Hannibal Lecter and Philosophy (Popular Culture and Philosophy)

by Joseph Westfall

  He’s offended by Starling’s ambition, yes, but anxious to teach her nonetheless—to think differently about good and evil, about God’s relation to such things, about his own in relation to God, and in the end, just as importantly, about her own. For now, though, he finds her unprepared, and so he proceeds to humiliate her, as if to reassert in anger his preferred status.

  Once on the other side of his humiliation, while Starling admits that his various observations are “hard to face,” she’s also undeterred. “You see a lot,” Dr. Lecter,” she admits, “but here’s the question you’re answering for me right now, whether you mean to or not: Are you strong enough to point that high-powered perception at yourself?” “Look at yourself,” she goads him, “and write down the truth. What more fit or complex subject could you find?” (Harris, Silence, p. 20).

  Lecter has offered himself as a response to the problem of evil, and Starling has rallied with what she believes is a reasonable alternative.

  Looking and Seeing

  The modern history of the problem of evil gives us not only a secular in addition to a theological problem. It has also given us, as Neiman has argued, two competing traditions of response, beginning midway through the eighteenth century. One tradition, inspired by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, insists, as she puts it, that “morality demands that we make evil intelligible.” The other, inspired by Voltaire, insists instead that “morality demands that we don’t” (Neiman 2002, p. 8). In which of these two traditions does Starling live most comfortably?

  “All is well leaving the hands of the author of things,” Rousseau famously tells us at the outset of Émile, “but degenerates in human hands” (my translation). We’re not naturally corrupt, that is, only socially. The good news, then, is that however bad we’ve managed to muck things up, making them better again, and so redeeming ourselves is pretty much entirely up to us. It’s just a matter of understanding better how, time and again, we’ve unwittingly crafted for ourselves circumstances that have deepened our corruption. And the better we understand this, the less likely it is we’ll carry on mucking things up. Good news, yes, but also no small task, especially given that, as both an effect and a cause of our deepening corruption, our natural instinct to preserve and promote ourselves has steadily overwhelmed our equally natural instinct to act compassionately toward others. And if we want to get serious finally, though, we’ve options. We can accept ourselves as we are, but make laws as they ought to be, in order to rein in our inclination to evil-doing, even while leaving the inclination otherwise intact. We can also keep laws as they are, but educate ourselves to be as we ought to be. Preferably, we do both at the same time.

  Even Rousseau’s biggest fans will admit that it’s a heavy lift, though, and all the more so as time’s gone on, the various behaviors that “shock nature and outrage reason” growing ever worse through the ages. So maybe Starling’s better off following instead the lead that Voltaire provides in his satirical novella, Candide. The main character, Candide, famously suffers page after page of trial and tribulation, alternatively heartened and appalled by the constant refrain of his mentor, Dr. Pangloss, that in spite of it all reason compels us to view our world as nonetheless the best of all possible ones. And so, the good doctor insists, our various misfortunes, however unpleasant, are contributions to this greater good, and so not so bad after all. In the end, though, Candide’s fed up. It’s our experience that compels us finally to assert that it’s not reason, but rather work that distances us from the “three great evils, boredom, vice, and need” (my translation).

  Is Starling in one camp or the other? And what about Graham? On the face of it, they both seem pretty clearly to be on Rousseau’s side rather than Voltaire’s. Confronting and understanding evil, sweating the endless details, is hard work, and it does relieve boredom and need, but it’s clearly the work of reason. Oddly enough, Lecter seems to agree. “You look,” Lecter exhorts Graham, in the second film version of Red Dragon, “but you don’t see.” And in The Silence of the Lambs he exhorts Starling similarly, insisting that all she needs to identify the killer she’s after, Jame Gumb (better known as “Buffalo Bill”), is all already there in her case files, if only she’d “pay attention.”

  But Graham and Starling are bound to admit, as are we, that there may be limits. There’s the one at least, it seems, which is Lecter himself.

