Clarices Setting Breaks The Silence Of The Lambs Timeline

Clarice’s Setting Breaks The Silence Of The Lambs Timeline

CBS’s Clarice series being set in 1993 doesn’t match up continuity-wise with the setting established in Silence of the Lambs, breaking the timeline.

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Clarices Setting Breaks The Silence Of The Lambs Timeline

In a seeming continuity error, Clarice’s 1993 setting automatically breaks the timeline of The Silence of the Lambs. Starring Rebecca Breeds as Clarice Starling, CBS’ new series is designed to move the FBI Special Agent past her experience with Dr. Hannibal Lecter and sets her on a new path to hunt more serial killers. But since Clarice is a direct sequel, why does it instantly deviate from when The Silence of the Lambs takes place?

Released in 1991, The Silence of the Lambs swept the 1992 Academy Awards and won Best Actress for Jodie Foster as Clarice Starling, Best Actor for Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter, Best Director for Jonathan Demme, and Best Picture. However, the events of the film itself are set in 1990, when Starling was an FBI trainee sent to interview Hannibal at the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Lecter became fascinated by Clarice and entered a quid pro quo agreement with her: Starling gave him “pieces” of her life in exchange for insight into how to catch Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine), a serial killer who kidnapped and skinned women. Hannibal’s first errand for Clarice was to “look in Your Self”, which led her to the Your Self garage in Baltimore where Starling found the severed head of one of Lecter’s patients, Benjamin Raspail. The year Silence of the Lambs takes place is plainly established in this scene: When told that the garage was leased prepaid for 10 years, Clarice asked, “So nobody’s been in here since 1980?” before she bravely entered the facility alone.

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Clarice’s premiere episode, “The Silence Is Over,” establishes that the 1993-set series takes place one year after The Silence of the Lambs because Starling tells her therapist (Shawn Doyle) she just attended the one-year anniversary of the Buffalo Bill murders ending with the families of his victims. This brought Starling back into the media spotlight as the “face” of the FBI’s Behavioral Sciences Unit and made her front-page tabloid fodder. Meanwhile, Clarice still harbors intense PTSD from her descent into the Buffalo Bill’s house of horrors in order to kill the murderer and rescue his final victim, Catherine Martin (Marnee Carpenter). But 1993 doesn’t make sense as taking place one year after The Silence of the Lambs.

However, there is a bit of a grey area within The Silence of the Lambs’ ending lets Clarice fudge the year into 1993 because there is a time jump at the end of the film. After Starling saved Catherine Martin, the film flashes forward to Clarice’s graduation ceremony, where she becomes a full-fledged Special Agent of the FBI. It’s not established how much time passes or how long Starling’s FBI training was overall, but it was long enough between killing Buffalo Bill to graduation for Hannibal Lecter to travel to the Bahamas, where he called Clarice from and asked her, “Have the lambs stopped screaming?”

And yet even this time jump in The Silence of the Lambs doesn’t quite let Clarice hold up its internal logic because Starling says she has been an “Igor” in the basement of Behavioral Sciences for the last year (after graduation). Since Bill was caught in 1990 (no holidays are seen to have passed during the film), then 1991 would have been the one-year anniversary of the killings, not 1993. Deliberately choosing 1993 wasn’t truly necessary since it would have been just as easy for Clarice to be set in 1991 or 1992 and still maintained Starling hunting serial killers in the analog era pre-Internet and cell phones.

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To be fair, the Hannibal Lecter films (and the NBC Hannibal TV series) are all playing by their own rules and not meticulously maintaining a consistent overall canon. The original Hannibal movie, Michael Mann’s Manhunter, was set in 1986, but The Silence of the Lambs disregarded it and set its own canon in accordance to when the film was produced because Thomas Harris’ The Silence of the Lambs novel was set in 1983. Meanwhile, NBC’s Hannibal made changes to Lecter’s timeline and it must be set in its own canon that doesn’t quite jive with The Silence of the Lambs or Clarice.

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/clarice-show-silence-lambs-timeline-setting-year-mistake/

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