Clarice Starling (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
thesepreciousthings) wrote2021-03-08 03:34 pm
thesepreciousthings) wrote2021-03-08 03:34 pm
Differences in Novel Canon vs. Movie
Despite using Julianne Moore as a PB, who played Clarice Starling in the film version of Hannibal, I play her from the novel, which is far different and ends her character arc on a darker, "the antihero wins" sort of note. (Yes, I consider Hannibal Lecter an antihero, but that is an aside from this, though I'd be happy to debate it because I love being a book geek about these novels.)
This journal entry is mainly meant to highlight things which the film left out and/or changed, so that people who want to know Clarice can get by with the two films she appears in, but still track the very marked shift in her character development and mindset as of her played canonpoint.
CONTENT WARNINGS: Misogyny, Hypnotherapy, Cannibalism. Thomas Harris does not pull any punches in his writing, and I will be sharing excerpts directly from the text. Obviously, here there be spoilers.
Iron and Silver
One thing that both films only lightly touch on is Clarice's attachment to her low-class, blue-collar parents. Silence of the Lambs acknowledges that her father was killed in the line of duty as a night watchman, and that she went to a Lutheran orphanage after fleeing from her uncle's Montana ranch trying to save a horse from execution (as well as those infamous lambs) ... but they do not mention the visceral flashbacks she has in the moments she needs them most for her own inner strength. Her mother washing the blood from her father's hat, her father peeling oranges at the kitchen table with his broken-tipped Barlow knife, the sparsity and quiet strength of their existence in poverty in 1970s rural Texas.
When she is involved in a shootout that takes the life of her former instructor and colleague John Brigham, Hannibal Lecter sends Clarice a letter in her grief. The movie shows this letter, but omits the piece with the strongest resonance:
From this exercise, Starling is able to find the strength to stand her ground in several political conflicts at the Bureau in her own defense: not only in the aftermath of Brigham's death, but in arguing her case for her methods for tracking Hannibal Lecter when he returns from Italy to America. Behind the scenes, one of Hannibal's surviving victims - a monster himself, a child molester and unethical pig farmer named Mason Verger - schemes to have Hannibal caught and eaten alive by pigs. He uses his political contacts to first defame Starling, then use her as bait for Hannibal's capture and atempted murder. It is clear through Clarice's shown trains of thought that she is hard-pressed to determine which of the two men is worse.
Leaving the FBI
Eventually, Verger's contact, FBI Attorney Paul Krendler, uses false evidence to frame Starling for alerting Hannibal to the presence of authorities, and sets it up to look as though she is his mistress and a traitor to the Bureau. Krendler is an insidious misogynist who has continuously verbally abused and belittled Starling throughout her career, keeping her from reaching the rank or prestige she should have with the skills and experience she possesses. She is placed on administrative leave and made to surrender her gun, badge, and equipment, but not without a few parting shots:
The Kidnapping & The Decision
In the film, Hannibal is kidnapped by Mason Verger's men at a shopping mall, while he and Clarice play a much more cinematically-friendly game of cat and mouse chasing each other as she tries to warn him about Verger. In the novel, Clarice is in the supermarket getting ingredients for her roommate to cook her birthday dinner when Hannibal is taken while leaving a bottle of champagne in the seat of her car.
Give that a second to sink in. It's about fifty times more powerful, right?
Now, add in the fact that Clarice comes out of the supermarket just in time to see Hannibal being dragged into the back of a van, is unable to pursue due to her lack of credentials or firearm, and has to spend what feels like an eternity dealing with the local police in the aftermath. She's been crippled, and the person who predicted it - and helped her kickstart her career, and has been somehow both a strange mentor and an enemy all at once - is in mortal danger from the same man who put her in the position she's in.
The film shows Clarice going home and going through the motions of what she decides to do. What it fails to convey is the contents of her mind:
She then arms herself with the revolver bequeathed to her at John Brigham's funeral, along with his old badge, and goes to Mason Verger's farm to rescue Hannibal. Things do not go completely according to plan, and in the course of freeing him from the barn where he's due to be eaten alive, Starling is shot with almost a double dose of tranquilizer darts. Hannibal picks her up and escapes with her into the woods, back to his sanctuary: a rented home on the Chesapeake Bay.
