Hannibal Lecter and Philosophy (Popular Culture and Philosophy)

by Joseph Westfall

  Of course, journalism being what journalism is, journalists did not leave “Dr. Salazar” in peace. He was later identified as Dr. Alfredo Ballí Treviño, a Mexican physician who served twenty years in prison for murder, and died in 2009. He apparently knew he was the basis for Harris’s character, and was teased by those close to him as a result thereof. Despite the man’s crimes, one cannot help but recoil at such rudeness.

  In any case, one presentation of Hannibal Lecter is as a psychopath, or something like a psychopath, in the manner and style of Dr. Treviño, and this deeply informs Brian Cox’s performance as Hannibal “Lecktor” (as it is spelled somewhat inexplicably in the film) in Manhunter, Michael Mann’s 1986 adaptation of Red Dragon. Cox played Lecktor as a synthesis, he has noted, of the infamous Scottish serial killer, Peter Manuel, and Cox’s own son (a teenager at the time; now an actor himself), Alan Cox. What comes through are a profound intelligence married to a sense of entitlement, a kind of merciless arrogance and unwillingness (or inability) to consider other people’s needs or desires in making his own choices: classic signs of psychopathy. Beyond this, the limited portrayal of Hannibal Lecktor in Manhunter does not allow us to go.

  The Anti-Hero

  Another, much later, depiction of Hannibal Lecter has its origins in the novel, Hannibal, although it only comes to full fruition in Hannibal Rising. There, Lecter is no longer simply killing and eating his victims for the pleasure it gives, or out of some deeply rooted psychological urge, but instead as a means of accomplishing his otherwise sympathetic goals—in Hannibal, to overcome his psychological fixation on the murder and cannibalization of his sister, Mischa, and to win Clarice Starling’s heart, and in Hannibal Rising, to avenge Mischa’s death. Like Frank Castle (“the Punisher”) or Batman, in his anti-heroic presentation Hannibal Lecter appears as something of a superhero, but one willing to do what more traditionally heroic individuals are not: to kill in order to get what he understands to be justice. While this interpretation of Lecter dominates in Hannibal Rising, and as one might expect, Gaspard Ulliel’s performance as the Young Hannibal in the film version, it characterizes only the last third of Hannibal. That said, it’s this anti-heroic take on Lecter that comes through most in Anthony Hopkins’s performance in Ridley Scott’s film adaptation of Hannibal.

  The shift from villain to anti-hero seems to have come as something of a surprise to fans of the Hannibal Lecter franchise, and thus it’s unsurprising that Hannibal Rising (book and film) and Hannibal (film) are the most controversial presentations of Lecter among Fannibals. While we take an inexplicable and morbid pleasure in giving witness to Dr. Lecter’s criminal activities and culinary crimes, we don’t want to root for him, exactly. Or, if we do want to root for him, we still want to feel like it’s wrong to do so. Hannibal Rising and, to a lesser extent, Hannibal, make Dr. Lecter seem like he’s basically a good guy—and this is not, generally speaking, his appeal.

  The Vampire

  Probably the most famous and well-loved presentation of Hannibal Lecter yet is Anthony Hopkins’s performance in The Silence of the Lambs, and later, in the film, Red Dragon. This is the Lecter—specifically, from Silence—that the American Film Institute ranked as the greatest screen villain of all time. This is the Lecter we see in the first two novels, as well, and he’s incredible: not a psychopath, exactly, since psychopaths can be explained and understood; not an anti-hero, as he acts unequivocally on his own, twisted behalf without any sense of the rightness of his actions. He is evil, and mysterious, and powerful (despite the limitations of his imprisonment)—and a cannibal—and in these ways, he has a clear resonance with that cannibalistic arch-villain of old, Dracula. Like the vampire, Lecter bides his time, hiding among human beings as one of the most cultured and best educated of their number, awaiting his opportunity to strike—and then, brutally, bestially, killing and eating his victims. Hopkins captures this duality well, in the way he makes that sucking noise after mentioning the census taker’s liver (“with some fava beans and a nice Chianti”), or in his brutal murder of the two guards in Tennessee (displaying the eviscerated body of one as a macabre angel of liberté), in Silence; and in the scenes with Edward Norton’s Will Graham in Lecter’s study (where Lecter tries to disembowel and murder Graham) and in the asylum exercise room (where he strains at his bonds like a wild animal) in Red Dragon.

