 Silence of the Lambs, the book is one of my favourite books of all time. Silence of the Lambs, the movie is the best book to movie adaptation ever made, in my opinion. And even without the book would be within the top three for psychological thrillers that I've ever seen. Thank you Barney. It's a fascinating story when viewed from the narcissistic abuse dynamic. On the surface we would think it's a fairly simple story. A Clarice Starling, young, naive, capable with her story of wanting to save the Lambs from the springtime slaughter. This is something that Hannibal Lecter weadles from her in exchange for information when they first meet. And she finds herself confessing to him as though he were more than just a psychiatrist but a priest. That her major motivation for joining the FBI, something that Dr. Lecter makes clear he finds absurd and ridiculous on her part. Is because when she was orphaned when her father, who Dr. Lecter contemptuously calls the dead night watchman. A security guard who was killed in a fatal shooting. When she loses her father she's sent to live on a farm. And when it's springtime she can hear the screaming of the Lambs in the night as they're slaughtered. In her distress she runs out and she saves a lamb and she runs away with this lamb. She doesn't get very far of course and then she's caught and she and the lamb are brought back to the farm. And she has to live with knowing that the lamb is taken from her and slaughtered like all the rest. Hannibal realises of course that she has a saviour complex that in the Carpman triangle she would be the rescuer or saviour. Who is Clarice Starling really trying to save? Well of course she also is the innocent lamb in this story. And Hannibal says to her very very memorably, Clarice you will let me know when the lambs stop screaming won't you? Do you think if Catherine lives you won't wake up in the dark ever again to the awful screaming of the lambs? Reflecting back to her that it is her trauma, her traumatic memory, her sense of loss, isolation, loneliness that nobody came to save her from her fate. That motivates everything she does as she moves forward with the FBI. He also sees very clearly how the FBI as an institution and her superior Jack Crawford are using her. She seems to be as a codependent, neurotically helpless in the face of serving this patriarchal institution and this patriarchal man who is around the same age as her father would have been if his father was still alive. The film doesn't go so deeply into her relationship with Jack Crawford. But the book does and it makes it very clear that whilst he does care for her, his years of service in the Federal Bureau of Investigation have made him cynical and he is prepared to put her in harm's way as a sacrificial lamb in order to see that justice is done. In this story there are other lambs of course. The senator's daughter who's captured by Buffalo Bell and held in a well until her body shrinks from starvation so that her skin will be smooth and loose when he kills her, removes her skin and makes a dress of it. She is the sacrificial lamb also waiting for slaughter being prepared over a matter of weeks and days in this terrifying, torturous, hellish set of circumstances which Clarice Starling feels completely obsessed and motivated, driven to save her from. The senator's daughter is now the lamb that she needs to rescue. Clarice is of course working from this neurotic fixation that if she can just save one lamb, then maybe the lambs will stop screaming. Doctor Lecter can see very very clearly that the lambs will never stop screaming and that there will always be people who are vulnerable, always people who are being predated upon by those who have chosen a darker path, the narcissists, the psychopaths of the world, the serial killers, the torturers, the murderers, the kidnappers and so on. He does try to warn her many times. He does try to teach her. He even offers her moments of potential therapeutic insight. At one point in the book he says to her, When the rabbit is caught in the trap it screams, it screams bring the fox running, but not to help Clarice, not to help. Even so she blithely and naively surges forward. So in a sense it's a tragic story. It can never work out well for Agent Starling, no matter what she does. And as the books and the story develop, I think it over a 20 year cycle, she actually rises high in the FBI and she does very very well. And to her horror and to the prediction of Doctor Lecter, who turns out to be her only true ally in the world, in the final analysis, the higher she rises the more at risk she is from the predators within the FBI. So the predator prey dynamic is not the sole dominion of criminals and victims. It transpires to be, as Hannibal Lecter warns her, intrinsic to human nature. There will always be predators. There will always be prey. A deeply cynical and psychopathic world view, but also one that closely represents a harsh reality of our world. Is Hannibal Lecter a narcissist or a psychopath? The repugnant and obnoxious Doctor Chilton is a narcissist and is extremely vain and possessive of Hannibal Lecter. As we see in the first scenes of the film, when we're introduced to these characters, we're introduced to Clarice, we're introduced to Jack Crawford, we're introduced to Doctor Chilton, to Hannibal Lecter's handler. In the stories that Hannibal Lecter actually respects and would never hurt, who is Barney, the stoic quiet custodian, somebody who has earned Doctor Lecter's trust over time and through being polite and kind and considerate. When we see Clarice at first, when she's first introduced to Doctor Chilton, he declares loudly, Oh, he's a monster. A pure psychopath. So rare to capture one alive. From a research point of view, Lecter is our most prized asset. It's never really quite clear exactly what Doctor Lecter is. Perhaps he's undiagnosable. To an extent, we could say that he's right out of the book as a classic psychopath. He does have a morality. As most psychopaths do, it's just not the common morality of the everyday man. Lecter himself is, in a sense, also a lamb in this story. And that is what creates the sexual tension that develops between Clarice and Doctor Lecter. In fact, you could say the Clarice styling for all of her efficiency, her toughness and her moral virtue actually has quite a