This is the point in the narrative where the 2001 movie leaves the book almost entirely on the cutting-room floor, and what follows are the two most important discrepancies of all.
Mischa's Place In The Universe
Thomas Harris weaves two very interesting and integral concepts through the novel that give us an immense insight into Hannibal Lecter's character. The first is that he possesses a perfect visual memory and has used it to build himself a mind palace (those familiar with the BBC version of Sherlock should know the concept well). The second is the death of his baby sister, Mischa Lecter, during the aftermath of World War II. The Lecter family was wealthy and staying in a hunting estate to avoid the fighting, but their estate was set upon by Nazi deserters. Unfortunately the poor climate meant there was barely enough food for the Lecters and their staff, let alone the deserters, and six-year-old Hannibal bore witness to Mischa being dragged off to be killed and eaten. Over the course of the novel, he becomes obsessed with healing his own trauma: particularly with the concept in quantum physics that time could be reversed and broken things remade, as long as a place is made in the current universe for them. He theorizes that Clarice's place in the universe would best suit Mischa.
When Hannibal brings Clarice to his home and cures her tranquilizer poisoning, he begins hypnotherapy to heal her of her own past traumas: her deeply buried anger at her father's ignorance and failure to save himself from death, and how the negative qualities she did not want to assign to him after death had been transferred to people like Paul Krendler, while mentors like Jack Crawford and John Brigham became stand-ins for her father's good qualities. Under hypnosis, Hannibal has Clarice imagine a meeting between herself and her late father, where she can talk to him about all that she has gone through. He even goes so far as to exhume her father's bones and bring them to the home so that she can properly say goodbye and leave her pain behind.
His final act in clearing Clarice out to "make way" for Mischa is the last part of her healing process, and the scene is preserved in the movie with so little of its context that it's played purely for the horror value: he captures Paul Krendler and brings him to a dinner party, so Clarice can confront him and tell him how she feels about him before he dies... while also playing the part of a gracious hostess, therefore placing herself as the better woman. ..
The meal, of course, is mostly haute cuisine ... not all the stuff of horror, but the first course is a few slices of Krendler's fresh, vivisected brain. To her host's delight, Clarice has seconds. After dinner, they discuss Mischa yet again, and Hannibal reveals that he had been preparing Clarice to make room for her.
Clarice, in return, uses the fruits of her recent therapy to her cleverness and benefit, and says" "if, as you say, there's room in me for my father, why is there not room in you for Mischa?" She then completely seals the idea by saying that she would be a woman in Lecter's life who would care for him, support him, that he would not have to share with a little sister. In doing so, she comes full circle: where Hannibal once manipulated her for his own gains all the way back at their first meeting in The Silence of the Lambs, she talks him into making her an integral part of his life, instead of simply a placeholder. Which brings us to the end of this lengthy discourse and the most important difference between the movies and the novel... the epilogue, set three years later.
The New Clarice Starling
I play Clarice Starling from a canon point where she has healed her past traumas, dealt with her anger, and is no longer an agent of the FBI, living a very luxurious life in Buenos Aires, Argentina alongside a still-at-large Hannibal Lecter, who has become not only her confidante but her lover. Canon does not make it clear whether or not she, too, now indulges in his hobby of hunting the "free-range rude" ... but I would not call it outside the realm of possibility on extreme occasions.
Journal Navigation
This journal entry is mainly meant to highlight things which the film left out and/or changed, so that people who want to know Clarice can get by with the two films she appears in, but still track the very marked shift in her character development and mindset as of her played canonpoint.
CONTENT WARNINGS: Misogyny, Hypnotherapy, Cannibalism. Thomas Harris does not pull any punches in his writing, and I will be sharing excerpts directly from the text. Obviously, here there be spoilers.
One thing that both films only lightly touch on is Clarice's attachment to her low-class, blue-collar parents. Silence of the Lambs acknowledges that her father was killed in the line of duty as a night watchman, and that she went to a Lutheran orphanage after fleeing from her uncle's Montana ranch trying to save a horse from execution (as well as those infamous lambs) ... but they do not mention the visceral flashbacks she has in the moments she needs them most for her own inner strength. Her mother washing the blood from her father's hat, her father peeling oranges at the kitchen table with his broken-tipped Barlow knife, the sparsity and quiet strength of their existence in poverty in 1970s rural Texas.
