|
Du bist hier: Referate Datenbank | Englisch
| Harris, Thomas: The Silence of the Lambs
Harris, Thomas: The Silence of the Lambs
Harald Krapfenbauer 1999/2000
krapfi@gmx.net
The Silence of the Lambs / Thomas
Harris
Vocabulary:
to mutilate –
verstümmeln
moth – Nachtfalter, Motte
chrysalis – Puppe, Kokon
investigation – Ermittlung
urbane – weltmännisch
savage – unzivilisiert,
gefährlich
# MAIN CHARACTERS:
Clarice Starling: A potential FBI agent
who is about to complete her training.
Hannibal Lecter: He once has been a
brilliant psychiatrist and is now imprisoned because of a fetish for
cannibalism.
Jame Gumb: criminal psychopath who murders
young women to sew clothes made of their skin. He is named Buffalo Bill by the
FBI as long as they don’t know his real identity.
Special Agent Jack Crawford: Section
Chief, Starling’s boss. He is the most successful tracker of serial
killers at the FBI.
# PLOT:
A serial killer named Buffalo Bill has killed and
mutilated six young women who were found in rivers. Clarice Starling is a young,
ambitious FBI trainee who is pulled out of school by her boss Jack Crawford to
go on a special assignment: She has to interview Dr. Hannibal Lecter, a very
dangerous psychopathic killer, whose nickname is “The Cannibal”
because he likes to eat parts of his victims. Buffalo Bill once had been
Lecter’s patient and so the FBI hopes to find the criminal through
Lecter’s knowledge about him.
Lecter plays an enigmatic game with Starling: While he
provides her with snippets of data that can lead her to the criminal, he
systematically uncovers and enjoys her personal fears.
During official trips to the places where the victims
were found, Starling and Crawford discover moth’s chrysalises placed in
the throats of the victims after they had been killed and
skinned.
Starling, who gets an ID-Card and a speedloader for her
work for the FBI, is running out of time when Catherine Martin, the daughter of
Senator Ruth Martin, is kidnapped and Buffalo Bill is suspected for
it.
Because the Senator wants to speak personally to
Hannibal Lecter, he is brought into another prison by plane, but unfortunately
he is able to escape in an ambulance car and not imprisoned
again.
While Jame Gumb plans to skin Catherine, the analyze of
a moth from a victim’s throat cannot help the FBI to pick up the right
trail. In spite of the risk getting recycled at school, Clarice Starling visits
the victim’s homes, because it’s the only chance to find the killer.
Without knowledge, she knocks on Buffalo Bill’s door a few days later. She
identifies him only when she notices a moth on his pullover.
In the following Clarice and Buffalo Bill chase each
other around his basement, with all lights out, but then she outwarts Bill and
kills him by a shot in his lungs.
She saves the live of poor Catherine Martin and is
awarded the title of Special Agent.
# INTERPRETATION:
The book was first released in 1988, and it is
considered by many to be a masterpiece of suspense.
Thomas Harris is a very skillful writer with a real
talent for suspense and a gift for creating very unusual characters. The book
takes us inside the world of professional criminal investigation. All the
elements of a typical thriller are working here – driving suspense,
compelling characters, inside information, publicity-hungry bureaucrats
thwarting the search, and the clock ticking relentlessly down toward the death
of another young woman. What enriches this book is the opportunity to live
inside the minds of both the crime fighters and the criminals. This because the
narrator’s point of view changes very often.
Clarice Starling is the central figure in the
book. She is clearly the hero of the story. The fact she is a beautiful woman,
slender and soft, makes her all the more a hero. She is given a past which
infects her present: In her conversations with Dr. Lecter, she tells about how
hard it is to be an orphaned and poor girl trying to be someone. With her
attendance at the FBI training school she wants to get out of her disappointing
and poor past. Her weaknesses makes her a character to empathize
with.
The title of the book refers to a scene in the new
prison Dr. Lecter is brought to. During a talk Clarice has to tell him about her
experiences on a ranch where she was sent to after her father’s death. I
want to read this short extract out of the book to you. (page
220f.)
Dr. Hannibal Lecter is merely a figurehead. He is
imprisoned and, presumably, his killing days are over. From a research point of
view he’s a goldmine. He provides an intriguing kind of genius madness,
but he is a sadist: Feeding from the pain of others, he for example compares his
experience of Senator Ruth Martin’s pain with “sweet
nectar”.
He is a fascinating mixture of the urbane and the
totally savage. As a brilliant psychiatrist, he still publishes a scientific
article from his cell, but his warders have to take care not to get within
biting distance. It is a fact that Lecter is a cannibal: At one point, when
annoyed with Starling, he says “A census taker tried to quantify me once.
I ate his liver with some fava beans and a big Amarone.”
# THE FILM:
The bestseller by Thomas Harris was adapted to film by
Jonathan Demme in 1991. It follows the novel very closely. Starring Jodie
Foster as Clarice Starling, Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter and Scott Glenn
as Jack Crawford, the film received outstanding reviews and saved the movie
company Orion from impending bankruptcy.
“The Silence of the Lambs” became only the
third movie ever to win the top five awards:
Best actor for Anthony Hopkins, best actress
for Jodie Foster, best screenplay, best director for Jonathan
Demme and best picture.
|
PDF-Format (16,00 KB)
ZIP
Archiv (6,44 KB)
(c) 2003-2012 ontaps GmbH