Furthermore, when we examine Hannibal as a cinematic monster and consider the audience’s relationship to such a character, we notice the paradox is raised. First, we, the audience, are horrified by him! Hannibal the Cannibal terrifies us. Though he is small in stature, well-spoken, and deceptively polite, we know there is a dark and ferocious monster just beneath the surface. While Dr. Lecter is a well-read, aristocratic socialite and patron of the arts who charms his guests as he hosts soirées, we know that, given even a moment’s opportunity, he’ll savagely lunge at Graham, threatening to eat his heart first, or chillingly serve a victim’s body as an amuse-bouche for all of his guests to eat. And so, he repulses us. Just like with Jason, who wears a hockey mask and hunts his victims with a machete, or Freddy who haunts us in our nightmares with his razor-blade glove, or Michael who stalks teenagers with a knife while wearing a Halloween mask, we are utterly terrified by Hannibal. Even when he is standing, bound to a hand-truck and wearing a restraining mask, we are petrified by his searching eyes, fearful that the monster within will somehow break through his chains and devour another victim.
Second, at the same time, we are attracted to Hannibal. Even though he incites fear, we are drawn to him. We anxiously await every move the monster will make. Audiences enjoyed Silence of the Lambs because we became mesmerized by Hannibal the Cannibal. It was Hopkins’s portrayal of the cold, detached monster that led him to win the Oscar for Best Actor. Fans fell in love with the character and eagerly anticipated the subsequent films to see the monster return. We are intrigued by his odd tenderness towards Starling. We smile when he tells Starling that he is about to have an old friend, the arrogant and condescending Dr. Chilton, “for dinner.” Furthermore, we even grow to root for Hannibal. Just as we were excited to see Jason and Michael’s bodies disappear at the end of their films (thereby indicating they are alive) or to see Freddy return at the end of his films (indicating he will continue to haunt us), we are excited when we see Hannibal capture and kill his victims and escape the authorities. Simultaneously, then, Hannibal is both the villain and the hero of the franchise.
The Mythos of Hannibal
Nevertheless, upon closer inspection, Hannibal is not the classic monster. Hannibal resists Carroll’s definition of the monster, in at least two ways. First, unlike Dracula or Frankenstein’s monster or zombies or Freddy, Hannibal is realistic—he is not a “creature not thought to exist by current science.” In fact, he is a creature thought to exist by current science. While we cannot imagine vampires or re-animated corpses or a dead man who can literally kill us in our dreams, we can recognize Hannibal as a person who could very well be alive today. He is an intelligent and persuasive human being, who attended Johns Hopkins University, developed a career and practice in psychiatry, enjoyed the arts, and became a well-known socialite in the Baltimore area. In this sense, Hannibal is, more or less, like us. Or, at the very least, we can imagine living a life similar to his. Here, Hannibal deviates from one of the central attributes of the cinematic monster: Hannibal is human. He does not have super-human powers that can help him to overcome his fights with human beings. While a bullet to the head would not kill Dracula, it would likely kill Hannibal. While stabbing Jason in the chest with a pitchfork would only slow him down, it would surely end Hannibal’s reign of terror. Even further, as we saw in Red Dragon, Hannibal can be caught and captured, as he was by Graham. When Hannibal prods Graham as to how he thinks he caught him, Graham admits, “You had disadvantages . . . you’re insane.” Soon after, Hannibal responds, “Don’t you understand, Will? You caught me because we’re very much alike. Without our imaginations, we’d be like all those other poor dullards” (Ratner, Red Dragon).
And yet it is these human attributes of Hannibal that make him so threatening and terrifying. His heightened sense of smell suggests he is above average as he recognizes Starling uses Evyan skin cream and sometimes wears L’Air du Temps (“but not today”), and he detects Graham by the fact that he is wearing “the same atrocious aftershave” that he “wore in court.” His social charm allows him to woo his victims into a false sense of security, just as he did with Graham and Pazzi. His appeal to the arts allows him to develop culinary skills for cooking and eating his victims (and even serving them to his unknowing dinner guests).
