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I was just quoting warren oates, not using the expression myself:

Yeah, good luck telling the target audience from flyover country that Buffalo Bill isn't an authentic queer. They'll very likely never notice or reflect upon this detail.

What happened, Matt? I used to be under your protection

Whoops, so you were. Sorry. But now I know the answer to my question.

mfunk9786 wrote:So what do you require, exactly?

I'd be fine with a publicly sourced interview with Demme, Ted Tally or Thomas Harris that mentions explicitly how important the detail of Buffalo Bill's inauthentic queerness was to them because they are so very conscious that the killer's drives/motives or whathaveyou might otherwise have been mistakenly misinterpreted as hatefully anti-trans. Even if I still don't buy that the finished film as a whole seems to care, that would definitely prove your point.

Though, of course, it would still leave open the question of where to put Buffalo Bill's very real gender and sexual identity issues -- if there's no room for him under the LGBT umbrella (can't queers be psychopaths too?). Not that everybody with his conflicts would kill, but surely there must be a few others who've experienced something like Bill's confusion. What would sensitivity permit us to name them?

I'll see if I can just produce Demme for you, he can't be that busy.

Matt wrote:

mfunk9786 wrote:It matters what a film is trying to say/not say, not how someone in flyover America interprets it.

Now who's being offensive? Also, post-modernism disagrees with you 100%.

To be fair, the implication that 'middle America' is too goddamn stupid to understand something they're being told outright is pretty offensive to begin with, and that implication wasn't MFunk's.

Mfunk: Wow, just wow. Never saw that coming. Phew. What can I say, you schooled me. I now admit that your speculation as to the weight of a certain tiny bit of dialogue spoken only once in a film must definitely be more correct than my notion that it's not nearly as crucial as you seem to need it to be to dislike another different film as much as you want to.

Matrix: It's not that Middle America is stupid. It's that, circa 1991, most people in most places in the U.S. that weren't urban or coastal had precious little interaction with anyone who they knew to be openly anything other than straight. So a fine distinction like "he wants to play dress-up and tuck his junk away, but he doesn't really feel like he's actually a woman inside, not like those who honestly need the operation" would be lost on them.

warren oates wrote:I'd be fine with a publicly sourced interview with Demme, Ted Tally or Thomas Harris that mentions explicitly how important the detail of Buffalo Bill's inauthentic queerness was to them because they are so very conscious that the killer's drives/motives or whathaveyou might otherwise have been mistakenly misinterpreted as hatefully anti-trans. Even if I still don't buy that the finished film as a whole seems to care, that would definitely prove your point.

Though, of course, it would still leave open the question of where to put Buffalo Bill's very real gender and sexual identity issues -- if there's no room for him under the LGBT umbrella (can't queers be psychopaths too?). Not that everybody with his conflicts would kill, but surely there must be a few others who've experienced something like Bill's confusion. What would sensitivity permit us to name them?

It's an important detail only insofar as the audience needs to understand what Buffalo Bill is not. Other than that, it's incidental. As was stated in the movie, Bill's psychopathy is the result of an intense self-hatred which makes him desire to become someone else (much like the killer in Manhunter/Red Dragon was instilled with so much self-loathing that he wanted to transform himself into another being). Lecter explicitly states that it has nothing to do with sex or gender for Bill; he's convinced himself that he's transexual as a way to explain his desire to become another person, not because he has any issues with his gender or sexuality. Hence the fixation on moths as a symbol for transformation, and hence his use of ritualized murder to accomplish his change when psychologists rejected his attempts at sex-reassignment because they too saw that he was not actually in confusion over his gender.

This is all somewhat loosely based on Ed Gein, a serial killer who would take women's body parts and fashion suits for him to wear. He was not transgender either. Dressed to Kill is deliberately associating psychopathy with transexuality, Silence of the Lambs makes an explicit distinction between the two. If you cannot see or understand the difference in that, then that is a failure to observe distinctions on a major level.

matrixschmatrix wrote:To be fair, the implication that 'middle America' is too goddamn stupid to understand something they're being told outright is pretty offensive to begin with, and that implication wasn't MFunk's.

