Reputed to have an IQ of 200, Lecter’s brilliance is flabbergasting. In Red Dragon, we learn that he was a model prisoner after his capture by Will Graham, until, having lulled his captors into a false sense of security, he bit the face off of one of his nurses. From his prison cell, Lecter manages to get in touch with Francis Dolarhyde, the serial killer dubbed “the Tooth Fairy,” and sends him on a revenge mission to kill Graham at the detective’s Florida home. In The Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal somehow kills his fellow inmate, Miggs, by getting the man to swallow his tongue, escapes by opening his handcuffs with a ball point pen nib, and masquerades as one of the guards by donning the victim’s amputated face. He then tracks down his adversary Frederick Chilton at a medical conference held in the tropics, leaving no doubt that he will be dining on the criminal psychologist’s remains after the film ends.
In Hannibal, he neatly slices the femoral artery of Pazzi’s henchman, Gnocco, does away with Pazzi himself, and with Matteo as well. Lecter manages to get himself caught by dropping off a birthday gift to Starling, who saves him from being fed to Mason Verger’s man-eating pigs. But he ultimately extricates them both from that mess, and (in the film version only) convinces Mason’s right hand man Cordell to push his adversary into the pigs’ pen (in the novel, Mason is killed by his sister, Margot). Finally, he captures Starling’s antagonist, Paul Krendler, and (in the novel only) feeds her the FBI man’s brains—which are so delicious she requests a second helping: “See if I sound like Oliver Twist when I ask for MORE” (Harris, Hannibal, p. 474).
Even young Hannibal is extremely crafty in Hannibal Rising. Bent on revenge against the foragers who ate his sister, he returns to the summer house where the siblings were held prisoner and unearths the Nazi dogtags of his captors. He methodically does them in one by one, finishing the job in the Canadian wilderness. While doing so, he manages to evade prosecution at the hands of Inspector Popil, who suspects young Lecter but can never amass the evidence necessary for a conviction.
But Hannibal’s machinations are even more brilliant in the television series. He befriends Will Graham, and helps him catch a couple of early serial killers, while executing several copycat crimes that are attributed to various other people. He skillfully and subtly leads Jack Crawford to eventually suspect that Will committed the murders, revealing incriminating evidence slowly and reluctantly (as a supposed friend would). Lecter enlists the aid of Will’s neurologist in covering up the investigator’s encephalitic illness (which Lecter may have infected him with), convincing Graham that there is nothing physically wrong with him, and that he is suffering from a profound mental illness. By the time Will comes to realize Lecter’s guilt, it is too late; the frame is complete, and Season 1 ends with Will in an institution for the criminally insane.
Season 2 begins with intense hand-to-hand combat between Jack Crawford and Hannibal, with each nearly killing the other and the outcome left in doubt. The show then flashes back to weeks earlier, tracing Will’s fight for freedom, as he attempts to convince Jack Crawford, Alana Bloom, and the legal system itself of his innocence. It ends with Jack and an exonerated Will trying to take Hannibal out on their own, with no FBI backup. Hannibal is one step ahead of them, however, and leaves them both cut deeply and bleeding profusely.
The television series is designed as a prequel to Red Dragon (whose plot line was always planned to unspool in its third season). Our knowledge (as fans of the films) that Lecter’s triumph is only temporary does not temper our admiration for his skillful execution of a “long con” (which only a season of episodes made possible). We are meant to delight in his remarkable ingenuity, and I did so unreservedly. His knowing smile in seeing Graham behind bars is positively exhilarating, and his sigh of relief as he downs a glass of champagne in first class while making his escape unscathed brings glee to Hannibal aficionados like myself.
“Free Range Rude” and Sympathetic Acquaintances
A fourth element in the saga of Hannibal Lecter that allows us to care for him is his choice of victims, and of acquaintances. His role in Red Dragon, The Silence of the Lambs, and the initial episodes of the Hannibal TV series is as helpmate to the detective protagonist. His insights help Will Graham track down the Tooth Fairy, and Clarice Starling capture Buffalo Bill. He is of great value to both of them, and to society, which has two less serial killers to worry about.
