Hannibal Lecter and Philosophy (Popular Culture and Philosophy)

by Joseph Westfall

  Hannibal: [sobbing in an operatic fashion]

  Tim: You don’t just sound sad. You sound disgusted with yourself. With how weak you were back then.

  Hannibal: Too damn right! I was pathetic! Letting that happen to my own family!

  Tim: You were pathetic. Just like the people you’ve been killing recently.

  Hannibal: Yes. That’s exactly it. I guess . . . I guess I’m actually striking out at that part of me that couldn’t do anything to help.

  Tim: That’s really brave of you, Hannibal. All this time you’ve been attacking the helpless little boy who couldn’t do anything to save his family . . . You’re all sorted now. That’ll be $150 please.

  Hannibal: You’re brilliant. If you have any cards, I’ll hand them out to all my guests at my next dinner party. Where I shan’t be serving person anymore, I promise.

  Getting someone like Hannibal to this point would take even the most brilliant therapist way, way longer than a ten-minute section of an individual session. It could take years of exploration to even broach that sort of area—along with a really bold therapist who has the courage to stay with Hannibal’s frame of reference this whole time, rather than breaking the empathic connection by chipping in with his or her own judgment on either the situation itself, or Hannibal’s understanding of it.

  But this is the kind of self-knowing that empathy can foster. If Hannibal felt the genuine empathic support of his therapist, he might feel safe enough to examine his actions to an extent he’s never done before, and eventually discover deeply rooted causes of his present behavior that he wasn’t even aware of himself. Causes that could stem from the events given in Hannibal Rising, where a totally helpless and weak young Hannibal had to watch impotently as his family was killed and their home destroyed. In the right therapeutic environment, Hannibal might discover that the wish to ritually degrade anyone he meets who appears weak or helpless is actually the wish to hurt the little boy whose powerlessness led to the deaths of his beloved family. He’d see that his anger towards people in the present day is actually his anger towards the young Hannibal that they remind him of.

  The true value of empathy should now be a bit more obvious than NBC’s show makes it appear. Imagine where an empathically-guided exploration of these discoveries could take Hannibal in future sessions. He could examine his past from an adult perspective and realize that what happened to his family was never his fault at all, but only ever that of the monsters who actually did all the bad stuff. His anger towards his own helplessness could then fade in favor of a kind sympathy. And he’d no longer need to displace his self-hatred onto people he meets in the present.

  One less serial killer for us to worry about when we’re heading home at night!

  So there are two possible versions of Rifkin’s world of “global peak empathy,” one much more desirable than the other. Either we’ll follow Will’s path and go a bit mad when a philosophy as terrible as Hannibal’s appears so irresistibly attractive that, once we’ve forged an empathic connection with him, our own sense of right and wrong is almost impossible to reclaim. Or people with pasts like Hannibal’s can be helped to work through their baggage of thoughts and feelings in a way that stops them having to be channeled into unhelpful behaviors like becoming a serial killer.

  Given what we see happen to Will in the show, it would be a particularly brave empath who risks guiding Hannibal on this journey of discovery! And given the wider risks for society as a whole, if we didn’t manage to pull ourselves back, and Hannibal’s philosophy spreads from one person to the next, it might be safer for all of us just to stay away instead, no matter how dangerous he’ll continue to be for the hapless folk who end up with an invitation to dinner . . .

  So it’s best for both of us if I end this chapter by saying to you exactly what Jack says to Will in “Tome-wan,” the penultimate episode of Season 2: “Don’t let empathy confuse what you want with what Lecter wants.” If you happen to see him the next time you’re out and about, you should probably walk on by, however nice your intentions. You might want to help him out, but he’d want to carry on killing people and eating them. And I’m guessing you’d rather not become so enamored of his philosophy during your empathic contact with him that you end up going even further than Will and embracing the role of cannibalistic serial killer for yourself!

  1 For a discussion of Hannibal Lecter as an aesthete that ranges beyond the bounds of the television series, see Chapter 13 of this volume.—Ed.

  2 For a deeper analysis of Hannibal Lecter’s sense of humor—including this sort of joke, and others—see Chapter 14 of this volume.—Ed.

  V.

