“What became of your lamb, Clarice?” By the time Dr. Hannibal Lecter, the cannibalistic serial killer from Silence of the Lambs asks this question to Clarice Starling, the vault of her wounded past is open to a man the world knows as a despicable murderer. In a quid pro quo deal, the monster pries into her childhood, the orphaned days, the little lamb that she wanted to save but failed, and that awful screaming of the lambs that populate her dreams. The entire conversation happens in tight close ups, and in this confined closeness of words, we witness something unthinkable. There are tears in the eyes of the monster, filled to the brim, hell-bent on beating his ego of being in control, to flow down the chins. A cannibal turns into something humane, and we are moved. We don't know why, yet we do.
Women at the centre
Jonathan Demme, the director whom we lost to cancer on April 26 was a man who could turn our world upside down simply with his compassion. The great thread that runs through his entire body of work is a certain empathy, a generous understanding of the world that could allow Demme to be kind towards characters that are not regular respectable folks, but oddballs existing on the periphery. Demme had this strange gift to make his audience discover that the subjects they keep avoiding are the very ones that connect them to the whole wide world. And this gift made him bring out some of the most evocative women on screen, without the paintbrush of preachy strokes.
For popular consciousness, his name is forever tied to The Silence of the Lambs (1991), the groundbreaking film that not only garnered accolades, it also won a forever ballooning fan base. But unlike most serial killer films where men remain the force and women as victims, Demme’s film subverted the tropes by putting a woman in the centre. There is a serial killer and a cannibal, but the film derives its strength from Clarice’s vulnerability, a woman dwarfed in the patriarchal framework of workplace, and how she overcomes them. The hallowed corridors of crime genre always have men pouncing as the hero, but The Silence of the Lambs showed that something opposite could be plausible and possible.
Even if you look at his first film Caged Heat (1974), an exploitative women-in-prison B-movie made in the garage of his mentor Roger Corman, Demme slyly pushed feminist agenda in it despite the genre trappings. In his big breakthrough Melvin and Howard (1980), he gave us Lynda Dummar (Mary Steenburgen), a woman who doesn't mince her words in the tale of the elusive American dream. If he turned Melanie Griffith into a ceaselessly surprising woman in one great mash-up of screwball and thriller in Something Wild (1986), he made Michelle Pfeiffer anchor an entire gangster farce in Married to the Mob (1988).
Difficult themes
Beloved (1988), his adaptation of Toni Morrison’s milestone novel was reviled for making it too expository for comfort. But if one looks beyond the immediate danger of making a film adapted from a much regarded novel, Demme’s interpretation opens up the novel’s mazy structure. He took it to a new realm by building on the memories and hallucinations of a woman and making it a requiem of astonishing images.
In Rachel Getting Married (2008), he took on every parent’s nightmare at a family wedding, and yet again, he compelled us to look past the all-pervasive destructive streak of a recovering drug addict. Anne Hathaway’s Kym is beautiful, because she is fighting the grandest of all battles, the war within, not for heroism, but just to survive, like you and me.
A connoisseur of finding feelings at peculiar places, it was Demme whose Philadelphia (1993) opened up the larger discourse on AIDS. When LGBT groups derided Buffalo Bill’s portrayal in The Silence of the Lambs for cornering the community into further isolation, it bothered Demme, and as atonement, he made the first major Hollywood film that addressed homosexuality and the dreaded disease. By making big stars face off in a courtroom drama, the film moved past the barricades of untouchability.
Intimate details
Demme was also a master of documentaries. And many of them dealt with music, especially concerts. What began with the Talking Heads rock documentary, Stop Making Sense (1984) – a sense of being close to the performers continued until the more recent Justin Timberlake + the Tennessee Kids (2016). Going beyond, the standard format of cutting between performers and the audience, Demme made his music documentaries a repository of musical energy. For a man capable of such compassion, it’s no surprise that he was respectful of music too.
As the news of his death broke out, a certain kindness took over the world. From his mentor Roger Corman to the ones he’s been sort of a mentor to, Justin Timberlake and Berry Jenkins, everyone spoke about his great kindness, before his colossal stature as a filmmaker. Demme may not have the signature of an auteur, but he possessed the great gift of making us fools, fools who cared for fictitious characters in his films. When we meet his men and women, we don't know what they know about us. Because they are us, travelling in and out of our being, allowing us a certain freedom, to see and understand things about ourselves. If this is not kindness, what is?