I dunno. Whatever his phrasing, I think warren's point has some merit. People see what they're inclined to see, and 1991 would have been during a time of overwhelming anti-trans sentiment from large segments of the audience. I'm not sure how much a line or two of dialogue in a fictional movie is going to change that.

Put another way - you can have a character talk about how sharks rarely eat people until he's blue in the face. But if the movie is about a shark that eats people, people are still going to leave with the image of sharks as relentless maneaters. Images are powerful, and putting a disclaimer in the dialogue only does so much good.

It's explicit dialog in the film before you ever see the character during the scene when they set up what kind of person we are dealing with. It seriously would not be possible to have it more explicitly made clear without sticking an animated slideshow in there.

It's worth pointing out here that the cant Foster recites about what transfolk are like is also significantly out of date, so it's not like it's some magical, perfect portrayal- and yes, insofar as images are more powerful than words, the tucking dance and skinsuit may overwhelm the words that we have spoken and have people forging or reforging a connection between unusual gender presentation and crazy go nuts time. But it's very, very clear that the movie wants to make a point of distinguishing exactly what Buffalo Bill isn't, and it goes out of its way to do so more than once- which makes it considerably less problematic than Dressed to Kill, which does exactly the opposite.

Mr Sausage wrote:

warren oates wrote:I'd be fine with a publicly sourced interview with Demme, Ted Tally or Thomas Harris that mentions explicitly how important the detail of Buffalo Bill's inauthentic queerness was to them because they are so very conscious that the killer's drives/motives or whathaveyou might otherwise have been mistakenly misinterpreted as hatefully anti-trans. Even if I still don't buy that the finished film as a whole seems to care, that would definitely prove your point.

Though, of course, it would still leave open the question of where to put Buffalo Bill's very real gender and sexual identity issues -- if there's no room for him under the LGBT umbrella (can't queers be psychopaths too?). Not that everybody with his conflicts would kill, but surely there must be a few others who've experienced something like Bill's confusion. What would sensitivity permit us to name them?

It's an important detail only insofar as the audience needs to understand what Buffalo Bill is not. Other than that, it's incidental. As was stated in the movie, Bill's psychopathy is the result of an intense self-hatred which makes him desire to become someone else (much like the killer in Manhunter/Red Dragon was instilled with so much self-loathing that he wanted to transform himself into another being). Lecter explicitly states that it has nothing to do with sex or gender for Bill; he's convinced himself that he's transexual as a way to explain his desire to become another person, not because he has any issues with his gender or sexuality. Hence the fixation on moths as a symbol for transformation, and hence his use of ritualized murder to accomplish his change when psychologists rejected his attempts at sex-reassignment because they too saw that he was not actually in confusion over his gender.

This is all somewhat loosely based on Ed Gein, a serial killer who would take women's body parts and fashion suits for him to wear. He was not transgender either. Dressed to Kill is deliberately associating psychopathy with transexuality, Silence of the Lambs makes an explicit distinction between the two. If you cannot see or understand the difference in that, then that is a failure to observe distinctions.

Yeah, I get everything you're saying. I know the Gein case too. Fine by me to say that objectively neither Bill nor Gein are trans. And yet? To say that there's not a scintilla of difference in their sexuality? To claim that each is otherwise -- aside from the obsession with women's skin suits, the mother issues (in Gein's case, where Psycho borrows from him) -- 100% straight and not at all conflicted about his otherwise conventional sexual desires, practices and/or gender identity seems odd to me.

What's odd to me is where you got those claims you're attributing to me. You certainly won't find any statements about anyone being straight. Or gay for that matter. It's irrelevant. Buffalo Bill isn't in confusion over his sexuality and gender, he's in confusion over his entire identity as a whole. He literally wants to become a totally different person. At that point sexuality and gender are beside the point, rather in the way that racism or misogyny are beside the point when you're dealing with a misanthrope. It's too wide to be that. And the movie makes this very specific point.

