FILM | The Sinister Gaze of the All-Seeing Lens

Hannibal: “...Of each particular thing ask: What is in itself? What is its nature?”

Clarice: “He kills women”

Hannibal: “No that is incidental”

Clarice: “Anger... social acceptance... sexual frustration”

Hannibal: “No, he covets. And how do we begin to covet? Do we seek out the things we want?”

Clarice: “He just..”

Hannibal: “We begin to by coveting what we see every day. Don’t you feel eyes moving over your body? And don’t your eyes seek the things you want?”

The Silence of the Lambs (1991) is brimming with Look-and-Gaze symbolism. The story follows the intertwined fates of an FBI Cadet ‘Clarice Starling, and a cannibal psychiatrist ‘Hannibal Lecter’, both form an unlikely alliance to hunt down a murderous local psycho responsible for mysterious deaths and disappearance of young women in Baltimore. The psycho, “Buffalo Bill” is an old patient of Lecter’s.

Midway into the film, he mentioned Marcus Aurelius’s passage from his journal: Meditations. The roman emperor suggests that our actions when reduced to its bare bones, are casual to its nature. Lecter hinted at a detail that Clarice might’ve overlooked. Our man ‘covets’ the biological vessel in which the woman of Baltimore walks with every day. A yearning that compelled our killer to renegotiate the term ‘transvestite’, as literally wearing the opposite sex.

We can find another instance of the look-and-gaze concept in the first act, where it manifested into a form apropos to the medium, a more blatant form if I may. At one point, the camera assumed Bill’s point of view as he looked behind his night-vision goggles. Watching her every move through a constricted field of vision and a de-saturated view from the goggles. In this climactic scene, we yet again see through Bill’s perspective as he solemnly examined Clarice, staggered in awe by the way her skin illuminates under the infrared.

“The Eye in cinema is the perfect eye, the steady ubiquitous control of the scene passed from the director to spectator by virtue of the cinematic apparatus” - Stephen Heath

As Christian Metz puts it, the camera liberates our sense of sight from the biological shortcomings. It operates as an extension of our eyes that allowed us to comprehend a whole new spectrum of colors that were inaccessible. But unfortunately, the engineering prowess of the lens holds no power over subjectivity. Cinema, in essence, is a visualization of the collective ideology, of groups, of society. As a result, the camera as an extension of the eye can be seen as a means of perpetuating power. Through constructed imagery, the auteur can identify and understand what the audience wants, and vice-versa, to make the audience identify their passion with the imagery before them.