Lecktor at Large among the Less-Dead
Cut to the chase. In my imaginary sequel, Lecter makes telephone contact with Graham and Starling. He tells them that he’s keeping a low profile, casing out a murderer whose sex worker victims don’t make it into the local papers. The serial murderer, Lecter informs Graham and Starling, “was doing his killing in Poughkeepsie, New York, a town on the Hudson River halfway between Albany and New York City—too far south to enter the Albany television market and too far north to be covered by the New York City TV footprint. That’s like saying it never happened” (Vronsky, p. 40). If that geographical location sounds a little too exact to be made up as film dialogue, you’re right. Those lines by my imaginary Lecter are from Peter Vronsky’s book Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters. And the serial killer is, or was, real.
Kendall “Stinky” Francois murdered eight sex workers between 1996 and 1998. He kept their corpses in the attic of his parents’ place. But his victims were never eaten or kept alive in a prison pit. And they weren’t skinned or made into sculptures, just strangled lifeless and stored in garbage bags. Add to the low publicity this not-made-for-TV, “typical,” single-digit serial killer career would’ve made, and Vronsky’s point about a killer and his victims staying invisible outside of a metropolitan television footprint is another example of how media-fed public knowledge about serial killers is adding to our ignorance of them. Who in the media would care enough to want their audience to know about missing sex workers outside of the world of their own metro area? “No one wanted to know how this killer was picking them,” the imaginary sequel Lecter tells Starling and Graham. “Because nobody knows they are gone. Some of them never became active missing person cases. They’re the missing missing. They’re the unknown unknowns, Will. When they are found dead, if they ever are, their deaths don’t matter as much. They are the ‘less-dead’.”
To put the “less-dead” into Lecter’s mouth is to cue up another real-world reference that’s used to think about the known unknowns and unknown unknowns influencing what we know about serial killers. And, intriguingly enough, the term “less-dead” originated with a criminologist, Steven Egger, who first linked wider public ignorance about serial murder generated by pop-cultural serial killers in a paper he gave at the 1992 annual meeting of the Academy of Criminal Justice Science, just two weeks before Silence of the Lambs won five Oscars at the Academy Awards. The “less-dead,” as Egger explains in his own entry for the term in the Encyclopedia of Murder and Violent Crime, “refers to the majority of serial murder victims, who belong to marginalized groups of society.” He continues:
They lack prestige or power and generally come from lower socioeconomic groups. They are considered less-dead before their deaths, they virtually “never-were,” according to prevailing social attitudes. In other words, they are essentially ignored and devalued by their own communities or members of their neighborhoods and generally not missed when they are gone. Examples are prostitutes, the homeless, vagrants, migrant farm workers, homosexuals, the poor, elderly women, and runaways. They are vulnerable in locations they frequent, and easy to lure and dominate. (Egger, p. 279)
Would Lecter ever target the “less-alive”? That’d spoil the appeal of snuffing out the deserving, especially after his retconned origins as an aristocratic killer of Nazi-collaborators, substituting evermore his eaten sister with the flesh of his victims. But those preying on the “less-alive” would be on Lecter’s menu as convenient take-away if he was the at-large focus of an FBI manhunt. That’s what Egger is getting at with the idea of the “less-dead.” The media and police can and do contribute to public ignorance about the victims of serial killers. So, as much as our continuing fascination with the mythical individuality of serial killers means we’d recognize their names more than those of Nobel Prize winners, very few people would be able to name even one victim of a serial murderer.
Good Will Hunting and the Dark Matter of the Hannibal-verse
If what the characters in Manhunter know about Lecktor makes up the known Hannibal-verse, then what they don’t know and don’t know that they don’t know isn’t just ignorance that gets pushed back by knowing more than they did before. The stuff that’s not known about Lecktor is more like the “dark matter” of the Hannibal-verse. And Lecktor relies on ignorance as much as he’s an ignorance-making demon in the world of Will Graham. Mindhunting with Lecktor means you’re not going to bump into what you don’t know. It’s going to roll out at you like a fiery wheelchair. The pull of these Lecktor effects—the invisible, cognitive influence he has on what can be known or what he keeps unknown—extends from the fictional world into the real world of what people think they know about serial killers. The mythological and fairy tale elements of the Hannibal-verse overtake our thinking about serial killing, creating ignorance where there could have been knowledge. And Hannibal, the “never-has-been,” as in there-never-was-nor-ever-will-be a real killer like Hannibal, is one real answer to the question of why we’re ignorant of the “never-were” victims of real, no-name, no-brand, serial killers.
IV.