  It’s Beautiful in Its Own Way, Giving Voice to the Unmentionable

  13

  An Aesthete par Excellence

  JASON HOLT

  We see him from behind, his hair slicked back toward us, the simplicity of a white t-shirt that seems somehow elegant despite the setting. The left hand splays open a book of poetry for eyes that savor it at leisure. Not much later, the book lies on a table, in the same incongruous setting, with notes of piano in the air, Bach’s “Goldberg Variations” coming from a tape recorder—the table a spread of drawings lovingly detailed from an eidetic memory and keen imagination by a surgically skilled hand. This is a pure aesthetic moment, yet also an overture, we know already, to a very different kind of scene.

  This aesthetic moment belongs to Dr. Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs, right before he butchers a pair of guards, cutting the face off one for an impromptu mask, stylizing the corpses in effecting his unlikely escape from the cell where the Memphis police have temporarily caged him. The soundtrack crescendos as Dr. Lecter, with a nightstick in tempo with the music, rains blow after blow on one of the guards—on us, in fact—seen from the guard’s perspective in an inspired use of the subjective cam.

  One may be tempted to interpret these scenes, the aesthetic moment and the butchery, as discontinuous, to think of the aesthetic moment as fake, a kind of camouflage used by Lecter to lull his captors into a false sense of only mild insecurity. Even the stylized guard’s corpse strung up on the cage may seem but a diversion to draw attention from the literally face-masked Lecter posing supine as the other guard. But although these strategic benefits are undeniable, it makes more sense to interpret the scenes as continuous. Lecter’s aesthetic appreciation is genuine, not disingenuous. The manner of stylization of the cage-pinned corpse clearly mattered to the one who posed it. Perhaps most importantly, it is apparently the same music, more fully orchestrated, that crescendos, a metronome for the nightstick blows, as if the nightstick is Lecter’s gruesome conductor’s baton. We also know from earlier that the butchery will have left Lecter’s heartbeat unaccountably, inhumanly, chillingly calm and steady. Afterwards, the blood-spattered carnage everywhere, the piano reasserts itself as if under the light touch of Lecter’s rhythmically gliding hand.

  What gives this progression of scenes continuity is the simple fact that Hannibal Lecter, enigmatic monster that he is, is an aesthete, one who prizes the rewards, the pleasures, afforded by art and beauty: art, in its various styles, whatever it depicts—and whatever its raw materials; beauty, in its different forms, wherever it might be found, in however unlikely a place. For the aesthete, such pleasures don’t just matter, they matter a lot, as they do for Lecter, who isn’t just an aesthete but an aesthete par excellence. Such aestheticism is in fact the very key to unlocking the mystery of his character, elaborated as it is into such an alien, such a grotesque extreme that few if any could wish for the strength of stomach to follow.

  This perspective makes an implicit assumption about the relative importance of various depictions of Dr. Lecter. Setting aside the seminal novels by Thomas Harris, I take Sir Anthony Hopkins’s portrayal to be canonical, prominently though not exclusively in Jonathan Demme’s 1991 masterpiece The Silence of the Lambs. This makes sense given the undisputed pop cultural preeminence of Hopkins’s Lecter and Demme’s Si
lence. Sir Anthony, alongside his significant body of film work, is notably also a composer and painter, a true artistic polymath; no wonder his portrayal of Lecter throws into sharp relief the doctor’s aestheticism. That said, I’ll always have a soft spot for Brian Cox’s inaugural movie portrayal in Manhunter, which deemphasizes, at least by comparison, the doctor’s aestheticism. The aesthetic is more evident in the Gaspard Ulliel effort in Hannibal Rising, its culinary and gastronomic side full-blown in Hannibal, both Hopkins’s film and Mads Mikkelsen’s TV incarnations.

