Buffalo Bill (character)

Jame Gumb (known by the nickname "Buffalo Bill") is a fictional character and the main antagonist of Thomas Harris's 1988 novel The Silence of the Lambs and its 1991 film adaptation, in which he is played by Ted Levine. In the film and the novel, he is a serial killer who murders overweight women and skins them so he can make a "woman suit" for himself.

Buffalo Bill
Hannibal Lecter character
Ted Levine as Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs.
First appearanceThe Silence of the Lambs
Created byThomas Harris
Portrayed byTed Levine
In-universe information
AliasJohn Grant
Jack Gordon
GenderMale

Overview

Background

Gumb was born in California in 1948 or 1949. It is stated that "The 'Jame' on his birth certificate apparently was a clerical error that no one bothered to correct." Gumb’s mother, an aspiring actress, went into an alcoholic decline after her career failed to materialize, and Los Angeles County placed Gumb in a foster home when he was two. The novel goes on to tell of Gumb living in foster homes until the age of 10, when he is adopted by his grandparents, who become his first victims when he impulsively kills them at age 12. He is institutionalized in Tulare Vocational Rehabilitation, a psychiatric hospital where he learns to be a tailor. Later, Gumb has a relationship with Benjamin Raspail. After Raspail leaves him, he kills Raspail's new lover, Klaus, and flays him.[1]

The screenplay omits Gumb's backstory, but does imply that he had a traumatic childhood. In the film, Hannibal Lecter summarizes Gumb's life thus: "Our Billy wasn’t born a criminal, Clarice. He was made one through years of systematic abuse."

Both the novel and film depict Gumb as confused and self-hating with signs of having gender dysphoria, though multiple characters state that Gumb is not a transsexual. In the novel, multiple examples of how Gumb does not fit the psychological profile of a real transsexual are given. Gumb wants to become a woman — or at least believes he does — but is deemed too psychologically disturbed to qualify for gender reassignment surgery. He kills women so he can skin them and create a "woman suit" for himself, completing his "transformation" — a theme explored in several aspects throughout the film and novel, most notably and obviously with the metamorphosis of the 'death’s head moth' which Gumb stuffs a chrysalis of into his victims’ throats after he kills them.

Modus operandi

Gumb's modus operandi is to approach a woman pretending to be injured, ask for help, then knock her out in a surprise attack and kidnap her. He takes her to his house and leaves her in a well in his basement, where he starves her until her skin is loose enough to easily remove. In the first two cases, he leads the victims upstairs, slips nooses around their necks and pushes them from the stairs, strangling them. He then skins parts of their body (a different section on each victim), and then dumps each body into a different river, destroying any trace of evidence.[1]

This MO caused the homicide squad to nickname him Buffalo Bill (Buffalo Bill's Wild West show typically claimed that Buffalo Bill Cody had scalped a Cheyenne warrior). One officer quipped it was because he "skins his humps." He also inserts a death's head moth into the victim's throat because he is fascinated by the insect's metamorphosis, a process that he wants to undergo by becoming a woman. In the case of Gumb's first victim, Fredrica Bimmel, he weighs down her body, so she ends up being the third victim found. In the case of the fourth victim, he shoots rather than strangles her.[1]

At the start of the novel, Gumb has already murdered five women. Behavioral Science Unit Chief Jack Crawford assigns gifted trainee Clarice Starling to question incarcerated serial killer Hannibal Lecter about the case. (Lecter had met Gumb while treating Raspail.) When Gumb kidnaps Catherine Martin, the daughter of U.S. Senator Ruth Martin, Lecter offers to give Starling a psychological profile of the killer in return for a transfer to a federal institution; this profile is mostly made up of cryptic clues designed to help Starling figure it out for herself. Starling eventually deduces from Lecter's riddles that Gumb knew his first victim, Frederica Bimmel, and goes to Bimmel's hometown of Belvedere, Ohio to gather information. By this time, Crawford has already found out the killer's true identity and gone with a SWAT team to his house to arrest him, but they find that it is only a business address. Meanwhile, Starling goes to the home of Bimmel's employer, Mrs. Lippman, only to find Gumb — calling himself "Jack Gordon" — living there. (Gumb had murdered Mrs. Lippman earlier.)

When Starling sees a moth flutter by, she realizes she has found the killer and orders him to surrender. Gumb flees into the basement and stalks her with a revolver and night vision goggles. Just as he is about to shoot Starling, she hears him behind her, turns around and opens fire, killing him. In the novel, he addresses his final words to her, asking her, "What does it feel like to be so beautiful?"