His developed ability at the gentle art of persuasiveness allows him to prey upon others. At the asylum, in response to Miggs’s assault on Starling, guards “heard Lecter whispering to him all afternoon and Miggs crying” and later found Miggs had committed suicide by swallowing his tongue (Demme, Silence). At an earlier point, Hannibal gives the man who would become his only surviving victim, Mason Verger, amyl nitrate and convinces him to cut his face off with broken glass. Later, when Verger seeks revenge by having Hannibal eaten by wild boars, Hannibal convinces Dr. Cordell, Verger’s physician, that he can feed Verger to the boars, and “always say it was just me,” to which Cordell agrees (Scott, Hannibal).
Likewise, his natural but well-developed intelligence makes him menacing. On the one hand, he is able to outsmart others. As a prisoner, he uses both Graham and Starling: the former, to attempt to kill him in revenge; the latter, to set up the opportunity to escape from the asylum, which is proven successful as he wears the skin of a dead guard to be escorted towards his freedom. On the other hand, he cleverly outsmarts those who are trying to stop him. He becomes aware of the Bureau’s attempt to cover up their knowledge of his correspondence with Dolarhyde (by noticing the rubber gloves in the back pocket of the agent pretending to be a janitor), and is able to continue his plan to have Graham killed. He also becomes privy to Pazzi’s plan to capture him for a reward and subsequently kills both the street thief hired to secure his fingerprints and Pazzi himself.
Thus, unlike Carroll’s monster, who is a creature beyond scientific thought and existence, it is Hannibal’s human attributes and demonstration of scientific plausibility that make him so threatening and terrifying to us. Carroll does acknowledge that Lecter does not seem to fit his definition of a monster. Instead, he suggests that Lecter “is arguably only a psychotic—albeit one unprecedented in the annals of psychiatry—rather than a monster.” However, Carroll offers a way around this problem—namely to recognize that Lecter is an example of science fiction, not contemporary psychology. He writes that examples like Lecter and Norman Bates “are actually creatures of science fiction, though in these cases we are dealing with science fictions of the mind, not the body” (Carroll, “Horror and Humor,” p. 148). We, however, offer an alternative response. Rather than emphasize Lecter’s unrealistic, or “science fiction” characteristics, we focus—and think audiences generally focus—on Lecter’s more human qualities. Rather than trying to force Lecter into a restricted definition of the monster, we think a widening of the definition to account for anomalous examples of monsters such as Lecter is in order.
Moreover, unlike the human Leatherface or even the semihuman Jason or Michael (ignoring their apparently supernatural ability to withstand scientifically plausible ways of being killed), Hannibal has a mythos that enhances our fear and attraction towards him. Leatherface, Jason, Michael, and other similar monsters are too simple. These monsters are silent, hide behind masks, and have very brief backstories: Leatherface is child-like and under the thumb of his family and kills others out of fear; Jason drowned at Camp Crystal Lake, his mother sought revenge and now he does, too; Michael, as a child, kills his sister and then fifteen years later breaks out of the asylum to return to his hometown to kill more teenagers. Meanwhile, Hannibal is a far more complex character and monster. The mythology that the Hannibal Lecter movie franchise created for their monster shows that Hannibal is a multi-layered character, which makes him all the more realistically human, horrifying, and attractive.
If we watch the films in the order that chronicles the life of Hannibal, we witness the complex layers of the character more clearly. In Hannibal Rising, Hannibal, an innocent boy, is raised in a seemingly good family in
Lithuania during World War II. Fleeing the Nazis, his family retreats to their mountain lodge. However, several soldiers kill Hannibal’s parents and hole up with Hannibal and Mischa over the cold harsh winter. In order to survive, the soldiers kill and eat Mischa, and unbeknownst to Hannibal at that time he, too, eats her. After escape, Hannibal is later raised by his widowed aunt, Lady Murasaki. Though his love for Murasaki is clear (he even kills his first victim to defend her), he is ultimately driven by revenge, as he seeks vengeance from the men who killed and cannibalized his sister. There, by torturing and mutilating his former captors, Hannibal loses his humanity, even leaving Murasaki to ask him, “What is left in you to love?” (Webber, Hannibal Rising).