  Discriminating Taste

  For aesthetes, art and beauty occupy a more prominent place in their value system than for most other people. Aesthetic value, the value of art and beauty, can be understood in contrast to other sorts of value, in particular intellectual and moral values. Consider as the ultimate trio of values the good, the true, and the beautiful, respectively the realms of moral, intellectual, and aesthetic value. Forget the problematic equations of the poet Keats (truth = beauty) and philosopher Plato (the good = the true = the beautiful), and appreciate that, in their ordinary senses, these terms are representative of entirely distinct values. In simple terms, being a good person has nothing to do with being smart or attractive, just as being smart has nothing to do with being attractive (which philosophers have lamented since Socrates) or good, just as possessing beauty has nothing to do with being a good or intelligent person. As an intellectual aesthete, Dr. Lecter clearly prizes two of these values very highly, leaving the other, we know which, an irrelevant castoff. A thing will have aesthetic value because of its power to provoke aesthetic experience, and for aesthetes such experiences are among life’s greatest pleasures.

  What makes an experience an aesthetic experience? It’s a particular pleasure associated with the appreciation of art and beauty. Whether you’re enjoying a painting of the sunset or the actual sunset, both enjoyments may count as aesthetic. You like looking at them, how you feel in, and reflect on, the moment of looking. Think of how you feel when you’re listening to your favorite song, or watching a beloved movie. The pleasures, the thoughts and feelings that come in actively appreciating these works of art, that’s what gives the experience an aesthetic quality. This is partly a kind of detachment. Think of Lecter’s steady pulse when butchering his victims, or the way you respond to a nude study differently than to porn. At the same time, there’s a kind of intensity of response in appreciating art, a keenness of attention, more focused and significant than in most ordinary experiences. What makes such “detached engagement” so rewarding, not just to aesthetes, is that it resolves internal conflicts, with intellectual and emotional responses in harmonious balance, in sharp contrast to everyday life.

  Your aesthetic appreciation of art, or anything really, can be informed and enhanced in different ways. Lecter, for instance, has an extensive knowledge of art history, not to mention a medical doctor’s appreciation of human anatomy, which, together with his fine drawing abilities, perhaps surprisingly recalls Leonardo da Vinci. Seriously, if you look at da Vinci’s anatomical drawings, I challenge you not to see just a little bit of Lecter there! But the doctor also has other types of knowledge and know-how relevant to his aestheticism. These include a surgeon-grade precision with a scalpel, which mirrors the rendering precision of his sketch pencil, along with chef-worthy culinary chops—where taste meets taste. Taste in either sense also depends on the taster’s level of perceptual sophistication, on how well they discriminate the relevant properties of what they’re judging: connoisseurship, in essence. Think of Lecter’s olfactory prowess, and his particular penchant for an exotic sort of acquaintance with mundane humanity. Here looms a potential feedback loop: aesthetic pleasure motivates improving its underlying knowledge, skill, and discrimination, which in turn enhances further pleasure.

  One thing that hasn’t been mentioned yet but must be is the affinity between art and play. The psychopath’s attitude toward their victims is often very much cat to mouse, or player to plaything. Play in its purer forms involves the freedom, responsiveness, and creativity of art, with a similar type of enjoyment. We know what fun Lecter has with anagrams and other wordplay, the half hints of coded puzzles—“If one does what God does enough times, one will become as God is”—with reluctant playmates Graham and Starling, who are unwilling, unlike Lecter, to treat it as a game. In fact, Lecter doesn’t exactly view Graham or Starling as mice so much as potential cats, as far as the game is concerned. He even handicaps himself, suggesting possible moves to Manhunter’s Graham: “You haven’t threatened to take away my books yet”; to Silence’s Starling: “No, no, no, you were doing fine. You’d been courteous and receptive to courtesy, you had established trust with the embarrassing truth about Miggs, and now this ham-handed segue into your questionnaire? Tut-tut-tut, it won’t do.” This, of course, is just an entrée into what Lecter really wants to play: a game of quid pro quo.

  Lecter’s attitude toward serial killing, half playful, half serious, reflects his aestheticism, which cuts a very wide swath in being able to take aesthetic pleasure from things that most of us would find utterly repulsive. Many people prefer even their aesthetic encounters to be with rather lighter fare. Many moviegoers would opt for the lightness of a romantic comedy over the darkness of a Hannibal Lecter film. Such preferences are fine, of course, but art history is chock-full of aesthetically powerful works depicting not just dark but horrific things: Goya’s disturbing painting of Saturn cannibalizing his son, for instance. As far as depictions go, of course, most of us understand aesthetic pleasure taken in a Goya painting or Demme film depicting cannibalism. We stop, however, at the divide between fiction and reality. But Lecter doesn’t stop. He’s able to derive aesthetic pleasure from, not just the depiction, but also the reality of such horror. Nor is it horror that matters to him, otherwise he wouldn’t be so harsh a critic of other serial killers, or so technical in preparing a dish. Lecter is above all discriminating. He’d reject a Nazi aestheticism, cigarette cases and lampshades made from human skin, not as extreme evil—as we would—but as extreme bad taste. Such a hate-based aesthetic would strike him as utterly stupid. Lecter only really hates people who’ve been evil to him—or rude.

