by Emily Maesar, Staff Writer

In 2000, author Thomas Harris penned Forward to a Fatal Interview. It was a short essay that was added to every new printing of his second novel, Red Dragon. In that piece he described his writing process, how he simply saw scenes between his characters and wrote them down. Not so much playing God, but simply acting as a scribe. Except with the good doctor Hannibal Lecter, it appeared. “I was enjoying my usual immunity while working, my invisibility to Chilton and Graham and the staff, but I was not comfortable in the presence of Dr. Lecter, not sure at all that the doctor could not see me.”

Valentine’s Day was the 30th anniversary of the release of The Silence of the Lambs. Thirty years since Jonathan Demme captured the feeling Harris talked about, and did it nearly ten years prior. And it is that feeling, I would argue, that makes it such a remarkable piece of filmmaking. It is what allows Dr. Lecter to be such a force: scary and enchanting all at once, to both Clarice Starling and to us. 

It is not a certainty to the author, the reader, or the viewer that Hannibal Lecter is not watching them. That he does not see them, in the same way he sees Clarice, down the lens of Jonathan Demme’s camera. It’s powerful and terrifying in equal measures, and it’s a major reason the 1991 film still endures, instead of fading away once its cultural impact was achieved. 

The Silence of the Lambs is the story of Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) who–like Will Graham before her–is brought into a serial killer case by the head of the Behavior Science Unit at the FBI, Jack Crawford (Scott Glenn). Jame Gumb (Ted Levine), dubbed “Buffalo Bill,” is kidnapping women, skinning them, and floating them down rivers. When a senator’s daughter is taken by Gumb, Jack does the only thing he clearly knows how to do: he sends someone to get a profile on the serial killer from the smartest person they have in custody: the good doctor, Hannibal “the Cannibal” Lecter (Anthony Hopkins).

As Clarice, a trainee at the FBI, navigates all the ups and downs of the case, she becomes personally entangled with not only Dr. Lecter, but with Gumb. Hannibal knows who Buffalo Bill is, and Clarice realizes this as she exchanges personal anecdotes with him for information. Luckily, Lecter finds her interesting enough to give her all the clues she needs to find Gumb…she just needs to be as clever as he thinks she is. 

First and foremost, I wanna say that this movie fucking rules. That’s not shocking, and it’s not news. It was the last film to win the “Big Five” Academy Awards, after all, and is one of three films in the history of the Oscars to do so. Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay (Adapted), Best Actor, and Best Actress at the 64th Academy Awards all went to Jonathan Demme's masterpiece, and it was so truly deserved. Every aspect of this film is an accumulation of all the creatives being at the absolute top of their game. It is a masterclass across the board in a way that so few films actually are.

So, what is the cultural legacy of The Silence of the Lambs 30 years on? Well, despite all the continued praise, it’s a bit complicated.

In fact, the elephant in every room with The Silence of the Lambs is the character of Jame Gumb/Buffalo Bill and his perceived trans identity. Like Norman Bates before him, Gumb is based (at least in part) on Ed Gein. And, like many after him, Buffalo Bill is a plot point on a line of trans killers in suspense and mystery stories across all of media. A line that leads us all the way to J.K. Rowling publishing Troubled Blood, a mystery with an antagonist who dresses up like a woman to kidnap and kill. It was released in late 2020, amid the most recent storm of transphobic tweets and an essay of Rowling’s own that expanded on those feelings. (If you have any interest in contextualizing that mess, then I suggest ContraPoint’s recent video. It’s an absolute masterpiece.)

And here’s the thing: a lot of people–including the creatives behind it–don’t think that Gumb is a trans character. Our hero (and our charming murderer second lead) have a full conversation about the whole subject, with a pretty definitive conclusion. As far as the story is concerned, he’s not trans. Jame Gumb simply does not want to be himself anymore and doesn’t know how to go about that. 

Which… also not great! He’s certainly meant to be a foil to Francis Dolarhyde’s Red Dragon killer in Harris’s first Lecter novel, but intentions don’t stop cultural perceptions. In fact, that reading is canon fodder for Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists (TERFs), like Rowling, to justify their beliefs and transphobic fears. 