  As we know from Hannibal Rising, before Lecter was busy being Lecter on this side of the Atlantic, he was busy being Lecter throughout Europe, avenging his sister Mischa, pursued in the process by Inspector Popil. “There’s not a word for it yet,” Popil admits, speaking of what makes Lecter Lecter. “For lack of a better” one, he adds, “we’ll call him a monster” (Harris, Rising, p. 283). When Graham comes later to consult with Lecter, in Red Dragon, he doesn’t resist Dr. Chilton’s echo of Popil, in his disappointed appraisal of Lecter as “impenetrable . . . an enigma” (Harris, Dragon, p. 57). Later still, in The Silence of the Lambs, Crawford too echoes Popil, in warning Starling to beware of “what he is.” Lecter’s a “monster,” he tells her, but otherwise, “nobody can say for sure” (Harris, Silence, p. 6). “Maybe you’ll find out,” he adds, at least a little hopefully, but this isn’t to be. Starling’s reason does allow her, with Lecter’s guidance, a greater understanding of Gumb. And this greater understanding allows her to apprehend and kill him. But in the process, she only comes to enough of an understanding of Lecter himself to trust that he’s no threat to her once he’s escaped.

  So the situation’s complicated. Graham and Starling respond to the problem of evil in the spirit of Rousseau—except when it comes to Lecter. In the presence of an evil as inscrutable as it is terrible, don’t we at some point just throw up our hands? Granted, we carry on working to thwart, or at least mitigate it—working very hard indeed. But as we do, don’t we also sometimes quietly resign ourselves to allowing it to defy reason? Graham and Starling do. Why shouldn’t we? Perhaps because there’s something that we know that Graham and Starling don’t.

  A Place for Mischa

  There is an important split in the Lecter canon, with Hannibal (the novel) and Hannibal Rising (the novel and the film) standing against the rest on at least one important point. Portions of these three works break with what came before, and in a crucial way—because these portions not only reveal to us Lecter’s origins, but in the process revise, and revise radically a key idea of Lecter’s that we read about in Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs and hear about in Manhunter. “We don’t invent our natures,” on the one hand, “they’re given to us along with our lungs and pancreas and everything else.” “Nothing happened to me,” in the same spirit, “I happened.” But, as we read in Hannibal and read and see in Hannibal Rising, something did happen to him.

  Hannibal Rising readers will recall that beginning in the summer of 1941, as Lithuania became a battleground on World War Two’s Eastern Front, and for most of the remainder of the war, the Lecter family hid from military forces in their generations-old “forest retreat.” As the Front collapsed in the winter of 1944-45, and as Russian forces moved West, Lecter and his sister Mischa were orphaned, and later captured by former mercenaries turned looters, led by the loathsome Vladis Grutas. “We have to eat or die,” Lecter hears them resolve, his “last conscious memory” of the lodge as, starving and desperate, they kill and eat Mischa. When we meet him next, Lecter’s a “child coming out of the brush,” scooped up by Russian troops, and deposited at the orphanage that Lecter Castle’s become, to begin the long road that is the rest of his life (Harris, Rising, p. 45).

  What we come to learn about the rest of Lecter’s life, from the pages of Hannibal and Hannibal Rising and from the film version of the latter, is that Mischa’s horrific death becomes, not surprisingly, its guiding force. The remainder of Hannibal Rising is animated by Lecter avenging Mischa, as he pursues and kills Grutas and his crew one by one. Hannibal readers will recall that even after many years, Lecter’s focus is more intellectually, b
ut no less passionately, focused on her. He’s become an avid fan of astrophysicist Stephen Hawking’s work, and his early speculation in particular, later disavowed, that eventually “the universe would stop expanding and would shrink again, and entropy might reverse itself.” Lecter wants more than anything for Hawking to have been right originally, for “the expanding universe to stop, for entropy to mend itself, for Mischa, eaten, to be whole again.” In language memorable for fans of the television series, Lecter’s hope is that “should the universe contract, should time reverse and [broken] teacups come [back] together, a place could be made for Mischa in the world” (Harris, Hannibal, pp. 363–64). And the idea remains pivotal right up to the novel’s final pages, though sadly not the film’s final frames.

