Little was known about transgenderism when Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs was released 35 years ago. “Trans” may or may not have been a term back then, but it certainly wasn’t commonly used.
Ted Levine, who played Lambs’ sexually perverse, cross-dressing serial killer Jame Gumb a.k.a.”Buffalo Bill”, has told THR’s Ryan Gajewski that he feels unsettled about Lambs having instilled a negative image of gender nonconforming trans folk.
Was Jame Gumb a transgender whatever? Not as I recall. He wore lipstick and eyeliner at home, but he sure as hell looked and talked like a regular dude when Jodie Foster’s Clarice Starling paid him a visit in Act Three.
Then again it’s not as if the real-life record of trans loners and depressives is completely unblemished.
While rightwing social media types have been pushing claims that trans persons are disproportionately responsible for mass shootings, snopes.com says this is false — it reports that the vast majority of mass shooting wackos have been straight or “cis” males.
Then again trans or trans-allied shooters have been associated with at least five horrific mass shootings (the recent Canadian school slaughter and the 2023 Memphis school shooting among them).
The Silence of the Lambs, by the way, is not a horror film — it’s a chilling, character driven, high-octane investigative thriller.