When covering The Silence of the Lambs for their Jonathan Demme mini-series, Blank Check with Griffin and David had on Emily VanDerWerff, the Critic at Large over at Vox. I really love that episode and it gives a lot of great contextual meaning to Demme, and why Lambs blew up the way it did. But, VanDerWerff, who had recently transitioned herself when they recorded the episode, had this to say on Gumb and Demme, which I find really profound: 

It (The Silence of the Lambs) flirts with all this iconography of trans people - of transition - in ways that made me uncomfortable. But here’s where I think this succeeds in the way that a lot of the other trans murderers, because this is a trope, have not succeeded. Which is: Jonathan Demme is such a humain director. He gives Buffalo Bill his humanity. It’s a diseased and horrible humanity, but he is a person.

However, I think it’s fair to say that the culture at large doesn’t view Gumb this way. That his perceived identity (as queer in some way), coupled with his horrible actions, made him an excellent model for future antagonists over the next 30 years of media. It made his pain, and the pain of people like him, a punching bag for mockery. The humanity Demme was able to give him in the “Lotion” scene is often overlooked; the quote and reference more important than Gumb’s struggle to objectify Catherine so he can kill her. What is a nuanced look at a human being struggling in the film, is often turned into a joke to devastating effect in the real world. (The Netflix documentary Disclosure touches on the representation of trans people in media beautifully, including talking about the effects of Buffalo Bill. Please watch it!) 

And then, of course, there’s the Clarice of it all. 

If the portrayal of Gumb is problematic, and it most certainly is, then Clarice is the other side of that representation coin. 

The FBI is a boys’ club if ever there was one. Like many films since its release, The Silence of the Lambs wants to take a look at what being a woman is like in spaces that are constructed for men. Not just on a superficial level, but on an emotional one. And I would argue that no male director has ever come as close as Demme to capturing it. It’s the humanity that Emily VanDerWerff spoke about that truly allows him to make this film from Clarice’s perspective without being patronizing. A lesson many stories after it failed to learn. 

Gender, as it pertains to Clarice, is only mentioned during a single sequence (when they go to the morgue, and are headed back to the FBI, after), but you can feel it all over the film. One of the best shots, in probably all of cinema, is the one in the elevator at the beginning. With no dialogue, and without having anyone play to the back about it, Demme tells us everything we need to know about Clarice and her place in the FBI. 

On the theme of gender in the film, VanDerWerff added, “It’s kind of about the ways that men fail to understand women, and the ways that women always understand men.” Which is, of course, an excellent reading of the film that I think gets lost in its imitators. Perhaps that’s why Lecter is so enchanting in this film. That he, after failing to understand Clarice for long swaths of their conversations, finally clicks into her, when no other men in the story do so. It endures, especially outside of the “typical” cis-male horror space, because it actually aims to understand being a woman given the circumstances, not just copying and pasting a vague notion of “Girl Power!” 

With all that being said, the good and the bad, I still love The Silence of the Lambs. I think that Clarice Starling is probably one of the most important protagonists, especially in crime fiction, of the last 30 plus years. But I also think that the film’s cultural impact across the board is probably a net bad. The association of Buffalo Bill, and real world repercussions of it, within the trans community, and LGBT community at large, is undeniable. And even though Demme, Tally, and Harris didn’t realize what they’d done until it was too late… it was, in fact, too late. Perhaps The Silence of the Lambs is simply a point on the long line of trans villains in media, but it’s a pretty fucking big one.

Media matters. It’s been proven time and time again that it does. We have to make a choice: Do people matter more than art, or not? I happen to think that they do. And people’s lives were changed, sometimes ended, because of the cultural impact of The Silence of the Lambs. We cannot change what this film, and novel, helped usher in - but what we can do is learn from both the positives and the negatives. After all, Demme felt so terrible about Buffalo Bill that he made Philadelphia, as imperfect as that film is. He realized that there weren’t a lot of positive representations of the LGBT community in mainstream films, and that he had contributed to that fact in a very profound way. So, he wanted to do something about it. 

Jonathan Demme passed away almost four years ago, and during his career he made some of the most influential films of all time, including The Silence of the Lambs. I’ll be doing recaps of CBS’s new series Clarice, which follows Clarice Starling’s return to the field after the Buffalo Bill case. I can only hope that Demme’s personal legacy with Lambs shines through the show. That his mistakes are not repeated, but that his humanity and sympathy is replicated. Because it’s been 30 years since The Silence of the Lambs changed everything… and I’d hate to think we haven’t moved an inch.