CADEN GARDNER (cont.): ...Yes, let us beginning the dialogue over Jame Gumb aka Buffalo Bill. You noted in how he is shot versus Lector and a lot of that comes from how the audience enters their spaces. Clarice talks to Lector while we see Gumb entrap a female victim and then keep her down in a hole in his closed off home. When Lector talks to Clarice, it's always at eye-level, the same talk directly to the camera close-up that Clarice has, what Clarice sees and the audience sees. Gumb doesn't really have that shot, not until I believe Clarice pays a visit. Gumb is shot from the point of view of Brooke Smith's Catherine Martin, looking up at him from the hole, while in peril. The imbalance and danger could not be more obvious. Gumb and Hannibal are both monsters, but of a different kind. Hannibal is never answering for his crimes, but he is talking about Gumb with Clarice. Notably, he does not deem Gumb as transgender, agreeing with the medical community that denied Gumb getting sex-change surgery. Rather, somebody lost and searching for something elusive. Whether you consider Gumb trans or fall more in line with Lector's assessment, there is something tragic. As the audience, we never get to directly hear about Gumb's inner turmoil from Gumb himself to figure out why he identified trans at some point. Yes, he is a murderer and does these terrible, elaborate things that Clarice defensively (I always kind of love how quickly she jumps in to note that transgender people are quite the opposite of violent killers when talking with Lector) notes is not the norm for being trans, so it is not a cause, catalyst, or trigger, but I do agree there is a level of sympathy that Demme gives Gumb. There is something about Ted Levine's cry of, 'You don't know what pain is!' towards Catherine that sticks with me. It is in such a way to suggest that Gumb has internalized a lot in grappling with himself that, as you said, I think a lot of audiences in 1991 don't understand. But with that moment Demme puts it out there that, yes, we, well, the rest of the audience who have not identified as trans, do not understand Gumb's pain at all.
WILLOW MACLAY: I love you response here, and I agree with almost all of your points. I think some of the more interesting characteristics of Gumb lay in these wrinkles we get into his inner life. He has these feminine urges that are twisted by circumstance. He loves to sew, but in a gendered sense it isn't acceptable so it becomes tortured and vile. He carries around a very small cute dog, which is coded as feminine, but his gigantic hairy arms kind of upset the stereotypically feminine. He doesn't know how to engage with his own femininity in a way that isn't violent because it's been kept away from him. At one point he did identify as transgender. That is deliberate text within the movie, and doctors did deny him a sex change operation. Which I think is some of the only inner information we get about Gumb. Gumb has a lot of depth as a character, especially as a serial killer. Where we're usually given these interpretations of evil that are bluntly symptomatic of something wrong within the nature of the soul, and Gumb might have the same issues, but something is amiss and he's gone out of his way to fix it in the only way he knows how. I think you're absolutely right about the "you don't know what pain is!" line which is given with such great ferocity from Levine, who I think is very good in this role.That line reading in particular is probably Gumb's best moment, because it does open an inner window into his life that he has struggled beyond all recognition to fix a problem and is ferociously angry about it in a way that has completely ruined him. Circumstances...
