Popular Culture Review Vol. 2, No. 2, July 1991 | Page 50
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The Popular Culture Review
He knows the answers to all of Clarise's questions but he wants her to
look within herself for them. He has always known the identity of
Buffalo Bill. He is moved to help with the case only through his
attraction to Clarise.
That the film is shot almost entirely in faded blues and grays
with splashes of red associated only with Lector further asserts not
only his character (cannibal) but his dominance as well. Unlike
Clarise and the others who restrain and repress their inner passions
and present only a faded mask drained of color and truth, he is whole,
flesh and mind. Red bathe s Clarise’s face as she views a photo
indicating Lector’s cannibalistic tendencies. Reds and golds surround
him in his cell in the Shelby County War Museum. Blue is cool and
analytical. It is the color of most police uniforms. It represents the
world of which Clarise wishes to become a part. Red is passion. It is
emotional. It represents all things which frighten Clarise, all the
things from which she is running away.
Lector confronts her with the sexuality which she has tried to
repress, with the responsibility she feels for her being different (i.e.,
attracting the stares of men and exciting them sexually, exciting them
to violence by merely existing). Lector draws upon her feelings to find
the answers to her questions and rejects her textbook analyses. The
reason she does not recognize Buffalo Bill’s pathology is that it is too
close to her own. The reason she is so easily led astray by surface
details is she is unaware of her own self-denial~her own struggle for
acceptance through transformation.
Lector helps Clarise by explaining Buffalo Bill to her,
explaining that he is not a homosexual/transsexual but only affects
those mannerisms to conform to the expectations he believes society
has of him. The audience, however, comes to know him visually
through the animal/insect symbolism which surrounds him. The
camera travels through his house, concerned with the clutter of
objects piled on top of one another, not him. The Death’s Head Moth
is his calling card. The sewing room of the first victim is papered in a
butterfly print with a couple of inches of horses and saddles left
exposed around the doorjambs to show this had once been a boy’s room.
It is here in this room that Clarise realizes that she is close to finding
him. Buffalo Bill owns a white toy poodle, the most effeminate of
all dogs. Again and again Buffalo Bill is described visually through
effeminate mannerisms and images of transformation and while they