Hannibal Lecter: An Unlikely American Idol
Few modern horror movies have matched the critical acclaim of Jonathan Demme's 1991 The Silence of the Lambs, featuring Anthony Hopkins as Dr. Hannibal Lecter, the cannibal psychiatrist. The film, along with Alfred Hitchock's Psycho (1960), is one of few horror/suspense films accepted by movie critics as one of the best American films ever produced. However, as the trilogy of movies in the Hannibal Lecter series progressed, many feared that the character would become commercialized, as he has in many ways. In the two subsequent films, Ridley Scott's sequel, Hannibal (2001), and Brett Ratner's 2002 prequel, Red Dragon, Lecter often seems more of a parody of himself, playing up the larger-than-the-screen status bestowed upon him after Anthony Hopkins's superior performance in Lambs. While many critics were upset at the “commercialization” of one of the greatest characters in the history of American cinema, an even more interesting change may be indicated through the character's acceptance in mainstream culture. Hannibal Lecter is a different type of cannibal monster than those previously seen in horror films, as shown through his motivations and criminal actions, and has been accepted by the audience as an “anti-hero” instead of the antagonist of the movie.
Cannibalism has become a prevalent theme in horror movies since the 1960s. According to Robin Wood, “[t]he cannibalism motif functions in two ways. Occasionally, members of a family devour each other [ . . . ]. More frequently, cannibalism is the family's means of sustaining or nourishing itself” (84). The latter theme has been seen throughout several movies, including Tobe Hooper's cult classic The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), which focuses on a family of demented butchers who kill others for their meals. The former is aptly represented in movies such as George Romero's 1968 cult classic The Night of the Living Dead, which focuses on zombies who return from the dead to eat the living and includes scenes of a daughter eating her parents and a brother eating his sister. Many critics feel that the zombies in the Romero film may be a critique on capitalism, as they could possibly represent the working class American or the animalistic nature of corporate America. Others have viewed the film through a political lens, reading the zombies as representative of Richard Nixon's “silent majority” or the weary soldiers of the Vietnam War.
Hannibal Lecter strays far from the traditional motifs of modern film that Wood outlined. Instead of having either the need for cannibalism for sustenance or an uncontrollable urge to murder and eat flesh, Dr. Lecter is very precise in choosing his victims and seems totally in control of his urges. As Roger Ebert outlined in his Chicago Sun-Times review of the film,
[T]he presence of evil [is] manifestly demonstrated [. . .] in the first appearance of Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs. He stands perfectly still in the middle of his cell floor, arms at his sides, and we sense instantly that he is not standing at attention, he is standing at rest-like a savage animal confident of the brutality coiled up inside him. Lecter, then, becomes scarier to the viewer because of his apparent control over his “evil,” a man who has “primal urges” but can control them. As Peggy Reeves Sanday says in Divine Hunger, “[R]itual cannibalism physically enacts a cultural theory (of order and chaos, good and evil, death and reproduction) that enables humans to regulate desire, to build and maintain a social order” (214).
In the terms of this model, Lecter's cannibalism could stem from his desire to control others. Lecter is intent throughout Lambs on dissecting other characters mentally. For instance, in his first meeting with Jodie Foster's character, Clarice Starling, Lecter comments, “[Y]ou're not more than one generation from poor white trash, are you, Agent Starling? And that accent you've tried so desperately to shed? Pure West Virginia. What's your father, dear? Is he a coal miner? Does he stink of the lamb?”
