Hannibal Lecter and Philosophy (Popular Culture and Philosophy)

by Joseph Westfall

  A Superior Artist: He Cooks as Well as He Kills

  Hannibal’s innate sense of artistry bleeds into everything he does, it cannot be helped; it is just who he is. As a consequence, Lecter defines himself in terms of the artistic construct that prescribes his world and has done so since he was a child. Lecter contextualizes himself in terms of the aesthetic that surrounds him—literature, music, art, and history. His aspirations to artistic superiority are remembered in Hannibal when finally Lecter finds himself (after years of imagining) in Florence, a wanted man: hated, hunted, feared, and perhaps even venerated. Florence is the epicenter of European art, the heart of the Renaissance, and is yet imbued with a history of murder, exemplified in Harris’s novel by Francesco Pazzi, who was thrown naked with a noose around his neck, to die writhing and spinning against the rough wall.

  The continued juxtaposition of murder and art, as posed by the contradiction of a cultured beast, is recognized in Hannibal Lecter’s relationship with Chief Investigator Rinaldo Pazzi (his death foretold by his name), who finds Hannibal living under the identity of Dr. Fell. Pazzi remembers a picture of Florence in the Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico—a pencil drawing with shaded charcoal of a view of Florence as seen from the Belvedere . . . it was a drawing in a photograph—a photograph of Hannibal Lecter. Deducing, with the instinct of a good cop, that Dr. Fell is the Hannibal Lecter, Pazzi gives him up—not to the authorities but to Mason Verger, to molest with man-eating hogs. Pazzi pays for his dubiousness, his betrayal; Lecter reenacts the original Pazzi disembowelment. As the hanging body of Rinaldo Pazzi reaches the upstretched arms of those on the ground, Dr. Fell’s tableau is likened to “the great Deposition paintings” (Harris, Hannibal, p. 211). Art, violence, death, pain. It’s all synonymous. In an earlier reference, Lecter recalls that avarice and hanging have been linked “since antiquity, the image appearing again and again in art” (Harris, Hannibal, p. 195). Florence is the concrete embodiment of Lecter’s artistry—it inspires him to play the clavier, to compose, to cook . . . to kill.

  Beware the Man Who Sits in the Black, Painting Colors on the Dark

  Like the folk stories of old, horror is a cautionary tale, a warning: divert from the proverbial path (whatever it may be) and trouble will follow. Stay away from the monster, who “sits in the black library, his mind painting colors on the dark and a medieval air running in his head” (Harris, Hannibal, p. 137). What Thomas Harris wishes to expose in his novels is the nature of “the monster” and in so doing brings to the fore an irony so great that it has grabbed the mind of the masses with resilience unparalleled. How can a man so cultured, an artist, be barbaric in such extreme measure? It’s the conundrum of human existence—how we have the potential for great good but also the knack for being total dickheads. Hannibal is the hyperbole of this very fact. Horror, which thrives on exaggeration, uses Hannibal Lecter to reflect the human condition by offering an ironic representation of reality. Benedetto Croce called reality the aesthetic oneness of opposites; a theory that runs rampant through all four of Thomas Harris’s Lecter novels. Hannibal Lecter leads a life infused with artistic process, a life characterized by experience—suffering, grieving, enjoying—of the reality that is his own. By alluding to Hannibal Lecter as the embodiment of the aesthetic (opposites), his psychopathology, when contrasted with his traumatic past and his love of art and associated skill, is undermined and presented as something recognizable. There is something about Lecter that we see in ourselves.

  Does this mean that it’s okay to go out and eat those who piss us off—for the sake of art, at least? Well, if it’s for art’s sake . . .

  VI.

  The Beauty and Art and Horror of Everything This World Has to Offer

  16

  Empathy for the Devil

  DAN SHAW

  Hannibal: We will absorb this experience. It will change us. We are all Nietzschean fish in that regard.

  Will: Makes us tastier.

