Buffalo Bill (The Silence of the Lambs)

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Hannibal Tetralogy character

Buffalo Bill
Real Name	Jame Gumb (a misprint of James Gumb)
Other Aliases	Jack Gordon, John Grant, Mr. Hide, William "Billy" Rubin (he did not ever go by this name himself)
Gender	Male
Race	Caucasian
Relationships	Benjamin Raspail (lover)
M.O.	Skinning of victims.
Weapon of Choice:	Pistol.
Portrayed by:	Ted Levine

Buffalo Bill is a fictional character featured in the 1988 novel The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris and its 1991 movie adaptation, in which he was played by Ted Levine.

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

1 In the novel
2 Character notes and controversy
3 Parodies
4 Influences

[edit] In the novel

Bill's real name was "Jame Gumb" ("James" was misspelled on his birth certificate, and he insisted that it be pronounced as such.) A serial killer, he murdered overweight women so he could remove their skin and fashion a "woman suit" for himself; he believed himself to be transsexual but was too disturbed to qualify for sex reassignment surgery. He became 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 said "This one likes to skin his humps."

The novel reveals that Gumb was abandoned by his prostitute 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. Gumb had transitory relationships with both men and women, most notably with Benjamin Raspail, one of Dr. Hannibal Lecter's future victims. Raspail left him when he murdered a transient and "did things" with the skin. He later killed Raspail's lover, a Norwegian sailor named Klaus, and made himself an apron of his skin.

He began the "Buffalo Bill" murders in 1983 by killing a girlfriend named Frederica Bimmel in a fit of rage. Bimmel's was the third body found and the only one Gumb attempted to hide, by weighting it down in a riverbed.

Gumb's modus operandi was 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 had a woman in his house, he would keep her alive for three days, starving her so her skin would be loose enough to easily remove, and then kill her either with a revolver or by hanging, and strip her skin off. He would then place a Death's Head moth in her throat — he was fascinated by their metamorphosis, a process he wanted to undergo by becoming a woman — and dump the body. He planned to eventually make a "woman suit" for himself. (In one of the film's most famous scenes, he dances around in part of the suit as one of his victims screamed for help offscreen.)

Gumb thought of his victims more as things than people, referring to them as "it" (hence the line "It rubs the lotion on its skin, or else it gets the hose again.")

The FBI intensified the manhunt for Gumb when he kidnapped Catherine Martin, the daughter of a US senator. Then-FBI trainee Clarice Starling enlisted Lecter's help in tracking him down, as Lecter had met him while treating Raspail. Lecter gave Starling a series of cryptic clues to Gumb's identity, but never revealed his name in hopes that Starling would figure it out for herself. She eventually deciphered one of the doctor's riddles — "This man covets, and how do we begin to covet? We covet what we see every day" — and realized that Gumb knew his first victim, Bimmel.

Starling's mentor, FBI Director Jack Crawford, told her that they already knew Gumb was the killer, and sent her to Bimmel's hometown of Belvedere, Ohio to investigate the tie between Gumb and his victim. Crawford would find out, too late, that the address supplied in Gumb's file was merely a business office.

Starling, meanwhile, went 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 was living in her house and using it as a torture chamber for his victims.) Starling realized who he really was when she saw a Death's Head Moth flutter by and ordered him to surrender. Gumb fled into the basement and stalked her with night vision goggles as she stumbled around in the dark, but she heard him behind her just in time to open fire and kill him. Martin was rescued, and Starling became a hero, as well as a full-fledged agent.

[edit] Character notes and controversy

Although neither Harris nor Silence of the Lambs screenwriter Ted Tally delved too deeply into Gumb's past, in the movie Lecter summarized his life thus: "Billy was not born a monster, but made one by years of systematic abuse." The same thing was said about Francis Dolarhyde in Red Dragon, although certain events from Dolarhyde's past are explained in greater detail, most notably his abuse at the hands of his sadistic grandmother.

The movie adaptation of Silence of the Lambs was criticized by some gay rights groups for its portrayal of the sociopathic Gumb as bisexual and transsexual. Equally controversial was the swastika-laden quilt Gumb had in his bedroom, although it is never directly stated that he was anti-Semitic. It is worth noting that morbid interest in Nazi paraphernalia and war atrocities is not uncommon among serial killers. [1]

[edit] Parodies

Buffalo Bill was parodied in the film Joe Dirt, as a backwards murderer who locks up the main character in a well with the line "It puts the lotion on. You have no idea what kind of hell I can bring you!"

His dance is also parodied in Kevin Smith's film Clerks II, performed by his running characters Jay & Silent Bob.

The Chicago electronica group The Greenskeepers released a song, "Lotion," in which the chorus is Bill's command "It rubs the lotion on its skin, or else it gets the hose again."

The line "It rubs the lotion on the skin" is featured in an episode of the American sitcom Scrubs.

The line "It rubs the lotion on its skin, or else it gets the hose again" is also featured in an episode of the sitcom South Park & Family Guy.

[edit] Influences

Harris may have based Gumb on four real-life serial killers:

Ed Gein, who murdered two women and dug up several graves to make a "woman suit" for himself.
Ed Kemper, who, like Gumb, killed his grandparents as a teenager "just to see what it felt like".
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.