  For eighteen years—from the publication of Red Dragon up to that of Hannibal—we were happily captivated by Lecter’s charms, secure in the knowledge that the object of our fascination was a basic, fundamental evil. He was altogether different, we’d been told, and believed, from Hobbs, Dolarhyde, Gumb, and their real-life counterparts—a provocative counterpoint, however fictional, to the ever-growing conviction that all evil is ultimately reducible to this or that “set of influences.” And then, suddenly, with Mischa, it seems we were wrong.

  Or were we?

  In both instances in which Lecter tells us that in his case at least, evil’s born, not made, he’s telling us something else too. He’s telling us that, while he may be in this sense fundamentally evil, his actions enjoy a kind of justification nonetheless. He’s imitating God, after all, at least as he understands God, and believes the rest of us should also. And isn’t it God, after all, who, from Lecter’s mature perspective, would have subjected Mischa to Grutas and company’s horror? Or allowed it to happen to her, but how much better is that? And does he not believe that “if one does what God does enough times, one will become as God is”? And if he becomes “as God is,” then if entropy doesn’t “reverse itself” of its own accord, Lecter himself can make it happen anyway—can find, that is, a place for Mischa.

  Hannibal readers find Starling and Lecter struggling again, as they had years earlier in The Silence of the Lambs. As the novel comes to its conclusion, they struggle around this idea in particular, where in the world to make a place for Mischa, and struggle once and for all. “Mischa could have Starling’s place in the world,” he’d considered, but she counters: “If a prime place in the world is required for Mischa,” she proposes, “what’s the matter with your place?” (Harris, Hannibal, p. 476). With Starling’s help, Lecter comes to realize that Mischa can indeed find a place in the world, but that this needn’t be at Starling’s expense. Mischa’s place in the world, it turns out, she convinces him, is in Lecter and Starling together. Cut from Rousseau’s mold to the end, it’s Starling’s reason that helps her resist being consumed by evil, though the threat to her identity is now hypnotic, rather than culinary. Reason saves her, literally, though how unscathed we don’t know. And, interestingly, it does so by helping evil, in the person of Lecter, better understand itself. Again, how unscathed we don’t know.1

  What begins in the horror and thriller genres, ends as something of a love story, however odd this may seem. When we last visit them, we read that Lecter and Starling are living incognito in Buenos Aires, a happy couple now, dancing on their terrace, seemingly without a care as to whether or not Lecter’s being hunted still. Does Starling remain under Lecter’s earlier hypnotic influence, or is she with him now of her own accord in some meaningful sense? She may “come to some unwilled awakening,” we learn, but only “if indeed she even sleeps.” We’re left to wonder. And if for “many months now, he has not seen Mischa in his dreams,” has Lecter given up his evil culinary ways? Again, we are left to wonder. But we should beware. As the narrator warns us in parting, we “can only learn so much and live” (Harris, Hannibal, p. 484). And yet, it seems we can’t help ourselves. We do wonder, about both of them.

  And we’re still wondering when the narrator returns to us in Hannibal Rising, and we read that in establishing Lecter’s “vital statistics” now, from his uncle’s recently discovered correspondence, we “may watch as the beast within turns from the teat and, working upwind, enters the world” (Harris, Rising, p. 2). And as to this beast within, we’re naturally fascinated by what we’re told in turn, in the transition between the first and second of the novel’s three parts. Lecter has escaped capture for his preparatory murder of Paul Momund, and set his sights on Grutas and company. He is, we’re told, “growing and changing, or perhaps emerging as what he has ever been” (Harris, Rising, p. 159). Perhaps also, then, as we watch him dancing with Starling, unable to heed the narrator’s warning to look away, Lecter’s emerging still as he’s ever been. If so, thanks are due to Starling, and so we also naturally wonder whether she too is emerging as she’s ever been.