  Unlike an “ordinary” psychopath, however, a vampire isn’t motivated by traumas and psychotic urges. A vampire is motivated by hunger. And his hunger is coupled with an understanding of himself as inherently superior to the human beings upon whom he feeds. It is not quite that he thinks of people as pigs—contrary to Will Graham’s assessment in the early episodes of the television series, Hannibal—but, rather, that he thinks of himself as being as far above ordinary human beings as pigs are below them. (To use Nietzsche’s language, he conceives of himself—and this goes for Dracula as well as Lecter—as an Übermensch, an overman or superman.) He kills and eats because he wants to, because he likes to, and because no objections anyone could provide—in the form of ordinary human law, or ordinary human morality—apply to one as great as he is. The presentation of Hannibal Lecter as a sort of vampire is the presentation of an individual of immense power—but also of inexplicable and extraordinary weaknesses: garlic and crucifixes and holy water and wooden stakes for the one in Transylvania; the memory of Mischa and the fascination with Clarice and the potential for friendship with Will for the one in Baltimore.

  The Devil

  The vampire is not the most powerful being to whom Hannibal Lecter forms an unholy analogy, however, and if we look to the first two-thirds of the novel, Hannibal, as well as to the performance of Mads Mikkelsen as Lecter in the television series of the same name, we see something even more sinister than Dracula: we see Hannibal Lecter as the devil. Mikkelsen seems in fact to have won the role, at least in part, thanks to his interpretation of the character along such satanic lines. As Bryan Fuller has noted on a number of occasions, Mikkelsen interprets “Hannibal Lecter as a fallen angel. He sees him not as a cannibal psychiatrist but as the devil, who is enamored with man, and . . . living out his temptations in concert with Will Graham” (Stephenson, “This Is My Design”). We see this characterization of Lecter frequently in the television show, although often quite subtly (fire in the background of a shot focused on Mikkelsen’s Lecter, for example), but sometimes quite directly: as the serial killer Abel Gideon notes in conversation with fellow asylum inmate Will Graham, “He’s the devil, Mr. Graham. He is smoke” (Hannibal, Season 2, “Mikōzuke”).

  But we needn’t look to the television series to see the devil in Dr. Lecter. He is depicted very much in this way in the novel, Hannibal, and again—as with Dr. Gideon’s comment to Will—quite explicitly. Romula, the woman in Florence whom Rinaldo Pazzi has extorted into assisting him in getting a fingerprint from Dr. Lecter (who is masquerading, at this point in the story, as Dr. Fell), nearly accomplishes her task when, looking Lecter in the face, she runs away. When interrogated by Pazzi about her failure, Romula explains, “That is the Devil . . . Shaitan, Son of the Morning. I’ve seen him now” (Harris, Hannibal, p. 156). And even prior to that, in Red Dragon and Silence, one of the marks of Satan as he appears in human form—an asymmetry on the left (usually a misshapen left foot, or even a hoof in the left foot’s place) from which we get our English word “sinister” (meaning, quite straightforwardly, “on the left”)—makes its appearance on Lecter’s person. In addition to his red and illuminated eyes, Dr. Lecter has that extra finger on his left hand.

  Presenting Hannibal Lecter as the devil, however, is more than simply finding elements of the mythology surrounding the Prince of Darkness in the mythos surrounding the Chesapeake Ripper. More than this, this last presentation is one of power: Hannibal Lecter as (nearly) omniscient, as (nearly) omnipotent, as in control of almost every event in which he has any stake at all, as setting himself up as a rival to God—which he does, again and again, in comparin
g his own work as a killer, and an eater, and a sower-of-death-and-destruction in general, to God’s. (Lecter’s collection of church collapses springs to mind—a collection of news items by way of which he often means to show that God is a murderer, enjoys killing, and insofar as we are created in His image, we should enjoy it, too. That’s a devilish argument, if ever there was one.)