vulnerability when it comes to a father complex. She has daddy issues. There is nothing she won't sacrifice for the big daddy of the FBI, even though the FBI will not sacrifice anything for her and will ultimately seek to sacrifice her. There's nothing she wouldn't do for Jack Crawford, even though he is manipulating her vulnerabilities, pulling her strings and putting her in harm's way. And ultimately, in the final round of the story of Science the Lambs, if you read the books, there's nothing that she won't do for Doctor Lecter. And in fact, one day, as unlikely as it seems, they become lovers. No, I came because I wanted to. People will say we're in love. Proving that the sexual frisson that we see in the first scenes between each other actually can flower and develop into a full blown relationship. They live together in the end of the series, though it is a little odd and it's not really clear whether this is the collective unconscious fantasy of these two characters or whether this is supposed to be taking place in real life. Hannibal Lecter to her is a powerful, intelligent, worldly, traveled father figure. He is not, whilst he is an American citizen, he's not American born. He is Lithuanian. He is of noble descent. He represents the foreign, the exotic, that which is of culture, that which is of history. Indeed, these are the things that he seems to be obsessed with. And we see these symbols with his chalk etchings, his charcoal etchings in his cell of cathedrals that have collapsed that he can draw with intricacy from memory. That is the Duomo seen from the Belvedere. You know Florence. She is attracted to him because he has what she wants. He has status, power and education and culture. He knows this and he taunts her with it, telling her that her accent, her mode of speech makes her sound like a hick. He says with your good bag and your good bag and your cheap shoes, you look to me like a well-scrubbed roub. At another point in the dialogue with her, he asks about her father and says, did he stink of the lamp? Asking her if she was of mining stock, the implication always that, as he says, she is just one step away from poor white trash. She feels this insecurity, this vulnerability, not just in their gap in age and their gap in experience, but at the level of class, at the level of breeding, at the level of culture. And he cleverly uses this to seduce her. Now, I didn't remember the first scene between Clarice and Dr. Lecter as being a seduction. And you may say that with time, I've just become a bit too Freudian, but if you read the book again and if you watch the scene again, there are multiple sexual overtones. Dr. Lecter, I want to fuck her or kill her or eat her or what? Probably all three. I wouldn't want to predict in what order. Even before Clarice and Lecter meet, Dr. Chilton is talking about somebody's tongue. He's talking about it in the context of a great violence, but he is talking about tongues. Throughout this whole dialogue, there are several references to smell and to taste, particularly in a sexual context. Indeed, multiple migs says something to Clarice Starling that actually hurts Dr. Lecter. He actually says, I would never have had you suffer that indignity because migs doesn't just say something very personal and crude to Clarice Starling about her sex. You know, we get a lot of detectives here, but I must say I can't ever remember one as attractive. Will you be in Baltimore overnight? Because this can be quite a fun town if you have the right guide. He then later throws his ejaculate from his cell and it hits her in the face. When I first saw this film, I saw only terror and brutality. But when I watched it again, I could see there's a lot of overtones of sex. He stands over her, leaning forward in his jumpsuit in an extremely phallic position. He probes her. Hannibal is, of course, a great general who did something remarkable militarily. A military genius, an extremely courageous man from history. Hannibal Lecter. Lecter is a lecturer and he is a lecher. And Hannibal is, of course, a cannibal. There is something of Hannibal Lecter in the probing phallic analytical surgeon. He pries, he pushes, he probes and he penetrates. And in that scene, she is slowly undressed and she opens to him slowly over time. Of course, as their dialogue and interactions increase, they become more and more intimate. So I'm not sure how well I should wish you, but I'm sure we'll have a lot of fun. In the final scenes of the film, which if you haven't seen it, I won't ruin it for you, but she hands him something. And when he takes the folder from her in one of the more erotic moments of the film, he runs his finger down her finger. When I first saw the film, when I was younger, I thought she looks horrified. When I saw it again, I thought she's horrified and also there are some more confusing. She's horrified and there are some more confusing, ambivalent emotions there. Hannibal is older, more experienced, more cultured. But as she learns, he's also a victim. This is powerful for Clarice Starling, the rescuer. She finds out that in his story in Lithuania, there were some soldiers after the war who were starving and they came and found him and his younger sister, Misha, hiding in a shed. Unfortunately, the soldiers decided to kill and eat Misha and to feed Misha to Hannibal. This core wound, this traumatic experience, made him the cold hearted serial killer that he becomes who has a taste for human flesh. Almost as a way of trying to control and re-dominate the core trauma by choosing to eat the people that he has targeted instead of being tricked as he was when he was a child into eating his beloved younger sister. In this sense, Clarice can still see the lost little boy in this powerful, evil, intellectual, this high status, highly celebrated, internationally renowned psychiatrist sought after by the FBI and institutions across the globe. A famous man, a man of letters. But for all that, a hurt, wounded, lost lamb, this combination is irresistible to her and eventually she falls prey to his final predation of the story. He doesn't consume her physically, but he does consume her sexually and romantically in the last act of the story. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much for your time and for your attention and I look forward to speaking to you again soon. Cheers.