Hannibal Lecter and Philosophy (Popular Culture and Philosophy)

by Joseph Westfall

  So with everything the Interwebs have on 1980s Hannibal, that’d be enough to force a recount from the Nostalgia Critic’s beat out of Red Dragon over Manhunter (Walker). How is it that people who know Hannibal are, well, still ignorant of Manhunter?

  Do You Know How You Caught Me, Will?

  But there’s another sense of “best Hannibal,” and that’s to best or beat Hannibal by outthinking him at his own “knowing game.” The knowing game is Lecktor taking advantage of what he wants Will Graham to know and not to know about the Pilgrim and his lunar cycles. To anticipate the knife twist of getting Lecktor wrong, you’ll need to do more than second guess what a psychiatrist, murderer, profiler, and prisoner freely gives up as expert advice. What don’t I know about what Lecktor is feeding me? After all, Graham’s controlled recreation of the fantasy world of the Tooth Fairy makes known aspects of what was unknown about the physical world, things that were in the blind spots of police procedure, like the latent fingerprints on Mrs. Leeds or how Graham’s been watching the same home movies that Dolarhyde has all along. But there’s a constant unknown for Graham. And that’s how much he can possibly know that will help with keeping himself psychologically separate from, and so in control of, what he mentally recreates when he’s profiling the Tooth Fairy.

  Lecktor knows this. He’s alert to why Graham wants to see him in prison; how the Tooth Fairy is picking his blooms. That’s Graham’s excuse to get his mindhunting mojo back by comparing notes with Lecktor. But Lecktor’s onto Graham getting him to do the predatory thinking for him without Graham having to immerse himself too deeply, or for too long, in a set of behaviors, desires, and patterns of thinking he doesn’t yet know enough about. So Lecktor cuts him off from giving up that knowledge as pre-digested. Making Graham do his own “field work” is Lecktor’s opportunity to get Graham messed up enough either to risk his own life chasing Dolarhyde or to be permanently switched on as a homicidal killer.

  Then there’s Lecktor’s fan mail from the Tooth Fairy. Did Lecktor allow it to be discovered knowing it would lead Graham to risk himself as bait? Or did he know that FBI disinformation about the Tooth Fairy in the Tattler would end up with Freddy Lounds as collateral damage in Graham’s gamble? When Lecktor congratulates Graham for setting Lounds up for his fiery Hot Wheels death, that’s Lecktor the psychiatrist coaching Graham to accept how alike they are as explorers of the joy of killing. Lecktor left Graham and the FBI ignorant about what Dolarhyde would most likely do. Sure, that’s a probability Lecktor bet on. But he had a purpose in keeping Graham ignorant. And that was a strategic deprivation of knowledge on Lecktor’s part: to get at Graham, one way or another.

  Outthinking Lecktor is going to take more than just getting inside the mind of a serial killer. It requires thinking not only about what you don’t know about a situation, a course of action, or why something that wasn’t known was left so unexamined. Overcoming unknowability, what you’re routinely ignorant of and why, involves thinking differently in ways that get at what’s not letting something become known even when in plain sight. Ignorance isn’t always just a lack of knowledge. And sometimes the best question to ask is why you don’t know what you don’t know, rather than how you might know it.

  If all this mentioning of knowns and known unknowns is making you think you’re hearing Donald Rumsfeld’s “There are known knowns” phrase, that’s a good association to make. The former Secretary of Defense’s famous expression is an example of how ignorance can be related to knowledge. And weirdly enough, Hopkins’s Lecter in Red Dragon does resemble Rumsfeld. Re-watch the scene in Red Dragon where Lecter, chained to the ceiling of an indoor exercise yard with an armed guard watching overhead, is talking to Graham (Ed Norton). From side on, Hopkins’s Lecter looks uncannily like Rumsfeld, so much so, that it’s hard not to hear morsels of Rumsfeld’s soundbites coming from Lecter’s mouth in that sing-song voice combo of Truman Capote and Katharine Hepburn. “You know the pilgrim’s killing on a lunar cycle, Will. That’s a known known. And you know he’s giving special attention to the women of the families he’s killing, but you don’t know how he’s selecting them. That’s a known unknown. What you don’t know that you don’t know about the Tooth Fairy, well, that’s the unknown unknown. And I think that’s why you’re here to see me, Will, isn’t it?” Best Hannibal. Your time before the next full moon starts now.

