Psycho—Trans

Abstract

While the cross-dressing comedies of the previous chapter focus on the playful aspects of transvestism as a temporary disguise or means to an end, Psycho, Dressed to Kill, The Silence of the Lambs and Cherry Falls feature men who dress as women for psychological reasons. Psychiatric cases, they constitute the dark underside of the progress narratives of the comedies. In Psycho and Lambs, the narrative is at pains to dissociate itself from a negative representation of transgender: in the first, a police psychiatrist explains that Bates is not a transvestite because he does not dress in women’s clothes to achieve an erotic thrill: ‘He was simply doing everything possible to keep alive the illusion of his mother being alive. He tried to be his mother’; and in the second, Hannibal Lecter implies that the killer is not a transsexual. However, the subject of gender cannot in either case be so easily dismissed. In all four of our films, as in the thriller genre generally, the narrative is driven centrally by the quest for knowledge of the killer’s identity, and the denouement is dominated by the dramatic and surprising revelation of this identity, but in these films the process involves two simultaneous unveilings: that of the murderer’s identity and that of his gender.¹