Exploring the theory that Hannibal Lecter created Buffalo Bill in ‘The Silence of the Lambs’
Anthony Hopkins only required 16 minutes of screentime to turn Hannibal Lecter into one of the most iconic antagonists in cinematic history, with the more muted reception to his returns indicating that less is more when it comes to the cannibalistic character.
Winning an Academy Award for ‘Best Actor’ when The Silence of the Lambs swept the board to become only the third film in history to net the ‘Big Five’, Hopkins himself admitted that he shouldn’t have signed on for either Hannibal or Red Dragon, with the law of diminishing returns inevitably setting in. There’s definitely too much of a good thing, and it turns out it applies to psychiatrists with a taste for human flesh, too.
Lecter’s role in the story, in the broadest of terms, is to assist Jodie Foster’s Clarice Starling in the apprehension and arrest of Ted Levine’s serial killer Jane Gumb, who earned the nickname ‘Buffalo Bill’. Of course, he uses his penchant for manipulation and fierce intelligence to shift the balance of power in his favour, culminating in his escape from incarceration.
However, there’s a theory positing that Lecter’s association with Buffalo Bill goes far beyond his involvement in the case, and it’s one that shouldn’t be entirely discounted, either. It’s known that Gumb was a patient of Lecter’s before he embarked on a murder spree of his own, but it’s been suggested that he was the one who planted that seed in the first place for his own benefit.
With Lecter manipulating and messing with Gumb’s psyche to push him down the road to killing, it creates an insurance policy should he ever be arrested. With Lecter behind bars and his inadvertent protégé out in the wild, the authorities would be obligated to pick his brains on the subject, knowing full well the connection between the two.
Instead of trying to squash Gumb’s psychopathy, Lecter may have used it to facilitate his ultimate escape as part of a long-term gambit. As well as securing him a transfer from a maximum security facility to surroundings that are inordinately easier to break out of, going so far as to order lamb chops for the express purpose of fashioning a crude lockpick to achieve that goal, his association with the FBI serves as the catalyst for his escape.
If it wasn’t for Gumb becoming the feared Buffalo Bill, then Lecter would never have been drafted in as an unlikely FBI consultant to begin with. When he was, he weaponised his superior intellect to put an escape plan into motion, which could have been tucked away as a last-ditched measure since his days as a psychiatric professional.
It’s hardly to be taken as gospel, but not only does it make some degree of sense, it also completely recontextualises The Silence of the Lambs if the movie is re-watched with this theory in mind.
