Hannibal Lecter and Philosophy (Popular Culture and Philosophy)

by Joseph Westfall

  15

  The Art of Killing

  ANDREA ZANIN

  John Douglas—a former special agent with the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), one of the world’s first criminal profilers, criminal psychology author, and the man who inspired the literary birth of Jack Crawford, top gun at the Behavioral Science Unit of the FBI in Thomas Harris’s monstrous Hannibal Lecter mythology—says of serial killers: “If you want to understand the artist, you have to look at the painting” (Douglas and Olshaker, p. 32). Seriously? It’s sort of sick, this art and murder business. Douglas’s metaphor evokes ideas so disturbing, so repulsive, that the brain revolts with revolutionary fervor. And yet it was Douglas’s pioneering work that inspired a villain so vile that society’s inherent-but-mostly-repressed deviance lurches to know more, to understand and even to bask in the latent ambiance of Hannibal Lecter’s dark incandescence. We want to know him; we want him to know us. And yet we don’t. Saturated in contradiction, Harris’s man-eating monster dines on the rude with a helping of fava beans and a glass of nice Chianti, an absentminded hand rising and falling in time with the cadence of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. It’s a mish-mash of “high culture” and debased immorality, and it’s utterly diabolical. To the tune of which, Douglas would have us believe that a successful serial killer is much like Picasso, working as carefully as a painter planning a canvas. These killers consider what they do their “art” and they keep refining it as they go along (Douglas and Olshaker, p. 6).

  Just as one might admire a work of art, it’s not so difficult to imagine a serial killer reveling in blood spatter and body part assemblage; the scene likely embellished with a prop or two—a stained knife, a reddened axe, a bouquet of flowers, some fruit, a trendy hat, a collection of bullet casings, maybe a designer bag or Jimmy Choo heel—for effect. It’s easy because it’s a subjective experience. And murderers are deviants anyway, which allows us to view their weirdo fetish-type behavior with a judging eye. But what is not so easy is appreciating the aesthetic value of a murder scene as an objective work of art. Disembowelment, decapitation, facial reconstruction, a masticated tongue . . . how is this art? Oh but it is! Forget classic notions of aestheticism proposed by the likes of Georg Hegel and his cronies, or at least be prepared to imagine with a postmodernist perspective, one that gives you license to open your mind to the notion that an invoked sense of revulsion is as much a symptom of the aesthetic as is gushing glorification.

  The best way to understand Hannibal, popular culture’s favorite cannibal, is to go all “Jack Crawford” on the guy and investigate the aesthetic of Lecter’s crimes with the savvy of an FBI agent. By probing Harris’s novels with CSI-type precision, the way in which art has informed Lecter’s upbringing and permeated every aspect of his existence, murder included, will materialize. And although our minds will writhe and reel with the effort, the dark Disturbia that lurks in the recesses of our very-human consciousness will relish the ride. Welcome to horror . . . equivocal in its ability to both repel and seduce. Like Pablo Picasso. Like Hannibal Lecter.

  Carving the Canvas: Horror IS Art

  On the face of it, a marriage of Horror (ugly) and Aestheticism (pretty) might seem like an oxymoronic assimilation, but the art of the twentieth century (in particular) has altered the principles of the aesthetic, proposing a definition amended by context and social change. Italian idealist philosopher and sometime politician Benedetto Croce was a proponent of the idea that “expression” is central to the definition of an artistic aesthetic in the way that beauty was once thought to be a fundamental component thereof. Art reflects the society of which it is a part, and it only makes sense that the terms used to define art evolve along with that which influences its character. So, what then? The world only became ugly in the last fifty years—at least, if the movies are anything to go by? Not at all. The world’s always been partially dismal but modern society, governed by a new set of social conventions, has stopped going all Pollyanna on the pain. The “glad game” is dead and buried. These days, we like to “keep it real,” also known as “freedom of expression.”

  But let’s backtrack a bit. Before rampaging against the so-called implications of traditionally defined aestheticism, what is it—aestheticism—and what do classical thinkers say about it? In philosophy, “aesthetics” deals with the nature of art, beauty, and creation—the appreciation of beauty, in other words. And so aesthetics and art are invariably linked—one cannot be without the other, kind of like Lecter and his muzzle, Jason and his mask, Freddy and his razors, Jigsaw and his bicycle, Leatherface and his chainsaw. Right? The problem with aesthetics is that it gets complicated when trying to understand the character of “appreciation”: what denotes “beauty” and thus what defines art. Philosopher David Novitz, acclaimed for his theories on the connection between art and everyday life, has argued that the typical hoity-toity brawl over what is and isn’t art (you’d be surprised to know what academics are willing to lose teeth over) is rooted in the subjective understanding of whatever trend so happens to be society’s “value of the day,” rather than an objective set of criteria. Novitz would agree that the deeply offensive manifestation of Hannibal Lecter’s morose immorality does not preclude his “work” from being defined as art, which is a radical concept in light of traditional aestheticism.

