These two concepts seem contradictory to me:
Lecter asks Starling what Buffalo Bill does - he covets…“we covet what we see every day”. From this, Starling realizes that Bill knew his first victim, Frederica Bimmel.
But we also learn that Bill thinks of his victims as things - “It puts the lotion in the basket”, etc.
So if he “covets” his victims, why does he think of them as things?
And while we’re at it…the pictures Starling finds in Frederica’s room imply a sexual relationship with…Bill? In the book, they are pix of her having sex with someone, and we learn that she even wrote love letters to him from down in the well. This doesnt seem to fit with Bills woman-skinning, cross-dressing style, does it? Explain?
#9…Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife.
#10…Thou shalt not covet thy neighbors GOODS.
Buffalo bill has depersonalized the girls into things, but he still covets them.
Okay I am going off a long shot here for the first part. Coveting also means envy, desire for. In this case I think Buffalo Bill feels envy for that which is his victim, he envies what she has, her skin. Remember he killed women of about a size 16 or 14 (I can’t remember that part.) He wants that, he envies that to finish his human skin suit or whatever he was trying to create. I never read the book though.
He had to basically starve them, but not so much that the skin would shrink. The lotion was to keep the skin soft and supple but refers to the Senator’s daughter as “It” so he could keep emotional attachments from forming. I think this is pretty typical of premeditative murder. The perpetrator needs to separate himself from the victim but at the same time has to have some sort of obession, especially in this manner.
As for the pictures in Fredrica’s room, they were not all that sexual, she was in her panties and suggests to me that she was “playing” around with a boy or boys. It could have been “Bill” but remember she sewed clothes and it wasn’t until Starling found the dress diamonds (for lack of a better term) when she put two and two together. Fredrica’s body, or one of the victims also had similar cuttings from her skin.
In the movie I don’t recall ever learning the exact relationship that Fredrica may have had with Jamie Gumm…I never read that book, maybe I should now.
Try this:
Buffalo Bill covets Frederica’s skin. To him, Frederica’s skin is an object, an article of clothing. Bill sees the living person inside of the skin as simply a device to keep his true prize (the hide) fresh until he “harvests” it.
I’m not really sure, considering his level of psychopathology, that Bill ever had to consciously depersonalize any of his victims. Seems to me that Bill never perceived any of the women that he killed as people in the first place, thereby removing his need for a conscious process of depersonalization. Bill’s pathology is sufficiently extreme so as to supersede any feelings of guilt whatsoever over what he does.
In my opinion, referring to the girls as “it” bears this out.
I loooove analyzing fictional loonies!! 
Oh, yeah, that’s right…!
Frederica’s “crush” on Bill was most likely just that, at least before her abduction. Remember, she was unattractive and lonely. While she was his captive, I guess the crush was deep-seated enough to blossom into a nice healthy case of Stockholm Syndrome??
Creaky, since I didn’t read the book (read the other two) the thing with the movie is, Jamie (Bill) is clearly distressed when he says “It puts the lotion in the basket.” Thereby telling me that he was doing his best to not think of her as human but rather a part of his project. He was doing his best to put her human side out of his mind. But as Starling said in part of the movie, paraphrasing he’s has a taste for this now and he wont let it go.
Again, I don’t recall exactly what the relationship was between Fredrica and Jamie but I would imagine that with any serial killer there has to be some separation between the human he is going to kill and the thing he will kill in his mind.
But, well, that’s just my wild ass guess as I have no study in criminal behavior and haven’t read the book.
Oh and in the movie, I slightly recall that Jamie lived in the house of the woman that Fredrica worked with on her sewing projects. Yeesh, I will now have to watch the movie again.
Yeah, see, I remember the book more clearly, I guess, and in the book (at least as I remember), Bill didn’t seem to have too much trouble thinking of his victims as objects to start with. Maybe they punched up Bill’s “distress” in the movie for dramatic effect, or so that the audience would more easily “get” the depersonalization thing.
Yes, Jame Gumb lived in the house formerly owned by the woman with whom Frederica had worked as a seamstress, which is initially how Jame and Frederica met.
Man, now I want to see the movie again! 
My thought was that Bill was coveting their feminity. Remember he was rejected for a sex change, so he was performing one of his own by building a woman suit that he could wear and become a woman.
I think he is trying to depersonalize the women because there was a part of him that knew what he was doing was wrong, it was just not strong enought to prevent him from doing it.
In which scene in the movie are Fredrica’s love letters in? I can’t recall that.
Thanx y’all…but as I said: in the BOOK, the pix in Fredrica’s room are of her having SEX with someone, and in the BOOK, we learn that Fredrica was even writing letters to Jame aka Bill from the well.
This is what I still dont get - why was there a sexual relationship? Anyone who has read the book help me out?
I like what was said about Bill coveting their HIDES…he coveted what he saw every day, but what he coveted was their femininity and their skin. Sounds good to me!
Why does Lecter’s clue have to be about what Bill actually covets? Could it not just be a way for Lecter to let Starling know that the path to finding Bill is through the first victim?
I think you are losing sight of the forest because the trees are in your way.
In the book, if I recall, and I’ve read it about 10 times (always late at night, home alone, so that when I finish, I’m a quivering mass of goo, and get no sleep whatsoever) Jame is FRIENDS with Fredrica. Hes gay (or thinks hes gay, whats to be gay, whatever). There are pics of her having sex, but not with him. I always understood it that she shared her sexual exploits with him like you would with a best girlfriend. He resented her for this, because he was unable to have sexual exploits of his own (at least, not in the same way she could - as a receptive FEMALE). He kills her, skins her, makes a girl suit, gets to have sexual exploits, yada, yada, yada.
The love letters she wrote to him from the pit, I thought, were a ploy to get him to let her out. You know, “Hey big, boy, let me out and I’ll do X, Y and Z to you.” and then she escapes and runs like hell.
Bill’s pathology seems to be basically psychopathic, with undifferentiated sexual identity. Basically, hes totally wack.
Al.
It’s been a while since I read the book (a great thriller,BTW, I finished it in one read; I couldn’t put it down), but I have the impression that Gumb and Fredrica did have something going on.
Doesn’t Starling find letters that were written by Fredrica to Gumb before the pit? I read the book like 10 years ago, but wasn’t the implication that that Gumb was Fredrica’s “Dearest secret friend” or something like that? I remember Starling speculating about Fredrica’s reaction when Gumb ‘revealed’ his true self/nature to her.
That was part of the horror. This fat, sad, lonely girl thinks she’s found a soulmate, and he turns out to be Buffalo Bill and he wants her for his tit suit.
Pretty creepy.
Bean Counter–I think that the implication is that Lector is so inmeasureably intelligent that all it takes is for him to meet a person once and he’s got the guy in the sense that he can determine the nature of a person by a brief interaction. He can see through people in a way that Starling finds uncomfortable.
To Lector, who’s a psychiatrist and a lot nuts himself, unsophisticated Jame Gumb is an open book and an easy read at that.
Lector does know what Gumb covets since he’s met him, and Starling’s answer does lie in the first victim. Crawford tells Starling that Lector’s only weakness is that he needs to be smarter than everybody else. Which he already is and therefore the flaw.