I Gave You a Rare Gift, but You Didn’t Want It
10
The Light from Friendship
ANDREW PAVELICH
Thomas Harris introduced the characters of Will Graham and Hannibal Lecter in the novel Red Dragon, and in that version of the story, we’re told that Will met Hannibal while investigating a murder, and almost immediately saw that Hannibal was the killer. It was meant to show how well Will understands the minds of killers, and how he makes intuitive leaps even before he fully understands them. Will then visits Hannibal in the mental hospital to “catch the scent” of the killer he is currently chasing, and Hannibal taunts him by claiming that they are more alike than not. It’s a powerful scene that sets Will up as a super-investigator who alone can bring down the kinds of psychopaths that populate Harris’s novels.
When Bryan Fuller created his series, he kept Hannibal and his psychosis, and kept Will and his powerful intuition, but changed the relationship between the two characters. When the show began, the audience assumed (or at least I did) that it would be about how Will catches killers-of-the-week while missing the big one that’s right under his nose. And while the show definitely had that theme, it also became a show about how Will and Hannibal, who share a kind of disconnect from the people around them, become friends. In the series, Hannibal often points to Will as either his friend or his potential friend, and Will spends most of Season 1 confiding in Hannibal as something between a therapist and a friend. Will then spends Season 2 seemingly masquerading as Hannibal’s friend in order to catch Hannibal in an act of murder, but at some points in this masquerade, the two seem closer than ever before. In the end, Hannibal stabs Will, and feels the tragedy of being betrayed by the one person who has ever been his friend. But was he right? What does it mean to be a friend? And, given the kind of person that Hannibal Lecter is, could he ever have been friends with Will Graham?
Aristotle on Friendship
To get a handle on whether the characters of Will Graham and Hannibal Lecter really are friends, we need to take a step back and look at friendship in general. There have been some classic descriptions of friendship in the history of philosophy, but probably the most important is one of the first: that of the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle.
Aristotle had a lot to say about friendship, but it starts with the basic idea that friendship is more important than we usually give it credit for. He thought that having friends is a necessary part of living well—both emotionally, morally, and practically. As human beings, he says, we naturally have affinity for others. If we are living rightly, then we will love our own lives, and we will want to share these lives with others. Friendships allow this.
For without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods; even rich men and those in possession of office and of dominating power are thought to need friends most of all; for what is
the use of such prosperity without the opportunity of beneficence, which is exercised chiefly and in its most laudable form towards friends? (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1155a)
What’s the point of power, or wealth, or even of goodness, if we cannot share this with someone we care about? Without friends, none of our achievements matter.
Aristotle also says that friendship must be recognized, and reciprocated. In part, he says, this is because we all wish for the best for ourselves, and our friends reflect our own concerns. We must know our friends, and they must know us. Friendship ultimately is aiming at equality between two people; it’s about two people being joined in all things. For this reason, Aristotle says that ordinary people cannot be friends with a king; there is simply no room to meet as equals, even if each party is wishing the best for the other. As Aristotle writes, “To be friends, then, they must be mutually recognized as bearing goodwill and wishing well to each other” (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1156a).
To put it all together, then, for Aristotle, the highest form of friendship is between people who are good, and good to each other:
Perfect friendship is the friendship of men who are good, and alike in virtue; for these wish well alike to each other qua good, and they are good themselves. Now those who wish well to their friends for their sake are most truly friends; for they do this by reason of own nature and not incidentally; therefore their friendship lasts as long as they are good—and goodness is an enduring thing. (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1156b)
In the world of Hannibal, there are a few candidates for this kind of friendship. One is the relationship between the members of the FBI forensics team. They have an easy time with each other, and seem to accept each other for who they really are. However, we rarely get a chance to see them outside of work, and so they may just have a kind of “work friendship.” Not that such a relationship isn’t real, but it’s not as deep as the perfect friendship that Aristotle talks about. For this, I think we should look to the relationship between Jack Crawford and his wife “Bella,” at least after she is honest with him about her cancer. They want the best for each other, and they want each other to be equals. They may not always agree about what’s best (an example being her attempted suicide), but they care about each other and place each other at the center of their lives.1
Aristotle’s philosophy of friendship is a very influential one that tends to line up with a lot of our everyday ideas: we want friends so that we have someone to share our lives and share our fortunes with, and we want our friends to reciprocate our friendship. Our friends must, as Aristotle says elsewhere, share our souls. But if we are going to discuss friendship and Hannibal, we also have to look elsewhere in the history of philosophy. Hannibal, after all, is hardly a conventional character, and his friendships will not be conventional either. We must turn to one of philosophy’s great outsiders: Friedrich Nietzsche.
Nietzsche on Friendship
Nietzsche is a notoriously difficult philosopher to understand. He is probably most famous for writing that “God is dead,” but this doesn’t exactly mean that he thinks that there is no God. What he means instead is that God does not matter—or more precisely, that God should not matter. If we understood the world in the right way, then we wouldn’t bother wondering what God wants, or what God says. God, Nietzsche says, is irrelevant to our lives.