  Hegel, a classical philosopher famous for his lectures on aesthetics, would definitely not be endeared to Novitz’s notes on art. But Hegel has some good points. He admits that “aesthetic” means, more precisely, the science of sensation or feeling—how the world perceives or reflects on art (culture and nature). What Hegel alludes to is that beauty invokes a plethora of positive emotions (joy, friendliness, confidence, revelation) and it is the presence of this response that defines art as art, which, naturally, excludes any sort of anything that might invoke terror, angst, melancholy, repugnance, fear or any number of other negative emotions on the spectrum. The thing with Hegel’s reasoning is that it just ain’t real—art, classic or modern, is not just about charming cherubs or nice nature scenes: it’s John the Baptist’s head on a platter, it’s a man without a face, it’s a shark resting in formaldehyde. Art isn’t always obvious and it’s not required to be pleasant. Which is where the thinking of American philosopher, poet and founder of Aesthetic Realism, Eli Siegel, comes in.

  An important philosophy to emerge in the twentieth century, as articulated by Siegel, is that reality itself is aesthetic. And reality isn’t always pretty. Neither is expression, as per Croce. Novitz reminds us that the traditionalism that has defined “high art” for centuries and its accompanying exclusivity has been eradicated by contemporary thought, which has transposed great freedom onto the individual, freedom to express and to be real in doing it. Art that was once frowned upon for its mass appeal has gained in stature thanks to the vista of modern thinking, thinking that allows the value of “realism” and “expressionism” to reveal both the ethic and the aesthetic of Hannibal Lecter’s crimes.

  In the novel, Hannibal, Thomas Harris describes Lecter as a connoisseur of the worst in mankind. Lecter, attuned to man’s evil, says that “. . . the essence of the worst, the true asafoetida of the human spirit, is not found in the Iron Maiden or the whetted edge; Elemental Ugliness is found in the faces of the crowd” (Harris, Hannibal, p. 128). Moral perversity is not something that escapes the human race; it is the condition of being human. But if you happen to let that perversity slip whilst under the gaze of the ever-observant Hannibal the Cannibal Lecter, then sayonara, see you in the next life. Lecter notices immorality (ironic!) and it disgusts him, so much so that those who contravene Lecter’s code of politeness end up on his dinner plate. Miggs, the poor bastard, swallows his own tongue at the behest of Hannibal Lecter, as punishment for assaulting Clarice Starling with his semen. Lecter also kills: Paul the fat butcher boy, for insulting Lady Murasaki; an untalented flutist who is served to the symphony board members post-mortem; an obnoxious census taker whose liver Hanni
bal eats; and all the men who murdered his sister, Mischa. Lecter metes out punishment on corrupt officials (Krendler, Pazzi, and Chilton), and then there’s Mason Verger, a convicted child molester who carves up his own face and feeds it to his dogs because Lecter told him to. But before we high-five the good doctor for his well-intended vigilantism, Lecter is, of course, not so noble in his murderous intent. His extermination of the rude is not an altruistic endeavor but something that is entirely self-gratifying, to the exclusion of all nobility and magnanimity—neither of which are a prerequisite for aesthetic prowess if we’re talking “modern art.”

  Where Hegel’s philosophy of art supports horror as an art form, like aesthetic realism and aesthetic expressionism, is in its preoccupation with the character of the aesthetic and how “true beauty” is informed by the notion of freedom—that art, at its best, presents us with the ideal of freedom. And “freedom,” according to Hegel, is something that can only be achieved by the mind through intelligent thought and will. So, take blood, for example. It is a natural entity and is necessary to the function of life but is quite indifferent to its own purpose or value; this lack of self-conscious awareness is what shackles it. Blood, however, can be freed through art; an artist’s rendition of blood (through paint, words . . . murder) imbues it with consciousness, thus destroying the shackles of its ignorance. Not only does Lecter force his consciousness onto blood but death, too, justifying it with an ethic. And as unpleasant as being killed and eaten might be, in death there is an element of freedom. Lecter liberates the rude from the shackles of their own immorality and he attributes death, which is unaware of its function, with purpose. In death, Lecter’s victims are freed—reinterpreted on the canvas of a dinner plate.