The Silence of the Lambs of course remains the locus of our empathy for Hannibal as a fictional creation. Once again Cynthia Freeland’s account of his appeal is excellent: “Lecter functions primarily as both a suitor and a mentor for Clarice . . . he, like we, appreciates something very fine, and in doing so he manifests just plain good taste . . . Lecter really does function to help Clarice grow up and reconcile herself to her bad childhood memories” (Freeland, p. 204). We believe him when he observes that it would be something to know her in private life, and he confirms his suspicion in the next novel, Hannibal.
Many fans of the series (myself included) thought that author Thomas Harris went too far in having them become romantically involved at the end of that book. Despite Lecter’s extensive use of hypnotic drugs, such an unlikely development simply strains our credulity.2 Ridley Scott corrected the mistake in the film version: near its end, Lecter asks, “Tell me Clarice, would you ever say to me stop . . . if you loved me you’d stop.” Her response is unequivocal: “Not in a thousand years.” Hannibal acknowledges that this reply is what he expected: “That’s my girl.” In a vulnerable moment while he is kissing her, she handcuffs the two of them together as the FBI closes in.
What he does next cements our identification with him. An unfeeling psychopath would simply sever her hand to extricate himself, and he threatens to do so (“This is really going to hurt”). But we see that she remains intact as the FBI arrives, and learn on the airplane that Lecter (like a trapped fox) has amputated his own hand to secure his escape. This confirms our belief that he indeed had genuine feelings for Starling, which textbook serial killers are supposed to be unable to sustain.
Who Hannibal chooses to murder, and the manner in which he does so, is also crucial to our empathic connection, which increases as the series of movies unfolds. Prison orderly Barney tells Clarice Starling that Lecter had a preference for killing “free range rude,” and only poses a danger to people he respects if they stand in his way (and sometimes not even then). In Silence, he slays his guards, the ambulance attendants and the hotel guest he impersonates, which he had to do in order to escape. At the end of the film, he is preparing to kill and eat his other captor, Dr. Frederick Chilton, who had been portrayed in a totally unsympathetic fashion. We naturally revel in the prospect, especially given Lecter’s witty observation to Clarice on the phone that he is planning to have an old friend for dinner. The film ends with him tracking his quarry and blending invisibly in with a tropical crowd, a scene that elicited a hearty round of applause from the audience in the initial screening I attended more than twenty years ago.
Lecter leaves a substantial trail of victims in Hannibal, all of them bounty hunters who seek his life for money; by this time he has been transformed from antagonist to protagonist. We root for him as he fends off Gnocco, Pazzi, and Matteo, and despite the fact that Lecter had caused Mason Verger to cut off parts of his own face and feed them to his dogs, Verger’s repugnant child molestation (in the book) and insatiable thirst for revenge have ensured our antipathy towards him. Hannibal’s stylish preparation of Krendler’s brain, and Clarice’s enthusiastic reception thereof (more so in the book than in the film), put the cap on his triumphs.
Young Hannibal is also the sole protagonist in Hannibal Rising, and, as noted above, the men he targets in his vendetta all deserve what they get. His murder of the butcher is somewhat disproportionate to the crime of suggestively insulting Lady Murasaki, but this is mitigated by the fact that, in the novel, his uncle dies of a heart attack trying to defend the lady’s honor.
While Hannibal’s evil is unmotivated an
d unexplained in The Silence of the Lambs, where the good doctor himself refuses to be psychoanalyzed and is proud of his choice to do evil, the later novels provide us with a pat Freudian etiology for his psychosis. His cannibalism is seen as resulting from childhood trauma, when his beloved younger sister Mischa was killed by a group of starving Hilfswillige (Russian POWs serving in the German army) and eaten in a stew that may or may not have been forced upon him as well. This trauma resulted in his losing his voice for years, and repressing the tragic memory, recovering it only with the help of truth serum in Hannibal Rising.
We have thus far discussed several factors that mitigate Lecter’s evil and make it palatable for us. Primary among them are his selective decisions of who to kill, his black humor, and the caring relationships that he forms with Clarice and Lady Murasaki. This pattern has been broken, however, in the Hannibal television series.