  —Hannibal, Season 2, “Su-zakana”

  Hannibal Lecter is one of the most fascinating evil geniuses in the history of the moving image. His legend grows in the contemporary television series Hannibal, where our fascination with the title character is clearly greater than with the far more sympathetic Will Graham, who is relentlessly manipulated and tormented by Lecter throughout the first two seasons. This essay will explore several reasons that explain our perplexing identification with such a diabolical individual, and conclude that the most important factor is Lecter’s unrelenting Will to Power, in the sense that Friedrich Nietzsche made the centerpiece of his philosophy. Like Nietzsche’s Overman, Lecter exhibits almost superhuman power in all three senses of the term that Nietzsche stressed: he is in complete control of himself, his environment, and all of the inferior individuals that surround him.

  Mirror Neurons and Close-ups

  Let me begin by focusing on how Lecter has been depicted on both the big and small screens. In the television series, and in all of the Lecter films, his visage is often framed in close-up. This is the first crucial element in my account of why we feel empathy for this particular devil; as Carl Plantinga, a pioneer in the recent upsurge of interest in philosophy of the emotions, has argued at some length (Plantinga, pp. 239–56), the human face is the primal scene of empathy in films. The facial expressions of filmic characters have a profound effect on us, even to the point of moving us to mimic their expressions ourselves. This, in turn, causes us to feel with the characters we are mimicking, infecting us with their emotions. Recent developments in neuroscience provide an intriguing explanation for why this is the case (see Bruun Vaage).

  In the early 1990s, neuroscientists in Parma, Italy were doing research on the brains of Macaque monkeys with electrode implants. The team, headed by Dr. Giacomo Rizzolati, was seeking information on how the brain exerts motor control over the hand, in hopes of finding ways that humans with brain damage could recover at least some degree of hand function. In the process, they made an astonishing discovery: certain brain cells of the macaque fired the same way if the monkey was watching another grasp an object or if it was grasping it itself. The idea that such cells would fire at the mere perception of another animal’s action identically to when the animal itself engaged in the action was totally unexpected and had profound implications. To their surprise, the researchers found that twenty percent of the cells in the motor cortex of the brain of the macaque were such mirror neurons.

  The discovery of such neurons shattered the cognitivist paradigm of brain function that had been widely accepted for decades. On that view, perception and action were governed by separate brain areas, and cognition was somehow the “go-between” that leads us to select and engage in the appropriate motor behavior that is warranted by the circumstances. The startling implication of the existence of mirror neurons was that the brain responds to the world in a far more immediate and holistic fashion. Interestingly, Hannibal himself explains Will Graham’s extreme empathic abilities to Jack Crawford as resulting from “too many mirror neurons” (Hannibal, Season 1, “Buffet Froid”).

  The close-up is the signature shot distance in the movie that made Hannibal Lecter a household name, The Silence of the Lambs. One-on-one exchanges between Lecter and Clarice Starling are the dramatic highlights of the film, and Jonathan Demme made the canny decision to depict these in a series of shot-reverse shot extreme close-ups. Both Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster delivered Oscar-winning performances, and I contend that one of the crucial differences between good and bad actors is that the latter are unable to set off infectious triggerings of our mirror neurons. Hopkins, on the other hand, made Lecter completely credible, and in so doing helped secure our empathy for his monstrous character. To appreciate the extent to which mirror neurons trigger affective mimicry, one need only reflect on how often entertainers have offered their impressions of the “fava beans” sequence in Silence.

  The use of extreme close-ups of Lecter continued in the feature film version of Harris�
�s next novel, Hannibal, especially in two of the most violent scenes. As Lecter prepares to hang and disembowel his nemesis, Rinaldo Pazzi, Ridley Scott provides us with a series of such close-ups, which convey his infectious glee. Then, when he is about to slit the throat of Matteo (one of Mason Verger’s henchmen), we get another vivid close-up, as he looms out of the darkness to fill the screen with his expression of eager anticipation.