  Lecktor-ology Meets Agnotology

  The study of ignorance, especially how ignorance can still exist even when we know better or know otherwise, does have a name. It’s called agnotology. The high-cultured Lecter of Silence of the Lambs or Hannibal would know what the Greek words mean that the term “agnotology” is derived from. But I bet 1980s Lecktor would know it from the Greek terms used in clinical psychology. Agnōsis is the Greek word for not knowing, making agnotology the study of why something remains or is kept unknown. Putting it another way, agnotology is concerned with knowledge like that other philosophical term, “epistemology,” which is about how we know what we know. But agnotology asks questions about what we don’t know and why. For Robert Proctor, the historian of science who has developed much of the questioning that aims at understanding why ignorance persists in the face of scientific understanding, such as the tobacco industry’s efforts to generate doubt about the health hazards of smoking (“doubt is our product”), the study of ignorance-making involves more than just understanding ignorance as the “not yet known” or non-knowledge on the other side of a steadily retreating frontier that knowledge is pushing against. The focus, Proctor reminds us in the introduction to Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance, “is on knowledge that could have been but wasn’t, or should be but isn’t” (Proctor and Schiebinger, vii).

  Both Graham and Lecktor reflect different aspects of ignorance in relation to knowledge about serial killers. That Graham knows why and where to dust for prints on the corpses of the Leeds family goes beyond what the Atlanta PD detectives can know about finding more trace evidence from forensic facts and routine investigation. But it’s the psychological processes of identifying too much with a killer’s fantasies and re-imaginings of the staging of the dead families as the Tooth Fairy’s audience, with the mother as the centerpiece in a postmortem mystery theater of becoming, that makes it dangerous knowledge. And Graham wants to stay ignorant enough about how and why he can know these things. John Douglas, the FBI profiler who was the inspiration for the characters of Jack Crawford as well as Graham, shares his fictional counterpart’s desire to keep the public ignorant about his own profiling techniques. In Mindhunter: Inside the FBI Elite Serial Crime Unit, he argues for continuing ignorance about most of his own profiling techniques at the risk of “giving away any closely guarded investigative secrets that could provide a ‘how-to’ to would-be offenders” (Douglas and Olshaker, p. 31).

  With Lecktor, it’s obvious how the serial killer specimen craftily keeps his clinical captors ignorant of what can be known about him. Lecktor knows about the Leeds and Jacobi cases from the newspapers, but doesn’t keep copies of the articles lest he’s thought morbid. Or that’s what he wants his captors to think. And as for Lecktor’s offer to help with profiling the killer of the families, it keeps everyone ignorant of his contact with the Tooth Fairy; and it lets him access crime scenes and the autopsy details of fresh kills that he can luxuriate over in memorized playback behind his eyes. And this gets to what we, as viewers, are ignorant of with regard to Lecktor.

