child. His death made her a victim and fuels her identification with Buffalo Bill’s kidnap victim Catherine Martin. All of that melds together in this evocative flashback scene.

Interesting to note, the script called for a third flashback, but was scrapped. Here screenwriter Tally explains why:

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.”

Here is that scene. Foster’s performance is so incredible, it’s easy to see why they chose NOT to film that third flashback:

To read more on Ted Tally and his experiences adapting the Thomas Harris novel “The Silence of the Lambs,” go here.

Screenwriting is scene-writing, so the more we study scenes — how they are constructed, how dialogue gets handled, when to enter and when to exit — the better off we are as writers. That’s the point of the Great Scene series. If you have a suggestion for a Great Scene, please post a RESPONSE with it.