Mysterious Skin

Rating: Null/10 (15 February 2010)

"I dwelt alone in a world of moan, my soul a stagnant tide." – Edgar Allan Poe
Would "The Silence of the Lambs" work as well as it does if actress Jodie Foster weren't an in-the-closet lesbian? Consider this: the entire film is about being uncomfortable in one's skin. Buffalo Bill, the serial killer at the heart of the picture, has sexual identity issues and hopes to build himself a woman's body. Scorned by the world, Bill kills his victims and strips them of their skin, his aim being to knit himself a "body suit" so that he may "blossom" and "become a more beautiful person".
Likewise, Foster's character, a young FBI agent tasked with finding Buffalo Bill, is constantly placed in positions in which she is chided, belittled and insulted. Taunted for her cheap perfume, her "white trash" roots, her lowly status, she's constantly being intimidated by men (inmates, police, prison wardens etc), sees her commander as a sexual threat, and seems to have entered the FBI in order to redeem her father, a modest cop shot on duty.
Foster's performance throughout the film (at the time, she was known for a slew of androgynous roles) is itself incredibly fragile, masking insecurity and uncertainty behind a facade of toughness. Because her character is so delicate, we the audience become almost protective of her. We watch as she fights her way through a variety of ominous situations and breath a sigh of relief when she eventually emerges victorious, blossoming into the beautiful flower (a promotion to FBI Special Agent) that the deranged Buffalo Bill is denied. Foster may not end the film feeling entirely comfortable in her own skin, but she's proved to herself that she can survive within her body. She can be herself - somewhat - and win.
Director Jonathan Demme's follow up film was "Philadelphia", a film which revolved around a gay character, so it's possible that "Silence's" homosexual subtext - if any - was deliberately nudged by him. Regardless, Demme's direction is remarkable throughout the picture. Watch how he milks every scene, every sequence hyped or taken to incredibly dramatic lengths. Foster's visit to Hannibal Lecter (a cannibal who lives in a maximum security prison), for example, takes us down endless flights of stairs, each level heralded by ominous dialogue, a prison warden even pausing to show Foster a photograph of Lecter's mutilated victims. But importantly, while characters in the film flinch in horror at the image on this photograph, the photograph itself is never actually revealed to Demme's audience. This happens throughout the film: horrors are talked about, emphasised, hyped, our appetite whetted at every turn, but never actually revealed. Here is a film which respects our imagination and treats the macabre with a certain amount of apprehension. Even the film's ending, in which an escaped Hannibal Lectre walks confidently off into the horizon, is the kind of dramatic tease-climax more common in super hero movies. Whilst most horror movies are a series of carefully set up orgasms, "Silence" is all anticipation.
With the publication of "The Murders in the Rue Morgue", horror maestro Edgar Allen Poe became the father of detective fiction. But what's interesting is that with this book we see that crime fiction was born within the horror genre. More specifically, from the very start, the criminal has been (wrongly) treated as a vaguely supernatural being; an incomprehensible, alien and irrational monster.
"Lambs" raked in zillions of dollars, and so kicked off a chain of copycat movies. Post "Lambs" we thus had such films as "Kiss The Girls", "Along Came A Spider", "Taking Lives", "The X Files", "Seven", "Zodiac", "The Cell", "The Bone Collector" etc etc, all of which copied "Lamb's" formula, all of which hoped to cash in on its success. The film also spewed the "wrong house cliché", the "he's in the elevator cliché" and numerous others, before the series, with "Hannibal" and "Red Dragon", degenerated into a silly franchise (the same fate befell "Jaws", "Halloween", "Psycho", "Alien", "Friday the 13th", "Elm Street", "Poltergeist" and "The Exorcist"). In a way, the fact that these franchises and sequels were even possible, highlights the faintly "supernatural" roots of such monsters. The vengeful sharks, serial-killers, aliens, demons and slashers come back to haunt their audiences, not because they can never be killed, but because they aren't remotely "realistic" in the first place (and, of course, because profits necessitate their reappearance).
8.5/10 - Worth multiple viewings. See "The Pledge" and "Memories of Murder".