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One of the reasons Gumb's particular crime isn't exploitative on behalf of the movie is because it serves a structural purpose: like a lot of similar stories of heroes versus villains, the movie pairs off its hero and villain by making both of them uncomfortable in their own skin (lit., fig.). This shared aspect allows the movie to draw out the crucial thematic differences in its two characters, as Starling uses her discomfort as motivation to assert herself and become a heroine, become indeed comfortable with who she is and thereby overcome her demons through positive action. Gumb fails to do any of this, and has allowed his discomfort to drive him towards the destructive and the anti-social instead. Gumb's hatred and victimization of women also places him as a direct ideological and thematic threat to Starling, whose identity as a woman is threatened several times throughout the movie implicitly and explicitly, with Gumb representing the ultimate threat to it. There is a structural component to this as well, as vanquishing Gumb also allows her to vanquish the major figure of misogyny and misogynistic power in the film, fulfilling her structural quest to assert herself as a female against those who would see her gender as a weakness to be exploited.

Because all of this fits together into a neat structural whole it cannot be simple exploitation, attracting an audience with the promise of lurid and prurient thrills. It actively supports and forwards the film's meanings as well.

That's an interesting thought, actually, Gumb's false transexuality as the ultimate co-option of feminity, thus allying him with all of the cracker sheriffs and so forth that Starling encounters elsewhere. He attacks women not because he fundamentally believes himself to be one, but because he believes them to be conquerable, as do so many of the other men we see- and he believes he can take everything that is theirs, including their identity.

Indeed, and the movie makes it a structural point that the attempts to victimize Starling for her perceived feminine weakness are what allow her to succeed. For instance, being treated as an inferior is what motivates her to do better than everyone else; having ejaculate thrown in her face is what leads Lecter to set Starling on the right path; having Chilton exploit her work for his own gain is what leads her to confront her childhood trauma and, as a result, get the file whose annotations from Lecter lead her to Gumb; Gumb's overconfidence in the basement, his feeling that she's so weak he can stroke her face and toy with her is what leads directly to his death as it means he's so close to her that she can shoot at him in the dark and hit her target. The victimization in this movie allows the victims to assert themselves.

Matt wrote:I think we can all agree that psychological and social understandings of transvestism, transgender, and transsexualism (not to mention the completely separate topic of Dissociative Identity Disorder/Multiple Personality Disorder) have come a long way since 1980. I wouldn't look to a De Palma movie for a nuanced and accurate portrayal of any one of them.

DePalma is chiefly concerned with creating as nightmarish and disturbing a bogeyman as he can imagine. I've always thought that the film is less indebted to PSYCHO, perhaps, than "An Unlocked WIndow", one of the most famous episodes of "The Alfred Hitchcock Hour." It was produced twice: originally, directed by Joseph M. Newman for a 1965 broadcast, starring Dana Wynter; it was re-produced, for the 1985 series revival, directed by Fred Walton, and starring Annette O'Toole \:D/.

Another very nightmarish allusion at play in the construction of Bobbi, is the specter of the Richard Speck 1966 killings, which were a very potent memory for the film's original audience in 1980. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the idea of the final image of Bobbi ("What if Speck had dressed like a nurse?!"), had been the genesis for much of the 'Bobbi'.

It's hard not to agree with most of what's in the recent posts by Sausage and matrix. Some really incisive analysis, especially when it comes to the way Silence's themes are dramatized in the arcs of the protagonist and antagonist. I would say, though, that we get to know much more about where Clarice has come from and what she's struggling to overcome, so it's easier to understand her journey than his, which is necessarily obscured at least partially by his function as a mysterious baddie and his place in the plot. Also, as much as the film might wish to imply the existence of healthy normalized trans/gay/queer life in opposition to Gumb's misunderstood put-on of sexual otherness, it does fail to offer us any representative alternatives of functionally healthy out non-hetero characters on-screen. (This is something I thought the recent Tinker Tailor does quite well, contrasting its various queer characters.) Speculate about Starling's sexuality all you want, but the film never makes anything explicit enough to create an actual dramatic contrast for the audience. Gumb's facade of false queerness is all we see of it in the film.

