"You wake up in the dark and hear the screaming of the lambs". A lesson in adaptation

“The Silence of the Lambs” is a 1991 film directed by Jonathan Demme that was a complete success both at the box office ($272 million with a budget of $19 million) and critically, being the third and last film to date to win the 5 principal Óscar.

Today I would like to talk specifically about the scene that gives its name to the film, the one where FBI agent Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) tells Dr. Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) about her childhood trauma due to the latter's insistence on not help her until she gives him something in return (the memorable Quid pro quo).

The first thing I think of when I see the scene is one of the typical counterarguments that book adaptations receive from readers of the source material. Usually the two main problems are that the film left out some things (understandable due to the difference in length and structure of each medium), and the other problem is “that's not how I imagined it.”

I did not read Thomas Harris' novel, but I am sure that this scene must have been adapted almost verbatim, I feel that the director must have read this fragment and thought that Clarice's story was so powerful that he did not want to represent it in images but rather have her tell it. It seems to me to be a fantastic union between both media, the power of describing a scene so that the consumer can imagine it linked to the performance of someone who narrates it, and with the quality that Jodie Foster does.

Leaving something to the viewer's imagination is not something foreign to the thriller genre, but it is usually used to describe murders or similar things, so we can imagine the terrible images and they do not have to show them, either for reasons of budget or classification of ages. But I think that something different was done here, and not only because the actors look at the camera (which obviously does contribute a lot and has been commented on many times), I'm sure Demme would have been perfectly capable of playing the scene as a flashback memorably if he wanted to, but he doesn't even need to.

The protagonist's narration provides so many details, telling how she heard a noise at night, went down the stairs, went to the stable, opened the door fearfully, etc. that when combined with the aesthetics and photography we have been seeing for more than an hour, we can collectively imagine almost the same image: a young Clarice running with the lamb, with the same anguished face with which she tells the story and with the difficulty she had in supporting the weight of the animal, through the field during a moonlit and foggy night.

In short, I think it is a great resource to narrate something in a film, but of course, you don't always have two performances of this caliber to produce something of this quality.

What is your opinion? Did you imagine the scene narrated by Clarice in the same way as I did? Have the lambs stopped screaming? Oops, that last question doesn't need to be answered.