  Blindness That Enhances

  Being blind is something most people don’t have much experience with, especially permanent blindness. We do, however, like Clarice Starling in Buffalo Bill’s basement toward the end of Silence, have some sense of what it’s like to have situational blindness, as nicely conveyed by Demme’s use of the subjective cam giving us the killer’s night-vision-goggled perspective on Starling’s fumbling in the dark. Most of us think, however, and it is almost clichéd to say so, that blind people sometimes find that their condition has an upside, that the blindness is associated with, and the basis of, enhanced abilities in other areas. For instance, many blind people have improved spatial memory, and more sensitive nonvisual sensory perception: improved hearing, more sensitive touch. From a neuroscientific viewpoint, the explanation of this phenomenon is pretty straightforward, in that lacking visual input, some of the brain is essentially freed up and can contribute to other sorts of processing. Remember Reba McClane, Dolarhyde’s coworker in Manhunter, running her fingers through the sedated tiger’s fur, feeling its breath on her forearm, listening to its heartbeat?

  Consider an analogy I would like to suggest between literal blindness and the metaphor of a psychopath being morally blind. A psychopath fails to see the moral dimensions of what they do and the moral status of other people, or they understand morality but fail to see the point of it. Lecter’s psychopathy is blended with an intelligence too brilliant to be lacking an understanding of moral issues. Rather, his personal code of values and integrity aside, he just doesn’t care. I’m thinking it’s still appropriate to call this a kind of moral blindness, even though it’s less a matter of not detecting the morally relevant features of a situation—for instance, that a potential victim is a person—and more a matter of ignoring these feature
s, of being unmoved by them where the rest of us, in different degrees, would be so moved.

  One of the fascinating aspects of Lecter’s character is that it shines a spotlight on values and abilities that he has but that are not intermixed, unlike most of us, with muddying shades of morality: the evil genius, the amoral aesthete. The psychopath’s moral deficit in this way shows such qualities as they do possess—in Dr. Lecter’s case, a brilliant intelligence and sophisticated aesthetic sensibility—in starker, purer outline, in a way allowing us to appreciate these qualities and the beauty and significance of such abilities for what they are in themselves. For this reason Lecter is a kind of abstraction, from morality, of intelligence and aestheticism. Without the pure psychopathy we would have a more complicated, more realistic representation of a sophisticated and aesthetically sensitive intelligence. By being what he is, Lecter helps us appreciate just how important, and often unnoticed, the aesthetic is in our lives, from enjoying popular artworks like Hannibal Lecter films to savoring everyday rituals like your morning cup of coffee. With more or less sensuality, more or less aestheticism, we may relish eating a well-prepared liver—though we’d be pickier than Lecter, and less picky too, about what kind of liver.

  Unlike Dr. Lecter, most of us are comparatively blind to the importance of the aesthetic in life. But of course, Lecter is blind to our moral concerns. Perhaps, as with a literal blindness that enhances other senses, it is precisely Lecter’s moral blindness that enhances his powers of aesthetic discrimination, along perhaps with his astonishing olfactory sensitivity and gustatory breadth. We know he can identify perfumes and colognes on habitual wearers—Graham’s Old Spice, Starling’s L’Air du Temps—and this surely informs his sensitive palate. Smell, of course, is a primitive sense, an evolutionarily old, beastly sense, and this is retained, regardless of how sophisticated, how intellectualized it is, in Lecter’s aesthetic sensibility. He seems more able to appreciate art than most of us, even those with some claim to the title aesthete. Just consider his stint as an art scholar in Hannibal. It may be—though let’s hope not!—that having a Lecter-like aesthetic sophistication depends on a Lecter-like psyche.