Come feeding time, I stand about fifty feet from his cage and spray baby food to him with a fire hose. The hell if he's cutting my face off.
Nobody mentions the silence of anything.
Even in the final scene, the brief silence is quickly broken by a phone call, which, in terms of a narrative device, turns about to be about as subtle strapping a bullhorn to a lamb's mouth and then sticking a hot cattle prod up its anus. First, director Jonathan Demme shows Lecter locked down like a mummy, cuts to a pen and then cuts away. Later, Lecter regurgitates part of the pen. Come feeding time, I stand about fifty feet from his cage and spray baby food to him with a fire hose. The hell if he's cutting my face off.