Influences

Harris based various elements of Gumb's MO on six real-life serial killers:[2][3]

  • Jerry Brudos, who strangled his victims, dressed up in their clothing and kept their shoes.
  • Ed Gein, who fashioned trophies and keepsakes from the bones and skin of corpses he dug up at cemeteries. He also made a female skin suit and skin masks.
  • Ted Bundy, who pretended to be injured (using an arm-brace or crutches) as a ploy to ask his victims for help. When they helped him, he incapacitated and killed them.
  • Gary M. Heidnik, who kidnapped, raped and tortured six women while holding them prisoner in a pit, where two died.
  • Edmund Kemper, who, like Gumb, killed his grandparents as a teenager "just to see what it felt like."
  • Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer (still unidentified at the time of the novel's writing), who, like Gumb, dumped women's bodies in rivers and inserted foreign objects into their corpses.

Analysis

Barbara Creed, writing in Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in the Hollywood Cinema, says that Buffalo Bill wants to become a woman "presumably because he sees femininity as a more desirable state, possibly a superior one". For Buffalo Bill, the woman is "[a] totem animal". Not only does he want to wear women's skin, he wants to become a woman; he dresses in women's clothes and tucks his penis behind his legs to appear female. Creed writes, "To experience a rebirth as woman, Buffalo Bill must wear the skin of woman not just to experience a physical transformation but also to acquire the power of transformation associated with woman's ability to give birth." Buffalo Bill wears the skin of his totem animal to assume its power.[4]

Jack Halberstam, author of Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters, writes, "The cause for Buffalo Bill's extreme violence against women lies not in his gender confusion or his sexual orientation but in his humanist presumption that his sex and his gender and his orientation must all match-up to a mythic norm of white heterosexual masculinity." Halberstam says Buffalo Bill symbolizes a lack of ease with one's skin. He writes that the character is also a combination of Victor Frankenstein and his monster in how he is the creator gathering body parts and experimenting with his own body. Halberstam writes, "He does not understand gender as inherent, innate; he reads it only as a surface effect, a representation, an external attribute engineered into identity." Buffalo Bill challenges "the interiority of gender" by taking skin and remaking it into a costume.[5]

Controversy

The film adaptation of Silence of the Lambs was criticized by some gay rights groups for its portrayal of Gumb as bisexual and transgender.[6] A Johns Hopkins sex-reassignment surgeon, present in the book but not the film (his scene was deleted and is found in bonus materials on the DVD), protests exactly the same thing. FBI Director Jack Crawford pacifies him by repeating that Gumb is not in fact transsexual, but merely believes himself to be. In the film, a similar scene is shown with Starling and Lecter in the same roles as the surgeon and Crawford, respectively. In the director's commentary for the 1991 film, director Jonathan Demme draws attention to various Polaroids taken of Buffalo Bill in the company of strippers; these are visible in Gumb's basement in the film.

gollark: .
gollark: I mostly just read it as "vaguely anticompetitive behavior" to not allow it
gollark: In general, I do not see the issue with mentioning other servers and how to access them if it's reasonably relevant to ongoing discussions.
gollark: You *can* do things, but that DOES NOT IMPLY YOU SHOULD.
gollark: Fascinating. I'm not saying you're wrong in this specific case, merely that this is increasingly ominous.

References
  1. Harris, Thomas (1991). The Silence Of The Lambs. St. Martin's Paperbacks. ISBN 0-312-92458-5.
  2. Bruno, Anthony. "All About Hannibal Lecter - Facts and Fiction". Crime Library. Atlanta, Georgia: Turner Broadcasting Systems. Archived from the original on October 11, 2008.
  3. Bowman, David (July 8, 1999). "Profiler". Salon. San Francisco, California: Salon Media Group.
  4. Creed, Barbara (1993). "Dark Desires: Male masochism in the horror film". In Cohan, Steven; Hark, Ina Rae (eds.). Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in the Hollywood Cinema. Abingdon, England: Routledge. pp. 126–127. ISBN 978-0-415-07759-0.
  5. Halberstam, Judith (1995). "Skinflick: Posthuman Gender in Jonathan Demme's The Silence of the Lambs". Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press Books. ISBN 978-0-8223-1663-3.
  6. Cassady, Charles, Jr. (July 11, 2005). "Common Sense Media review of The Silence of the Lambs". Common Sense Media. San Francisco, California.
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