  Blood and Charcoal: Symbolic Horror and the Skill of the Kill

  Horror, as a genre, is permeated by symbolism. Horror offers insight into a fractured psyche, a broken world, and serial killers function as symbols for, and expressions of, human pathology. Lecter’s murders represent his detestation of the frailty of the human condition. It was man’s weakness and overall ignobility that led to his sister’s death, which, arguably, awakened the evil that lay dormant in Hannibal into a monstrous, mythical being. And so Hannibal, as myth and monster, functions symbolically on two different planes: Hannibal as art (created by Thomas Harris) and Hannibal as artist (imposing his expression onto the world at large). Lecter is thrust into art by virtue of his being—he exists in fiction, his lifeblood is fueled by the art of the written word. He is thus art personified, subject to the aesthetic values that define his very existence. Harris amplifies Hannibal’s literary predisposition to art by making it something inescapably essential to his character. And it makes sense to suppose that if an individual is artistic by nature, art is an intrinsic part of a person’s character—it’s genetic. Art will then bleed into all aspects of that individual’s living, breathing existence. Murder included.

  In Red Dragon, the first of the Lecter novels, Harris regularly draws on John Douglas’s “serial killers are artists” reference in having characters think of and refer to the Tooth Fairy as an “artist,” the crime scenes as “tableaux,” and so on. In so doing Harris challenges his reader to acknowledge the artistry inherent in that, which on the face of it, is morally abhorrent. It’s a difficult pill to swallow but unpacking the concept releases an objectivity that helps the mind rationalize the heart’s reaction. The word “artistry” presupposes the notion of “skill,” which, when applied in the context of traditional aesthetics, constructs “art” as a productive skill or a set of skills used to achieve an end (paintings, sculptures, operas, novels, and the like): Aristotle called it techne. But Novitz destabilizes classical thinking by proposing that the arts are not a set of skills that supervene on our lives with no more purpose than decorating our existence. Novitz says that the arts are a fundamental, indispensable part of life because they are the skills by which we live—the skills that one must possess in order to lead, and so have, a life. Murder is the skill by which Hannibal Lecter lives; it is an artistry permeated with symbolic value, beautifully constructed and inescapable in its drastic implications.

  In Silence of the Lambs, Harris points at Lecter’s artistic inclination when Clarice Starling notices the drawings on the walls of Lecter’s cell in the asylum, including a drawing of the Palazzo Vecchio and the Duomo in Florence which Hannibal has sketched from memory, as well as an interpretation of Golgotha after the Deposition. Not only is Lecter’s skill emphasized but also the fact that his art is important to him; Lecter’s drawings (along with his toilet seat) are confiscated as punishment for killing Miggs, and Clarice, understanding the value they hold as an extension of Lecter’s life essence, later offers him his drawings (not the toilet seat) back in exchange for information on Buffalo Bill. The symbiotic relationship between horror and art is further emphasized when Starling, upon one of her visits to Lecter in the asylum, finds Lecter sketching: “He was sketching on butcher paper, using his hand for a model. As she watched he turned his hand over and, flexing his fingers to great tension, drew the inside of the forearm. He used his little finger as a shading stump to modify a charcoal line” (Harris, Silence, p. 131). The juxtapositions in this passage are just insane with innuendo. The word “butcher,” the deathly implications of which lurk under the guise of kraft paper, and “stump,” innocent in its function as a make-shift shading tool, are anything but virtuous when used in reference to Hannibal Lecter—the ultimate butcher, carving his victims for the purpose of consumption with the same hands that sketch with a delicacy that hints at genius. The butcher and the artist; one and the same. As Clarice and Lecter engage in conversation about the “remains” of Buffalo Bill’s (supposed) latest victim, Lecter sketches, rubbing “his charcoal on the edge of his butcher paper to refine the point”—again, “butcher” and “charcoal” mingle like old friends. The interplay is darkly comical and accentuates the relationship between death and aesthetics.

  He Picked Up Two Flowers and the Knife

  The hints that Harris drops in his first two novels undergo significant development in Hannibal Rising, series prequel, and Hannibal, series conclusion. The reader is transported back to the beginning in Hannibal Rising, which is a journey of discovery that sheds light on all the things we wonder about Lecter—it tells us why by offering insight into Lecter’s past. The book positions Lecter not only as an artist by virtue of his action and passion, but because he was born that way. Hannibal Lecter’s uncle, Robert Lecter, is a great artist; his paintings are, in fact, sequestered in Goering and Hitler’s private collections after they had been seized for being “decadent,” “subversive,” and “Slavic” (Harris, Rising, p. 67). Lecter inherits his uncle’s artistic aptitude and is described as being inherently talented from a young age.