Silence of the Lambs, a film in which issues of sexual identity and gender confusion are beside the point:

Spoiler

NSFW

matrixschmatrix wrote:It's explicit dialog in the film before you ever see the character during the scene when they set up what kind of person we are dealing with. It seriously would not be possible to have it more explicitly made clear without sticking an animated slideshow in there.

It's worth pointing out here that the cant Foster recites about what transfolk are like is also significantly out of date, so it's not like it's some magical, perfect portrayal- and yes, insofar as images are more powerful than words, the tucking dance and skinsuit may overwhelm the words that we have spoken and have people forging or reforging a connection between unusual gender presentation and crazy go nuts time. But it's very, very clear that the movie wants to make a point of distinguishing exactly what Buffalo Bill isn't, and it goes out of its way to do so more than once- which makes it considerably less problematic than Dressed to Kill, which does exactly the opposite.

I haven't seen Dressed to Kill, and I have no reason to doubt that the differences between it and Lambs are as you describe.

I'm just saying that I also agree with warren oates that the dialogue would likely not be enough for a lot of people to overcome their preconceptions, and that I also think it's very likely that the difference between the two movies may not be as easily perceived by many audiences as they are to you. I wouldn't even limit that to "middle America" or "flyover country" or anything else, either - we all have difficulties overcoming our biases, especially and ironically when it comes to subject matter that we're largely ignorant about. The intentions of the artists only go so far in this regard, and it's a very serious risk when working with sensational subject matter.

Warrenoates, didn't you just get through chiding Mfunk for doing that very thing, posting a picture in lieu of an actual argument?

Normally I think you're a good poster, but this is embarrassing.

BrianC wrote:I'm just saying that I also agree with warren oates that the dialogue would likely not be enough for a lot of people to overcome their preconceptions, and that I also think it's very likely that the difference between the two movies may not be as easily perceived by many audiences as they are to you. I wouldn't even limit that to "middle America" or "flyover country" or anything else, either - we all have difficulties overcoming our biases, especially and ironically when it comes to subject matter that we're largely ignorant about. The intentions of the artists only go so far in this regard, and it's a very serious risk when working with sensational subject matter.

Then again this movie isn't about social reform, so it's something of a moot point. What people will or will not think is in large part up to them. What the real issue is, for me anyway, is whether or not the film is confused about how transexuality actually works, and it's clear that it's not. It makes an explicit distinction between transexuality and psychopathy, and in that regard I don't have a problem with it. It's also not using the actual trans community to forward its plot, and all mentions of transexuality in the movie are used to disassociate it from the killer's actual psychology, which is otherwise discoursed on at some length.

So if the audience is confused, it's not because the film is. And certainly I don't see anyone without preconceptions or bigotries coming out convinced that this was an accurate depiction of transexuals.

Mr Sausage wrote:Warrenoates, didn't you just get through chiding Mfunk for doing that very thing, posting a picture in lieu of an actual argument?

Normally I think you're a good poster, but this is embarrassing.

BrianC wrote:I'm just saying that I also agree with warren oates that the dialogue would likely not be enough for a lot of people to overcome their preconceptions, and that I also think it's very likely that the difference between the two movies may not be as easily perceived by many audiences as they are to you. I wouldn't even limit that to "middle America" or "flyover country" or anything else, either - we all have difficulties overcoming our biases, especially and ironically when it comes to subject matter that we're largely ignorant about. The intentions of the artists only go so far in this regard, and it's a very serious risk when working with sensational subject matter.

Then again this movie isn't about social reform, so it's something of a moot point. What people will or will not think is in large part up to them. What the real issue is, for me anyway, is whether or not the film is confused about how transexuality actually works, and it's clear that it's not. It makes an explicit distinction between transexuality and psychopathy, and in that regard I don't have a problem with it. It's also not using the actual trans community to forward its plot, and all mentions of transexuality in the movie are used to disassociate it from the killer's actual psychology, which is otherwise discoursed on at some length.

So if the audience is confused, it's not because the film is. And certainly I don't see anyone without preconceptions or bigotries coming out convinced that this was an accurate depiction of transexuals.

