Hannibal Lecter and Philosophy (Popular Culture and Philosophy)

by Joseph Westfall

  What about the kind of life Lecter lives? On first glance, the Lecter of the TV series seems to do well. He seems happy: he has friends, a fulfilling job, successful hobbies, and so on. Even the Lecter of the movies often gets away with murder. There are speed bumps when the cops get close but he manages to escape. But is this true: does Lecter live well? No. He has people in his life but those aren’t really friends in any significant way. If they get close, they learn what he is and then they must die. He has only acquaintances. Further, he must live on the run. Even if he remains out of prison, he has to live his life constantly on guard against the authorities. It’s an isolated and paranoid existence. If humans really are social animals, then it’s Lecter who leads an inhuman life. And that’s just not living well. The way he lives his life and the actions he takes constantly prevent him from leading a decent life.

  Virtue ethics, then, gives us a way to think about the morality of Lecter’s actions that’s hard to twist into a distorted rationalization. Eating people really is a bad thing to do, because there’s just no way to think of a morally good person who cannibalizes in the way Lecter does. And this seems to hold even if we take murder out of the equation. Typically—life-boat or stranded-in-the-Andes situations aside—we don’t view acts of cannibalism grounded in virtue or the good life. Viewing people as potential dinner or proto-meat doesn’t express what we’d associate with a good character and the form of life involved in harvesting human corpses for supper fails to reflect what we’d reasonably call the “good life.” The traits his actions uncover belong to the person who seems fully inhuman and one leading a life unrecognizable to anyone living a decent human existence. Finding a way to justify Lecter’s actions from the perspective of virtue ethics requires more than a distortion or perversion—it requires a direct inversion: taking those traits we think are virtues for vices (and vice versa). To use virtue ethics to defend his actions would be to undo the theory at its very core and the theory would merely collapse. Lecter can manipulate his actions to make them seem to fit various ethical theories but he can’t manipulate himself to fit the sort of person we admire. Even if Lecter thinks he can justify his actions, there’s no way he can justify himself. And so, virtue ethics gives us the condemnation of Lecter we find so natural and forceful when thinking about his acts of murder and cannibalism.

  II.

  What Does He Do, This Man You Seek?

  4

  Acts of God

  TRIP MCCROSSIN

  “Oh, Officer Starling, do you think you can dissect me with this blunt little tool?,” Hannibal Lecter quips in The Silence of the Lambs, sporting his best Southern drawl, reviewing with disdain the questionnaire she’s just presented to him. As we watch, she’s able to get but a few words out in her defense before he cuts her off with a humiliating tirade. “You look like a rube,” he chides, in the film as in the novel, “a well-scrubbed, hustling rube with a little taste,” and carries on in this vein for a long and merciless minute, until she’s visibly shaken (Harris, Silence, p. 20). In the novel, though, several hundred words of provocative dialogue intervene.

  Their exchange begins with Starling’s attempt to entice him with his own curiosity about, as she says, “what happened” to him. “Nothing happened to me, Officer Starling,” he replies, “I happened. You can’t reduce me to a set of influences” (Harris, Silence, p. 19). Readers of Red Dragon, and viewers of the first film version of it, Manhunter, recall Lecter communicating this already to Starling’s predecessor, Will Graham. “We don’t invent our natures,” he’d urged, “they’re given to us along with our lungs and pancreas and everything else. Why fight it?” (Harris, Dragon, p. 259).

  In both cases Lecter then ruminates, eloquently as always, on the nature of good and evil generally, and on the “problem of evil” in particular, in such a way as to offer himself as a kind of solution. As Graham and Starling struggle with Lecter—to elicit his help in understanding and capturing more mundane “monsters,” and also eventually Lecter himself—they struggle in the first place to offer an alternative to Lecter’s solution. As we naturally identify with Graham and Starling, but just as naturally are captivated by Lecter, we’re reminded that we struggle similarly.

