So far in this blog, I have focused primarily on the revival of the slasher film in the 1990s, however, Psychological thrillers also reach their peak in the 1990s. This included movies like Se7en, The Sixth Sense, Misery, and the award-winning, 1991 horror film, The Silence of the Lambs, which I’ll be discussing further in this blog. 

The Silence of the Lambs has been the only horror film ever to receive an Academy Award. It delves into the lives of serial killers and psychoanalyzes them using psychiatrist/cannibal, Dr. Hannibal Lecter, as the go-to in the FBI’s search in finding the notorious Buffalo Bill, who is later revealed as Jame Gumb. At the fore-front of the investigation is, young detective, Clarice Starling. Starling visits Dr. Hannibal Lecter several times in jail to gain more information on the real identity of Buffalo Bill. The movie is in the point of view of the protagonist, Clarice Starling, as she uncovers the real identity of “Buffalo Bill” through interrogating Dr. Lecter, who was previously Gumb’s psychiatrist.

This film deals quite a bit with gender. It takes an interesting look at transsexual people, cross-dressing, and it utilizes a strong female lead. It elicits a new way in looking at gender roles that are no longer black and white. The Silence of the Lambs leaves a lot of room for gray area in terms of gender and explores what this means for different people.

Transexuality in the film:

The main antagonist in the film, James Gumb, aka “Buffalo Bill,” is known for skinning women and wearing their skin as a body suit. Gumb quite literally puts himself inside of multiple women, and takes on their outward appearances.

It is later discovered that Gumb has always identified as a women, but was rejected from sexual reassignment surgery. Because Gumb was entered into an institution for killing his grandparents at age 12, he is denied the surgery on the basis that he is mentally ill. Being rejected from the surgery and from suffering “years of systemic abuse” as a child, according to Dr. Lecter, are what causes Gumb to become the monster that he is. This is typical of “horror movies of psychological disturbance (Barry Keith Grant, The Dread of Difference “Introduction”).” These films “usually offer at least a vague psychoanalytic explanation locating the cause of madness in the character’s earlier developing sense of sexual identity”(Grant, The Dread of Difference “Introduction”). Gumb goes through a sexual identity crisis in the movie, and this “others” him. He becomes a monster because of his “otherness.” The LGBTQ+ community has seen this as problematic because the only transsexual in the film is a viscous killer.  This becomes a misrepresentation of the community as a whole. This isn’t a new concept, however. In Carol J. Clover’s article Her Body, Himself she analyzes this idea and argues that “the notion of a killer propelled by physchosexual fury, more particularly a male in gender distress, has proved a durable one.” Often times in horror films the killer is disturbed due to a gender identity crisis; this proves true for Jame Gumb as well.

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Gumb tucks his penis between his legs to feel more confident, and like the woman that he feels he is.

Gender as a Social Construct:

By Gumb putting on the female body suit, he is stepping into the body of a woman. In doing this, the movie shows how gender is interpreted by every person. A person’s sex is merely an outer shell. The inside of a person– his or her values, beliefs, likes and dislikes– is what really what shapes gender. Gumb’s sewing preferences depict “the ways in which gender is always posthuman always a sewing job which stitches identity into a body bag”(Judith Halberstam, “Skinflick: Posthuman Gender in Johnathon Demme’s The Silence of The Lambs“). The movie literally shows that the outer body of a person is not what defines the inside, and that the outer shell is only skin deep; people’s inner person is what shapes what they want to be portrayed as on the outside.

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Jame Gumb is pictured sewing up his body suit. He is naked in this scene, while he creates the body that he has envisioned for himself.

 

The Film’s Poster:

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This is the famous poster for the 1991 thriller The Silence of the Lambs. The image shows Jodie Foster’s face with unusually red eyes and a moth with skull markings on her lips.

The first image that aired for the movie was this (pictured right) iconic poster picturing Jodie Foster with unusually red eyes, and a moth on her mouth. At a closer glance you can see that at the head of the moth is an image of a skull. At an even closer analysis, the skull pictured on the head of the moth isn’t a human skull at all. In fact, it is a famous photograph entitled In Voluptas Mors by Philippe Halsman, which uses the bodies of seven women all arranged in a way to make the shape of a skull. This photograph is based off of a sketch by surrealist artist, Salvador Dali. The original photo “reveals the skull to be made up of 7 naked women in apparent homage to the master of illusion and the unconscious, Salvador Dali”(Spencer, Hamist, “Silence of the Lambs – an analysis”). 

 

 

 

The original photograph In Voluptas Mors (translated as in voluptuous death), depicts seven naked women in the arrangement of a skull, as Salvador Dali “stands next to the literal human skull, quizzically eyeing the viewer like some sort of dubious ringmaster”(Behind the Scenes of Salvador Dali’s Most Scandalous Photo Shoot”).

This image can be translated easily into the movie as Buffalo Bill quizzically looking over the bodies of seven naked women. For its purposes in the movie, the naked women represent the women that Buffalo Bill has skinned. They are naked and vulnerable, which symbolically represents their loss of the fleshy exterior bodies that Buffalo Bill has skinned off of them, and they are in a skull formation because they have died in this open, susceptible state at the hands of Buffalo Bill.

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This is the original Dali painting In Voluptas Mors. Dali looks on skeptically as the naked women form a deathly skull shape.

 

The Butterfly Motif:

The importance of the moth in the original poster is not forgotten. Butterflies and moths are used quite a bit in this film. Their transformation from caterpillar into butterfly is hugely symbolic. This motif is used throughout the movie to represent Buffalo Bill’s transformation from male to female as he creates the female body suit for himself. The most exemplative instance of this occurs when Jame Gumb is dancing with makeup on. He is shown looking at himself in the mirror and just as he tucks his penis in between his legs, he spreads open the shawl that’s draped behind his back. In this instance Gumb has made the transformation.

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This image shows that Jame Gumb has made the transformation from caterpillar (male) into a butterfly (female).

 

The types of gender discussions that this movie brings up is quite important and transgressive, especially to a 1990s audience. Whether or not Gumb’s chacter is a problematic, misrepresentation of transsexuals, the film does force these subjects into the homes of the average American, and demands that these topics be looked at. The Silence of the Lambs is a truly iconic horror movie, and the psychological aspects makes it an exquisitely creepy thriller that’ll give audiences the chills for generations to come.

 

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