Buffalo Bill (The Silence of the Lambs)

Hannibal Tetralogy character
File:Silencelamp7.jpg
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	1953
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

Jame Gumb (aka Buffalo Bill) is a fictional serial killer and 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

A serial killer, Gumb murders overweight women so he can remove their skin and fashion a "woman suit" for himself; he falsely 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 mother — an alcoholic prostitute who misspelled "James" on his birth certificate — and was taken into foster care at age two. He lived in foster homes until the age of 10, after which he was adopted by his grandparents, who became his first victims when he killed them at the age of 12. After being released from a juvenile facility when he was 19, he went on to serve in the Navy. He began the "Buffalo Bill" murders by killing a girlfriend named Fredrica Bimmel. Hers is the third body found and the only one Gumb attempts to hide, by weighing it down in a riverbed.

Gumb's modus operandi 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. In the first three cases he led the victims upstairs under the belief that they were to be offered a shower. He then slipped a noose around their necks and pushed them from the stairs, strangling them. In the case of the fourth victim, he shoots and skins her, places a Death's Head moth in her throat and dumps the body. 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. 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 Republican U.S. Senator Ruth Martin. Then-FBI trainee Clarice Starling enlists Hannibal Lecter's help in tracking Gumb down, as Lecter had met Gumb while treating Benjamin Raspail, Gumb's one-time lover. 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 Calumet City, Illinois 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." Following the elderly woman's death, Gumb inherited her house and began 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. Martin is rescued, and Starling becomes a hero, as well as a full-fledged agent.

Character notes and controversy

The film's screenwriter, Ted Tally, does not delve too deeply into Gumb's pathology; in the movie, however, Lecter summarizes Gumb's 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, but merely 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 shown in Gumb's bedroom, although 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.

Influences

Harris based Gumb on five real-life serial killers:

• Jerry Brudos, who would dress up in his victims' clothing and keep their shoes.
• Ed Gein, who fashioned trophies and keepsakes from their bones and skin.
• Ted Bundy, who pretended to be injured and asked his victims for help, and then incapacitated and killed them.
• Gary M. Heidnik, who kidnapped six 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".

In popular culture

• The rapper Eminem uses the quote "She puts the lotion in the bucket, it puts the lotion on the skin, or else it gets the hose again" in his single 3 a.m., from the album Relapse.
• In the film Joe Dirt, the main character visits the house of "Buffalo Bob" and the famous lotion scene is parodied.
• In the film Clerks 2 Jason Mewes recreates the character's famous dance scene from The Silence of the Lambs, complete with Goodbye Horses, as Jay.
• In the cartoon Family Guy, During the Episode "Stuck Together, Torn Apart" Stewie Griffin Quotes "It rubs the lotion on its skin, or else it gets the hose again" after he finds a girl (later revealed to be an adult midgit) in a well.
• Seth Green stated on The Late Late Show and in a commentary that Gumb's voice was his inspiration for the character of Chris Griffin on Family Guy. Chris would later do the same dance as Buffalo Bill did in the episode "Stew-Roids".
• In the cartoon "South Park", during the episode "Bebe's Boobs Destroy Society", Eric Cartman plays a game he calls 'Lambs' involving placing one of his dolls in a pit in his basement and torturing her telling the doll "It puts the lotion on its skin, or else it gets the hose again!"