Rookie FBI agent Jane Banner (Elizabeth Olsen) has just been pepper-sprayed. She gets it in the face while investigating a killing on the icebound Wind River Indian reservation in Wyoming. The murdered teenage girl has a brother, and he has been staying in a local drug den. He may well have been involved, his father says. When Banner goes to confront him, she is attacked and maced by another drug user. She gropes around through blurred vision and searing pain, but her weapon sits lightly and professionally in her hands. She kills a young Native American man who lives in this shell of a home.

The scene is a reference to a parallel one, coming at the end of The Silence of the Lambs. In that movie, Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) stumbles in the pitch dark of Buffalo Bill’s home while he stalks her through night vision goggles. Her hands shake with fear and the gun wobbles. At the last second, she hears Bill cock his own gun in the dark, and she wheels around to fire, her hand suddenly sure.

In both movies, a female rookie FBI agent forms the emotional center of an investigation into wrongful death. Wind River has very different stakes to The Silence of the Lambs: It focuses on the systemic, unchecked violence committed against Native women, rather than the work of a couple of psychopaths. But, seen alongside each other, Clarice Starling and Jane Banner reveal American movie-making’s interest in the interiority of law enforcement personnel—especially pretty young white women. These movies watch their heroines suffer, fear, and bury it all under a calm surface of professional resolve, often in the face of horrendous violence and mortal danger. Their emotional interiority sits at a difficult and interesting place in our culture now, at a time when America is reassessing its relationship to the way that cops feel.

“The Silence of the Lambs”

Women represent approximately 10 percent of law enforcement personnel in the United States. But in movies and television they are overrepresented. As well as The Silence of the Lambs, Wind River joins a genre that runs from The X-Files to Sicario to Miss Congeniality. In each of these movies, the young female agent is very beautiful. In each, she is self-assured and expert, but also brittle.

In Sicario, Kate Macer (Emily Blunt) loses her illusions about the nobility of her work fighting the war on drugs. At the movie’s end, the tough antihero Alejandro (Benicio Del Toro) tells her that she is “not a wolf.” She is left quivering by her experiences in Mexico, but this is what makes her an ideal protagonist. Because of her idealism and her resemblance to the pretty star of a simpler type of film—blink and you’ll mistake Sicario for a romance—Kate Macer holds the viewer’s hand like a nanny through a sophisticated, circuitous, and highly ambivalent movie.