Much has been made of the relationship between Hannibal and Will Graham, especially in Season 2, with some critics claiming that the series is really about the love between the two of them. Skeptical at the end of the first season myself, I have come to believe (after reading several end-of-season interviews with creator Bryan Fuller) that Hannibal did long for a friend (shades of Dexter) and sincerely hoped Will would take Lecter’s side, embrace his murderous nature and run away. There is something very Nietzschean about that. A true friend, in Nietzsche’s estimation, wishes above all else to make you stronger.3 As a contributor to the website Faustian Europe put it:
what is for Nietzsche the difference between friend and enemy? One can easily derive from the above mentioned that there is no difference at all. Both friend and enemy is someone who you consider your equal. It is someone who you think is worth fighting against. From the fight, you both learn and ultimately strengthen your resolve. In fact, it might be said that “your best friend is also your best enemy, and your best enemy is your best friend.” Similarly, Nietzsche mentions Christ’s “love thy enemy” as a commendable principle to follow, but not in the “Christian sense.” For Nietzsche, since love and hate are almost inseparable, the enemy, your antithesis, is also someone to be truly admired, because this enemy inevitably forms a part of “who you are,” the enemy shows you a different side of the coin, and thus makes you stronger in the end.
Lecter did consider Graham a potential equal, was certainly tested by him, and is eventually caught and brought into custody by Will.
In the first season of the series, Lecter relates details of his personal history and reflections only to his psychotherapist, and even then is admittedly less than candid with her. He weaves an inescapable web of lies around Will Graham (with whom we are clearly meant to sympathize), and the victims he chooses are largely innocent, mere extensions of the serial killers he is copying and one-upping (or, at worst, unmannerly individuals he has encountered in the business world). Graham seems briefly to turn the tables on Hannibal in Season 2, and Lecter reveals part of who he is in the process of trying to woo him over to the dark side. But Will is eventually overwhelmed, and Lecter remains the most compelling character in the show. The key to understanding why is his complete mastery over every person and situation that he faces, and this brings us to the most crucial piece of the puzzle, my Nietzschean theory of horror pleasure.
Hannibal and the Will to Power
The foregoing should not mislead anyone into thinking that I believe we only empathize with the monster in horror films. In my view, we empathize with both the powerful monsters in horror movies and with the “good guys” who eventually subdue them and, in so doing, we feel a shared sense of heightened power in seeing great resistance overcome. Beyond the factors I have identified above, the key to Hannibal’s fascination for us is that his power—in Friedrich Nietzsche’s sense of the term—is unmatched.
Nietzsche notoriously contended that, for good or ill, we all seek to exercise our will upon others. As he puts it in The Gay Science:
On the doctrine of the feeling of power. Benefiting and hurting others are ways of exercising one’s power upon others: that is all one desires in such cases . . . Whether benefiting or hurting others involves sacrifices for us does not affect the ultimate value of our actions. Even if we offer our lives, as martyrs do for their church, this is a sacrifice that is offered for our desire for power or for the purpose of preserving our feeling of power. . . . Certainly the state in which we hurt others is rarely as agreeable, in an unadulterated way, as that in which we benefit others; it is a sign that we are still lacking power, or it shows a sense of frustration in the face of this poverty . . . (Nietzsche, Gay Science §13)
Crucially, Nietzsche not only claims that we benefit others for the way it makes us feel (substituting an unapologetic egoism for a spurious altruism), but in this passage he affirms his belief that benefiting others, presumably by increasing their feeling of power, is (all other things being equal) more enjoyable than harming them. Harming others who are weaker than us simply for the sake of doing so is a sign that (like the typical class bully) we lack power.
