I recently rewatched Silence of the Lambs, my favorite film, for about the hundredth time. It’s a very tight movie, without a single unnecessary detail, so I was surprised when I noticed something that seemed a little strange — perhaps even amateurish — in the very first scene.
Almost as soon as we fade in, a totally unnecessary super — or locator — appears on the screen, telling us we’re in the woods near Quantico, Virginia, the home of the FBI.
But why?
It’s unnecessary because in just a couple minutes — before the opening credits are even over — it will be obvious that Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) is training for the FBI. We’ll even see a guy with a hat that says FBI, summoning Clarice to a meeting with Jack Crawford (Scott Glenn), head of the Behavioral Science Unit that tracks serial killers.
Also Read: 13 Silence of the Lambs Details a Normal Person Wouldn’t Notice
So why do we need that obvious locator — over a shot of woods — telling us we’re in the woods? And in Quantico, no less, which we’ll soon come to understand is the headquarters of the FBI, if we didn’t already know that.
Is this quibbling? Sure. But what makes 1991’s Silence of the Lambs great — it’s one of the very few films to sweep the major Oscar categories — is how well it doles out information, telling us what we need to know without ever overexplaining.
When Clarice is shown a picture of a nurse Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) has attacked, for example, we don’t see the picture. Our imagination is worse than whatever we could be shown. And the restraint in this early scene makes the later bloodshed more shocking effective.
So why does Jonathan Demme, who won Best Director for Silence of the Lambs, open his Best Picture-winning masterpiece with what seems like a silly, extraneous detail?
Because the locator is a trick.
How Silence of the Lambs Sets Up a Masterful Misdirection
The purpose of the “Woods near Quantico, VA” locator isn’t really to tell you where the opening scene takes place. It’s to set up an incredible misdirection scene late in the film.
Silence of the Lambs has not one but two of the best misdirection sequences in movie history. The first, of course (spoilers) is Hannibal Lecter’s escape from a Memphis courthouse, in which he uses poor Sergeant Pembry’s face as a mask to get an ambulance ride to freedom.
The second is the scene we’re about to get into.
But first: Silence of the Lambs uses a fair number of locators. You could argue that none of them are needed. Some directors prefer to use context clues — like showing the Empire State Building to indicate we’re in New York — because it feels less heavy handed than superimposing the name of a city onscreen.
But again, the purpose of locators in Silence of the Lambs isn’t to clarify — it’s to confuse.
Specifically, it’s to trick you at the start of the very famous, frequently imitated but never equaled scene in which we think the FBI is raiding the home of Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine) in Calumet, Illinois. It’s edited in a very sneaky way — as the agents ring the buzzer, a bell goes off in Bill’s basement.
But as we soon discover — Bill is actually in Belvedere, Ohio, where Clarice, and only Clarice, has tracked him down.
One way the scene tricks us is that at the top of the sequence, a locator tells us we’re in Calumet, Illinois — which is where the FBI team is. But it’s not where Clarice and Buffalo Bill are. They’re about to hunt each other in a pitch black basement in Ohio, in the film’s stunning and terrifying climax.
The locator has tricked us. And the film has just taught us, with two masterful misdirection scenes, that we can’t trust our eyes. We have to do what Clarice always does: look deeper.
Main image: Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster in Silence of the Lambs. Orion.