I thought this camp appropriation of Buffalo Bill by drag performers in San Francisco at the Castro Theater this month was interesting in the context of this thread. Nothing like taking the piss out of controversy.

SATURDAY JULY 28 SPECIAL EVENT
THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS
with “The Silence of the Trans” a shockingly gruesome, musical pre-show extravaganza...
Starring Sharon Needles, Peaches Christ & The Midnight Mass Players

Peaches Christ Productions wants you to rub the lotion into its skin to celebrate the World Premiere of “The Silence of the Trans,” a blood-soaked summer spectacular! Famed “Midnight Mass” hostess PEACHES CHRIST will debut a sparkling pre-show musical featuring Ms. Christ as Trannibal Lector and special guest, Season 4 winner of “Rupaul’s Drag Race,” SHARON NEEDLES as Buffalo Jill! Written by Jared Webster (Suppositori Spelling) and Joshua Grannell, who also directs.

TWO shows will be presented on at 8:00 and a murderous matinee at 3:00. Both programs will feature a pre-musical extravaganza, a “Serial Killer” Costume Contest with prizes "gore-lore” and a screening of the award-winning horror/thriller The Silence of the Lambs (1991, 35mm). Sharon Needles will also be available for a post-show fan meet & greet, and for autograph signing in the Castro mezzanine once the film begins.

Fascinating thread.

While it's difficult to know exactly how to "classify" Buffalo Bill, Bobbi, and even Norman Bates (are they transgender? transvestites? etc.) perhaps we can agree that they are all queer characters whose gender identity, gender expression (clothing) and sexuality run counter to all manner of social norms. It seems pretty obvious to me that all three characters are likely to signify as queer to most audiences, even those who might not be experts in Gender Studies. Their queerness is, in all three cases, bound up in their murderous urges, but they are queer nevertheless, IMO (in other words, their insanity and their queerness remain separate, though seemingly related, issues).

All three films also bear the cultural blindnesses of their historical moments, and furthermore, since all three characters are largely the products of straight-identified male directors, writers, and actors (Anthony Perkins being the obvious exception here), we should recognize that these are unrealistic, often absurd, potentially hostile representations of queer people, to say the least. To echo a previous poster, none of these films is likely to get a stamp of approval from any LGBT organization for portraying queerness in a positive light.

That said (and at the risk of opening up an entirely different discussion), I maintain that it's still possible to appreciate and enjoy these films, even if aspects of them may be offensive, troubling, or simply ignorant/dated. There are many great films that are marred by racism, misogyny, and homophobia, and we need to recognize these things when we see them and try to understand how they're bound up in the ideology of the film. But negative representations don't necessarily render these films contemptible; rather, they complicate them in ways that I, for one, find interesting and useful. DRESSED TO KILL--which I saw last summer for the first time in many years, btw; it held up beautifully for me--remains a fascinating film with a ludicrous understanding of queerness. But who would watch DRESSED TO KILL looking for a nuanced, sensitive, realistic representation of queerness? The film's representation of women is another can of worms entirely (and I believe it was initially protested by feminist groups when it premiered). De Palma's films, like those of his acknowledged inspirer Hitchcock, are fundamentally about style and aesthetic pleasure. As subtle or realistic social dramas, they are ridiculous.

Point being: great films frequently do not line up with my political views, but that doesn't stop me from watching, appreciating, and thinking about them. All of the films in question here are too intelligent and compelling to be dismissed solely on the basis of negative representation (and to the credit of everyone on the board I'm not accusing anyone of having made this claim).

(My apologies if this is rambling or incoherent. This is a complicated issue and I'm not sure if I've articulated myself clearly.)

It seems somewhat glib to conflate genuinely problematic sexual identities or proclivities with the 'queer' umbrella, even if the identity includes some of the normal markers for queerness. It seems like it would be terribly offensive to include, say, pedophilia in that grouping- it's not an absolute catchall for sexual alterity, and I think a lot of the usefulness of the word breaks down if you define it as such. And again, while people may not choose to acknowledge it, we have a couple of key and very noticable lines deliniating the difference between Gumb's whole thing and a recognized Queer identity, and I think that is absolutely a key element.

