Buffalo Bill (character)

Hannibal Tetralogy character
File:Silencelamp7.jpg
Buffalo Bill
Real Name	Jame Gumb (a misprint of James Gumb)
Aliases	Mr. Hide John Grant Jack Gordon Jamie Gumb
Nicknames/ Other	"Buffalo Bill", (William) "Billy" Rubin (novel name Lecter gives), Louis Friend (film name Lecter gives)
Gender	Male
Race	Caucasian
Birth	1948
Relationships	Benjamin Raspail (Lover) Fredrica Bimmel (Girlfriend, later victim)
M.O.	Kidnapping by acting disabled and getting people in his van. Leaving his victim in a pit for a few days, then partially skinning the victim for use of skin.
Cause of death:	Shot by Clarice Starling
Portrayed by:	Ted Levine

Buffalo Bill is the main antagonist in the 1988 novel The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris, and its 1991 film adaptation, in which he was played by Ted Levine.

Character overview

Bill's real name is Jame Gumb ("James" was misspelled on his birth certificate). A serial killer, he murders overweight women so he can remove their skin and fashion a "woman suit" for himself; he believes himself to be transsexual but is too disturbed to qualify for sex reassignment surgery. He becomes known as "Buffalo Bill" during his murder spree because of an off-color joke by Kansas City homicide detectives; upon discovering his first victim, the detectives say "This one likes to skin his humps."

Character history

The novel reveals that Gumb was abandoned by his alcoholic mother, and raised by his grandparents, who became his first victims when he killed them impulsively as a teenager. After being released from a juvenile facility, he went on to serve in the Navy. He begins the "Buffalo Bill" murders by killing a girlfriend named Fredrica Bimmel. Bimmel's is the third body found and the only one Gumb attempts to hide, by weighting it down in a riverbed.

Gumb's method is to kidnap a woman by approaching her pretending to be injured, asking for help loading something heavy into his van, and then knocking her out in a surprise attack from behind. Once he has a woman in his house, he starves her until her skin is loose enough to easily remove, then shoots and skins her, and dumps the body. He then places a Death's Head moth in her throat. He is fascinated by the moths' metamorphosis, a process he wants to undergo by becoming a woman. In one of the film's more infamous scenes, he dances around with his penis tucked between his legs, wearing a silk cape which he flourishes like butterfly wings--as one of his victims works towards her escape offscreen. Gumb thinks of his victims as things rather than people, often referring to his victims as "it", e.g., "It rubs the lotion on its skin, or else it gets the hose again."

The FBI intensifies the manhunt for Gumb when he kidnaps Catherine Martin, the daughter of U.S. Senator Ruth Martin. Then-FBI trainee Clarice Starling enlists Lecter's help in tracking him down, as Lecter had met him while treating Benjamin Raspail, a lover of Gumb's. Lecter gives Starling a series of cryptic clues to Gumb's identity, but never reveals his name in hopes that Starling would figure it out for herself. She eventually deciphers one of the doctor's riddles — "We covet what we see every day" — and realizes that Gumb knew his first victim, Bimmel.

Starling convinces her mentor, FBI Director Jack Crawford, to allow her to follow up on the lead. She travels to Belvedere, Ohio, Bimmel's hometown, to question her family and acquaintances. Over the phone she is informed that the FBI has learned the name of the killer and is deploying to Chicago with the FBI Hostage Rescue Team to take him down.

Starling, meanwhile, goes to the house of a Mrs. Lippman, Bimmel's elderly employer, only to find Gumb himself, calling himself "Jack Gordon." Gumb had killed the old woman, and is living in her house and using it as a torture chamber for his victims. Starling realizes who he really is when she sees a Death's Head Moth flutter by, and orders him to surrender. Gumb flees into the basement with Starling in pursuit, and then cuts power to the basement and stalks her with night vision goggles. As he cocks his revolver, Starling instinctively fires at the sound, killing him. With his dying breath, Gumb asks Starling how it feels to be beautiful. Martin is rescued, and Starling becomes a hero, as well as a full-fledged agent.

Character notes and controversy

The movie screenwriter Ted Tally does not delve too deeply into Gumb's pathology, but, in the movie, Lecter summarizes his life thus: "Billy was not born a criminal, but made one by years of systematic abuse."

The film adaptation of Silence of the Lambs was criticized by some gay rights groups for its portrayal of the sociopathic Gumb as bisexual and transsexual. A Johns Hopkins sex-reassignment surgeon, present in the book but not the film, protests the exact same thing; Crawford pacifies him by repeating that Gumb is not in fact transsexual, though he believes himself to be. In the film, a similar scene is shown with Starling and Lecter in the same roles as the surgeon and Crawford, respectively. Also controversial was the swastika-laden quilt Gumb had in his bedroom. It is never directly stated that he is anti-Semitic. In the director's commentary for the 1991 film, director Jonathan Demme draws attention to various Polaroids taken of Buffalo Bill in the company of strippers; these are visible in Gumb's basement in the film.

Similarities Between Buffalo Bill and Francis Dolarhyde

Jame Gumb shares many similarities between himself and Francis Dolarhyde from Red Dragon.

The first, and most obvious is their hatred of their own personal identity. Dolarhyde was convinced by his abusive grandmother that he is ugly at an early age, which is why he breaks all the mirrors in his victim's houses and is often angered or driven to kill by what others say about the way he looks, even if what they say is not meant as an insult. Gumb was also abused to the point where he hated his own identity so much that he came to believe he was a transexual. There is also the fact that they both care about something or someone despite their ruthless and potentially insane nature. In the case of Jame Gumb, it was his poodle, Precious. In the case of Dolarhyde, it was Reba Mcclaren, a blind woman he had met and who was attracted to him, not knowing that he was a killer. In the case of their murders, they both leave a calling card. For Dolarhyde, it was stabbed eyes with peices of glass from the broken mirrors and a symbol he carved into a tree as the sign of the Red Dragon. Gumb left the women's clothes out that he killed, sliced up the back and eventually removed the women's skin after three days and dumping them in a river. Gumb also shoved Deaths Head Moth cocoon down the victim's throat.

Influences

Harris based Gumb on five real-life killers:

• John Wayne Gacy, who like Gumb was a Bisexual and stored his victims in an underground chamber in his home.
• Ed Gein, who murdered two women and dug up several graves to make a "woman suit" for himself.
• Ted Bundy, who pretended to be injured and asked his victims for help, and then incapacitated and killed them.
• Gary Heidnik, who kidnapped five women and held them hostage as sex slaves.
• Edmund Kemper, who, like Gumb, killed his grandparents as a teenager "just to see what it felt like".