The box-office success of "The Silence of the Lams" in Britain and the US has provoked a surge of interest in serial killing and male sexual violence. Articles and programmes about the subject kept cropping up everywhere in the media. Some of the features focused on high-tech forensic detection (Time Out, May 29-June 5, 1991); others picked over the dry details of the victims ("Killers on the campus", Weekend Guardian, June 22-23, 1991). Then there was a television mini-series on the puzzling civilised arm of serial killer Ted Bundy (The Deliberate Stranger, BBC, August 6-7, 1991).
What united most of the pieces was a bland wall silence about the root causes of these sickening acts. There seems to be an unwillingness to look closely at the reasons behind the fact that the overwhelming majority of these killings are committed by men, and the vast majority of their victims are women, All we get instead are well-worn phrases about "sex monsters", "psychopaths" or even "the beast within".
For example, in an article called Slaughter of the Lambs (Sunday Times, 23 June, 1991), there was a classic image of the "sex monster": wild staring eyes bulge out at the reader from the page. With his haunted obsessiveness, this was an image of a man with a difference. Not an ordinary photograph of a 'normal' man, but of one with the somewhat demonic, possessed energy in his eyes that would mark him out from any group of ordinary men. By representing the sex killer as monster, or the "beast within", this closes down the scope of possible investigation to the origins of male, sexual violence.
Indeed, this mythologising of male abusers, batterers and sex killers into sex beasts and evil geniuses blocks men from asking awkward questions about masculinity, power and violence (that means you and me). They feel distanced from the otherworldly evil of men like Hannibal Lecter and Buffalo Bill, safely removed from these issues because, after all, we are talking about the actions of crazy freaks, aren't we?
This masking is also deepened by a gender- and power-blindness that often renders male sexual violence invisible to many men. The possession of power blinds many men to the specific conditions and contradictory shaping of their own masculine and sexual identities. Their own hidden assumptions about maintaining power and control over or getting their own way around women are never connected, albeit different levels and intensities, with these "abnormal" crimes.
What I want to argue here is that this avoidance of issues of masculinity and power is being perpetuated by films like The Silence of the Lambs and the linked media interest in serial killing. On the surface, the film seems to be pro-feminist. It has a strong, leading woman character (Jodie Foster as a fledgling FBI agent) who actively defends herself and other women through solving the crime (through using detailed women's knowledge) and shooting the serial killer. But the structural power stays with the men in the film. Jack Crawford, her enigmatic FBI boss, uses her as attractive bait to dangle in front of Hannibal Lecter in an attempt to persuade him to share his secrets. As a direct result of her boss's deviousness, she is put into the position where Lecter can invade her head with the skilled precision of a psychological terrorist.
The film shows that women aren't lying down and taking it any more. They are on the move, shouting, screaming and firing back. But the gendered viewpoint used in the film leaves out 50% of its potential focus. The root causes of male, sexual violence remain hidden away within the frozen, "sex monster" framework.
| This caricaturing and dignifying of killers leaves me feeling disturbed and outraged |
The film's thin, shadowy treatment of the serial killer, Jame Gumb (or Buffalo Bill), widens the gap between the abnormal, sex beast as presented here and the world of ordinary men. Not only is the treatment deeply homophobic, lightly sketching Gumb in as a creepy, effeminate and conflicted transsexual but no challenge is offered to the traditional images of the sex-crazed beast. So here, in one of the most disturbing of the film's scenes, a woman is caged up in the bottom of a dark pit. She might end up as Buffalo Bill's next victim. We're not sure. She is shown screaming and moaning for help. Buffalo Bill comes to the edge of the pit, looks down, throws back his head and starts to howl like a savage wolf. All of this bestiality deflects attention away from the simple fact that it is, mainly, normal heterosexual men who are serial killers.
The heroic glorification of Hannibal Lecter, the evil, "civilised" genius, also serves to divert our attention away from any serious investigation into the roots of male sexual violence. His elegant manipulation of Clarice Starling, the young FBI agent, blinds us to the fact that by the end of the film Lecter has actually killed five men. The audience are kept on the hook by the suggestion of menace beneath the polite charm. Caught up in the edgy exchanges between them we are seduced into overlooking what he is supposed have done and why he did it.
This caricaturing and dignifying of killers, leaves me feeling disturbed and outraged. If we leave male sex killers as mysteriously shrouded, Gothic monsters or howling wolves ruled by an uncontrollable impulse to kill women for their skins then we are perpetuating a culture that believes that men are compulsively driven by forces beyond their control and women are just there "for frying bacon and screwing". To contest that culture, more men need to stop being detached observers of supposedly crazed freaks, and begin to own up to the possibility of new connections between themselves and the Peter Sutcliffes and Buffalo Bills of this world.