I mean, if you start with the assumption that your movie is going to have a killer whose MO is caught up with queer signifiers, that's not somehow automatically a cruel and offensive thing- it's something that happens in real life, and it doesn't implicate trans people to have a crazy person believe that he is trans any more than Ted Bundy implicates all straight college boys. If the movie pretends that the person is representative, or gives the audience a bunch of shock images that are allowed to stand as their own explanation, than that is problematic, but that's not what happens in Silence of the Lambs.

As I believe I said earlier, that doesn't mean Lambs isn't worthy of any critique, and it doesn't mean that its presentation is totally perfect- I think Starling's explanation of transpeople is itself outdated and a bit problematic at this point, and certainly it's easy enough to cull a truly transphobic portrayal out of it. What we get is something of a band-aid, a movie that uses that shocking imagery but also tries to make it clear that it's not trying to implicate transpeople with that imagery- but the explanation we get doesn't feel forced and the distinction doesn't feel like something the filmmakers had forced on them and do not themselves believe. Starling's line fits into the psychological atmosphere of the film, and it's actually a fairly memorable sequence itself.

I guess I agree with warren oates's post earlier in the thread in that I don't believe that Gumb's sexuality is "unmarked"--i.e., that his sexuality and gender identity are beside the point, or are ancillary to his being a psychopathic murderer, or are meant to go unremarked-upon. He may not be transgender, strictly speaking, but the film nevertheless presents him (visually, if in no other way) as confounding notions of gender and sexuality in ways that can perhaps only be called queer (or perhaps genderqueer, a term that is gaining parlance in the LGBT world and that seems to account for gender identities that are more amorphous, like Gumb's. Not an expert on this, though, so don't quote me here).

I haven't seen LAMBS recently enough to recall the dialogue from Starling that you refer to, so I apologize. But it's telling that I've forgotten those lines of dialogue in which Starling apparently tries to make it clear that Gumb is not trans, while I distinctly remember the scenes of Gumb, for example, applying make-up and tucking his penis. This is not to say that the film marks him as trans in spite of itself, but that it still goes out of its way to code him as non-normative w/r/t gender. The impression of Gumb that I (and others, it seems) come away with is of a psychopath whose violent tendencies are bound up in his gender and sexual expression. I agree with your assessment that the film (through Starling's line, as you've described it) seems to be trying to cover its ass, so to speak--to say "Gumb isn't a trans person, so don't accuse us of being transphobic!" However, this seems very ineffectual to me given the vividness with which Gumb is portrayed as someone who is unquestionably queer in his attitudes toward sex and gender, and whose queerness is made to look threatening, mainly be being associated with acts of extreme violence.

Relatedly, for a long time I've meant to look up queer theorist (and drag king) Judith Halberstam's essay on this film. Apparently when the film came out everyone was anxious for her to weigh in and many expected her to hate it (as was the trend among many LGBT critics at the time), and she wrote a largely positive piece on it, if I'm getting the story right.

EDIT: Corrected a point that I had attributed to the wrong forum user.

When Buffalo Bill is first being introduced, Starling says that what she's hearing doesn't fit for transexuals- that transexuals are this and this and this, and what Bill does is totally unlike that and does not make sense for that kind of person. As one of the major concerns of the movie is psychological profiling, it's actually pretty key in understand its portrayal of Gumb, and it's a place where the idea is as much as anything 'whatever you think about trans people, they're not weird and fucked up. This guy is weird and fucked up.' The FBI profiling part of the movie is one of the really memorable parts, for me at least, so it's a line that sticks in my mind.

It helps that it happens before we see or know much about Gumb, and it sets the scene for what to expect- it's not a crappy after-the-fact ass covering move, but part of the establishment of the character. That doesn't entirely take away from the ass-covering nature of it, but it's not just that, and does feel like a bone thrown to the PC police or something.

Part of the problem here is the assumption that sexuality is binary, that Gumb must be either gay or straight (or bi). I don't think he's any of those things; I think his actual sexuality, whatever it is, whatever you name it, is deeply twisted and abhorrent and alien to normal people, gay and straight alike. And as I argued earlier, it seems to me like he's trying to squeeze himself into some normal mode of human sexuality, with lacklustre results. He's 'queer' only in that he acts it, but this is totally performative, surface level, not internalized. He is trying to act like the people he sees around him without actually understanding what makes them who they are. Which is what you'd expect from a guy that thinks you can become a woman by putting on her skin. He has no grasp of other people's interiority, and we should take that as a clue that, whatever relationship his sexuality has to other humans, it's one very few people could ever relate to.

