The Silence Of The Lambs Analysis

The Chicago murder rate has risen rapidly since 2013. The murder rate peaked in 2001 with 23.0 per 100,000 residents and has more than tripled New York City’s rate of 7.0 per 100,000 residents (“Crime Rate in Chicago, Illinois”) while in 2015, the murder rate was 17.5 per 100,000 residents (“Crime Rate in Chicago, Illinois”). Seeing that the Midwest is the second highest region for violence crimes in the United States, it’s clear where Thomas Harris, the author of the Hannibal series, found his inspiration for the primary antagonist, Jame “Buffalo Bill” Gumb, in his psychological thriller The Silence of the Lambs. Thomas Harris crafted his bone-chilling antagonist, Jame “Buffalo Bill” Gumb in his iconic novel, The Silence of the Lambs, on Henry

In a like manner, Buffalo Bill would call his victims ‘it’, showing how he also didn’t see his victims as people, but rather something he had the right to dismantle.Some killers used dehumanization to keep their morals balanced, yet Holmes and Buffalo Bill felt no remorse towards these women; Dehumanizing, to these killers, drove power into their minds, yet they each developed this objectification in different ways. Though Holmes believed that he was “born with the devil in [him],” (109) and that he “could not help the fact that [he] was a murderer, no more than the poet can help the inspiration to sing,” (109) which explained is reasoning for degrading, Buffalo Bill “wasn’t born a criminal [...] He was made one through years of systematic abuse,” (Talley). Buffalo Bill had a poor relationship with his mother, a drunk prostitute that gave him up for adoption at the age of two. This relationship to his mother actually was inspired by the South Dakota-born “Lust Killer”, Jerome “Jerry” Brudos, who also inspired Buffalo Bill’s transsexuality. Brudos’ rejection from his own mother who wanted him to be her daughter (Bovsun) and Buffalo Bill’s rejection for transsexual surgery from John Hopkins, University of Minnesota, and Columbus Medical Center fueled their need to change themselves into what their insecure minds want them to be: women. The

Holmes’ castle hosted “a wooden chute that would descend from a secret location on the second floor all the way to the basement, a walk-in vault with airtight seams and asbestos-coated iron walls; a gas jet embedded in one wall that could be controlled from his closet; large basement with hidden chambers and a basement for the permanent storage of sensitive material,” (Larson 66-67). The castle was constructed as a maze, used to confuse any guest that walked through the halls. Similarly, Buffalo Bill’s basement was designed as a maze which contained a large pit to cage his victims in. The layout was twisted enough that it cause Clarice Starling, the detective on the case, to struggle through the tight halls while Buffalo Bill could easily stalk her. Another inspiration for the dungeon was shadowed Edward Gein’s Wisconsin slaughterhouse. In Gein’s basement, he “butchered the [bodies he would dig up or kill himself] with care, keeping several heads, sex organs, livers, hearts and intestines, before discarding human parts that held no interest for him [...] [and] employed noses, lips and labia to fashion mobiles he positioned about the kitchen and even used human skin to fashion lampshades, waste cans and coverlets for chairs,” (Biography.com Editors). He, like Holmes, would experiment with the corpses, but he also practiced taxidermy and indulged