:-" Except my picture is actually directly to the point and worth at least 1000 words? [Btw, apologies to the mods and anyone who clicked on it before the NSFW tag was added. It didn't occur to me and I'm sorry. Mods, thanks for cleaning it up quickly.] I don't think the script is confused about the nature of real transexuality. But I do think that the film, at least as it is seen by most viewers, does, on the level of images, intentionally conflate a variety of non-hetero sexual desires/identities/practices with Buffalo Bill's character and motivation. Weren't there some fairly prominent protests against the film on its release by gay activists for these very reasons?

warren oates wrote:Except my picture is actually directly to the point and worth at least 1000 words?

While refuting nothing at all. Look, BrianC has made a couple of intelligent points that deserve serious consideration. You haven't, and you've turned this into exactly the kind of argument I wish we didn't have around here. So, I'm out.

Mr Sausage wrote:It's also not using the actual trans community to forward its plot

I fail to see how DRESSED TO KILL has anything to do with the trans community (which seems to be your implication). It has one 'transsexual' character - who happens to be a violent psychopath. But claims that its an attempt to depict transsexuality or make a comment about transsexuality in general make little sense to me. The character is clearly not a regular transsexual, in the same way Danielle in SISTERS is not a regular siamese twin. The psychopathy in DRESSED TO KILL is the product of the violent repression of a female identity (and perhaps certain tendencies in the character), not merely the fact that the female identity exists.

The reasoning there is that there's a whole lecture about what transexuality is that seems to imply that the character in question does in fact fit the profile, and that some crazy person with a violent alter ego is the type of thing one might expect from those wierdo transfolks. As most people then (and for that matter, now) know virtually nothing about trans people, it's a pretty brutally harmful misrepresentation.

Apologies to Sausage and anyone else who felt I've been too strident or not taking this thread seriously.

Mfunk, I did the research via Google Books, found an interview with Demme and it turns out that he was concerned with precisely the nuanced understanding of Gumb/Bill's motivations that you and Sausage and others have articulated above. And like you guys, he felt that the single line of dialogue would be enough to contextualize all the rest of the film's provocative images.

So most of us agree on what the text of the novel and the dialogue in the film posit: that Buffalo Bill's not confused about his gender identity and sexuality (He's not trans and "...he's not really gay" his former gay lover even tells Lecter in the book), but he is confused about being confused about it. A really fine distinction that still doesn't make Silence feel significantly less exploitative of sexual/gender otherness than Dressed to me.

I guess I just still wonder if mere identity (sans words and ideas like "sex" and "gender") confusion/crisis is what Jame Gumb/Buffalo Bill is truly troubled by, isn't there anything at all to the way this plays out in his life? I mean, he's not dressing up in a bat costume and fighting crime. He's not simply hanging with different crowds or experimenting with drugs. He's not cheating on his spouse. It feels weird to declare Gumb's obvious obsession with issues of sexuality and gender off-limits because the character is somehow unaware of what it all really means to him. Why make him so femme? Why show him dancing around and tucking away his man parts? Why give him a gay lover and a fag hag girlfriend in his backstory? It seems like the film wants to have its sexualitysploitation and eat it too.

Why does this matter? Well, for one, there are large parts of the U.S. that still believe being LGBT is a personal choice. It certainly seems that way for Gumb -- a wrong reversible choice that Michele Bachmann's husband could have cured!

Idk, I still like both of these films a lot. They're great thrillers. Silence has some of the best plotting I've seen in mainstream genre films and at least two indelible characters. Dressed is still so darn watchable, with really excellent camerawork, especially in the museum scenes. I won't condemn either for the way it sensationalizes sexual otherness, but I also wouldn't nominate either to win a Humanitas award.

In Gumb's case it seems fairly clearly to be body dissociative disorder or something like it, which as I understand it is one of the things doctors who perform SRS are always on the watch for- the desire to be something other than one's self isn't rooted in sexuality per se, and it's not something anyone is by when it's enabled, as far as I know. In this situation, it expresses itself in a particularly horrible and somewhat sexualized way, certainly, and it does relate to sex- the issue he has is a significantly different and differently rooted one. His exploration of different identies is key to the character, but the connection to Manhunter is a significant one- the interest is about transformation, not about the identity being lost or gained. It's no more specifically about gender or orientation that Manhunter is about mythology and fantasy creatures.

