Sue me- I read this in three days flat once I found my work library was throwing a copy out, as a longtime fan of the film, with the exception of its capacity for a transphobic reading; more on that in a bit. I’m wary of blanket judgments like “the book is better than the film.” Making cinema is a complicated series of negotiations between creatives and executives, commerce and art, and usually it is the commerce that wins out in the selection and translation of literature into films. The speight of truncated or mediocre adaptations as made by Classical Hollywood (Wuthering Heights, Pride and Prejudice etc.) are testament to that. But there are always exceptions, where the emphasis is on translation from prose to visuals. Silence of the Lambs is one of them.

Silence of the Lambs is not a Jonathan Demme film. It is also a Jodie Foster film, an Anthony Hopkins film, a Tak Fujimoto film, a Howard Shore film and a film by the hundreds of others below and above the line who helped make it, imparting their own intelligence and experience onto the text provided. The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris, however, is very much a Thomas Harris book. He may have had readers and editors, but it is fundamentally his vision of the story between Hannibal Lecter and Clarice Starling. The strictures of collaboration make for a different text between film and book even if Tally’s screenplay is very faithful to Harris’s words. Whatever changes made are slight (Fool’s Gold in the film, bilirubin in the novel) and do not adjust the overarching spirit of the tale.

However, there are intriguing differences and they deserve some consideration as to how they modify the nuances of tone. Especially notable is the relationship between Starling and Lecter. In the film (though it’s been some years since I’ve seen it), the lines between the terrifying cannibal and the plucky FBI agent are starkly drawn, in part due to Tally’s rewriting of the confrontation scenes but also in the performances from Hopkins and Foster. Foster seems on the verge of tears constantly, a great shudder of exertion in human form dragging herself through her traumatic past. Hopkins is carnivalesque, a delighted hunter, a showman playing with his food. His madness seems less controlled, more instinctive. Those two poles are played off against each other in no small part thanks to Demme’s choice to have actors look directly into the camera when addressing Starling while Starling always looks off camera; as much as we are aligned with her perspective, we are also aware that we are gazing at a prey animal. She seems far more frail, far more hopeless.

Harris’s Starling is much stronger and much more subtly flawed. Her interactions with Lector have none of the blustering attempts at strength Foster brilliantly expresses, instead giving as good as she gets from the manipulative Lithuanian-by-way-of-Baltimore. She quickly susses out the moves he wishes to make to get into her head or acquire extra information he can use against her and does a good job of blocking them, until she makes a fatal mistake for her ambition and forces herself into a corner. That’s another difference between the mediums; Clarice’s ambition and relentless drive to succeed is foregrounded in Harris. She knows that seeing Lector and getting good answers from his battery of tests will advance her in Jack Crawford’s eyes, so she jumps at the opportunity to do so. Lector recognises this and plays with it, perhaps because her hunger is roughly analogous to his own.

Not for human flesh, mind, which is the least interesting part of his character. Instead, it’s about being an active agent in the world, an autonomous unit who demonstrates a curiosity about others, what makes them tick and the complexity of human experience- but only for their own selfish ends. The old “line between cop and killer is razor thin!” trope is hackneyed beyond words, but at an elemental level it is present and intriguing here. That in Hannibal the book Starling and Lector become lovers (spoilers) but Foster emphatically rejected this angle when it came to Scott’s film (I believe she called it a “betrayal of Clarice”?) is no surprise to me considering how much Foster works to put distance between herself and Hannibal the Cannibal. Harris affords no such clarity of good, such as it is, and evil here.

The film is a filtering of the book into the clearest possible narrative for two hours of runtime, done by people who not only understand and respect the book but are thinking consciously of how to translate that to a visual medium. Where the syntax of the cut, the focus pull and the closeup take the place of Harris’s punctuation and inner monologue. It makes perfect sense for propulsion (as does excising the presence of Bella, Jack Crawford’s dying wife) and results in a subtly different text to interpret. But it does mean that an interesting parallel with Red Dragon/Manhunter is lost; that dangerous quality of empathy that can come for those dealing with the truly evil.

I could go on and on about the differences and their impacts (Bill/Gumb, for example), but that would be a dissertation-length review and nobody would read that. So I’ll close simply by saying that this is not better than the film, and neither is it worse. It is simply, intriguingly, different.