The Story ; The 1991 film opens during the credit sequence in the "Woods near Quantico, Va," where young Federal Bureau of Investigation Academy trainee Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) in a bluish-gray sweatshirt is in solitary - climbing up a rope on an incline, sweatily hauling herself up hand over hand. [It is a perfect metaphor for the personal journey and ordeal she will soon experience in the film. Her name symbolically signifies a feminine bird, trembling and quaint.] As part of her indoctrination and test of her skills, the trim, pretty, mid-20's young woman is undergoing a physical challenge to her endurance through an obstacle course. Clarice jogs through the woods, climbs a rope-netted barrier, and passes signs on a tree that read: "HURT," "AGONY," "PAIN," "LOVE - IT." Midway, she is pulled off the course and called in to see her supervisor. One of the few female trainees at Quantico, an elevator door in the building closes on her - she is surrounded by red-shirted males.

In the Behavioral Science Services section of the Academy, she enters into the cinder-block office of her senior, FBI supervisor, Special Agent Jack Crawford (Scott Glenn). There in the cluttered office, she turns and is startled to see a wall covered with glossy pictures and clippings of a current investigation into multiple murders. Ghastly enlarged photos of mutilated female corpses are particularly lurid and gruesome. One headline in The National Inquisitor stands out