177 The Silence Of The Lambs: Mirror and Magnifier of Homophobia in The ‘90s
The movie The Silence of The Lambs won 7 Academy Awards in 1992: for Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, Adapted Screenplay, Film Editing, and Sound Mixing.
Toast never saw the movie until just the other week, in 2023.
Because Siena made her watch it.
She has taken it upon herself to increase Toast’s cultural literacy, at least when it comes to movies. (There’s a list; next up is Fatal Attraction.) And Toast has obliged. So here we are.
But Siena’s getting something out of it, too.
She herself hasn’t seen these movies in decades, so it’s startling and orienting for both of us, to watch these artifacts from 30 years ago unintentionally reveal the degree of change in social norms.
A lot of things in the movie were ‘dated.’
In addition to the obvious stuff like the tempo (slower), and the fonts and styles of the title screen and opening credits (wow, old-timey and grainy), there were the assumptions baked right into the story and characters.
Here’s what we mean.
In Silence of The Lambs, there’s just one character who happens to be gender non-conforming. And it also just so happens that this exact character is also the movie’s ultra super creepy disturbing serial killer who employs methods even more heinous than usual. They’re even even more creepy and scary than the famous “Hannibal the cannibal.”
And and and, this badder-than-the-bad-guy’s cross dressing is a symptom of being mentally defective.
So.
You sit down to watch this 1991 movie now, in 2023, and you go
“Huh. No wonder the ‘90s had a phobia about gender non-conforming folks.”
Society’s existing fears were acted out (literally) in the movie, which was a huge hit, so tons of people saw those fears sort of come to life onscreen, and it only amped up the latent fears even more.
What was most striking to us was realizing how, back then, in the early ‘90s when The Silence of The Lambs was an enormous blockbuster, there was zero public awareness of how it was reaaaaally bad publicity for LGBTQ+ folks. That part was just considered normal, literally unremarkable, not even worth remarking about because of course gender-fluid people actually were creepy weirdos.
When you think about it, it’s kind of a miracle that LGBTQ+ folks were able to gain any kind of respect or diffuse that kind of fear between now and then.
It took about 30 years.
But we’re grateful for the miracle.
Oh!
Siena refers to another movie, this time from the ‘60s, in our discussion. Here’s more info: we looked it up and it was called The Killing of Sister George (1968). The storyline featured a lesbian couple. With a name like that, we might have to put it on our list, so we can be even more grateful for the miracle of LGBTQ+ acceptance (such as it is) today.
Speaking of diffusing fears of the creepy dangerous gender non-conforming types, it looks like 2020 was the year The Hallmark Channel cranked out an LGBTQ+ storyline with their schmaltzy holiday movie machine. Lifetime TV also got into the act somewhere along the way.
Christmas miracles, indeed.
Nothing to be scared of here.
Equal schmaltz for all. Nice.