When she is involved in a shootout that takes the life of her former instructor and colleague John Brigham, Hannibal Lecter sends Clarice a letter in her grief. The movie shows this letter, but omits the piece with the strongest resonance:
I will show you a quality that will help you. You are not blinded by tears, you have the onions to read on. Here's an exercise that you might find useful. I want you physically to do this with me: do you have a black iron skillet? You are a southern mountain girl, I can't imagine you would not. Put it on the kitchen table. Turn on the overhead lights.
Look into the skillet, Clarice. Lean over it and look down. If this were your mother's skillet, and it may well be, it would hold among its molecules all the vibrations of all the conversations ever held in its presence. All the exchanges, all the petty irritations, the deadly revelations, the flat announcements of disaster, the grunts and poetry of love. ( . . . ) We are elaborations of carbon, Clarice. You and the skillet and Daddy dead in the ground, cold as the skillet. It's all still there. Listen. ( . . . ) Your father, Clarice, was a night watchman. Your mother was a chambermaid.
Was a big federal career your hope or theirs? How much would your father bend to get along in a stale beaurocracy? How many buttocks would he kiss? Did you ever in your life see him toady or fawn?
Have your supervisors demonstrated any values, Clarice? How about your parents, did they demonstrate any? If so, are those values the same? ( . . . ) Have you failed your dead family? Would they want you to suck up? What was their view on fortitude? You can be as strong as you wish to be.
You are a warrior, Clarice. The enemy is dead, the baby safe. You are a warrior.
The most stable elements, Clarice, appear in the middle of the periodic table, roughly between iron and silver.
Between iron and silver. I think that is appropriate for you.
~ Chapter 5
From this exercise, Starling is able to find the strength to stand her ground in several political conflicts at the Bureau in her own defense: not only in the aftermath of Brigham's death, but in arguing her case for her methods for tracking Hannibal Lecter when he returns from Italy to America. Behind the scenes, one of Hannibal's surviving victims - a monster himself, a child molester and unethical pig farmer named Mason Verger - schemes to have Hannibal caught and eaten alive by pigs. He uses his political contacts to first defame Starling, then use her as bait for Hannibal's capture and atempted murder. It is clear through Clarice's shown trains of thought that she is hard-pressed to determine which of the two men is worse.
Eventually, Verger's contact, FBI Attorney Paul Krendler, uses false evidence to frame Starling for alerting Hannibal to the presence of authorities, and sets it up to look as though she is his mistress and a traitor to the Bureau. Krendler is an insidious misogynist who has continuously verbally abused and belittled Starling throughout her career, keeping her from reaching the rank or prestige she should have with the skills and experience she possesses. She is placed on administrative leave and made to surrender her gun, badge, and equipment, but not without a few parting shots:
"This is a frame. I think Mason Verger is trying to capture Dr. Lecter himself for purposes of personal revenge. I think he just missed him in Florence. I think Mr. Krendler may be in collusion with Verger and wants the FBI's effort against Dr. Lecter to work for Verger. I think Paul Krendler of the Department of Justice is making money out of this and I think he is willing to destroy me to do it. Mr. Krendler has behaved toward me before in an inappropriate manner and is acting now out of spite as well as financial self-interest. Only this week he called me a 'cornpone country pussy'. I would challenge Mr. Krendler before this body to take a lie detector test with me on these matters. I'm at your convenience. We could do it now."
"Special Agent Starling, it's a good thing you're not sworn here today-" Krendler began.
"Swear me. You swear too."
"I want to assure you, if the evidence is lacking you're entitled to full reinstatement without prejudice," Krendler said in his kindliest voice. "In the meantime you'll recieve pay and remain eligible for insurance and medical benefits. The administrative leave is not itself punitive, Agent Starling, use it to your advantage," Krendler said, adopting a confidential tone. "In fact, if you wanted to take this hiatus to have that dirt taken out of your cheek, I'm sure the medical-"
"It's not dirt," Starling said, "It's gunpowder. No wonder you didn't recognize it."