Part of what makes Nietzsche hard to grasp is that he doesn’t think that everyone is capable of really believing the things that he says are true. One of the core concepts in Nietzsche’s philosophy is that there are two kinds of people in the world: most of us, the ordinary masses of humanity, unquestionably worship a higher being, and tell ourselves that this being has given us absolute moral truths. We do this, Nietzsche says, to shield ourselves from actually having to make decisions in life, and as such, we hide ourselves from the truth. Opposed to this group are those very few who know the truth, who know that there is no higher authority—that even if there is a God, there is no reason to take him as the arbiter of morality. Nietzsche calls these people “Übermenschen” in German, sometimes translated as “supermen,” but probably more aptly (and literally) translated as “overmen.” They are people who stand over the rest of us, due to their willingness to embrace the truth about the universe. They even stand as equals to God—obviously not equals in power, but equal in creativity and desire. This, Nietzsche says, is actually what God wants in us: “Companions the creator seeks, not corpses, not herds and believers. Fellow creators, the creator seeks—those who write new values on new tablets” (Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra I: “Prologue”). The overmen do not wait for God to approve their actions—they act as they wish, without regard for what the masses call “morality.”
It should come as no surprise that this is how Hannibal sees himself. Consider two of the times that Hannibal actually talks about God. When he is helping Will examine his feelings about having killed Garret Jacob Hobbs, he says: “Killing must feel good to God, too. He does it all the time. And are we not created in his image?” (Hannibal, Season 1, “Amuse-Bouche”). Much later in the series, when Hannibal serves Will roasted ortolans, he explains that it is traditional when eating them to cover one’s head before God, but he doesn’t do this himself, saying, “I don’t hide from God” (Hannibal, Season 2, “Kō No Mono”). This all lines up with what Nietzsche said about the overmen—they are not subservient to God, but equals. Autonomy and freedom from ordinary morality are the hallmarks of Nietzsche’s overman, not subservience.
Hannibal actually mentions Nietzsche once, when serving a trout that Will caught. He says: “More flavorful and firm than farmed specimens. I find the trout to be a very Nietzschean fish. Trials of his wild existence find their way into the flavor of the flesh” (Hannibal, Season 2, “Su-zakana”). For the overman, life is all about struggle and growth. When we realize that this is the only life that matters, Nietzsche thought, we can truly live, and accumulate the real experiences of life—much like the trout. And in this process of creativity, conflict, and struggle, life (ours and the trout’s) acquires its taste. The overman does not want comfort. He wants life.
An entire book could be written about Hannibal and Nietzsche, but here we’re interested only in friendship. For Nietzsche, friendship is about cultivating the Übermensch; it’s a striving of two people to each become more than just ordinary humans. Friendship in this sense does not preclude conflict, or even open combat; it may even encourage it. One can imagine enemies in war thinking of each other in this sense of friendship—as equals who are equally set apart from the rest of humanity and are striving to grow. Their fight does them both good. This may not make sense in a modern version of war, where death is quick and impersonal, but it makes more sense in a classical view of war, with the combat of champions, each becoming greater through the struggle.
If one wants to have a friend one must also want to wage war for him: and to wage war, one must be capable of being an enemy.
In a friend one should still honor the enemy. Can you go close to your friend without going over to him?
In a friend one should have one’s best enemy. You should be closest to him with your heart when you resist him. (Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra I: “On the Friend”)
This is the kind of friendship that Gilgamesh and Enkidu, or Achilles and Hector, could have had (even though they didn’t become friends in life, Achilles certainly respected Hector in death). Friendship is about striving, and becoming better—which makes friendship, for Nietzsche, largely a matter of self-interest.
Nietzsche and Aristotle actually share a great deal in their thoughts on friendship—they both view it as an essential part of the best life, and they both view the relationship between friends as one of shared interests. The difference, or at least one big difference, is that for Aristotle, friendship was ultimately about honesty and reciprocation. For Nietzsche, friendship is about growth, which can take place through conflict, and can include dishonesty. This difference is goin
g to be important when looking at Hannibal and Will.
Hannibal’s View of Will
Hannibal Lecter has a hard time making friends. Over the course of the series, as he becomes close to Will, he seems to get excited about the possibility of friendship. Up until then, as his therapist Dr. Du Maurier says, Hannibal is “disconnected from the concept of friendship” (Hannibal, Season 1, “Relevés”). There are many people in his life who seem like friends (Jack Crawford being one), but their relationships are only really on the surface. Again, Dr. Du Maurier puts it well, saying that Hannibal wears a “person suit” to navigate the world (Hannibal, Season 1, “Sorbet”). Acting like friends with Jack is a part of that suit, but he sees in Will the possibility of more. We get the sense as an audience that this would be the first real friendship that Hannibal has ever had.
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