To say he's queer is to say that queerness is nothing more than some clothes and a couple affectations. And it's not, those are just the outward expressions of an internal state. My claim is that Bill does not have this internal state; he is trying to pass for queer without actually being it, and we can see how wrong he gets it.

As for Pyscho, he dresses up his mother's corpse and talks to it, and then blacks out and thinks he's her. To call this queer is to miss the point. It's clearly larger than that.

My apologies for not being more specific about my use of the word queer, which I mean to suggest something much more profound than clothes or affectations, to be sure. (I should also explain that I'm coming from a background in critical theory/queer theory, which is informing my ideas about this issue.) As I'm using it here, the term queer suggests a radical sense of Otherness that is at odds with reproductive, genital heterosexuality and the conventional gender codes and social behaviors that go along with that. Cutting a broad swath, I know. But while this use of the term can cause some confusion by becoming unwieldy (in that it encompasses so many types of sexuality and gender expression--homosexuality, bisexuality, transgenderism, asexuality, and so on), I think it's useful especially when trying to refer to characters like Gumb, whose approach to gender and sexuality are, I think we would all agree, radically "Other," but in ways that we can't definitively label. The fact that his sexuality is indeed "deeply twisted and abhorrent and alien" is itself proof of this Otherness. Indeed, I would say that the film's association of queer sexuality with twistedness and abhorrence is itself telling, because even as much as the film tries to disavow its homophobia, it's also undoubtedly fascinated with the very idea of queer sexuality as twisted and abhorrent and alien. The two could be seen as innately linked within the logic of the film: queerness, in the form of Gumb, is presented as something scary, crazy, and predatory.

To be clear, I am not implying that Gumb's sexuality is "the same" as that of gay or bi or trans people, most of whom do not express themselves by wearing other people's skin. What I am saying is that all of these sexualities are in some way seen as Other by dominant culture and that they are often met with fear or horror, and that we can therefore think of Gumb as, to take one somewhat obvious line of interpretation, a monstrous villain on whom a whole host of paranoid fears about queer people are being dumped, albeit in exaggerated forms. Gumb can be read as a kind of nightmare/funhouse-mirror vision of what hysterical straight people imagine queerness to entail. You're right that we don't really get insight into his internal state, but it seems undeniable to me that the film (made at a point in our cultural history when even to be a vanilla homosexual was to risk a fair amount of hostility for not being "normal") presents him as something other than "the norm" w/r/t gender and sexuality. For that reason alone we can consider this a representation of a queer character.

Nicely said. Thanks, ian, for stating so articulately some of the stuff I'd been groping toward in earlier posts. I appreciate the scholarship you're bringing to the table too.

Hmm, it was my impression that 'Queer' in the context of queer theory had a more specifically defined meaning than sheer otherness- again, that as a blanket term it usually does not encompass genuinely problematic sexual expression, pedophilia and so forth. If the term does include that, than any work depicting genuinely problematic expressions of sexuality is therefore automatically going to be depicting queerness, and queerness does include the inherently predatory and dangerous. At that point, how can one fault a film for depicting that?

It's also worth pointing out that Silence is a movie with two serial killers in it, and the one everyone remembers is the one who is a quintessential insider- there seems to be nothing sexualized in his killing, and his presentation is as a successful, powerful, intellectual white man. So certainly it doesn't have the simple dichotomy of outsiders=bad, insiders=good- indeed, most of the unpleasant people we spend a lot of time with are perfectly normal bureaucrats or cops.

ianthemovie wrote:but it seems undeniable to me that the film (made at a point in our cultural history when even to be a vanilla homosexual was to risk a fair amount of hostility for not being "normal") presents him as something other than "the norm" w/r/t gender and sexuality.

ianthemovie wrote:queerness, in the form of Gumb, is presented as something scary, crazy, and predatory.

