Hannibal Lecter and Philosophy (Popular Culture and Philosophy)

by Joseph Westfall

  We should also note that Lecter cannot be a sociopath (or secondary psychopath). For he is not the product of some identifiable sub-culture that teaches its members psychopathic patterns of behavior. There is no sub-culture for Lecter.

  Moreover, Lecter is a consummate planner and forecaster, both of the consequences of his own actions and those of other persons. He is like a chess master, planning many steps ahead of his opponents. Such planning, and the cool detachment that goes with it, are not the marks of a psychopath or a sociopath.

  For all these reasons, then, we have to admit that Hannibal Lecter is not properly described as a psychopath or a sociopath. The term “monster” is no better, for it classifies him as Other, that is, as utterly alien to the rest of us. But, as we will see, he is anything but alien to the rest of us. To see this clearly we must first back up and consider his history.

  His Traumatic History

  When Hannibal Rising opens, Lecter’s family is preparing to evacuate their ancestral home in Lithuania to escape oncoming German forces, part of Hitler’s invasion of Russia in June 1941. They retreat to their hunting lodge in the forest and remain there until December 1944. Hannibal thus loses his home and spends three and a half years in hiding, fearing discovery by the Germans and, later, the Russians. This already has to be very stressful for a child, no matter how gifted that child may be. One winter’s day, in the space of a few minutes and almost due to accident, the household servants, his tutor, both of his parents, and six soldiers are killed violently in the presence of Hannibal and his sister; only the children survive. A few days later, Grutas and his men show up and take them captive. There follows their brutalization, partial starvation, and the eventual killing (by axe) and eating of Mischa. Hannibal witnesses that killing and eating also. The loss of those we love by violent means is among the most traumatic events that a human can witness. Hannibal loses all the people he loves by violent means and within a very short period of time. What we see later on is a young boy, and still later an adult, who is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.

  There is no uniform agreement among scientists as to exactly what constitutes PTSD, and it may well not have a single coherent biological manifestation. But three elements are very common: re-experiencing the traumatic events (especially by means of “intrusive” memories); behavior designed to avoid memory of the traumatic events (including suppression of conscious memories and other forms of dissociation); and unusual physiological responses to stimuli that resemble the traumatic events, either too much arousal or too little. All of these are found in Hannibal.

  His dissociation begins with suppression of his memory of the actual killing of Mischa. He can remember events leading up to it, but not the actual killing itself. Neither can he remember consciously what happened after that until he is found wandering in the forest by a Russian tank crew, who shelter him and deliver him to a nearby village for safe-keeping. Indeed, Hannibal’s amnesia lasts for some time after the events.

  He is also mute when he comes out of the forest and remains so, as we have noted, for two years. Mutism is another form of dissociation, one that silences Hannibal’s most powerful gift: his high verbal intelligence. His physiological response to highly stressful events in later life is to dampen arousal: his heart rate, respiration rate, metabolic rate, and emotions. He is calm when he attacks Paul Momund in the village market. He is calm much later when he attacks the nurse in the asylum. He is calm when the Sardinian kidnappers attempt to take him in Florence. And he is calm during the shoot-out at Mason Verger’s farm, where Hannibal was threatened with being eaten alive by Mason’s ferocious pigs. This preternatural calmness is the mark of Lecter throughout his childhood, adolescence and adulthood when under severe stress. It is a further manifestation of his PTSD. For the major symptoms of PTSD to continue in a trauma victim even for decades is not unusual. Holocaust survivors show the same pattern up to seventy years after the horrific events that engulfed them. Survival is bought at a very high price.

  It is a further feature of Holocaust survivors that they also exhibit psychological resilience in the face of their otherwise traumatic history. Resilience is itself a complex, multi-level phenomenon. But basically it is the capacity to cope with those traumatic events and to make a good life afterwards. Survivors often are able to build new families, sustain professional careers, integrate themselves well into new cultural settings, and so on. Somewhat paradoxically, their dissociative abilities help with this. So also do their capacities for self-control, for planning, and for reflecting on their experience.

  Hannibal shows the same pattern. He is a master planner, as we see even in his early deadly encounter with the butcher Momund. He out-plans and out-reflects all of his enemies, often preparing years in advance for hard times. Moreover, once he decides that it is necessary, he takes effective steps to recover his lost memories of the death of Mischa. He uses a combination of hypnotic and anesthetic drugs to help him do this, and also a quasi-self-hypnotic setting. These details (including the sodium thiopental he uses, which is known for its power to dampen anxiety) are scientifically accurate and of proven effectiveness in just what Hannibal is attempting. The recovery of those memories is enough to give him vital clues towards discovering the identity of Mischa’s killers, one of them dead at the hunting lodge, the others free and flourishing in the world after the war. He hunts them down, every one. The combination of resilience and continued PTSD is common among severely traumatized persons.

