Recently I revisited the 1991 film adaptation of Thomas Harris’ The Silence of the Lambs.
I read all Thomas Harris’ books up through Hannibal Rising and can’t recommend them enough. The movie adaptations range from excellent to just okay, but the books are much better. Each one is a masterpiece of pacing, plot, and character development.
However, there’s a longstanding issue I want to clear up about transgender representation in the film.
In one of the early meetings that Clarice Starling has with Hannibal Lector, she asks if Buffalo Bill might be a transsexual, remarking that “Transexuals are normally non-violent and placid”.
To which Lector replies: “Billy is not a transexual, but he wants to be.”
The implication is that Bill is a sociopath who unconsciously uses transsexuality to justify his dark fantasies about transformation, which is also where the moth symbolism comes in.
Lector suggests that a man fitting what they have of the killer’s description would have been rejected by any of the prominent Midwestern clinics that treat gender dysphoria, and this is the way they find him by the end of the movie.
I’m not here to quibble over whether Lector’s point of view, or the movie’s depiction, is scientifically accurate, but to ask if this depiction hurt trans rights.
Regardless of sexual orientation, a killer is a killer. The argument that Buffalo Bill (or another famous horror film crossdresser, Norman Bates) harms the rights of transsexuals by depicting them as killers is silly.
In real life, we now have well-documented examples of every possible persuasion of serial killer. Every race, every gender, every sexual orientation, and more than a few “etcetera”. Look it up.
They’re killers because they’re killers, not because of their race, gender, or sexual orientation.
The trouble with looking back on The Silence of the Lambs or Psycho for adequate transgender representation is that it was never about sexual orientation.
It’s about the fight between those who would do harm and those who would seek to prevent harm, and how hard it is to fall on the side of preventing harm.
On a related note, earlier this year we had the release of the film Longlegs, written and directed by Osgood Perkins (son of Anthony Perkins). Nicolas Cage plays the titular character of “Longlegs”, a Satanic child murderer, who also might be considered trans, or at the very least, androgynous.
Due to the nature of Cage’s portrayal, some viewers were outraged by what they believed was a negative stereotype against the LGBTQ+ community, to which Osgood Perkins eloquently replied: “Anyone who is anti-trans is a fucking piece of shit idiot and it would be great to not be confused with a fucking piece of shit idiot.”
Also worth mentioning is that Anthony Perkins was a closeted gay man who lived a double life, not so unlike the character of Norman Bates, which he played. Yet, some were still in an uproar over Longlegs, which they felt was a negative portrayal of a trans mass murderer of children.
No one demographic is really any more biologically predisposed to become a killer than any other, but political propagandists from both sides like to sensationalize any anecdotal evidence they find to galvanize their base.
Whatever outrages people enough to get them to the polls is good enough for the teeming mass of filthy, disgusting liars that are the majority of modern politicians.
As we saw with the last few U.S. election cycles, even when this tactic backfires on their constituents, they don’t care, they just keep pressing harder, and why shouldn’t they?
At the end of the day, they still walk away with more money, future book deals, insider trading information, and at least their fifteen minutes of fame.
There’s a lot of debate about, and a lot of conflicting research on, why someone is driven to serial murder. C. Rommial Butler did a great job of exposing the ambiguity of this debate in another Horror to Culture piece, Talking Schop with Slenderman, so I’ll direct you there rather than belabor that point.
But it only takes a small step into the most basic logical thought process to see that representation in media, and especially in Horror, can only be fair and accurate if it reflects reality.
When Norman Bates was playing Mommy, he did it side by side with Robert Mitchum’s heterosexual psycho ex-con in Cape Fear, to name only one example of many.
Thomas Harris’ novels and the films based on them had only one transsexual killer among many others who were quite different, with unique pathologies, and by then the list of convicted serial killers in the real world as well as depictions in media included every possible variation.
What I’m saying is: we need to stop.
We need to stop filtering everything through identity politics, which are always going to be ambiguous stereotypes, and start focusing on the character—moral, ethical, and accidental—of the individuals around us, because that is the reality that the people manipulating us, for money, power, or fame, don’t want us to see.
The personal connection between people who actually care about preventing harm is more likely to turn the tide of vitriol away from those innocents who deserve protection and back onto those unscrupulous opportunists who would throw them to the wolves.
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Shel Rogers is retired, a fan of classic horror and science fiction, and enjoys privacy. They're also a Mycological Enthusiast and amateur ham radio operator.
