Cinephilia and Beyond

First of all, I just thought it was so smart, so literary and knowing, and not just in a technological, police-procedural, serial-killing way–which Tom [Harris] is extremely knowledgeable about. It’s so knowing about people and human nature and character, and the dialogue is so good. It was “the thriller” raised to literature. And the story is just so unpredictable; to have the twinned killers, two bad guys instead of one, and the whole intricacy of the criminal plot. But, above all, it was the relationship between this young woman and this mad psychiatrist which was not like anything I’d ever seen. Jonathan and I were talking about it and he said, “This is new, dramatically; there has never been a relationship of two main characters like this.”

And then, for reasons I’m not even sure of, I felt very moved, and still do, by Clarice Starling. By her courage and vulnerability–and I probably respond more to courage in a main character than any other quality. She’s in a male world, and she’s a student, and she’s orphaned… I was just deeply moved by her. And Thomas Harris had so artfully worked in mythic underpinnings–it just had this feeling that there’s the orphaned young woman making her way in the world, and there’s the good stepfather in Crawford and the evil stepfather who’s Lecter who are taking on her education. That’s a huge part of the story, in fact it’s the emotional heart of the whole story; her search for a missing father and her attempt to replaced that void which is never going to go away. The whole thing of saving the lamb and being able to save Catherine Martin is all tied up with her inability to save her own father when she was a child. —How They Write a Script: Ted Tally (“The Silence of the Lambs”)

Oh… and pleasant dreams, by the way

p.s. “Believe me, you don’t want Hannibal Lecter inside your head.”