Owning up here means personally implicating ourselves, as fallible and contradictory men, in these killings. Instead of distancing ourselves from the horror through the pretence of purely objective analysis or striving to be self-righteously above such matters, we need to emotionally re-connect ourselves to the terror, fear and despair of the worlds of serial killers, and to make more explicit the links between them and 'normal' men like us.
The roots of male sexual violence are to be found in the everyday shaping of traditional, masculine identity even though Buffalo Bill and Peter Sutcliffe do represent exaggerated forms of that identity. Male sex killers are different from other men in degree and intensity but not in kind. They too exist within a common continuum that links the man next door and me with Buffalo Bill.
In my own personal history, for example, there's the same kind of confusion and in-betweenness in the building of my shaky, masculine identity as there is in the world of Peter Sutcliffe. Despite many differences, I too was a sensitive Mummy's boy who never felt at home in an aggressive, macho culture. I always vacillated between envying a fantasised, "feminine" world, like Buffalo Bill, and, at the same time, feeling fearful about and threatened by it.
The threat of owning my emotional self within the brutalising culture of an all-boys boarding school in the early 1950s pushed me into a long process of bodily betrayal and emotional denial. This involved me in a flawed attempt to squeeze out the "feminine" from my system. My botched efforts at virile assertion through sport, sexual performance and competitive language games were my frightened attempts to counter what I perceived as underminingly "feminine" in myself.
All my striving to play up my manliness and to desperately confirm my manhood through performance and closing the door tightly on the Other, I knew really were hollow charades. Inside, I was convinced that I was soft, weak and not a "real" boy/man. That's why I was so harsh towards myself in regulating the boundaries between my heavily defended "masculinity" and a dangerously invasive "femininity".
Perhaps Sutcliffe shared something of that common background of confusion and self-doubt that I experienced? At a different level but very much within the same continuum, Sutcliffe's attempts to counter his own perceived effeminacy within a jeering northern working class culture were through his murderous acts. He did this through projecting his internal fears outwards onto women. His acts of ripping and stabbing were ways of conquering what he feared most in his life, as well as asserting a fantasy image of how he would have liked to have been looked up to as a man.
When I came to read Joan Smith's account of why Sutcliffe killed women, (in Mysogynies Faber, 1989) - In destroying women's bodies, he challenged and conquered the terrible thing he could never acknowledge: the feminine part of himself - I can feel amidst my horrified recoil, some of the same territory that link us as precarious and divided men. I can begin to see the gendered nature of his violent acts. Also I can half recognise that those acts were Sutcliffe's desperate efforts to re-assert a threatened masculine identity and sexual potency.
These resemblances aren't unique to Sutcliffe and me. They are common to all men. Particularly those men whose sense of themselves has been shaped by the interaction between an early, over-close attachment to a mother and a savagely disturbed, "bully-boy" culture usually met with in one of the institutions of patriarchal authority, such as all-boy boarding schools, military institutions, work-place groups, pub culture. These early clashes and tensions in boyhood have often produced an exaggerated sense of vulnerability in some men that then has to be defended by a desperate re-assertion of manly difference and superiority. And, in a few extreme instances, those re-assertions and re-affirmations can take a savagely destructive form.
| Male sex killers are different from other men in degree and intensity but not in kind |
The time has come for many more men (including film directors, writers, media men) to start taking responsibility for what other men do. With male sexual violence on the increase, the time has come for us to ask how films like The Silence of the Lambs can earn the right to work with the horrifying images of a skinned woman's body being examined and Buffalo Bill's voyeuristic, infra red vision of the panic-stricken Clarice Starling, scrabbling in the dark at the end of the film. Without some serious effort to make sense of these haunting, shocking images and to look at their root causes - the shaky construction of masculinity within a misogynistic context - then women will go on being kept in line from a paralysing fear of the lurking sex beast, and the senseless destruction of lives will continue.
That means challenging and interrogating the divisions between "normal" men and maniacs in future work that explores sexual and gender politics. Where that challenging must start is not out there but here inside all those carefully buried emotional worlds of male critics, media men, writers and directors. Every man's fear of what he sees as the "feminine" in himself connects him directly with the worlds of the male, sex killer and the man who rapes and batters.
Jonathan Demme, the director of The Silence of the Lambs, has been reported as saying, We have in our society men who murder dozens of women. Is there anything being done to address this problem? One possible answer to his question is to ask him to explore his own gender unawareness about his own masculinity, and the suppressed links between Buffalo Bill and himself. It's not enough to continue seeing his subject and area of exploration as inhabiting the segregated and unearthly realm of wild-eyed sex beasts and demonic vampires. His true subject is first within himself and then the tangled and secret ties that bind men like Sutcliffe and Buffalo Bill with all us men.
The silence of the wolves now urgently needs to be broken. The time for projecting outwards our fears and fantasies about ourselves as men is over and it's high time we did some sustained digging and delving into our own frightening, inner spaces.
Copyright © Achilles Heel Collective
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