Silence Of The Lambs

The movie Silence of the Lambs is categorized as a horror movie genre, which is full of symbolic references and representations. One of the most powerful and essential symbols of the movie are the lambs, which are also mentioned in the title. Lambs symbolize purity, innocence, and in the movie it is a journey of redemption and psychological freedom.

The protagonist of the movie Clarice Starling is introduced to the audience as an innocent and naive character. She is interested in the Behavioral Science Department in the FBI. She is a very sensitive and fragile individual. She desires to construe why people are violent, belligerent, and what drives them to kill. When she is assigned to meet with a serial killer for help, she is fascinated and

Lecter happens the third and final time. During the meeting, Clarice discovers that Dr. Lecter knows the serial killer she is looking for and wants information about him, but he wants to know more about her past before he provides her with any information. Once she speaks, she becomes more vulnerable and “bare,” she becomes the lamb. After her father death, she was sent away to live on a farm where she had negative experiences. She tried to free the innocent lambs from being slaughtered by her relative, but she could only take one and runaway, but she is eventually caught and the lamb is slaughtered. Dr. Lecter now understands that she yearns and longs to stop the slaughtering of the innocent and helpless people; the moment Dr. Lecter says “You still wake up sometimes, don’t you? You wake up in the dark and hear the screaming of the lambs… And you think if you save poor Catherine, you could make them stop, don’t you? You think if Catherine lives, you won’t wake up in the dark ever again to that awful screaming of the lambs,” he gives Clarice the case files with information on how to find the serial killer. The fact that Clarice bares herself in front of Dr. Lecter, in their third meeting, is her first step towards redemption and becoming powerful in a patriarchal society. The lamb within her is changing, as she also is shedding her wool and becoming

Clarice’s greatest fear is failure, her failure to help the lambs not to be slaughtered is compared to the intense desire to find and save Catherine. Failure is something the whole world fears as everyone wants to succeed in life, but not everyone can. The journey from pure innocence to stained maturity is a journey full of heartaches and burdens of reality. The alteration from a young girl, like a lamb, to a confident woman, FBI agent, is a traumatic experience where all man must go through.

From a religious perceptive, the lamb is a symbol of innocence and salvation, it represents all of humanity that Clarice is trying to save. The significance of the lamb throughout the movie reveals how innocence is lost like Clarice at the beginning is lost and does not know what to do. The analogy of comparing Clarice to the lamb crying and trying to find the right path in life is a like all of humanity trying to find reasoning and logic in their