~ Chapter 72
In the film, Hannibal is kidnapped by Mason Verger's men at a shopping mall, while he and Clarice play a much more cinematically-friendly game of cat and mouse chasing each other as she tries to warn him about Verger. In the novel, Clarice is in the supermarket getting ingredients for her roommate to cook her birthday dinner when Hannibal is taken while leaving a bottle of champagne in the seat of her car.
Give that a second to sink in. It's about fifty times more powerful, right?
Now, add in the fact that Clarice comes out of the supermarket just in time to see Hannibal being dragged into the back of a van, is unable to pursue due to her lack of credentials or firearm, and has to spend what feels like an eternity dealing with the local police in the aftermath. She's been crippled, and the person who predicted it - and helped her kickstart her career, and has been somehow both a strange mentor and an enemy all at once - is in mortal danger from the same man who put her in the position she's in.
The film shows Clarice going home and going through the motions of what she decides to do. What it fails to convey is the contents of her mind:
What do you look at while you're making up your mind? Ours is not a reflective culture, we do not raise our eyes up to the hills. ( . . . ) Starling, seeking something, anything, walked through the kitchen into the quiet and order of Mapp's side of the duplex. ( . . . ) Mapp's side looked like Mapp lived there.
Starling went back to her side. It looked to her like nobody lived there. What did she have framed? Her diploma from the FBI Academy. No photograph of her and her parents survived. She had been without them for a long time and she had them only in her mind. Sometimes, in the flavors of breakfast or in a scent, a scrap of conversation, a homely expression overheard, she felt their hands on her: She felt it strongest in her sense of right and wrong.
Who the hell was she? Who had ever recognized her?
You are a warrior, Clarice. You can be as strong as you wish to be.
Starling could understand Mason wanting to kill Hannibal Lecter. If he had done it himself or had hired it done, she could have stood it; Mason had a grievance.
But she could not abide the thought of Dr. Lecter tortured to death; she shied from it as she had from the slaughter of the lambs and the horses so long ago.
You are a warrior, Clarice.
Almost as ugly as the act itself was the fact that Mason would do this with the tacit agreement of men sworn to uphold the law. It is the way of the world.
With this thought, she made a simple decision:
The world will not be this way within the reach of my arm.
She then arms herself with the revolver bequeathed to her at John Brigham's funeral, along with his old badge, and goes to Mason Verger's farm to rescue Hannibal. Things do not go completely according to plan, and in the course of freeing him from the barn where he's due to be eaten alive, Starling is shot with almost a double dose of tranquilizer darts. Hannibal picks her up and escapes with her into the woods, back to his sanctuary: a rented home on the Chesapeake Bay.
This is the point in the narrative where the 2001 movie leaves the book almost entirely on the cutting-room floor, and what follows are the two most important discrepancies of all.
Thomas Harris weaves two very interesting and integral concepts through the novel that give us an immense insight into Hannibal Lecter's character. The first is that he possesses a perfect visual memory and has used it to build himself a mind palace (those familiar with the BBC version of Sherlock should know the concept well). The second is the death of his baby sister, Mischa Lecter, during the aftermath of World War II. The Lecter family was wealthy and staying in a hunting estate to avoid the fighting, but their estate was set upon by Nazi deserters. Unfortunately the poor climate meant there was barely enough food for the Lecters and their staff, let alone the deserters, and six-year-old Hannibal bore witness to Mischa being dragged off to be killed and eaten. Over the course of the novel, he becomes obsessed with healing his own trauma: particularly with the concept in quantum physics that time could be reversed and broken things remade, as long as a place is made in the current universe for them. He theorizes that Clarice's place in the universe would best suit Mischa.
When Hannibal brings Clarice to his home and cures her tranquilizer poisoning, he begins hypnotherapy to heal her of her own past traumas: her deeply buried anger at her father's ignorance and failure to save himself from death, and how the negative qualities she did not want to assign to him after death had been transferred to people like Paul Krendler, while mentors like Jack Crawford and John Brigham became stand-ins for her father's good qualities. Under hypnosis, Hannibal has Clarice imagine a meeting between herself and her late father, where she can talk to him about all that she has gone through. He even goes so far as to exhume her father's bones and bring them to the home so that she can properly say goodbye and leave her pain behind.