  There is much in their complex storyline that helps us in this, as it’s developed over many years now, in four novels, five films, and a television series. Here we make a modest beginning, exploring a provocative contrast that emerges as the storyline unfolds, in what we come to learn about Lecter’s past that may qualify his early assertion that we “don’t invent our natures.” In the process, we make out an additional source of our enduring fascination with the storyline, over and above the sheer talent of the writers, actors, and filmmakers who’ve brought it to life.

  What Feels Good to God?

  The problem of evil, commonly phrased as the question, “why do bad things happen to good people, and good things to bad?” began as a theological problem, as far back as the Old Testament’s Book of Job. How, according to Milton’s turn of phrase in Paradise Lost, do we “justify the ways of God” to humanity, if this means somehow reconciling faith in God’s wisdom, power, and benevolence with the misery we regularly suffer nonetheless?

  The problem is also a modern secular one—as Susan Neiman has argued in her book, Evil in Modern Thought—which poses a threat not to God’s standing, but to human reason. How, that is, can we make reasonable sense of the world, if we can’t make sense of it teeming with suffering that defies human reason?

  Interestingly, Graham’s, Starling’s, and Lecter’s storylines address neither version of the problem exclusively, or perhaps even primarily.

  The theological version we find, for example, in Lecter’s challenge to Graham and Starling that they draw the lesson he does from his parable of “church collapses.” Fans of the television series will recall that Lecter’s challenge arises first (following the storyline’s internal chronology, rather than that of the novels, films, and television series as they’ve appeared) in the therapy session that concludes Episode 2 of Season 1 (“Amuse-Bouche”), and again in their third session in Episode 9 of Season 2 (“Shiizakana”), back when Lecter was, of all things, Graham’s therapist. Readers of Red Dragon find Lecter invoking the parable again some years later, once captured and imprisoned at the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, in his “brief note” to Graham, which, in light of the series, we can imagine easily enough is meant to remind him of the earlier therapy conversations. Later still (assuming order of appearance now), Lecter includes it in his phone call to Graham, in Manhunter, and in the second film version of Red Dragon in their last in-hospital meeting. Readers of The Silence of the Lambs will recall the parable from the missing dialogue cited above. And readers of Hannibal, finally, will recall that when Starling is called upon to explain to Jack Crawford Lecter’s enduring fascination with her, what she reaches for most naturally is again the parable.

  “It wasn’t the act that got you down,” Lecter challenges in his note, referring to Graham’s killing of Garret Jacob Hobbs, whom he’d pursued before pursuing Lecter. “Really,” he goes on, “didn’t you feel bad because killing him felt so good?” And “why shouldn’t it feel good? It must feel good to God—He does it all the time, and are we not made in His image?” “God dropped a church roof on thirty-four of His worshipers in Texas” not long ago, he continues, “just as they were groveling through a hymn. Don’t you think that felt good?” Why else would God do such a thing, he’s asking, or let it happen, which has to feel really just the same, especially to the likes of the thirty-four? And so, feeling good as it does, surely God “won’t begrudge you one measly murder,” Lecter concludes, the measly murder of Hobbs that is. And if so, why should Graham begrudge himself?

  “You’d be so much more comfortable,” he urges, “if you relaxed with yourself,” with your “given” nature—“why fight it?” (Harris, Dragon, p. 259). Lecter doesn’t. He embraces his given, and he believes God-like, nature. A
nd so, he’s urging, should Graham—and likewise, by extension, should the rest of us.

  What’s in a Phone Call?

  Lecter’s phone call in Manhunter, if we imagine it follows up on the note in Red Dragon, revisits and interestingly extends an idea from the conversation in “Amuse-Bouche,” the idea of power.

  In the conversation, Lecter having described the Texas church collapse, Graham asks, “did God feel good about that?” “He felt powerful,” Lecter answers. And in the later therapy sessions, with Lecter’s guidance, Graham becomes more comfortable admitting that in killing Hobbs he’d felt a “quiet sense of power.” But now, in Manhunter’s phone call, Lecter’s going deeper still. Killing “feels good,” he says, “because God has power, and if one does what God does enough times, one will become as God is.”