  A further aspect of Lecter’s resilience is how he copes with his intrusive memories. Such events tend to be brief, emotionally disturbing, unconnected to other memories, and coming “out of the blue.” Notable among these is the recurrent image of a young deer, wounded by an arrow, that Grutas and his men found in the forest, killed and ate a few days before they killed and ate Mischa. This is among the last of Hannibal’s conscious memories before Mischa’s death and when it suddenly intrudes upon his thinking (once while playing the harpsichord in his Baltimore house, once on the aircraft taking him back to America) he cannot stand it and screams like a child. But he finds a way to counter the emotional force of this memory. He kills the brutish deer hunter Donnie Barber with a crossbow bolt. And the sound of the string of the crossbow counters the flashback. His dominance and competence in killing Barber is enough to cancel out the helplessness and incompetence associated with his failure to protect his sister. This use of other autobiographical memories to counter the emotional impact of flashbacks is also accurate according to recent scientific studies. He will use the same technique later to aid Clarice Starling. In all of these respects, then, the resilient Hannibal manages to find his way to resources that can help him (or others) and to make use of those resources to aid in his later recovery and flourishing. He both “navigates” well to these resources and “negotiates” well with them (see Ungar 2012).

  By giving us this history, Harris builds a biologically realistic bridge between us and Lecter. Harris thus succeeds in arousing our own empathic response to Lecter, especially as a boy and adolescent. That empathic response is a basis for understanding Lecter and not merely writing him off as Other than us. We may not identify with all of his purposes, all of his motives or all of his values, but we can identify with his plight. Just as Clarice Starling cannot resist the plight of the screaming lambs about to be slaughtered (in her memory), neither can Hannibal Lecter resist the plight of innocent sufferers like Mischa, or the plight of the bullied children whom he defends and avenges in the Soviet orphanage. He goes so far as to release the captive birds at Kolnas’s restaurant, birds that will otherwise end up on customers’ plates. Neither can we resist the plight of Hannibal himself. Our empathic response to him is both cognitive and emotional. But what about those motives, those values, and those purposes? There is more to be said about them.

  His Motivations

  So, Lecter is moved to aid “those in peril.” He is also resilient in his pursuit of pleasure. Lecter has exp
ensive and even exotic tastes, in food, wine, music, art, furnishings, musical instruments, artistic performances, automobiles, clothing. Harris gives enough details to show just how expensive his tastes are. He leases or buys cars, for example, that cost today hundreds of thousands of dollars. He drinks wines that cost thousands of dollars a case and hundreds of dollars a bottle. And so it goes. He will not deny himself, as Starling observes, even though the pattern of his exotic purchases is almost enough for her to track him down once he returns to the United States from Italy.

  Hannibal has exotic intellectual tastes and interests as well. His education has been second to none. He subscribes to a number of advanced scientific journals ranging from physics and solar system studies to neurophysiology. He edits and reviews for scientific journals. He writes and publishes in them also, even while in the asylum. When free he pays premium prices for tickets to concerts, plays, and other public performances.

  In all of these ways, Lecter is seeking one fundamental objective: his autonomy. The term itself means “self-governing” or “self-ruling.” It is a form of mastery or competence that enables a person to make real in the external world the purposes and values that are most central to his or her identity. Here, indeed, is another facet of his resilience. For competent persons can broaden and build their repertoire of patterns of action. They can also marshal the necessary resources, including personal relationships, goods of the body, situations or circumstances that they need to achieve their purposes. Lecter is a master at these tasks.

  A further part of his autonomy is his attitude towards institutions, including the institution of medicine to which he has otherwise devoted himself. More particularly, he has one attitude towards institutions that have failed of their promises or are in the process of declining in their quality and value. And that attitude is one of contempt. In his book Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, the sociologist Albert Hirschman argues that when our institutions or organizations start to fail or to decline we have basically three possible responses. We can exercise continued loyalty to the institution and its values, despite their decline. We can try to exercise a voice for reform inside the institution. Or we can exit the institution. Lecter plumps for exiting as his basic strategy. He goes even further, however, in seeking to undermine the faith others have in those same institutions. This is especially so for Clarice Starling. Her loyalty to the FBI, an institution that finally turns on her and destroys her reputation, is attacked by Lecter. And eventually she, too, exits. Indeed, it is arguable that her exiting is the essential move that saves both her and Lecter himself from destruction. It is also a powerful bond between them. The destruction of faith is one of Lecter’s favorite amusements, but by no means the only one.

  Early in his stay with his uncle and aunt in France, Hannibal is seen by a psychiatrist, Dr. Rufin. Rufin observes that Hannibal is constantly pursuing several independent trains of thought, always one of which is for his own amusement. Many years later, Clarice Starling describes Lecter’s amusing of himself as “whimsy.” We know a good deal about amusement. It is a very positive and durable emotion. Given his powerful memory for events and scenes, Lecter is in a position to retain his amusements and to use those memories as a resource during harder times. Amusement, then, can also serve to broaden and build an individual’s emotional resources and action repertoire. Its positive emotions can become a positive spiral to counter the negative spiral that external events may otherwise cause. As such, amusement is also part of Lecter’s resilience and serves his drive for autonomy.

