Skin Shows

In The Silence of the Lambs (1991) by Jonathan Demme, one of many modern adaptations of Frankenstein, a serial killer known as Buffalo Bill collects women in order to flay them and use their skins to construct a “woman suit.” Sitting in his basement sewing hides, Buffalo Bill makes his monster a sutured beast, a patchwork of gender, sex, and sexuality. Skin, in this morbid scene, represents the monstrosity of surfaces and as Buffalo Bill dresses up in his suit and prances in front of the mirror, he becomes a layered body, a body of many surfaces laid one upon the other. Depth and essence dissolve in this mirror dance and identity and humanity become skin deep.

My subject is monsters and I begin in Buffalo Bill's basement, his “filthy workshop of creation,” because it dramatizes precisely the distance traveled between current representations of monstrosity and their genesis in nineteenth-century Gothic fiction. Where the monsters of the nineteenth century metaphorized modern subjectivity as a balancing act between inside/outside, female/male, body/mind, native/foreign, proletarian/aristocratic, monstrosity in postmodern horror films finds its place in what Baudrillard has called the obscenity of “immediate visibility” and what Linda Williams has dubbed “the frenzy of the visible.” The immediate visibility of a Buffalo itself monstrous transforms the cavernous monstrosity of Jekyll/Hyde, Dorian Gray, or Dracula into a beast who is all body and no soul.

Victorian monsters produced and were produced by an emergent conception of the self as a body which enveloped a soul, as a body, indeed, enthralled to its soul. Michel Foucault writes in Discipline and Punish that “the soul is the prison of the body” and he proposes a genealogy of the soul that will show it to be born out of “methods of punishment, supervision and constraint.” Foucault also claims that, as modern forms of discipline shifted their gaze from the body to the soul, crime literature moved from confession or gallows speeches or the cataloguing of famous criminals to the detective fiction obsessed with identifying criminality and investigating crime. The hero of such literature was now the middle-or upper-class schemer whose crime became a virtuoso performance of skill and enterprise.