  Lecter’s God is Saint-Fond’s God, from the Marquis de Sade’s History of Juliette: “Why did you stray into the paths of virtue?” God asks. “The perpetual miseries with which I’ve blanketed the universe, should they not have convinced you that I love only disorder, and that you had to imitate me in order to please me?” (my translation). Lecter’s solution to the problem of evil is, in effect, that he’s just doing God’s work.

  All the more provocative, when Lecter talks of God, as he often does, most recently in the television series, he’s not doing so as an intellectual or otherwise insincere sleight of hand. As portrayed in Hannibal Rising, the younger Lecter was without faith, as a result perhaps of losing his sister, Mischa. “We take comfort,” he says as he’s burying her, “in knowing there is no God” (Harris, Rising, p. 222). By the time we meet up with him in the television series, though, clearly this has changed. However unusual his conception of God—as malevolent, that is—he leaves little doubt that he believes.

  Lecter’s talk of God is meant to convince Graham and Starling, and by implication the rest of us, to think and do as he thinks and does. Both resist, and in the process help us to. Starling’s resistance, though, is more successful and so more provocative.

  Typhoid and Swans

  “You’ve given up good and evil for behaviorism, Officer Starling,” or rather, he insinuates, tried to. “You’ve got everybody in moral dignity pants,” he challenges, “nothing is ever anybody’s fault. Look at me, Officer Starling. Can you stand to say I’m evil? Am I evil, Officer Starling?” What he wants is to provoke her to admit that she can’t “give up” the idea in his case, even if perhaps only in his. But she resists, admitting that she understands him to be “destructive,” yes, but insisting in turn that for her “it’s the same thing.” “Then storms are evil, if it’s that simple,” he mocks, and “we have fire, and then there’s hail. Underwriters lump it all under ‘Acts of God’.” Surely, he’s urging, she can’t want to treat him this reductively.

  She tries to correct her mistake, indicating that she’d meant to say that he’d been deliberately destructive. But, as if to say that it’s simply irrelevant, he cuts her off with a Sicily church collapse. “The facade fell on sixty-five grandmothers at a special Mass,” he describes. “Was that evil? If so, who did it? If He’s up there, He just loves it, Officer Starling. Typhoid and swans—it all comes from the same place” (Harris, Silence, p. 19).

  For fans of the television series, this will all seem naturally, though also a bit oddly, to ring a bell. In keeping still with the storyline’s internal chronology, that is, Lecter seems again to be channeling earlier conversations with Graham, in Episodes 9 and 10 of Season 2.

  “What do you think about when you think about killing?” Graham asks, in the third of their therapy sessions in Episode 9 (“Shiizakana”). Consistently with what we’ve heard him say already, Lecter answers that he thinks “about God.” “Good and evil?” Graham asks in turn. “Good and evil has nothing to do with God,” he answers, and proceeds to explain this with what he’ll reprise in the above conversation with Starling, which is the version of the parable involving the Sicily church collapse and the common source of typhoid and swans. The distinction between good and evil, if it has nothing to do with God, must then be useful only to us, especially if we resist Lecter’s understanding of God as malevolent. And also, if it helps to keep open, as he believes it does, the possibility of fundamental evil, immune to behaviorist reduction.

  And it’s precisely this that’s at stake in the dinner conversation, between Graham and Lecter, which concludes Episode 10 (“Naka-Choko”). The conversation is key to Graham’s plan to convince Lecter that the two of them are finally “just alike,” by convincing him that he’s now a killer in Lecter’s image, in order to lure him into revelation and capture. This he does by intimating, ever so coyly, that the meat he’s provided for their dinner is from a recent victim. As Lecter later tussles with Starling, he would naturally remember a particular portion of the conversation, and see it as paving the way for confronting her as he does. “You can’t reduce me to a set of influences,” Graham says, describing himself as he imagines Lecter would describe himself, “I’m not the product of anything.” And so, when later slighted by Starling’s “what happened to you,” Lecter has Graham to thank for knowing just what she’d expect to hear.