The problem with statements like these is the "duh" factor. Trying to find the sinister import behind presenting a predatory serial killer with a sexual fixation as not normal is a paranoid reaction.

The risk of your argument is that it may bind you to a delusion. If every single non-normative sexuality is queer, then any presentation of violent, destructive, anti-social, psychotic, and unhealthy sexuality (which exist) gets lumped in with non-normative but healthy and benign sexualities in the definition you're using. Because the one now has to reflect on the other--since they are all now equivalently 'other'--you're in a position where you have to criticize any depiction of very real abhorrent sexualities, which then puts you in the position of wanting (implicitly or explicitly) these sexualities not to be depicted at all. And that would be to want to foster a delusion since they do exist. Please don't understand me to be saying this is definitely what you are, right now, doing. What I am saying is that this logic can only lead in that direction, and that is to start ignoring certain unpleasant realities for being unpleasant.

ianthemovie wrote:What I am saying is that all of these sexualities are in some way seen as Other by dominant culture and that they are often met with fear or horror, and that we can therefore think of Gumb as, to take one somewhat obvious line of interpretation, a monstrous villain on whom a whole host of paranoid fears about queer people are being dumped, albeit in exaggerated forms.

This is a kind of criticism that exists in the broadest possible terms taking the broadest possible view of the movie. But any attempt to deal with the depiction of Gumb in detail will demonstrate how such a reading does not hold up. I thought I had done that enough, but evidently it's not made much of an impression. One of the crucial points I've been trying to make is that Queer identities are, even to him, 'other.' He's so far outside healthy human feelings that even typically 'other' sexualities become normal or normative--that is, reflecting a healthy, functional human identity. They are his attempts to fit in. What we see Gumb doing is making a travesty of human identities like homosexuality and the transgendered and even women. So you're right that what Gumb displays is fearful and exaggerated, but this is not on behalf of the movie, this is on behalf of a character who has become a bloated grotesque and a mockery of a human because he pretends to be things he is not. He may on a superficial glance seem to exemplify paranoid fears of other sexualities, but the movie makes very clear that this is because he has perverted them into something they are not because he is trying to be something he is not and getting it deeply wrong. Jame Gumb is a man who cannot admit who he really is, what he really is. Because the film makes that explicit, I think it is free of the fears or hatreds you imply.

ianthemovie wrote:it's also undoubtedly fascinated with the very idea of queer sexuality as twisted and abhorrent and alien.

I see this as a kind of rhetorical trick. By saying it's fascinated with "queer sexuality" rather than "queer sexualities" you're making all of them, healthy or unhealthy, equivalent, but then attributing that equivalency to the the movie as if that were its argument. Then you say it's interested in queerness "as" twisted, as if twisted sexualities were this film's invention and not an unfortunate reality. Sexual predators who target young boys or who kill women to turn their body parts into clothing and furniture are not inventions, they are real. The film may well be fascinated with that kind of behaviour, but that is not the same as having posited those behaviours and their deeply troubling aspects in the first place.

To respond mainly to your comments, Sausage, I think the problem (for those who have a problem with the film being homophobic/transphobic) may be boiled down to this idea that real issues that affect many trans people (such as feeling alienated from one's biological body, wishing to have the body of the opposite gender, feeling like a freak or a monster, experimenting with wearing opposite-gendered clothing, trying to alter one's own body so that one can "pass" as male or female either by binding breasts or tucking one's penis, etc.) get twisted in LAMBS into a Grand Guignol version of what it means to be transgender via the genuinely reprehensible figure of Gumb (whether we want to call him queer or trans or someone who's trying to ape what it means to be trans). The film takes each of these aspects of transgender experience and translates it, to varying degree, into the realm of horror. It associates them with a character who is utterly beyond the pale, both psychologically and morally. Obviously, any sane audience member is going to react with horror to a character who tortures women and cuts off their skin, and I don't mean to suggest that people who have such a reaction to Gumb are homo/transphobic. It's more that the film gives us no choice but to react with horror to its sole representation of this kind of alternative gender identity because it is presented as inseparable from Gumb's general nastiness. As I said earlier, the film goes out of its way to present this character as not only psychopathic, but also non-normative with regard to his gender and sexuality. It makes very specific choices to show him altering his gender. And, as I suggested earlier, I would argue that this is one of the ways that it invites us to view him as crazy/sick/scary etc. It's that decision on the part of the film to associate gender-bending solely with twisted psycho killers that I think many members of the LGBT community object(ed) to.