In Red Dragon, we find Hannibal years older, settled in the states, but still carrying on his disregard for human beings, as he is a psychopathic murderer who eats his victims. He attempts to kill, mutilate, and eat Graham when Graham catches on that he is the serial killer he was trying to find, and only assists in the effort to catch the Tooth Fairy (in Manhunter and Red Dragon) as a means of exacting further revenge on Graham. While Hannibal would like to see Graham dead, in The Silence of the Lambs, he meets Starling. Though the monster seems to be ready to kill anyone in any way, shape, or form (Verger, a classical musician, Graham, a nurse, Miggs, guards, Chilton, Pazzi, Krendler, etc.), he clearly has no intention of harming her. Instead, they play their game of quid pro quo and, while he earlier sent Graham a rather spiteful letter, when he later escapes, he calls Starling to tell her, “I have no plans to call on you, Clarice. The world’s more interesting with you in it.” In Hannibal, when Starling handcuffs her wrist to Hannibal’s with FBI agents in pursuit, Hannibal even cuts off his own hand as opposed to hers. All of this suggests that, given Hannibal’s love for his sister, he treats Starling as if she were Mischa grown up. Thus, given the mythos that expands the character of Dr. Lecter from his life after escaping from prison, to his early youth that shapes the monster we see today, we find that Hannibal is a multi-layered character that explains his behavior and yet horrifies us further.
Hannibal the Monster
Thus, while Carroll’s account of the monster partially helps us to understand Hannibal as a monster, it has its limitations. While Hannibal does, indeed, threaten us, given his complex and multi-layered (but realistic and human) character, Hannibal is a person that can exist according to current science. As this limitation goes against our initial impression of Hannibal, we need to broaden the scope of Carroll’s otherwise accurate definition. An attempt to do just that was made famous by the philosopher Cynthia Freeland. According to Freeland, the monster is, and definitely can be, a true-to-life being rather than a supernatural one. The guiding principle, for Freeland, should not be scientific but, alternatively, conventional (or ethical). A monster, according to Freeland, is therefore a creature (of any kind) which exhibits and embodies a social or moral perversion and deviancy. In other words, a monster is a manifestation of evil (see “Realist Horror” and The Naked and the Undead by Freeland). This definition fits Hannibal rather well. In fact, it is due to the very fact that Hannibal is human, but has lost his humanity and is morally and socially deviant, that makes him the threatening monster. This is why he tells Graham, “We live in a primitive time, don’t we, Will? Neither savage nor wise. Half measures are the curse of it. A rational society would either kill me or put me to some use” (Ratner, Red Dragon). Hannibal recognizes that he is a unique monster, not because he is beyond scientific possibility, but rather because he is, indeed, a human monster, whose cold, calculating, detached mental and physical behaviors make him all the more threatening.
Finally, Freeland’s account of the monster helps to further enhance, and explain, Carroll’s paradox of horror that we, the audience, face when we watch Hannibal on the big screen. We are, as Carroll would say, both horrified by and attracted towards Hannibal. We are attracted to him, even though we find him fundamentally repulsive. But not in the same exact way we are repulsed by and attracted to Frankenstein or Dracula. Hannibal’s humanness makes him a unique cinematic monster. As we find that Hannibal is a multi-layered character, and as much as we are still horrified by him, we nevertheless find a way to identify (and maybe even sympathize) with him. Yet, as Hannibal explains his behavior (to the point that we see the human and not the monster), he horrifies us further. Following an alteration of Carroll, we thus pay the price of intensified repulsion for the deeper reward of sympathizing, discovering, and getting to know the human behind the monster. The mythos of Hannibal thus intensifies, and enhances, the paradoxical feelings of fascination and revulsion, thereby making the payoff all the more rewarding. Thus, despite the fact that he is a cannibal and his nature as a monster exists in many dimensions, he raises sympathy.1 He’s in a way a combination of a monster and a tragic figure. As such, his existence as a character in cinematic horror helps to change the way we look at the nature of the horror genre, how we define a monster, and how we discuss the contradictory feelings of repulsion and attraction known as the paradox of horror.
1 For two alternative accounts of the empathy (or sympathy) we feel for Hannibal Lecter, see Chapters 12 and 16 of this volume.—Ed.