What interests me about the fact that Gumb is not really gay and not really transexual is the way this implies that he's pretending his feelings are normal, pretending there is a regular, common, human explanation for them so that he won't have to acknowledge the deeply traumatic truth. Connecting the depiction of this character with gay-conversion proponents is an extraordinary reach, one more rhetorical than actual. If Gumb is "not really gay" then logically there are people who are actually gay, none of whom reflect Gumb or vice versa.

This conversation reminds me of something I remember arguing some years ago on this board concerning the depiction of Tom Ripley in The Talented Mr. Ripley, namely that Ripley isn't gay (or even straight). Ripley is a narcissist; he loves and desires the idea of being Dickey, because if he were Dickey he could feel all of these wonderful emotions about himself. Ripley, not really understanding, confuses this narcissistic desire with sexual desire, again trying to find a natural explanation for unnatural urges. Eventually we see Ripley be gay or straight depending on whatever identity he is playing at the moment. This is very similar to Gumb in that both want to love themselves and both try at first to find this love through more understandable forms of desire (homosexual love in this case), only to give that up and attempt transformations into other people entirely. The only difference being that Ripley is a blank slate without a personality of his own, while Gumb does have one and despises it. In both cases these are people whose sexuality is abhorrent, and in order to hide the fact from themselves try to funnel their urges into more normal, if less common, forms of sexuality. But this inevitably fails, leading them further and further into awful, degrading acts as they try to achieve a balance they can never attain.

These are stories about people using sexuality to achieve non-sexual ends. Gumb simply wants to be 'other', and it hardly matters that he's chosen to become a female any more than it matters that Dollarhyde chose to become Blake's Great Red Dragon in the Sky. They could easily have chosen to become something else, it would've made no difference to their desires. Gumb just happened to've decided that his feelings must mean he's gay, then later transexual, even tho' the people actually in those worlds could see that his feelings had nothing to do with either. It was his way of trying to fit in.

Which, in Gumb's case, is sort of fascinating insofar as he is trying to fit in with a group of people who are themselves terribly and tragically othered, and for whom he seems to have a fair amount of contempt (if his attitude towards women is any indication.)

Fitting in and gender issues certainly are chief concerns of the movie, and I think it's not a coincidence that a movie largely about a female FBI agent and how she is able to integrate with largely male power structures has a villian who is himself connected to issues of gender- but Gumb isn't in any way someone who feels like a woman inside, he is someone who believes that women are inherently desirable and wants to reforge himself into something that could be desired, as a woman is. The fact that Gumb is also a misogynist reinforces that dynamic, and the idea that he is basically trying to other himself, to make himself into something that he doesn't actually understand at all.

I'm sure that also relates to his Nazi paraphernalia.

matrixschmatrix wrote:Which, in Gumb's case, is sort of fascinating insofar as he is trying to fit in with a group of people who are themselves terribly and tragically othered, and for whom he seems to have a fair amount of contempt (if his attitude towards women is any indication.)

I think because he feels like an outsider he identifies with groups who are themselves outside mainstream society. He wants to fit it, and what fascinates me about that is how, by wanting to fit in, he implicitly wants to be normal, thereby making groups often perceived as abnormal, well, normal. They are his attempts to become an actual functioning human being, implying that gay and transgendered people are healthy and functional as humans in all the ways that he is not.

Right, I definitely think Demme and Harris's perception of those groups is that they are 'normal', in that they are functional people without demons driving them around or anything, which is obviously what Gumb wishes he could be. The extent of Gumb's self loathing is revealed in what I believe to be Gumb's own attitude towards those groups, not the implied attitude of the film (which, for a movie that could easily be glib shock horror about how terrible everyone outside the norm is, captures a lot of Demme's normal humanism and delight in people of different kinds wonderfully. I'm thinking in particular of the two strange guys Starling visits for help with the moths she has found, who could easily be played as tension inducing scary weirdos- but are instead immediately likable presences, for all their incompetent hitting on Clarice.)