Jame Gumb
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Hannibal Tetralogy character | |
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| 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. | He kidnaps by feigning disability and lures victims into his van. He leaves his victim in a deep pit for a few days, then he shoots them and partially skins the victim to sew together with skins of other victims. |
| Weapon of Choice: | Pistol |
| Cause of death: | Shot by Clarice Starling |
| Portrayed by: | Ted Levine |
Jame Gumb (aka Buffalo Bill) is a fictional character 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.
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[edit] Character overview
Gumb kidnaps overweight women so he can starve them. He starves them so that their skin is much looser so after he murders them he can more easily remove their skin to fashion a "woman suit" for himself. He considers himself 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."
[edit] 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 impulsively murdered 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 leads the victims upstairs under the belief that they were to be offered a shower, and slips 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 serial killer 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 will 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.
[edit] Character notes and controversy
The film's screenwriter, Ted Tally, does not delve too deeply into Gumb's past; 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.[1] 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. 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.
[edit] Influences
Harris based Gumb on five real-life serial killers:[2][3]
- 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."
[edit] In popular culture
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Lists of miscellaneous information should be avoided. Please relocate any relevant information into appropriate sections or articles. (September 2009) |
- 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 Relapse: Refill, the re-release of Relapse, there is a track entitled Buffalo Bill.
- 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 "American Dad" episode "Tears of a Clooney" "Francine Smith" stalks "Stan Smith" in the dark with night vision goggles and a barbers razor.
- In the Family Guy 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 midget) in a well.
- In the "Family Guy" episode "Stew-Roids" Chris Griffin is humiliated by his sister when she shows a video of him doing a reenactment of Buffalo Bill's famous dance. He replaces "Would you fuck me? I'd Fuck me." with "Would you do me? I'd do me."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.
- In the South Park 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!"
- In The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy, Billy threatens Grim to put the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again.
- In the Queens of the Stone Age song "Turing on the Screw", Josh Homme quotes Bill's line, "It puts the lotion in the basket".
- The Greenskeepers' song Lotion is written from the viewpoint of Gumb. It includes the line "put the fucking lotion in the basket".
[edit] References
- ^ http://www.commonsensemedia.org/movie-reviews/Silence-Lambs.html
- ^ Bruno, Anthony. "Buffalo Bill" page 2 - "All About Hannibal Lecter - Facts and Fiction" @ Crime Library.com
- ^ Bowman, David."Profiler" Interview with John E. Douglas @ Salon.com July 8, 1999.
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