By the beginning of The Antichrist, Nietzsche had formulated his value theory succinctly:
“What is good? —All that heightens the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself in man. What is bad? —All that proceeds from weakness. What is happiness? —The feeling that power increases, that resistance is overcome” (Nietzsche, Antichrist §2). The feeling of power is the feeling of being in control of yourself, the environment that surrounds you, and those who are your inferiors. In doing so, one should adopt “the conviction that one has duties only to one’s equals; towards the others one acts as one thinks best” (Nietzsche, Will to Power §937). As Lecter has yet to meet anyone he considers his equal, he has done pretty much as he sees fit. In the films, he aimed the Tooth Fairy at Will Graham, served up Buffalo Bill to Starling, killed Rinaldo Pazzi, most of Mason Verger’s henchmen, and all of the cannibalistic murderers of his beloved sister.
But this essay was provoked by my enthusiasm for the television series. The artistic success of the series stems in part from several ways that the depiction of Hannibal differs there from the classic films. I believe that those differences serve to confirm my theory more convincingly than the films ever did.
As noted above, there are many extenuating circumstances in the cinematic depictions of Lecter that facilitate our approval of this chilling serial killer. His relationships with Clarice Starling and Lady Murasaki mitigate his inhumanity by providing him with love interests whom he cares for and helps. His choice of victims that either deserve to die, are totally unsympathetic, or are trying to kill or incarcerate him, tempers our outrage. His dark humor gives birth to a number of amusing one-liners, and once a character has made us laugh we are well on the way to approving of him.4
Several of these elements are absent in the television series. Hannibal’s apparent romantic interest in Alana Bloom in Season Two was clearly feigned, and (with some regret) he ends up having Abigail push her out a third-story window. Lecter murders innocent and anonymous figures throughout the TV series (with the exception of Dr. Sutcliffe, who deserves his fate for conspiring with Lecter to conceal Will Graham’s encephalitis), and there are no comedic taglines to enter into popular culture. The remarkable culinary and aesthetic tastes are still present, and he does help the FBI catch other serial killers, but he is not in love, his victims are (by and large) sympathetic innocents, and his black humor is held to a minimum. Yet I believe that Lecter has been even more compelling on the small screen, because his power is even greater and more impressive.
Early critics of the series were troubled by the fact that, despite its title, Will Graham figured more prominently in the first half dozen episodes than Hannibal himself. Yet this was the case in the first two movies as well. Following their template, Hannibal began the series as a consultant to Graham, helping him capture other serial killers. Graham, deeply troubled by his ability to empathize with such murderers, had quit his job as an FBI homicide inves
tigator, only to be brought back into such a psychologically unsettling position by Jack Crawford. Hannibal is brought in as a consultant in Graham’s psychotherapy, and initially seems to be trying to help this troubled profiler (who can feel with serial killers to a disturbing degree). As the first season unfolds, Will’s psychological and physical condition degenerates, and while we sympathize with his worsening plight, we do not empathize with him (in the sense of wanting to be him and share his feelings of powerlessness).
Hannibal slowly becomes the central figure of the show, in both a dramatic and an empathetic sense. Other serial killers become almost an afterthought, eclipsed by Hannibal’s ability to easily outstrip them in a series of copycat crimes. The battle of wills between Graham and Lecter takes center stage, and it is no contest. Hannibal reduces Will to a virtual puppet, convincing the investigator that he is experiencing a purely mental collapse, and framing him for the murders that Lecter was perpetrating.
His ruthlessness is also demonstrated in his treatment of Abigail Hobbs, the daughter and accomplice of Garret Jacob Hobbs, the serial killer who Graham guns down to save Abigail’s life. Lecter seems to take Abigail under his wing, helping her to conceal a murder she commits in his home, and to deal with her role in her father’s crimes. Yet he eventually cuts her throat as well, a surrogate father who tries to kill her just like her real father did. The best efforts of Will, Jack, and Alana to end his reign of terror are all in vain, and after their climactic confrontation, a bloody Hannibal walks out into a bracing rainstorm in total triumph. As he tells Alana Bloom in Episode 10 of Season 2, he has played them all like his beloved Theremin (“a very psychological instrument,” as she describes it). He is the virtual embodiment of Nietzsche’s vision of the master of power, the Overman.
Hannibal Lecter and Philosophy (Popular Culture and Philosophy) Page 24