Three Act Structure: The Silence of The Lambs

Spoiler Alert!

Today, most Hollywood films follow the traditional three-act structure. By looking closely at one of my favorite films, “ The Silence of the Lambs,” we can see how the structure works in terms of plot and character development.

The first act begins, as almost all do, with the introduction of the main character, Clarice Starling—an up and coming female FBI student. In the first scene, her boss tells her about a new serial killer, Buffalo Bill, who has been targeting young women. Unknowingly to her, her boss sends her on a trial mission to see if she can gather any information about Bill from the jailed, notorious forensic psychiatrist/cannibal—Hannibal Lector. The peak of the first act comes when, using a deciphered code form Lector, Starling arrives at a storage facility and uncovers the severed head of a Buffalo Bill victim, proving that she is therefore capable of handling the case. The fist act is a means of character introduction. It tells us that Starling is intelligent, driven, but inexperienced. It makes us question whether or not she will succeed in this psychologically based challenge, or will the manipulative, deranged genius of Lector get the best of her. Will he help her take down Buffalo Bill, or just use his smarts to take advantage of her naïveté.

As Ramirez Berg said in the lecture, the second act is the hardest because it contains most of the plot. It is the bridge between the introduction of the characters and the eventual climax. In this specific example, the second act follows Buffalo Bill. It introduces him and his mdness as well as Starling’s FBI crew and their attempts to learn about him. We learn that Bill is just as smart as he is disturbed, and that if previous incidents act as examples, time is of the essence if Starling is going to catch him before he kills his current victim. The major plot point of the second act occurs when Lector, after being moved to a courthouse in Tennessee, escapes in a gory act of killing two security guards. Clarice felt uneasy dealing with Lector when he was behind bars, but now that he has escaped, she has two psychopaths to worry about. As Ramirez-Berg said, this escalates the stakes and propels the film into the next act where we find out whether or not Starling has the ability to solve the case.

As one would expect, the third and final act comes down to an extremely tense confrontation between Starling and Bill. After using a few tips from Lector, and her own smarts, Starling finds the house of Bill and his abducted victim. An extremely famous scene occurs in which Starling ends up killing Bill in a pitch-black house even though he has night vision goggles at his disposal. This scene is the climax of the act and of the movie as a whole. Clarice proves herself victorious, and Lector escapes to an island and decides not to bother Starling after all. This happy ending format is, as Ramirez-Berg suggested, very stereotypical of the three-act structure.

If you haven't seen SOTL I'd highly recommend it. Here's one of the more famous scenes, just to give you a taste. Pun intended.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lwlh9uJrQl4