  But Lecter is also a killer, you protest. And surely this separates us decisively from him, placing him “beyond the pale.” His homicides have nothing to do with us, after all. They are inexcusable and are what makes him a monster.

  Oh, really? Let’s look more closely.

  His Killing

  It is true that Lecter kills. However, his killing is always instrumental and rational; his killings serve clearly identifiable purposes. They are not merely random nor compulsive nor ritualistic. He kills to achieve revenge, for example, and revenge is a common motive found in all humans and in all human cultures known to us. Its pleasures can be intense and durable. It is even codified in many cultures, both ancient and modern. Lecter also kills to punish, and so do we. Although capital punishment is not uniform any longer in human societies, not long ago it was such. For the longest part of human history, reaching back as far as our resources can take us, we find killing as an ultimate form of punishment (likewise in our closest primate relatives). It is often justifiable especially when those who are killed are otherwise likely to escape any form of justice for their crimes. But we can go further than this.

  There are excellent reasons for thinking that homicide is a human adaptation. It can, in particular circumstances, effectively solve problems that bear on an individual’s or group’s biological fitness, their capacity for successful reproduction. Humans kill in predictable circumstances. They kill, for example, to prevent the loss of a valuable mate. They kill to protect other valuable resources. They kill to enhance or to defend social status and reputation. We are among the most cooperative species on the planet. But we are also among the most aggressive species on the planet. And our aggression often takes the form of killing, for perfectly clear and compelling reasons (see The Murderer Next Door by Buss).

  Lecter is thus doing what humans and other primates have done for millions of years. He also does his killing in just the ways that evolutionary theory predicts. Of course, sometimes what Hannibal Lecter thinks is a valuable resource to be protected or enhanced by killing is something we would not find so. Thus, he kills the curator of the Capponi Library in Florence so that he himself can take that man’s place. He kills the incompetent violist in the Florence orchestra so that a better musician can take his place, thereby improving Hannibal’s own experience of the orchestra. We are not likely to find these deaths defensible. But just as you are not likely to blame Jason Bourne for his killings, neither are you likely to blame Hannibal Lecter for most of his. Why would you? He’s just like you. When he tells Will Graham that Graham was able to track him down because Graham is just like him, he is talking also to us. And now we can say something positive about his kind.

  Hannibal as Outlaw

  In the ancient and medieval worlds some persons were declared to be outlaws. This was sometimes punishment for homicide or treason, sometimes for much lesser offenses. But the effect was the same: to place that person beyond the protections of the law. They could thus be killed by anyone else without fear of further punishment. The Romans did this, the Greeks did this, medieval Britons, Scandinavians, Germans, Slavs, all did this. And we in turn are fascinated and even mesmerized by the figure of the outlaw. Think of our many films, television series, and novels that celebrate the outlaw. But the situation is more complicated than simply being shoved out the door of civil life and its institutions.

  Some outlaws live both inside and outside of the law. Lecter is such a one. For he rents houses, leases cars, engages in commerce, manages his wealth, carries on professional tasks, goes grocery shopping, and attends the theater. In all of these ways he is fully integrated into civil society and follows its norms and conventions in order to achieve his purposes. How else would one do it? What else would be the point of one’s outlawry? He also defends the weak against the predatory strong. He punishes the guilty; promotes the autonomy of others, exercises empathy and compassion, does not lie and does not steal.

  But he also lives outside of the law. He hides from the authorities. He alters his facial appearance. He uses false passports. He avoids being fingerprinted. He kidnaps people. And he kills whom he determines to kill, he himself and all by himself. He is jury, judge, and executioner in his own cause. He lives as independently as he can, never yielding final loyalty to any institution. His being outside of the law is also what makes him vulnerable to the deadly schemes of those who hunt him: Inspector Pazzi in Florence, the Sardinian kidnappers, Mason Verger
, Inspector Popil in France, and so on. No one is as vulnerable to the aggression of others as the outlaw.

  There is no good critical study of the concept of the outlaw, much less of our fascination with outlaws. But we can see some of what is going on. For we too are killers, at least potentially (and many of us actually). We too seek our pleasures. We too thirst and hunger for autonomy at the same time seeking the valuable spouse or partner. But it is the killing that is perhaps the hardest for us to face. For here our aggressive human nature is most clearly revealed to us. In Hannibal Lecter, then, we are given a mirror within which to discern the outline of that nature. Perhaps only in the context of a fiction could we do so in a sustained way. For in such a context we are safe (just as we are safe in the movie theater). And in such safety we can look and see what Lecter shows us: there is an outlaw in all of us.

  1 For a fuller account of the nature and therapeutic quality of the Lecter-Starling relationship, see Chapter 18 of this volume.—Ed.

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  Consuming Homicidal Art