  Lecter’s “promising eye” (Harris, Rising, p. 77) is revealed by an “excellent chalk and pencil drawing of a baby’s hand and arm . . .” (Harris, Rising, p. 59) that is stuck above his bed in the orphanage that overtakes Lecter Castle in the aftermath of war. As a young man living in Paris (home to the Louvre and many other grand artistic pleasures), Lecter makes money by selling his sketches to art dealers and, attending medical school, is revered for his anatomical drawings. In fact, it’s his artistic talent (a school-boy drawing of a frog) that wins him a scholarship to medical school in the first place. Hannibal’s preoccupation with art is emphasized by the amount of time he spends sketching—at the back of class, especially. He also immerses himself in contemplations relating to the technicalities of art, such as the intricacies of bringing nature to life in artistic media, marveling at “Turner’s mist and his colors, impossible to emulate” (Harris, Rising, p. 139) after an afternoon of sketching boats on the pond.

  Lecter proves his artistry in Lady Murasaki’s presence when he arranges a vase of blossoms to feng shui perfection: “Hannibal considered. He picked up two flowers and the knife. He saw the arch of the windows, the curve of the fireplace where th
e tea vessel hung over the fire. He cut the stems of the flowers off shorter and placed them in the vase, creating a vector harmonious to the arrangement and to the room. He put the cut stems on the table” (Harris, Rising, p. 77). The artistry of Hannibal’s display would be futile without the knife to correct the stems. Harris nurtures the notion that there is nothing haphazard about Hannibal Lecter, who acts with purpose and precision—every word he utters and every move he makes is done with thought, with intent. Even when a samurai sword is the weapon in play and a body is the flower. Paul the butcher boy ends up sans head as punishment for insulting Lady Murasaki. Hannibal sketches as he waits upon his victim and as the murder progresses to a climax, Hannibal looks into Paul the butcher’s face, the moment before he takes his life, and offers him a glimpse at his artwork: a sketch of Paul the butcher’s head on a platter with a name tag attached to the hair. The tag reads Paul Mormund, Fine Meats. The drawing is rendered into reality when Lady Murasaki finds Paul’s head:

  A dark object stood on the altar before the armor. She saw it in silhouette against the candles. She set her candle lamp on a crate near the altar and looked steadily at the head of Paul the Butcher standing in a shallow suiban flower vessel. Paul’s face is clean and pale, his lips are intact, but his cheeks are missing and a little blood has leaked from his mouth into the flower vessel, where blood stands like the water beneath a flower arrangement. A tag is attached to Paul’s hair. On the tag in a copperplate hand: Momund, Boucherie de Qualité. (Harris, Rising, p. 110)

  It’s almost beautiful. No, it is beautiful, and certainly expressive and equally superb in its evocative symbolism. The reticent motif: the butcher drawing on butcher paper as Clarice Starling looks on—Hannibal’s first victim a butcher’s son. Omg! And the flowers—arranged with care and calculation just a couple pages back; a courtesy extended to Lady Murasaki’s ancestors, illustrating Hannibal’s exacting purpose and sense of artistry, whether it is placing a flower arrangement or placing a severed head. Later in the novel, Hannibal offers up Dortlich’s head “on a tree stump”—remember the stump that modified the charcoal line? Double omg! And check this out: “Dortlich’s cheeks were missing, excised cleanly, and his teeth were visible at the sides. His mouth was held open by his dog tag, wedged between his teeth” (Harris, Rising, p. 228), punished for cannibalizing Lecter’s sister. Like Paul the unfortunate butcher-boy, Dortlich is also imagined in art (a portrait) before he is zapped by our favorite cannibal. The artistry of these murders is further enhanced by a reference to Caravaggio’s “Judith Beheading Holofernes,” which is a bloody depiction of the murder of the Assyrian general, blurring the lines between art and murder. Interestingly, just before Hannibal and Lady Murasaki come across this painting in the Jeu de Paume Museum, she greets Hannibal by kissing his forehead and touching his cheek, a familiar gesture between the two, as observed by Inspector Popil—an extension of the link between murder and the cheeks that Hannibal consumed (Paul the Butcher) and is yet to consume (Dortlich), and art. Triple omg.