Those interested in queer readings of LAMBS would probably do better to look up, say, Judith Halberstam's essay on the film (I checked on it; it's in her book SKIN SHOWS--though I haven't read it myself), or other queer scholarship on the film, than to try and get it from me, as I don't know how else to mount this argument. For a great beginners' introduction to the history of representations of LGBT characters on film, I would also highly recommend watching/reading THE CELLULOID CLOSET. LGBT characters have long been villainized on film, and LAMBS is, for all its merits, yet another example of this cultural trend. That's really all that this boils down to.

They don't get twisted by the movie though. Your problem is that you seem unable to separate the goals of the movie with one of its characters. Gumb in an attempt to normalize himself plays ordinary trans things as a horrorshow, but the film constantly reminds the audience how normal trans people are not like this. If anything the film goes beyond the call of duty in this regard and to describe as you do Gumb as a member of the LGBT community, something the book and film do not, is duplicating the offense you are accusing the film of.

Twice you used the term "boiled down." As long as you're reducing things, then yes, you are going find exactly what you're looking for because all attempts on behalf of the film to give complexity and shading to the psychology of its characters and its themes are removed, leaving you with a great lump of generalizations.

My main problem is that you're falling prey to confirmation bias. What you're doing is tracking down the reasons why you are right, and only them. If you want to find something you will always find it. What is much simpler and less prone to bias is to look for the reasons why you are wrong. First, identify clearly and specifically what you would need to find for your theory to be wrong. Second, look for it. If you find it, then you are wrong; if you don't, then you can assume you are right and go about assembling the evidence for your position.

Now, in order for me to be wrong, Silence of the Lambs needs to be doing these things:

A. have a villain with a generalized, non-specific pathology onto which all and any behaviours identified with the trans and gay communities can be placed indiscriminately, without concern for coherence, and who can therefore sum them up. An abstraction rather than a specific character, essentially. Phobic representations of the Other are always non-specific and generalized.

B. the movie offers no explicit or implicit distinction between trans and gay people on the one side and its villain on the other.

C. the villain's actions and perversities have no larger purpose in the themes or structure and exist as an end in themselves.

D. the film offers normative heterosexual males as its recommended or ideal identity.

I looked for them. I did not find them. In fact in the process of looking for them I came to a much clearer and more detailed understanding of how this movie works then I ever had before. A. Gumb's psychology is very specifically understood, is specifically described, and is developed according to the logic the movie has set for itself. He is a specific and not a generalized character. B. The movie, in at least two specific points, makes an explicit distinction between Gumb and actual transexuals. C. Gumb's pathology is integral to the structural and thematic apparatuses of the movie. D. Normative heterosexual males are almost unanimously painted in a negative light.

Because of the above, I am convinced my reading is unbiased and accurate. I am not convinced that yours is. It is too general, its terms are not specific enough, and it does not grapple with the evidence or arguments against its position.

Sausage, your close readings of Silence in this thread have been pretty awesome, and I've thoroughly enjoyed reading them all. Though I'm still not sure I agree with every conclusion you've made.

Mr Sausage wrote: Now, in order for me to be wrong, Silence of the Lambs needs to be doing these things:

A. have a villain with a generalized, non-specific pathology onto which all and any behaviours identified with the trans and gay communities can be placed indiscriminately, without concern for coherence, and who can therefore sum them up. An abstraction rather than a specific character, essentially. Phobic representations of the Other are always non-specific and generalized.

B. the movie offers no explicit or implicit distinction between trans and gay people on the one side and its villain on the other.

C. the villain's actions and perversities have no larger purpose in the themes or structure and exist as an end in themselves.

D. the film offers normative heterosexual males as its recommended or ideal identity.

A. I don't see this point as an either/or. Gumb is very much a complex and specific character with a precisely limned psychological backstory who, as Ian notes, nonetheless also partakes in a number of more generalized and potentially phobic representations of the other.

