Hollywood media just dropped an embarrassing 35th anniversary piece on The Silence of the Lambs, the critically acclaimed thriller from 1991 starring Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins. In a Valentine’s Day post entitled “‘Silence of the Lambs’ Team Reckons With Transphobia Criticism: “There’s Regret” The Hollywood Reporter featured an interview with Ted Levine, the actor who portrayed Buffalo Bill (aka Jame Gumb, the skin-suit psycho). The actor now says he has “regrets” over “unfortunate” lines that supposedly don’t “hold up too well” in the modern era. Producer Edward Saxon also piles on in the piece, confessing the filmmakers weren’t “sensitive enough” to stereotypes, and THR (and the trans-activists) are gobbling it up like candy, particularly after capping the piece off with some Trump blame.
This actually isn’t a new complaint. They’ve spent decades whining that this fictional monster, based on Ed Gein (a grave-digging ghoul that stitched mom-suits from corpses), is actually some kind of slur against the LGBTQ+ community, even going so far as to organizing a large-scale protest at the 64th Academy Awards in 1992. I’m scratching my head at all of this, wondering if any of these snowflakes even saw the movie, much less read the book. Levine never actually names any”wrong” lines that were spoken or crossed. Just hand-wavy virtue mumbling.
Levine told THR about his “complicated feelings” over playing Buffalo Bill and the film’s representation of gender, saying “it’s unfortunate that the film vilified that, and it’s f***ing wrong,” adding that he’s “wiser now about transgender issues” insisting that he never played Gumb as gay or trans, just a “deeply troubled heterosexual man.” At least he got that last part right. I guess the real problem with the story was all the “transphobia,” not the serial killer starving women to skin them for a body suit.
But why the groveling now? If you actually watch The Silence of the Lambs or crack open Thomas Harris’s 1988 book that it’s based on, it’s obvious: Buffalo Bill isn’t even technically trans. Hannibal Lecter lays it out plain as day to Clarice Starling telling her “Billy’s not a real transsexual, but he thinks he is. He wants to be.” Lecter explicitly states that Gumb is someone who hates himself and is searching for a new identity, these snowflakes obviously felt this was a distinction without a difference for the average viewer. Guess maybe it touched a nerve.
The movie actually bends over backward to defend real transsexuals when a doctor tells the feds they’re “very passive” and want zero ties to this freak who flays women for outfits. Gumb flunked every psych eval for sex-change surgery because he’s a stone-cold psychopath. The FBI sniffed him out using those rejection records. Did these trans-activists skip over that part? Or maybe they never even watched it and only know how to feel about it from what they’ve been told to feel about it. Gumb was just a jealous creep dreaming of wearing real women like skins. Textbook auto-gynephilia with a psychopath streak.
Maybe the problem is that the film actually spotlights how doctors used to have a spine. Years of real therapy were prescribed before any hormones or the knife were applied to a transgender person. No drive-thru mutilations back then. Nowadays, kids get rushed into this mess by woke parents and cash-grabbing surgeons. Many end up with regret, wrecked bodies, and raging despair. Troubling reports also keep piling up about how more “transgender”-identified folks are behind recent mass shootings and extreme violence, likely due to SSRIs, transition-trauma frying their brains, and online, radical echo chambers.
For the rest of us normies, The Silence of the Lambs was actually considered a straight-up feminist powerhouse back in 1991. It wasn’t another slasher flick turning dead women into softcore eye candy. No leering at naked victims or slut-shaming in this horror thriller. In the film, one of the kidnapping victims is down in a pit yelling at her attacker in bold defiance, keeping her grit, and eventually clawing her way out. Heroic as hell. This was groundbreaking for real women. Clarice Starling was a believable, strong, female protagonist for the ages. Unlike today’s unbelievable “action heroines,” Jodie Foster’s character prevailed using her intuition, empathy, and intelligence rather than physical force alone.
It’s just a fantastic film, but one that’s now being buried under worries about how it may have hurt the feelings of a niche community. Real evil doesn’t check identity boxes, but Hollywood does. And according to today’s unwritten rules of entertainment, villains have to be straight white dudes. No trans baddies, no gay psychos. You can be certain we won’t have any horror thrillers movies based on reports about Jesse Strang, Rober Paul Westman, or Audrey Hale. How long before all of our favorite classic movies are trashed for not meeting Hollywood’s ever-shifting progressive standards?
And it’s sad to watch Levine and Saxon cave to activists who milk victimhood 24/7, demanding the world baby their obvious instability. Hollywood has been radicalized and feminized into a sniveling apology machine, chasing DEI brownie points while entertainment withers. Identity politics has resulted in a deluge of corporate blandness rather than entertainment. This is peak woke rot. The Silence of the Lambs roared because it faced real-world monsters head-on. Now the industry’s collapsing under its own spineless weight right before our very eyes.
Stop tucking and grow a pair, Tinseltown.
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English (US) · 