Which brings us back to The Silence of the Lambs, the still-controversial masterpiece from which Clarice springs, and the legacy of transphobia that emerged in its wake. People understandably focus on the scene in which the serial killer Buffalo Bill puts on his makeup and tucks in front of the mirror — but that’s not the real Bill, just a self-aggrandizing fantasy. No, the real Bill comes out when he’s taunting Catherine Martin by mocking her screams in the bottom of that well, pulling at his shirt to mimic having breasts in a cruel pantomime of womanhood, one meant to insult and injure. (I mean, in that tucking scene, he is wearing a dead woman’s scalp as a wig.) As both Hannibal Lecter and Clarice herself say in The Silence of the Lambs, Bill isn’t trans. He’s just a dime-a-dozen misogynist, killing women because he hates and resents them, not because he is one himself.
But within the world of Clarice, the discourse around Bill’s crimes is no more nuanced than the one around The Silence of the Lambs was when it came out 30 years ago. Transphobic shitheads are always going to use Bill as a cudgel; given that Clarice is built around Bill much more so than around even Hannibal the Cannibal, it behooves the show to address this head-on. Giving voice to these concerns, hiring a trans actress to play a trans woman in order to articulate them, making the point that the silences (pun almost certainly intended) around Bill and his place in popular culture are as damaging in their own way as an affirmative assertion of his illusory trans-ness would have been — these are worthwhile moves to have made.
I reviewed last night’s episode of Clarice for Vulture.
Tags: clarice, hannibal, reviews, the silence of the lambs, TV, TV reviews, vulture