  Graham’s panic-induced exit from the cell accompanied by Lecktor’s “Smell you later” is obviously how we know Lecktor’s gotten through Graham’s mental defenses. And there’s much in that scene of Graham’s one and only face-to-face encounter with Lecktor. Matt Zoller Seitz and Aaron Aradillas show in their amazing video essay on Manhunter how the shot composition and editing make it look like Lecktor is a distorted mirror-image of Graham as Graham puts questions to the killer for whom he almost ended up as a meal (Seitz and Aradillas). And seeing Graham behind the cell
bars reminds us where he’ll end up if he becomes a killer like the one he’s identifying with. But it’s the very beginning of their encounter in the cell that gets us closer to how creepily that scene really plays out. Uttering that memorable line with his back to Graham says so much about how Lecktor, with his powers of smell and memory, would already have the advantage over his victims, detecting them even without seeing them. If you stay at the aftershave joke, however, you’re not thinking about how other aromas discernible to Lecktor’s acute power of olfaction would’ve added to his enjoyment: the sweet cooking smell of his victims as stewed or baked cuts of meat infused with ingredients. And as for the chemical breakdown of his victims, after the savored taste of people pieces cooked at fifteen-to-twenty minutes per pound, there’s the metabolizing of their flesh as nutrients within Lecktor’s body. If you haven’t thought about where the smelling joke that Lecktor tells (probing for details about Graham having kids) finishes up, through Lecktor’s gut and out the other end, you’re staying just with the Lecktor you think you know from what you can see and hear, rather than thinking with your nose. Smell thyself.

  But how does ignorance relate to what we know about or don’t know about real serial killers? Think about what would happen in the law enforcement world after Graham kills Dolarhyde. You’re an FBI Internal Affairs Division special agent. There are multiple shooting deaths of local law enforcement officers that resulted from responding to calls by FBI agents investigating a suspect strongly connected to the homicides of two families. The lead FBI agent elected not to wait for a backup SWAT unit. There’s the wrongful death of a tabloid journalist connected to the same FBI agent who used said tabloid to bait the same homicide suspect. Then there’s the supplying of homicide case files on two murdered families to an imprisoned serial killer who was later found to be in correspondence with the suspect connected to those very same murders. Why wouldn’t you investigate what wasn’t known but could’ve been? What could’ve been done about the risks of such uncertainty?

  It’s not so much “who knew what and when?” but more a case of “why were decisions made without questioning more of what wasn’t known?” Was there an overreliance on profiling that led Graham to identify too much with the Tooth Fairy? And was there an overreliance on Lecktor as a source of knowledge that he would exploit? What this questioning points to is how ignorance is at work in what we think we know about serial killers. As Robert Proctor says of agnotology as a knowing game (and you’ll soon see how applicable this is to what the FBI said they knew about serial killers), the focus is on the need “to think about the unconscious, and structural production of ignorance, its diverse causes and conformations, whether brought about by neglect, forgetfulness, myopia, extinction, secrecy or suppression. The point is to question the naturalness of ignorance, its causes and its distributions” (Proctor and Schiebinger, p. 3).

  And this gets us back to where we started out, with “best Hannibal Lecter.” In a curious way, that people are more familiar with Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal than they are with Brian Cox is connected to why the American public in the 1990s got a very different account of the phenomenon of real world serial killer activity from the FBI: they didn’t know what they didn’t know because of the phenomenal success of The Silence of the Lambs.

  And the Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay Go To . . .

  How much did the success of Silence of the Lambs affect what the American public knew from the media about the FBI’s Behavorial Science Unit, the BSU? More than you might’ve guessed. By the mid-1980s, the FBI was politically and socially accepted as best placed both to understand and to deal with the major social problem of serial murder. After all, it was the FBI’s behavioral science experts at Quantico that alerted the American public to the rising problem of roaming serial killers, responsible for up to a quarter of all homicides every year, with some of them operating across state lines. Why wouldn’t the best solution to the country’s growing serial murder problem include beefing up the FBI’s profiling and crime analysis resources as well as creating new powers for the FBI that increased its jurisdiction over serial murder, and ultimately justification for the BSU at Quantico? But in 1990, the biggest challenge to the profiling system developed by the BSU wasn’t from rising rates of serial murder, but from a deeply flawed psychological assessment that wrongly identified suicide/murder, rather than an accident, as the cause of the deaths of forty-seven naval personnel in an explosion aboard the USS Iowa in 1989. The BSU’s psychological analysis was found invalid by an American Psychological Association review panel, and the dramatic display of the professional fallibility of the FBI’s profiling prowess was targeted by the news media for skepticism and even outright dismissal. All of that was soon overshadowed, however, by the Oscar accolades heaped on Silence of the Lambs, and the media’s favorable depiction of the BSU led to increased media access to the FBI’s serial murder experts and profilers.

