It rubs the lotion on it’s skin
“The Silence of The Lambs” is film about a serial killer who skins women and makes a suit out of their skin. He is clearly not comfortable in his OWN skin so he wants to change it. He takes these women and literally cuts the skin off them and sews it together. He “suffers a kind of gender dysphoria that he thinks can be solved by covering himself in female skin… and he murders simply to gather the necessary fabric.”[i] Bill does not identify with any gender and this is why he is making a woman-suit and not trying to get a sex change. He is not woman, and he is not man. Our society would classify him as a man, but the point is that HE does not associate with that. “Buffalo Bill hates identity, he is simply at odds with any identity whatsoever; no body, no gender will do and so he has to sit at home with his skins and fashion a completely new one.”[ii] Bill does not feel that by wearing this woman suit he will somehow transform into a woman, he knows that he will still be a guy in a skin suit, but that places him in an awkward position, “Buffalo Bill symbolizes the problem of a kind of skin dis-ease.”[iii] He is not comfortable in his own skin.
Skin can be seen as the covering. What everyone else see’s, “[it] becomes a metaphor for surface, for the external; it is the place of pleasure and the site of pain; it is the thin sheet that masks bloody horror. But skin is also the movie screen, the destination of the gaze, the place that glows in the dark, the violated site of visual pleasure.”[iv] In this Halberstam, is saying that skin is what people view, and when watching a movie, the horror is projected onto a skin that you cannot look away from. This is like Bill in his inability to see his own skin a place where he wants to be. When Bill skins the girls he is not doing it because he gets pleasure from killing them, he does it only to attain the necessary parts to make his suit. We see this as a sick mutilation by a psycho, but in Bill’s mind he is just trying to climb into a skin where he can feel comfortable. This is like the sexual reassignment surgery that is preformed now a days. People can change their gender at whim, but it requires a cutting of the skin and playing around with the shape. This is similar to what Bill does, but he uses other people’s skin to do it. He doesn’t want to be changed, physically, but he wants to switch from gender to gender at any point he wishes. This is like a transgender person who feels that they are the opposite from what society has deemed them. Bill is not a transgender, but he is seeking to have no gender, a truly scary thing in our views.
[i] Halberstam, Judith. “Skinflick.” Skin Shows. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995. 164-165.
[ii] Ibid.
[iii] Ibid.
[iv] Ibid.