  In the uncertainty the narrator’s left us with, we can’t help but let our thoughts linger on the dancing couple, wondering what will become of them—or, more precisely, what they will become, together and each in their own right. But with their competing responses to the problem of evil seemingly reconciled, for the time being at least, we also can’t help but hope—for them, and for us.2

  1 For more on the consequences—for Hannibal Lecter, as well as for the Lecter mythos—of the culmination of his relationship with Starling in Hannibal, see Chapter 18 of this volume.—Ed.

  2 I’d like to thank my son Sean for my copy of Hannibal, which he gave me on Father’s Day the year of its publication, helping to set me on this particular path, and for all of the other paths we’ve shared since that best of all possible days when he was born. Thanks also to his mom for helping him in the process.

  5

  Office Hours Are for Patients

  DANIEL MALLOY

  There are moral principles that apply to all of us all the time. Dr. Hannibal Lecter regularly violates many of these—they forbid us, for example, from killing other people, from desecrating corpses, and from lying. Dr. Lecter obviously has very little problem breaking these rules.

  There are other codes of ethics, however, which apply to only some of us and only some of the time. Many professions, for example, have codes of ethics specific to themselves. The principles included in these codes are sometimes just explanations of how the more general moral principles apply to members of this profession; and they are sometimes specific principles to the profession that have little to no connection to broader moral principles.

  Professional codes of ethics are just one example, however, of the moral principles that govern particular kinds of relationships. For virtually any sort of relationship among humans, there is an implicit or explicit set of governing moral principles. Parents have duties to their children that no one else does, and vice versa. Coworkers have certain duties that they owe exclusively to one another. Friendships, similarly, have an implicit ethical code that governs them.

  Before Dr. Lecter was revealed to be Hannibal the Cannibal (or the Chesapeake Ripper), he was a well thought-of psychiatrist. In fact, it is that reputation that first brought him into contact with the FBI and Will Graham, and it was at least in part responsible for the continued consultations with him after his capture. But aside from using his psychological insight to aid FBI investigations, he also served as a therapist for Will Graham and others connected with him. We know Hannibal Lecter is not a good person, but is Dr. Lecter an ethical therapist?

  This question requires explaining what is involved in being an ethical therapist, and, in turn, the basics of professional ethics for any field. This chapter argues that, just as Dr. Lecter wears a “person suit” to hide his less savory activities as the Chesapeake Ripper, the code of conduct that binds him as a psychiatrist is the closest he can come to understanding friendship. In Dr. Lecter’s attempt to befriend Will Graham, the professional code of conduct he abides by serves as a model for how friends behave.

  My claim is that Dr. Lecter’s use of the ethics of h
is profession in his attempt to become friends with Will reveals the core of professional ethics: the attempt to artificially create and ensure the kind of trust that defines friendships. At the same time, Dr. Lecter’s evolving relationship with Will reveals the limitations of professional ethics, which can never emulate the mutual trust of friendship because of the power imbalances inherent in the professional-client relationship. As their relationship evolves, the levels of trust and relative positions of power between Dr. Lecter and Will shift. They never quite achieve either a professional-client relationship or a friendship, but their relationship is always modeled on one or the other.

  Being a Professional

  Not all jobs are professions. Cashiers, cooks, and clerks are bound only by the moral and legal codes that bind everyone, regardless of their particular circumstances. Most often, when speaking of professions, we are referring to doctors and lawyers. There are other careers that we might think of as professions, and that likewise have unique codes of conduct—a case could be made, for instance, for considering members of the clergy, teachers, engineers, and accountants, among others, as professionals in the relevant sense. In considering the foundations of professional ethics, we must ask what is it about a profession that requires a separate code of conduct? And we should bear in mind that codes of ethics for professionals are in no way a new thing: the Hippocratic Oath, after all, has probably been around in one form or another since Hippocrates in ancient Greece, which makes it roughly as old as Western civilization.