  But here’s what’s odd. Graham goes on to say of himself, continuing the pretense, that “he’s given up good and evil for behaviorism,” which is what Lecter later takes to be the source of Starling’s dismissive attitude toward good and evil. Lecter doesn’t note the tension. And so what he later accuses Starling of would have to be different from what he takes Graham to be attributing to himself, so far unaware of the pretense. And Graham must indeed mean something different, because behaviorism is based on precisely the contrary assumption that none of us is meaningfully irreducible to this or that set of influences. What’s important to Lecter at this point, it seems, is to educate Graham, as he would later try to educate Starling, as to the sheer folly of “giving up good and evil,” whatever may be its philosophical, psychological, forensic, or other motivations. “Then you can’t say that I’m evil,” Lecter challenges Graham, as he will later challenge Starling. “You’re destructive,” Graham replies, “same thing,” just as Starling will eventually say, leading in both cases to storms, fire, hail, and other acts of God. “Is this meal an act of God,” he asks, rhetorically—urging Graham to concede, as he’ll later urge Starling to, that it’s surely unwise to be this reductive.

  Similarly confronted, Starling’s motivated to defend herself, invoking deliberation as what sets Lecter’s destructiveness apart, which provokes the parable. But Graham remains silent. In the spirit of the parable, which he’s heard only recently, and assuming the pretense, the meal is an act of God, and a deliberate one at that. Graham’s responding as he imagines Lecter would. It makes sense, then, that Starling’s response is importantly different.

  What More Fit or Complex Subject

  Within the first few minutes of the pilot episode of the television series, before Graham’s encounters with either Hobbs or Lecter, we find him lecturing at the FBI Academy about a recent crime scene, the killing of Mr. and Mrs. Marlow. “Everyone has thought about killing someone, one way or another,” he concludes, “be it your own hand, or the hand of God.” He’s equating the two hands in a way that he might well think back on when Lecter confronts him with the parable. What he asks them in closing, though, suggests something else.

  “Now think about killing Mrs. Marlow,” he challenges them, as he projects eerily onto the screen behind him the image of her lying dead in a pool of her own blood, and ask yourself, “Why did she deserve this? Tell me your design. Tell me who you are” (Hannibal, Season 1, “Apéritif”). Whoever killed Mrs. Marlow, and however they may think about their acts in relation to God, what most of us naturally do, and Graham is asking his students to do more carefully, is to think of them in relation to us. We tend to think that we can explain such acts, that is, if we can explain them at all, not because God’s capable of the same, but because we’re perfectly capable in the first place.
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  And Starling is reaching in just this same direction in her own response to Lecter’s parable, later on, in The Silence of the Lambs. “I can’t explain you,” Starling interjects, seemingly anxious to redirect the conversation, “but I know who can” (Harris, Silence, p. 19). She’s daring to reject the answer Lecter’s implying, which is that God, or more precisely God’s behavior, can. But he’s already rejected her appeal to behavioral science. And she’s also already ruled herself out. So what precisely is on her mind here? What she eventually proposes, of course, is that he’s on her mind.

  Lecter stops her curtly, though, with “upraised hand,” before she can say so. He’s newly offended, it seems, by her continuing insinuation that he can be reduced “to a set of influences.” “You’d like to quantify me,” he objects, offended in particular that she’s “so ambitious” as to be blind to his being not derivatively, but fundamentally evil, and as such, no conventionally recognized sort of evil at all. He takes himself not to be, on the one hand, a moral evil. “You sensed who I was” we hear him say to Graham, for example, in the second of their three meetings in the second film version of Red Dragon, “back when I was committing what you call my crimes.” Nor does he take himself to be merely a physical evil, on the other hand, as he’s made clear to Graham and Starling, some altogether material phenomenon from which we suffer, such as storms, fire, hail, and other acts of God. He’s surely too much fun, his taste too refined, for him to be but that. And so, by process of elimination, what he is must ultimately defy reason in any interestingly conventional sense.