B. There's a difference between one line of dialogue and what we see Gumb doing in the rest of the film. The film offers up one verbal distinction, but zero dramatic ones. The way the audience learns about an important contrast in any film is to have the alternatives represented by other on-screen characters and to have the differences between them played out dramatically. There are a total of zero other-than-Gumb queer characters in Silence. If the real yet subtle distinction of Gumb's inauthentic queerness were as important to the story's creators as it seems to be to those on the other side of this argument, then don't you think we'd see at least one other character in the film to represent the normal healthy everyday queerness that the film otherwise only hints at the possibility of?

(This is where I think much of the contention in this thread is. We all seem to agree that there's a distinction is in the film. But we don't agree about how to interpret it, how much weight to give it in the whole, and how much more enlightened or less exploitative this distinction makes Silence vis-a-vis a film like Dressed.)

C. Mostly agree with you on this point. Though Ian seems to be saying that it isn't so much that the villain's perversities have no larger purpose (a purpose which you've unpacked quite meticulously and eloquently above), but that they are also at a certain point inextricably tied up in his broader sexual/gender otherness.

D. I'm not sure why heteronormativity is strictly the domain of straight males in this hypothetical. Or that the hetero males who end up being negatively portrayed in the film are meant to be understood as normative. And it seems to me that the good guys -- Starling, her FBI boss/mentor, her roommate and a number of supporting players -- are all squarely hetero and pretty positively portrayed (though not necessarily in ways that would foreground their sexuality as normative).

I don't think there's any reference at all to Starling's sexuality, so it seems off to assume it's either hetero- or homosexual. Also, her boss is actually kind of an asshole- if I recall correctly, there is at least one occasion where he basically benches her on the assumption that all the cracker sheriffs won't respect a female FBI agent.

I also don't see why it's necessary to have a representation of genuine transexuality for one to understand that what we see is an inaccurate representation- the sexual interests of most of the characters are irrelevant, really, and it would feel unbearably pandering and stupid to stick a trans best friend in for Clarice or something. And again, the assumption that doing so would be helpful is based on an inaccurate conflation of Gumb with the LGBTQ community.

warrenoates wrote:I don't see this point as an either/or. Gumb is very much a complex and specific character with a precisely limned psychological backstory who, as Ian notes, nonetheless also partakes in a number of more generalized and potentially phobic representations of the other.

"More" generalized? "Potentially" phobic? It seems like you're trying to make space for an argument in increasingly dwindling room. All of his behaviours relate to his specific, individual pathology. Any superficial resemblance to behaviours in the trans community is because the character is trying, superficially, to fit in to that community. A phobic representation of a marginalized community must always be--and always is--generalized and indiscriminate. The moment you have a specifically drawn character, that character becomes an individual and can no longer be a representation of a group or community. If your argument relies entirely on the mere association of gender-bending and a bad character, irrespective of the specifics of his depiction, you do not have a good one, but you do have one that you can use no matter how much evidence to the contrary you are offered.

warrenoates wrote: There's a difference between one line of dialogue and what we see Gumb doing in the rest of the film. The film offers up one verbal distinction, but zero dramatic ones. The way the audience learns about an important contrast in any film is to have the alternatives represented by other on-screen characters and to have the differences between them played out dramatically. There are a total of zero other-than-Gumb queer characters in Silence. If the real yet subtle distinction of Gumb's inauthentic queerness were as important to the story's creators as it seems to be to those on the other side of this argument, then don't you think we'd see at least one other character in the film to represent the normal healthy everyday queerness that the film otherwise only hints at the possibility of?

By the time you're shoe-horning in superfluous characters and narrative events to convince your audience that you're really not as trans-phobic as all that, you're obviously too insecure with the material and shouldn't be making it in the first place. Let's not lose sight of this film actually is, a psychological thriller, not a social picture. Not to mention that dramatizing the actual trans community through a single individual is a. going to make that character a generalization and therefore more liable to be actually phobic, b. invite viewers to draw explicit parallels between the two characters, since the one is only in the movie because the other is, which may serve to confuse and muddle the issue not to mention ruin the binary opposition between Gumb and Starling (with Lecter in the middle) that is so crucial to the film's structure by refocusing that binary on another, superfluous character. There is also no reason, dramatically or thematically, that the actual trans community needs to be dragged into this. They aren't at issue and they aren't the problem, so they should be left out of things. I don't think you have any specific reason to want all of this in the movie; I don't understand what about it would placate you as you just seem to dislike the very idea of a gender-bending serial killer. So there aren't any terms on which you're going to accept it.

