Silence of the Lambs fully intends to leave a sickened feeling in the stomach. Yet, when the screen went dark, my nausea felt somewhat cruel. My disgust —as directed by the film— was targeted at Buffalo Bill’s attempted transition through body-horror. The infamous skinsuit presented as this trans-person’s last hope in a system which denied them gender affirming surgery; their mindset implicitly portrayed as a warped desperation for body-modification. Whilst the film uses he/him pronouns for Bill throughout, I’ll be using they/them to recognise the uncertainty of their gender identity.
Despite Buffalo Bill’s limited screen time, their sewing project drives the plot. Tracing what unites a growing list of skinned women’s bodies, FBI trainee Clarice Starling is forced into the good graces of imprisoned cannibal Hannibal Lector. In homage to Frankenstein’s monster, we gradually discover our killer is building themself a female body skin suit.
At Oscars night, 1992, the film swept up Best Picture, Director, Lead Actress, and Lead Actor. Outside, Queer Nation protested for better LGBTQ+ representation in film. As the film has settled into its fame so too has its criticism. Typically put, it understands Buffalo Bill as a villainising portrayal of transness, wrongly associating the transition to womanhood with violence towards other women. While a valid critique, it underestimates the representational complexities, of social exclusion and surgical transitioning, of Bill’s transness.
The film gifts defenders a tokenistic excuse for the more basic critique. Clarice, “there’s no correlation between transexuals and violence.” Hannibal, “Billy’s not a real transsexual, but he thinks he is. He tries to be.” Faulty as any adaptation, what passes for explanation in the book is cut out of the final edit. Where Thomas Harris, the original author, wrote (in ode to Psycho) a killer with a disturbed desperation to become his mother, director Jonathan Demme edited out any reason to think Bill would not be considered trans today. No matter how genius a psychologist Hannibal is supposed to be, his merely denying Bill’s transness does not actualise that being the case.
Hannibal’s character evaluation seems to speak more loudly to the social exclusion faced by trans individuals than to any clear claim over gender identity. Directing Clarice to the only three major centres for gender affirming surgery, he predicts Bill would have applied and been rejected by one or all of them. He supposes this rejection based on outdated psychological tests no longer involved in determining appropriate care for trans individuals. In content and tone, this conversation epitomises the failure to listen and denial of care, which trans people frequently experience.
In a different film, perhaps, one could almost take this as progressive commentary. When trans people are not trusted to aptly express their own feelings, this can have profound psychological effects. Yet the film makes those effects murderous and there undermines any consideration for the trans image.
Are Buffalo Bill’s murderous tendencies a manifestation of a system which failed them? Or, as Hannibal suggests, is their transness a pretence, resulting from despair of their systematic exclusion? The film lacks an answer, yet either way it is a punishing portrayal: a villainous trans person or a fraudulent one. When we meet our murderer— dressed in effeminate clothes, with a woman’s scalp for a wig, putting their makeup on, we are encouraged to fear the guise of transness.
Worse, the murderous tirade which introduces us to them is conflated with surgical gender care. The worry is, more of us fear surgery and modification to our bodies than we typically talk about. Inevitably, then, watching Bill push skin through a sewing machine produces a guttural reaction. The cis viewer’s discomfort – at the thought of their body, which they are happy in, being violated – becomes wrongly entangled with transness, particularly gender affirming surgery. Conflating our bodily fears with a trans person’s behaviour wrongly insinuates that the way we might feel about our bodies has anything to do with what trans people do with theirs.
Silence of the Lambs, then, is a uniquely discrediting and cruel presentation of the trans experience. This much is clear. Yet, I worry I’ve still given defenders an easy out; it is not trying to be a film about the trans experience. It prioritises horror and feminist commentary, and it does it well. Fans may still defend that knocking back trans-positive progress in its wake is a mere reflection of its time. Summer 1991 also saw the screen birth of Denise Bryson, Twin Peaks, soon after Buffalo Bill. A trans FBI agent, Denise – often the only woman in the room and an inspiration to aspiring trainees much like Clarice – showed the complete compatibility of women forging progress together. Age does not excuse the failure to recognise the media’s representative power. Filmmakers must know they have custodianship over the identities they portray. Silence of the Lambs should have done better.
“Anthony Hopkins in Silence of the Lambs” by scriptingnews is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