  As Philip Jenkins investigates and documents in his groundbreaking study, Using Murder, and his follow-up research published almost a decade later, “Catch Me Before I Kill More,” much of the FBI’s knowledge about the scale of serial homicide, and therefore both the necessity of the scope of their powers and the public perception of serial murder, was based on falsehoods. Jenkins argues that serial murder in the 1970s and ’80s was “neither new nor distinctively American” (Jenkins, p. 4). It’s a highly infrequent phenomenon accounting for at most one or two percent of homicides, not a quarter of them. And the majority of serial killers are “homebodies,” not interstate rogues. Their victims are mostly in the same locale or region as themselves. Jenkins’s research shows that the FBI’s support and promotion of a serial killer panic is a perfect case study in ignorance-making about serial murder. The public perception of serial murder was a false one. The FBI’s justification for bigger budgets, more powers, the behavioral wizards and access to their authority and knowledge by the media and Hollywood filmmakers, was all based on ignorance of what was already known, ignorance that prevented investigation of the BSU’s fallibility and statistical falsehoods. Ignore the FBI experts behind the curtains of the serial murder panic. Where to now, Special Agent Dorothy, when the mindhunting wizards are exposed?

  Riffing in the Known Hannibal-verse

  Best Hannibal dream sequel? Mike White, co-host of the film podcast The Projection Booth, once pitched a friend’s take on how one possible Hannibal Lecter sequel (one, thanks to character licensing restrictions, we’ll never get) would play out: Clarice Starling needs a recovering Will Graham to help track down Lecter, sans ponytail. But can Starling trust Graham’s “mindhunting” to keep her safe from Graham himself, let alone Lecter? Let the knowing games begin. Would Starling work out what she doesn’t know about strategies Lecter might use to try to trigger Graham’s homicidal urges? Do Graham and Starling know how Lecter is shortlisting his more deserving victims to feed his own needs? And which world of 24/7 news cycles should the sequel have for media coverage of the known knowns and known unknowns about Lecter? The one filled with talking heads, soundbites of FBI press conferences and 911 calls of coast-to-coast Lecter sightings, syndicated hosts interviewing profilers and true crime writers (think Freddy Lounds meets Glenn Beck), all replaying in between thirty-second fillers on murderabilia hunters, Lecter cult collectors, and arrested copycat killers? Or the one where, as Slate.com and CNN remind us, our fascination with serial killers is dwindling? We’re not in serial killer country anymore, Dorothy. (See Beam, “Blood Loss: The Decline of the Serial Killer”; Fox and Levin, “A Surprising Truth about Serial Killings.”)

  Was that last “What If” another trick question about Lecktor? Kind of. Riffing on “What Ifs” for an imaginary sequel is another knowing game that expands the known Hannibal-verse of pop-cult knowledge about serial killing. If the Silence of the Lambs film echoes a Grimm fairy tale, which fairy tale would Starling’s teaming up with Graham be a retelling
of? Or what if this team-up sequel was Scream-ified and went meta with Lecter on serial killer culture? This riffing on what can be known, even to rearrange the storytelling pieces into ways that make it unfamiliar, doesn’t stop at established franchise material that has purely coincidental resemblances to anyone, living or dead. We know enough about the serial killer lore behind Thomas Harris’s creation of Jame Gumb. That character was a composite of Ted Bundy, Ed Gein, and Gary Heidnik. So flipping through the flipbook of real-life serial killers, which murderer or three could be the inspiration for the non-Lecter killer or killers in the imaginary sequel? Or would a real killer with neither a Wikipedia page nor a serial killer trading card be a better unknown source for a character that Lecter targets? And how do you find out about an unknown predatory killer anyway? This is where Lecter gets to be both the cause of ignorance about serial murder and, in the imaginary sequel we deserve, something of a guide into the land of the unknown unknowns about serial killers.