  Hannibal Lecter observes ordinary human beings like us from on high; he figures us out, determines what makes us tick; and then he presents us with temptations tailored specifically to us. He does this to Will Graham, to Margot Verger, to Alana Bloom, to Abigail Hobbs, to Randall Tier, to Donald Sutcliffe, to Abel Gideon, to Francis Dolarhyde, to Clarice Starling, to Frederick Chilton . . . whether it’s the books or the movies or the television series we’re talking about, Hannibal Lecter is never simply a serial-killing cannibal psychiatrist. He is always also the mirror in which we see our darkest desires reflected, the tincture of evil (and sometimes more than a tincture) in every soul. To the extent that he sees our darkest parts, he can manipulate them—and us—to arrange the world as he likes, without ever even having to lift a finger (or eleven). He does it, not by corrupting us, exactly, but by something far more destructive: by pointing us out to ourselves. It’s especially appropriate, then, that this devil has made psychiatry his profession. And equally appropriate—proper, we might add, for the doctor’s urbane benefit—that we have a group of philosophers, those savants of self-reflection, gathered here to ask of him as of themselves, who—and what—are you?

  •••

  As Inspector Popil notes, “The little boy Hannibal died in 1945 out there in the snow trying to save his sister. His heart died with Mischa. What is he now? There’s not a word for it yet. For lack of a better word, we’ll call him a monster” (Harris, Rising, p. 283). We don’t always see the monster in Dr. Lecter, however, despite the fact that the monster is always there. Sometimes, if we find ourselves unadvisedly peering a trifle too deeply into those maroon eyes, we see something of ourselves lurking in the darkness behind those pinpoints of light. Like Will Graham and Clarice Starling before us, we come to know ourselves in our conversations with the monster. And Hannibal Lecter is the best and scariest monster we’ve got, because of all our monsters he’s the most like us, even if he remains on some level always and forever more a mystery. Socrates once noted of himself, “I investigate not these things, but myself, to know whether I am a monster more complicated and more furious than Typhon or a gentler and simpler creature” (Plato, Phaedrus 230a). And, according to Nietzsche, “A foreigner who knew about faces once passed through Athens and told Socrates that he was a monster.” Socrates replied, simply, “You know me, sir!” (Nietzsche, Twilight §3). As Socrates knew, we all seem sometimes monstrous, and monsters are not always ugly. Charm and scales: monstrosity and mystery can, in their union, seem to us sometimes like beauty.

  As a monster, of course, Lecter will eventually attack us; eventually, he will try to kill us and consume us, if we let him. But be warned: he will not merely attack us from the outside. He will come to understand us, slowly, one morsel at a time, and his assault will take us whole, both inside and out, like eating an ortolan—a debauched delicacy, bones and all.

  Each of us is, in some ways, deeply and darkly a mystery. None of us is known fully to ourselves. Philosophy and self-reflection can shine a light in some of the dark corners, but “this we share with the doctor: In the vaults of our hearts and brains, danger waits. All the chambers are not lovely, light and high. There are holes in the floor of the mind” (Harris, Hannibal, p. 253).

  Dr. Lecter will see you now.

  I.

  Having an Old Friend for Dinner

  1

  Cosmopolitan Cannibal

  MANDY-SUZANNE WONG

  You just came here to look at me. Just to get the old scent again, didn’t you?

  Why don’t you just smell yourself?

  —HANNIBAL LECTER in Red Dragon by Thomas Harris

  A gourmet magazine invites me of all people to interview Dr. Hannibal Lecter, epicurean connoisseur and culinary artiste. Naturally we meet in Copenhagen. City of Mads Mikkelsen, Hans Christian Andersen, and the great philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. Home of Noma, the world’s greatest restaurant, and its superstar chef René Redzepi, who serves live insects on purpose.

  I propose Nyhavn, a row of sun-colored buildings along a canal. Except the world-renowned ice cream parlor that makes its own waffle cones, each building is a cozy restaurant with a snug little bar. Wooden boats in the canal, a Flamenco guitarist on the sidewalk. The smell of Danish beer and the summertime crowd and the new waffles. I can’t think why he agreed.