  In his television incarnation, played with cool intensity by Mads Mikkelsen, Lecter is once again granted a significant number of close-ups. These occur mainly in the dialogues between Lecter and Graham, Lecter and Jack Crawford, and Lecter and his analyst, Dr. Du Maurier (which are held over dinner or during psychoanalytic sessions). One of the most complex and perplexing sequences occurs in Season 1, after Graham has been arrested (the result of Lecter’s frame job) for the murder of Abigail Hobbs. In a session with his analyst, Lecter sheds a tear as he apparently laments being unable to save Abigail or help Will. Despite knowing that Hannibal had framed Will for the murder of Abigail, I felt his sorrow, which (in light of subsequent events) proves to be real and not feigned. This indicates that close-ups of Hannibal help to secure our empathy for his character independently of our cognitive evaluations of his actions.

  Aesthetic and Culinary Taste

  As the philosopher Cynthia Freeland has noted, another of the crucial elements that allow us to enjoy this morally heinous character is that “he has developed his own kind of refined standards of taste” (Freeland, The Naked and the Undead, p. 207). As Friedrich Nietzsche might have put it, Lecter gives a distinctive sense of style to his character, which permeates all of his actions. His impeccable taste is displayed throughout the films, and in every episode of the television series. It is expressed in his sartorial choices, in his love for the arts (especially music), in the striking spectacles of his murdered victims, and in his cannibalistic relish for fine cuisine.

  Hannibal is a music aficionado, whose grisly crimes are almost always accompanied by a classical soundtrack. The most violent set piece in The Silence of the Lambs is his brutal slaughter of the two guards in Memphis, which is counter-pointed (until its climax) by the Goldberg Variation of Johann Sebastian Bach that has become a leitmotif associated with Hannibal thereafter. While on the directing board of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra in Red Dragon, Lecter chooses to slay one of its musicians because of the poor fellow’s subpar performances.

  In Hannibal, he attends a fictional opera in Florence, which featured an original song called “Vide cor Meum” (an exquisite piece based on Dante’s poem “La Vita Nuova”) that was composed specifically for the film by Patrick Cassidy. Its theme recurs in the final episode of Season 1 of the TV series, as Lecter triumphantly confronts Will Graham locked up in the asylum and permits himself a subtle smile. The Goldberg Variation discussed above appears several times in Season 2, and accompanies Lecter’s escape on an Air France jet at its end.

  Lecter’s artistic taste is also in evidence in several of the striking tableaux that he creates out of his victims. Most famously, he mounts one of his guards in Silence on the outside of his cage, where the poor fellow is made to appear like the figurehead of a ship. He kills Rinaldo Pazzi in a fashion that mirrors the fate of the detective’s Renaissance ancestor, who was hanged and disemboweled from the same building in Florence for colluding in an assassination attempt on Lorenzo de Medici. In Hannibal Rising, Young Hannibal guts the butcher who insulted Lady Murasaki in the French marketplace, by slicing him horizontally in a way that parallels his original disparaging remark about the configuration of her genitalia.

  Surprisingly, the television series ups the ante on both the grisly and aesthetic nature of Hannibal’s crime scenes. In a brilliant conceit, Lecter commits a series of copycat crimes that are even more gruesome, and executed with greater style, than the originals after which they are modeled. Garret Jacob Hobbs impales his victims on antlers hanging on walls, but Lecter splays his quarry out horizontally in an outdoor tableau that resembles a sacrificial altar. Georgia Madchen killed her friend by slicing the corners of the girl’s mouth all the way back (and leaving her on the floor). Hannibal breaks Dr. Sutcliffe’s jaw and leaves him sitting in his desk chair with a maw even more gapingly fixed in what has come to be called a Glasgow Grin (the same mutilation that was visited upon the Joker prior to the action in Christopher Nolan’s film, The Dark Knight).

  The second season is unrelenting. Hannibal hangs a judge up in his own courtroom like a beef carcass. He fashions body parts into a statue of Shiva, the destroyer. But most impressively, in the finale of Season 2, he leaves all of the characters that we care about (Will Graham, Jack Crawford, Abigail Hobbs, and Alana Bloom) writhing on the floor (or street) as they slowly bleed out, the defeated victims of savage confrontations poetically orchestrated (with segments in slow motion) by director David Slade.