I have two very clear things I ask a movie like this: is it confused, and is it liable to confuse people who are not confused or bigoted. No on both counts so it is fine with me.

Mr Sausage wrote:I have two very clear things I ask a movie like this: is it confused, and is it liable to confuse people who are not confused or bigoted. No on both counts so it is fine with me.

1) Probably not. But probably also not as definitively or rigorously as you'd have it be. 2) Yeah, maybe. Just based on my informal survey of a half dozen or so friends, none of whom would qualify by any measure as bigoted, who didn't remember that line about Bill being an inauthentic would-be tranny, but all of whom remember the images of Gumb in his get-up dancing around.

I have no problem with a gender-bending serial killer. Likewise, I have no problem with the film as it is. My problem is simply with some of you guys trying to make it appear as a more enlightened, responsible and queer-friendly film than it is. Because I don't think those considerations mattered much at all to Thomas Harris. And to the extent that they did matter to Demme, he (mistakenly I think) thought one line of explanatory dialogue would suffice.

As for how hard it would be to offer positive representations of queer sexuality in other characters by constrast? Well, I agree that it would be difficult to shoe-horn a real transperson in there. But that's not even what the film would need to seem as careful or enlightened as some of you would have it be. I'm simply asking for one of the good guys to be redrawn as a vanilla homo. Like I mentioned in another post, Tinker Tailor does this effortlessly in a much plottier film, making explicit a number of things that were only hinted at in the book and adding entirely new information about characters that wasn't in the novel. This openness about sexuality in the secret services was something that was explicitly on the agenda of the screenwriters and Le Carre for this new film adaptation. The contrast between Connie's matronly and probably celibate lesbianism, Peter Guillam's dutifully normal yet painfully concealed homosexual relationship and Bill Haydon's almost symbolically slippery (which side is he on?) bisexuality is clearly drawn in what's probably less than two minutes of screentime, while we're learning other things about these characters too. All of this isn't really what Tinker Tailor's about and yet it's there for anyone who wishes to notice. So, no, it wouldn't be nearly as difficult to create a dramatic contrast between different queer characters in Silence as you make it seem.

Well, arguably Tinker Tailor winds up being somewhat bi-phobic, as the thematically appropriate slipperiness you cite is actually a common and problematic prejudice both gay and straight people hold towards bi people- that they are insincere or indecisive. Having a noble, forcibly closeted gay figure alongside that doesn't actually do anything to alleviate that issue.

Well, I'll still have to disagree a little. Because, like Sausage has schooled us all, individual characters matter. Guillam's overall character -- his uprightness, his daring, his loyalty -- plus the few glimpses we see of his utterly domestic and normal gay relationship are contrasted completely with Haydon's arguably inauthentic bi-ness.

Spoiler

The only dramatized instance of Haydon's sexuality we see is his hetero cuckholding of Smiley's wife, which he fully admits latter was 100% about the spy game to him and nothing more. Haydon's sexuality is presented as a functional tool in his bag of espionage tricks and nothing more... unless you consider the implied relationship with Jim Prideaux, which may in fact be far deeper than friendship, in which case he's betrayed the only serious homosexual relationship we've seen him in too.

Which, again, plays into a common misperception of bisexual people, that their sexuality is inauthentic.

I don't actually think the movie winds up being biphobic, though I'd be prepared to be corrected on that- its attitude towards people's sexuality in general seems too relaxed and laissez-faire to really sustain any charges that it wanted you to make assumptions about the characters based on whom they want to fuck. I do think it's kind of a silly example of a movie where a possibly problematic depiction is redeemed by a good one, particularly as the type of sexuality being represented is different- and basically, I don't think that ever happens. You wind up with the Tonto problem, where you have a Good Indian and a bunch of Bad Indians, and that's often worse than just having the negative stereotypes.