Hannibal: 10 Things We Won't Get To See
6. Jame Gumb And Buffalo Bill
The Silence Of The Lambs is still the seminal chapter in the Hannibal Lecter story, the multiple Oscar-winning movie that began and defined the franchise. It’s entirely possible that Bryan Fuller might never have obtained the rights to those iconic characters, and even before Hannibal’s cancellation, the rumour was that he had other plans for season four.
But then Fuller just had to drop hints at the Saturn Awards last month about how excited he was about the possibility of working on the Jame Gumb character: the serial killer known as ‘Buffalo Bill’, the antagonist of The Silence Of The Lambs. In that conversation, he dropped hints that his interpretation of the wannabe-transsexual serial killer would have been radically different from anything we’ve seen before.
It’s highly unlikely anyone will ever get to see it now, of course… but the character could certainly do with a new spin. The original iteration of the character as a grotesque doesn’t sit well with our modern understanding of and sympathy for issues relating to gender dysphoria… ‘Buffalo Bill’ may not have ever been intended to represent a true transsexual, but that’s something that was never properly delved into in either the novel or the film of The Silence Of The Lambs.