  The aestheticization of violence has long been recognized by Freudian critics like Robin Wood as crucial to our ability to enjoy such gruesome scenes (it is also important to note that we are often shown only the stylish results of Lecter’s crimes, especially in the television series). This goes a long way towards explaining why, as Steven Schneider has observed, there has been a striking trend in horror movies since the 1960s toward depicting the monster as a corrupt artist (Schneider and Shaw, pp. 274–97).1 In his view, it is because doing so facilitates our identification with evil perpetrators who evidence real flair in the staging of their crimes. But that doesn’t tell us the whole story. As I will show in the final section of this essay, this aestheticization of violence is also a factor in our admiration for the degree of control that Lecter’s grisly craftsmanship exhibits.

  Lecter’s artistic tastes and stylized murders go hand in hand with his love of fine cuisine. Most serial killers keep souvenirs of their victims; he usually eats part of them, cooked to perfection in classic dishes. In Red Dragon, he incorporates the innards of the untalented flutist he murdered, serving them up to the Symphony Board in a delightful amuse-bouche. Young Hannibal makes a brochette with the cheeks of his first quarry in the revenge vendetta in Hannibal Rising, and no one can forget how Lecter tells Clarice in The Silence of the Lambs that he ate a census taker’s liver “with some fava beans and a nice Chianti” because of his demanding questions.

  Lecter shares the internal organs of his victims with most of the primary characters in the TV series, where he is shown to be a consummate chef who produces a remarkable dish in virtually every episode (including an exotic version of chicken soup for Will Graham when the detective is hospitalized). Writer-producer Bryan Fuller invests this aspect of Hannibal’s character with genuine authority by bringing in James Beard award-winning chef José Andrés as an expert consultant. Scenes of conspicuous consumption are lingered over, to the point where one can almost taste the fare being served, and the fine wines that accompany it. We relish these scenes despite knowing that several of them involve the consumption of human body parts. To underscore the importance of this culinary theme, the episodes of each season are named after courses in a gourmet dinner service (the episodes of Season 1 take their titles from French haute cuisine, those of Season 2 from Japanese haute cuisine, the first half of Season 3 from Italian cuisine).

  I have always believed that our sense of taste reveals a great deal about us. In Hannibal’s case, it marks him as a totally unique individual and a member of the elite upper class. In tandem, his remarkable aesthetic and culinary sensibilities attract us to him as a man of enviable discernment. We want to feel with a man of such taste, to experience the delicate sensations that only someone with such a degree of discernment can appreciate; as Nietzsche observed, “The happiness of those who can recognize [beauty] augments the beauty of the world, bathing everything that exists in a sunnier light; discernment not only envelops all things in its own beauty, but in the long run permeates the things themselves with its beauty” (Nietzsche, Dawn §550). In this precise sense, Hannibal’s artistic and culinary
proclivities appeal to us emotionally, drawing us ever further under his spell.

  Evil Genius

  Evil geniuses like Dr. Mabuse, Professor Moriarty, Lord Voldemort, Simon Gruber (in John McTiernan’s Die Hard: With a Vengeance), the Joker, Jigsaw (in the seven Saw movies), and Lex Luthor are the driving forces in many of our most popular action, suspense, and horror films. Yet most of them exist only to be thwarted by the good protagonist, while often contributing to their own demise: we love such wily villains for the intricacy and ingenuity of their diabolical plans, and for their black humor, and there is no greater genius in the history of the moving image than Hannibal Lecter. Seldom boastful, and often witty, he contributes to his own capture only when he gets sentimental. As Nietzsche put it in The Dawn of Day: “So long as genius dwells within us, we are courageous, as if mad, indeed, and are heedless of life, health and honour; we fly through the day freer than an eagle and in the dark we are more certain than the owl” (Nietzsche, Dawn §538).