What Jame Gumb (aka “Buffalo Bill”) does to his victims is a crime, but calling it that seems insufficient. When Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) finally puts him down, it is not an act of punishment but self-preservation. Perhaps because of centuries of rhetorical appropriation, it is easy to forget that American religious and legal institutions are a synthesis of two very different cultural traditions.
I have argued elsewhere that Clarice can and should be read as a “Christ figure,” but doing so only serves to underline the at times ambivalent, at times contradictory notions about punishment that the contemporary church tries miserably to balance. Clarice is most like Christ in that she suffers, saves, and sacrifices. Yet when she descends into a basement hell to free the captive, she does so not as an invincible deux-ex-machina arriving to dole out vengeance but as a shockingly vulnerable agent of law.
Twelve years before The Silence of the Lambs appeared on the Crime and Punishment list, it landed in a similar position on the first themed Arts & Faith list as a horror film. In the interim, much has changed in our culture, rendering the use of the gay/trans serial killer trope even more problematic than it was in the preceding decades. The film asserts — through Dr. Lecter — that Bill is not a “true” transexual but only thinks he is. Do we consider Bill and Lecter monsters because of what they do or who they are?
FBI profiler John Douglas (the model for Scott Glenn’s character in Lambs) has argued in his books that those who are anti-death penalty must be willing to look squarely at the most heinous, depraved crimes and consider the demoralizing consequences of meeting them with anything other than the ultimate punishment. If it is possible to look at the deeds of Buffalo Bill and, like God, take no joy in the death of the wicked, it may be so only when we come to see some punishments as tragic necessities rather than cathartic choices. — Kenneth R. Morefield (2024)
Arts & Faith Lists:
2012 Top 25 Horror Films — #23
2024 Top 25 Crime and Punishment Films — #24