His final act in clearing Clarice out to "make way" for Mischa is the last part of her healing process, and the scene is preserved in the movie with so little of its context that it's played purely for the horror value: he captures Paul Krendler and brings him to a dinner party, so Clarice can confront him and tell him how she feels about him before he dies... while also playing the part of a gracious hostess, therefore placing herself as the better woman. ..
Starling apparently was weighing an issue, using her palms like the Scales of Justice. "You know, Mr. Krendler, every time you ever leered at me, I had the nagging feeling I had done something to deserve it." She moved her palms up and down judiciously, a motion similar to passing a Slinky back and forth. "I didn't deserve it. Every time you wrote something negative in my personnel folder, I resented it, but still I searched myself. I doubted myself for a moment, and tried to scratch this tiny itch that said Daddy knows best.
"You don't know best, Mr. Krendler. In fact, you don't know anything." Starling had a sip of her splendid white Burgundy and said to Dr. Lecter, "I love this. But I think we should take it off the ice." She turned again, attentive hostess, to her guest. "You are forever an . . . an oaf, and beneath notice," she said in a pleasant tone. "And that's enough about you at this lovely table. Since you are Dr. Lecter's guest, I hope you enjoy the meal."
- Chapter 100
The meal, of course, is mostly haute cuisine ... not all the stuff of horror, but the first course is a few slices of Krendler's fresh, vivisected brain. To her host's delight, Clarice has seconds. After dinner, they discuss Mischa yet again, and Hannibal reveals that he had been preparing Clarice to make room for her.
Clarice, in return, uses the fruits of her recent therapy to her cleverness and benefit, and says" "if, as you say, there's room in me for my father, why is there not room in you for Mischa?" She then completely seals the idea by saying that she would be a woman in Lecter's life who would care for him, support him, that he would not have to share with a little sister. In doing so, she comes full circle: where Hannibal once manipulated her for his own gains all the way back at their first meeting in The Silence of the Lambs, she talks him into making her an integral part of his life, instead of simply a placeholder. Which brings us to the end of this lengthy discourse and the most important difference between the movies and the novel... the epilogue, set three years later.
Follow this handsome couple from the opera? All right, but very carefully ...
At the millennium, Buenos Aires is possessed by the tango and the night has a pulse. The Mercedes, windows down to let in the music from the dance clubs, purrs through the Recoleta district to the Avenida Alvear and disappears into the courtyard of an exquisite Beaux Arts building near the French Embassy.
The air is soft and a late supper is laid on the terrace of the top floor, but the servants are gone.
Morale is high among the servants in this house, but there is an iron discipline among them. They are forbidden to enter the top floor of the mansion before noon. Or after the service of the first course at dinner.
Dr. Lecter and Clarice Starling often talk at dinner in languages other than Starling's native English. She had college French and Spanish to build on, and she has found she has a good ear. They speak Italian a lot at mealtimes; she finds a curious freedom in the visual nuances of the language. ( . . . )
Clarice Starling's memory palace is building as well. It shares some rooms with Dr. Lecter's own memory palace - he has discovered her in there several times - but her own palace grows on its own. It is full of new things. She can visit her father there. Hannah is at pasture there. Jack Crawford is there, when she chooses to see him bent over his desk. ( . . . )
It is hard to know what Starling remembers of the old life, what she chooses to keep. The drugs that held her in the first days have had no part in their lives for a long time. Someday perhaps (. . .) Starling may hear a crossbow string and come to some unwilled awakening, if indeed she even sleeps.
- Chapter 103
I play Clarice Starling from a canon point where she has healed her past traumas, dealt with her anger, and is no longer an agent of the FBI, living a very luxurious life in Buenos Aires, Argentina alongside a still-at-large Hannibal Lecter, who has become not only her confidante but her lover. Canon does not make it clear whether or not she, too, now indulges in his hobby of hunting the "free-range rude" ... but I would not call it outside the realm of possibility on extreme occasions.