As a book, The Silence of the Lambs, a best-seller, won wide critical praise. The movie, released in 1991, was also a resounding commercial and critical success, winning seven academy awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress, Best Actor, Best Editing, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Editing, and Best Sound. It also generated heated protest from gay rights activists at many theaters and outside the auditorium on the night it accumulated Oscars. Jame Gumb outraged the protesters. In more recent years, the film has continued to be both canonized and criticized. As you read the book and/or watched the movie, how did you understand Jame Gumb and the politics of sexuality in The Silence of the Lambs? Do you think the book and movie differ in their understanding or depiction of Gumb? Is the character an anti-gay (or anti-trans) stereotype or something more or different?
6 thoughts on “Silence of the Lambs 3”
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I agree with Katherine and most of what has been said. I have not yet watched the film so I can only speak to the novel. I think the novel makes it clear that Bill is not really trans, he just believes he is. It also does a fairly decent job of reinforcing this fact, and making it clear that this story is not one about a trans person. In fact, right before the doctor at Johns Hopkins gives Gumb’s name to the FBI, this point is made again. I think the novel toes the line well. But, I guess the main question here is: how is it received by the reader and what is the outcome? Clearly, that’s where it becomes problematic, and in that sense I suppose one could say that’s where the novel fails. But, on the other hand, the novel engages in a kind of meta commentary at the end, when it discusses how the story of Bill and Starling and Lector has already been sensationalized. In this way, the novel seems self aware.
I also think Meghan makes a good point about the femininity battle that takes place in the film. This is very much clear in the novel. Starling is the only woman to work on this case, which she notes several times, especially, when she is temporarily taken off the case. In the final chapters of the novel, this is mostly because she thinks she can relate to Catherine and figure out where she would have encountered Gumb. However, it’s when she starts learning about Gumb and starting to think like him that she finally catches him and finds him.
Also, I figured I would share this article: “The Enduring Feminist Vision of THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS” https://filmschoolrejects.com/feminist-vision-silence-of-the-lambs/
I agree with both Katherine and Danielle that the depiction of Jame Gumb is much more problematic in the film than in the book. What I found most troubling was that it seemed like Gumb’s character was oversimplified (perhaps for the sake of time or to make it easier for the audience to follow) to the extent where his identification as transsexual became his defining characteristic. As Katherine mentioned, you lose a lot of the nuances about Gumb that make him such a complex character. One of the primary differences between the book and film’s presentation of Gumb is in the portrayal of Gumb’s pre-killing ritual. In the book, Gumb watches the film of his mother in the beauty pageant, which begins to shed light on his troubled childhood. Harris also confirms at the end of the book what had already been implied about Gumb’s background – his mother was an alcoholic and he was forced into foster care at a very young age. In the film, the main scene that offers the viewer with an intimate glimpse into Gumb’s personality is the dancing scene. Not only is this scene an exaggeration of Gumb’s character compared to how we understand it in the book, but the fact that this is the chosen pre-killing ritual reinforces the connection between Gumb’s violent actions and his identification as transsexual.
As I was watching the movie on Amazon, it included the trivia fact that Gumb’s dance scene was not included in the original draft of the screenplay. It was added after Ted Levine, who plays Gumb, insisted that it was essential to understanding Gumb’s character. I’d be interested to hear people’s thoughts on this fact. Do you agree with Levine that this scene was critical to understanding Gumb? And how would removing this scene change the conversation about transsexual stereotypes, if at all?
I agree with Katherine on the point she makes regarding the film’s depiction of the not-so-nuanced scenes in the film that portray Gumb. The film fails to capture the perspective the book offers on Gumb and his complicated psyche. The loss of this perspective is what I think makes the film so much more problematic because the viewer is not privy to the same background the book provides the reader with–background that is still slightly problematic in its depiction of transsexuals but is slightly more polite than the outlandish performance of Jame Gumb’s character in the movie. I think that perhaps in the movie it is much easier for the viewer to draw an association between queer and criminal/crazy and that this likely fueled a lot of the anti-sentiment towards the movie in more recent years. The movie really demonizes a Jame Gumb as a result of his sexuality, and only serves to perpetuate the association between the queer community and criminality in horror films. I felt as though the book did a little bit better of a job of eliciting a sympathetic reaction to Jame Gumb’s character by the reader, but is still problematic in the associations it posits overall. I will say though, that the actor who played Jame Gumb was very talented in his acting, though the screenplay could have done more to ameliorate the gross stereotypes it suggests regarding the queer community, mental illness, and criminality.
The first time I interacted with either the film or the book was in a film class–Aesthetics of the Moving Image. The professor showed us a clip of Buffalo Bill as he stood Catherine Martin ordering her to put the lotion on her body. We were shown this clip in order to discuss how queer characters are often villainized in media. Buffalo Bill is clearly queer and not queer coded, but the discussion soon turned to how often villains are queer coded as a way to show how strange and evil they truly are. Because of the history of queer coding villains, I think a lot of the critique of the film is valid. I also think they could easily have been avoided if the filmmakers had put in any thought on how their portrayal of Buffalo Bill would be perceived. I think the filmmakers could have focused more on Buffalo Bill’s sexuality, giving it context and depth. As of right now, the filmmakers seem to just use his sexuality for shock-factor–like Katherine says–in order to create their villain.
I found that Jame Gumb in the book struck me as less of an anti-trans stereotype than in the film. In the book, the tension between the doctor at the Columbus medical center and Crawford illuminates the struggle of trans and queer people to distance themselves from a harmful reputation of deviance and criminality. The historical stereotyping of queerness as criminal is not necessarily totally excavated, but it is acknowledged as a problematic factor in Buffalo Bill’s case. Furthermore, I think that Crawford’s character is depicted as person who does not harbor ill-will or suspicion towards trans-people, in particular. Indeed, he asserts that Buffalo Bill is NOT really trans–which is precisely why he would’ve been rejected by the hospitals for surgery. In general, I didn’t feel that the book did not do a lot of work to mitigate the anti-queer sentiment that might factor into a case like Bill’s, but I also think it didn’t allow that sentiment to be legitimized and it ensured that the investigators were not portrayed as bigoted. The film, on the other hand, doesn’t embrace the same nuance, and it also plays up the deviance of Gumb’s character with shock-factor scenes. In this respect, I think the movie is much more problematic and unaware of the deeper stereotypes it gives leverage to.
Like others, I found the portrayal of Jame Gumb in the film to be more transphobic than in the book. I’m still not done with my re-watch of the movie for tomorrow, but I’ve seen it a few times so relying off memory here. I think that discussion around Silence of the Lambs often misses a ton in some sort of feminist effort to claim Clarice as a hero — but in order to do this, one must accept the premise that Buffalo Bill is a villain who deserves to die, or, in other words, the transmisogynistic premise that trans women represent male violence. Plenty of horror movies seem to portray trans women as “crazy” murderers – Hitchcock’s Psycho comes to mind, but like Danielle said, there are plenty of movies where villains are queer coded. And I think there’s a battle between Clarice’s and Bill’s feminities in this film — one in which Clarice, our feminist hero, defeats the Buffalo Bill’s “perverse” transfemininity. Hannibal Lecter’s attitude towards Buffalo Bill (he thinks Bill is faking her gender identity) seems like a pretty accurate portrayal of the relationship between psychiatry and trans people — the medical establishment has long pathologized trans women, deciding who was truly trans or not, and subsequently who deserved to medically transition or not. I just think it’s important to think about how even though Clarice is the hero for killing Buffalo Bill in the end, according to statistics, trans women are far more likely to be murdered than to be murderers.