The Revenge of Silence of the Lambs

Last week was historic for film culture, shaking up all preconceptions of how the media work, how the public reacts, and how politics infiltrate past, present, and future culture. It’s not possible to measure which movies created the most significant impact, but the confluence of The Silence of the Lambs, The Post, and Melania had a seismic impact on the way we think about our cultural experience.

The 1991 serial-killer thriller The Silence of the Lambs came back to haunt us through its real-life near simulation in the ongoing abduction case of Nancy Guthrie. The 2017 Steven Spielberg hagiography The Post was invoked by Jeff Bezos’s mass firings at the Washington Post. The recently released documentary Melania exposed the inescapable partisan prejudices of entertainment media.

Of these three coincidences, the freakiest concerns The Silence of the Lambs and its transition from horror-movie legend to window into real life several decades later. When the NBC network’s talking-head polemicist Savannah Guthrie made a videotape plea for the safe return of her mother, Nancy — a private affair that inexplicably was broadcast to the nation — social media lit up with users recognizing the words of her request as identical to those used in the famous movie.

Actress Diane Baker portrayed Senator Ruth Martin, whose daughter was kidnapped by serial killer Jame “Buffalo Bill” Gumb. Although the family relations differ, Senator Martin’s video entreaty — “She’s kind. Talk to her you’ll see” — was widely cited as Savannah Guthrie’s model, possibly suggested by FBI experts. But this led to speculations about the unusual case and its exaggerated media exploitation. That this situation centers on a mere TV news personality of the profession that lies to us all the time — not a Lindbergh- or Sinatra-level figure who had won mass affection before his own kidnapping tragedy — makes us realize that we’re at a definitive flash point for this era of media gaslighting.

The Silence of the Lambs captured the popular imagination, winning Academy Awards for its director Jonathan Demme, one of the last great American humanist filmmakers (Handle with Care, Something Wild, Beloved, Rachel Getting Married); he died before the cultural revolution of the Covid lockdowns and contested elections that inspired global distrust and suspicion. Hearing lines from Ted Tally’s Oscar-winning screenplay repeated in circumstances of real-life peril revives our questions about what the media sell to us. No wonder we feel as abused as Jame Gumb’s victims.

The art that Demme and Tally attempted while loitering in a disreputable thriller genre (despite their odd cast of sympathetically viewed queer figures — Jodie Foster’s Clarice, Anthony Hopkins’s Hannibal Lecter, and Ted Levine’s Jame Gumb) does not prevent us from questioning whether the Guthrie kidnapping is becoming another media circus.

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The most conspicuous scene in Spielberg’s The Post showed the Washington Post’s former owner Katharine Graham (Meryl Streep) emerging victorious from a legal case, descending courthouse steps in Washington, D.C., amid the glare of flashing paparazzi lights sanctifying her in bursts of halation. This scene captured the dubious mythos that mainstream media have accorded to the paper known for its Nixon-era Watergate coverage — an image so tarnished that last week’s staff firings struck many as a consequence of the paper’s Trump-era flips from objective reporting to vengeful advocacy to fake news.

The Post was not a hit like Silence of the Lambs; the paper’s reputation and “Democracy dies in darkness” self-glorification made popular acclaim superfluous to the pooh-bahs who ran it. Amazon tycoon Jeff Bezos bought the Post in 2013, but this month’s layoff of almost a third of the paper’s employees (for financial reasons and a “broad strategic reset” by its executive editor), shook the weakening confidence of readers who now see the company’s former elites exposed.

This unmasking comes at a time when not even a Spielberg testimonial can convince Americans to embrace an institution they cannot trust. (The public also rebuffed Spotlight, the film that similarly glorified the Boston Globe’s Catholic Church sex-scandal campaign. Marty Baron was its editor before moving on as editor of the Washington Post.) Despite numerous defenses from journalistic celebrities such as Peggy Noonan and ex-executive editor Marty Baron, the self-righteousness in contemporary media circles is haughty — not just partisan — and is recognized and rejected as a class deficiency. (In The Post, Streep and Tom Hanks as Ben Bradlee came off as arrogant pretend-aristocrats. Spielberg hailed them as knights evolved from the Robert Redford–Dustin Hoffman movie All the President’s Men.) It’s just deserts during the “affordability” fad.

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Attacks on the documentary Melania demonstrate reverse snobbery — the mainstream media’s inability to be fair to the current administration, defying anyone or anything that supports it. The bad reviews contradict the electorate’s majority opinion so drastically that only partisan lunatics can deny the incivility. The urge to bad-mouth Melania reeks of the political cruelty and vanity (envy) that dispense with rational argument and instead engage in the petty exercise of power. The mistreatment of Melania Trump by vilifying Melania is as bizarre as that British feminist polemicist Sophie Lewis from the London Review of Books who pretended to intellectualize the phenomenon of political gaslighting and, from an ocean away, made a ludicrous, hysterical comparison of Donald Trump to Hannibal Lecter.

Seeing Millennial media’s failings reflected in these movies suggests moral chaos. The Silence of the Lambs was too repugnant for the compassion that Demme sought, so 31 years later its lesson is misapplied. The Post was too partisan to present its subject honestly. Melania is too good for an era when the documentary form (and journalism itself) is mostly unreliable propaganda made by the left-wingers averse to competition and seeking to dominate their compatriots. Last week’s trifecta of misunderstood movies indicates that we cannot think about movies the old-fashioned way. It might be seen as a minor crisis, but it’s a real one.