18
Doctor, Heal Thyself
RICHARD MCCLELLAND
Hannibal Lecter is like many other animals found in nature: adept at hiding in plain view. We think of the praying mantis, the North American walking stick, chameleon lizards, the patterns of coloration on caterpillars, butterflies, moths, and birds. All often enable these creatures to hide from their predators while remaining in the open. Lecter hides his deepest motivations while practicing psychiatry in Baltimore for many years, only to be found out and captured more or less by accident. He hides in plain view when he has escaped from the authorities in Tennessee by the simple expedient of checking into a hotel near a major plastic surgery unit in St. Louis, where large bandages obscuring his face are not exceptional. He hides in plain view in Florence, Italy, as Dr. Fell, again in part by obscuring his true face and having had his extra finger removed from his left hand, and also by speaking a very pure and fluent Tuscan dialect of Italian, and possessing encyclopedic knowledge of Florentine culture and history. When we last see him, living in Buenos Aires, he is once again living in luxury and in the open, but disguised from his predators.
He is in all these respects, the master of illusion. We know that illusions are often worked by means of misdirection. I think Lecter works as an illusionist at a much deeper level than these would suggest, a level so deep as to reveal many of his own otherwise hidden psychological depths (and their underlying biology, which Harris renders with extraordinary realism and insight). To discover those depths we must look more closely at the history of Clarice Starling. Lecter begins to interact with her in The Silence of the Lambs, at the beginning of her FBI career. The interaction continues off and on for seven years, culminating in Hannibal, at the end of that career. Aristotle once observed that “choice reveals character more than actions do” (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1111b5). And it is arguable that choices, especially momentous choices, arise very often in our social relationships. Both Starling and Lecter make momentous choices in the course of their relationship, especially in the final stages that we see in the novels. We will misjudge the moral values of these choices until we look more deeply into their interaction and especially the transformation that it effects in both of them. Nor will we know why we do not like Hannibal Lecter—or we may dislike him for the wrong reasons.
Starling’s Early Encounter with Lecter
Clarice Starling first encounters Dr. Hannibal Lecter in the asylum for the criminally insane in Baltimore. Lecter chooses to talk with her, when he has already refused to talk with many others. Evidently he finds her attractive, later saying, “I think it would be quite something to know you in private life” (Harris, Silence, p. 137). In the course of their conversations he gives her many insights into her own personality. These ring so true that Thomas H
arris writes: “Here she had heard things about herself so terribly true her heart resounded like a great deep bell” (Harris, Hannibal, p. 78). Late in one of their talks, Lecter produces a pair of metaphors that foreshadows a much later and more profound interaction: the metaphor of the change a grub undergoes in its chrysalis (metamorphosis) and the metaphor of the imago, “an image of the parent buried in the unconscious from infancy and bound with infantile affect” (Harris, Silence, p. 149). It will be important to recall later that one of the strongest of the infantile emotions is rage. For both Starling and Lecter himself harbor important imagoes that are bound by rage and which in turn have bound them from free and adaptive action. The binding power of the imago is not released without dealing with its associated rage. The deep psychological exploration required to reach Starling’s rage (primarily directed at her dead father) will require all of Lecter’s medical (and especially pharmacological) skill, all of his psychotherapeutic insight, and a great deal of courage from both of them. He will also have to act as the consummate illusionist. However, before we see how this happens, there is further preparation for Starling’s metamorphosis.
Starling’s Social Exclusion: Stations on the Way
The novel Hannibal is as much the story of Starling’s gradual disillusionment with the FBI as it is the story of Lecter’s life in Florence, his capture by Mason Verger’s Sardinian kidnappers, and his eventual rescue by Starling. We meet her after some seven years in federal service, years that have resulted in her career “flatlining.” Starling has lived her life since childhood in institutional settings, following their constitutive rules with diligence and success until she encounters the rageful envy of Paul Krendler and others in the institutional hierarchy of the FBI, envy aroused by her early success in finding the serial killer Jame Gumb, ahead of and in spite of Krendler’s machinations. Harris notes several times that Starling has no gift for or insight into institutional politics. At the same time, she is tempted by the corrosive responses of Krendler (and others) to doubt herself, rather than them: “The worm that destroys you is the temptation to agree with your critics, to get their approval” (Harris, Hannibal, p. 29). Both she and Jack Crawford, her mentor in the FBI, are substantially disillusioned by their experience of corrupt higher-ups. So strong is this commonality between them that Starling once falls out of her role as protégé and calls Crawford by his first name. Starling herself is aware that disillusionment is one of Dr. Lecter’s surest sources of amusement and that he seeks to foster her “loss of faith.” But such loss is also an objectively valid response to her situation. And things get worse.
Hannibal Lecter and Philosophy (Popular Culture and Philosophy) Page 26