  And then he says (I’m looking the wrong way), “You’ve been at Andersen’s for breakfast on Bernstorffsgade. You came from there on foot. Quite the little tourist, aren’t you?” He gives me the details of the shampoo they put out at my hotel, the detergent they use on the sheets, and the hotel’s shameful location next to an amusement park and a big Metro station.

  I haven’t told him where I’m staying. He smells it on me.

  He says, “Someone with your skin tone oughtn’t to wear so much gray. You should use committed hues, not try to look like you’ve stood under the chimney.”

  His eyes are reddish with black pupils. The tilt of his head is clinical. The better to see you with, my dear. “Your mother must be very beautiful,” he says. “You can’t abide it at all.”

  That’s why he agreed. Not because I’m anything to look at. Nor because I write about eating from philosophical points of view.

  “A philosopher,” says Dr. Lecter. “That means you want to talk about anthropophagy.”

  Eating human flesh. Also known as cannibalism.

  I almost say: That’s something we philosophers could really sink our teeth into. I refrain.

  The doctor says, “Your great German predecessor, Arthur Schopenhauer, called anthropophagy a form of supreme error. I wonder if you believe, as he did, that I am worse than the common murderer who lets his victim’s sweetbreads go to waste, more heinous than a slaughterer of millions. Or if you think you’re another Michel de Montaigne, a magnanimous French brain, who’d want to see me as some kind of noble savage.”

  Don’t lie to Dr. Lecter. He will know. He responds to courtesy, not flattery. I mustn’t grovel or try to cloak my terror in indignant silence.

  “Neither,” I say.

  I won’t forget the small white teeth in Dr. Lecter’s smile. This is why he agreed to talk to me: because he thinks it would be fun to show me some painful truth about myself, about philosophers who dare to peel away the masks we wear, and the awful things they often find.

  Are you ready for that?

  The Saw

  Sometimes philosophers and scholars summon the courage for brutal honesty. We call it critique. This is not what a restaurant reviewer does. It’s worse, way worse. And dangerous. Critique is thinking with no holds barred. It’s a thoughtful perspective that finally makes you realize all the implications of what you believe.

  I mean all of them, not just those that make you look good. Critique will devour your illusions. A nice chopped salad made of everything you thought you knew. You’ll emerge with the certainty that you’re a schmuck, a tool, a meaningless bunch of carbons, or worse.

  Not that philosophers are pessimistic or (when sober) cruel. Critique is an honest search for answers. But it’s an honesty as sharp as a new autopsy saw, and that kind of honesty never tells you what you want to hear. It reveals that many popular beliefs, even those on which our society is founded, are based on unfair or just plain inaccurate assumptions. Critique is a popular tool in philosophers’ batterie de cuisine. We use it to think about political systems and other systems of belief, often to reveal how people actually relate to one another and the world—which is usually very different from how people think they relate to one another and the world. Different enough to leave scars.

  This sort of honesty is Dr. Le
cter’s favorite, most damaging weapon. (Just ask Clarice Starling.) He thinks I’m a little child who wants to play with this deadly tool. That’s why he’s giving me the time of day.

  Monstrously Good Taste

  For a while we talk food, the selection and preparation of ingredients. It comes down to quality over quantity. Because cooking and enjoying food are cultivated arts for refined sensibilities. At the same time, Copenhagen’s Chef Redzepi says that cooking must be honest. To be honest about eating, you must accept that it is killing. That’s why the shrimps are moving in Redzepi’s appetizers.

  “Gourmandise,” says Dr. Lecter, “good taste ‘unites an Attic elegance with Roman luxury and French subtlety, the kind which chooses wisely . . . savors with vigor, and sums up the whole with profundity: it is a rare quality, which might easily be named a virtue’. You recognize the words of Brillat-Savarin” (Brillat-Savarin, p. 95).

  Or not. Dr. Lecter is better informed than everyone he talks to.

  “Dumas tells us that Brillat-Savarin was a gourmand of exquisite taste,” he continues. “Le grand dictionnaire.”