However, it is this questioning that allows Lecter to choose whether he will respect or destroy someone. Clarice Starling earns the killer's respect throughout the film because she does not back down from his dissection and because she proves to him that she is intelligent. He attempts a mental dissection of Clarice, but it does not completely work on her and the glimpses into Clarice's past that Lecter does gain actually give him respect for her. Yet, since he could not fully dissect her mentally, he does not attempt to reenact it with a physical dissection. Likewise, he seems to take on Will Graham as an understudy in Red Dragon, presenting challenges to Graham much as he does Clarice. While Lecter did attack Graham, it was only out of self-protection and not a planned assault. Therefore, Lecter's motives for attacking and consuming a victim seem to come out of his need to control a situation and his belief that he is of a higher moral standard and capable of judging others. He kills Miggs because of his base behavior to Clarice and presumably kills Dr. Chilton at the end of Lambs because of his improper behavior toward Lecter while Lecter is in his custody. Lecter originally chooses Mason Verger as a victim in Hannibal because of his sexual molestation of young children. Lecter's justification for killing a flutist is because he is out of tune with the rest of the orchestra and that it would benefit the community with him out of the way. As Sanday notes, “cannibalism is equated with all that must be dominated, controlled, or repressed in the establishment of social order. Evil is projected onto enemies, animals, the cosmos, or harbored as a basic instinct. In ritual cannibalism, the victim becomes the symbol of evil—the living metaphor for chaos, which must be dominated in the interest of social well-being” (214).
In a psychological study of author Thomas Harris's Lecter character, which the films are based on, Bettina Gregory says that Lecter's need to dominate others is based on a “malignant narcissism.” “Hannibal Lecter is using omnipotence to defend against oral rage and envy. He plays God with people's lives to devalue them in order to show that he does not need them” (110). Therefore, Lecter's motivation of killing and eating others or even feeding his victims to other people is based not on a need for sustenance but instead on his desire to prove his dominance and pass judgment on others for their behavior, to make himself “godlike,” to see himself as some sort of a controller of that social well-being. While it would be easy to interpret Lecter's being a cannibal to a need to cover his own insecurity, a comparison of his character to Jamie Gumb (played by Ted Levine) in Lambs shows Lecter to be a controlled and confident killer who, because of superior knowledge and reasoning skills, believes himself to be capable of making such moral judgments as to condemn another to death. For instance, Gumb is murdering others to make himself a suit of skin so that he can become someone else by going inside their skins. In contrast, Lecter ingests his victims, proving his dominance over them.
What is most intriguing about the Hannibal Lecter character, however, is not what motivates him to action in the film but rather what motivates the audience to align themselves with him. Cannibalism has traditionally been one of the least discussed aspects of human nature. As Eli Sagan says in Cannibalism, “This self-imposed taboo may be related to the intense desire to protect our conscious lives from the knowledge that we have deep, powerful, aggressive feelings within ourselves” (xx). Sagan goes on to question, then, why we include cannibalism in popular children's stories such as “Little Red Riding Hood” and “Hansel and Gretel.” Robin Wood's theory that the monster in horror films often represents a repressed thought or desire in society (72-73) is applicable here, as the reason why Hannibal Lecter is both scary and understandable to American viewers is that cannibalism is linked to a repressed desire of humans akin to the realized instinct of all carnivorous animals to hunt their prey. As Moira Martingale noted in Cannibal Killers, “Our fascination with cannibals—so brilliantly tapped by the Oscar-winning film The Silence of the Lambs [. . .]—suggests that old desires still lie buried within us” (9-10). Lecter is both scary and fascinating to the viewer, then, because of those repressed desires.
After World War I, Freud noted numerous times that, despite the great advances by human civilization, the base instincts of the species still sought to manifest themselves at every moment. Similarly, Hannibal Lecter is scary to us because he represents one of our greatest fears: that, no matter how superior we become through education, through culture, and through refinement, the basest aspects of human nature—to dominate others, to be violent—will still prevail. Therefore, Hannibal Lecter is scary because he becomes a physical form for the viewer's fear that we cannot escape human nature and that evil can co-exist with good in the same form so that no amount of socialization can eliminate those aspects of human nature.
The viewer's fear of Hannibal Lecter is even more interesting because it leads to an eventual respect for the character, giving him a hero status by the end of The Silence of the Lambs. Demme leads the viewer to cheer instead of cringe when Lecter reveals he is going to eat Dr. Chilton at the end of the movie. This need of the audience to cheer Lecter and this acceptance of a character who commits the vilest of crimes by our culture's standards may be an indicator that, in addition to our fear of becoming like Hannibal Lecter, we truly do have an inner-desire to become like him. If this is the case, Lecter's character gives the viewer the chance to relish repressed desires that they are not otherwise capable of dealing with. While those desires may not be as drastic as physically consuming the flesh of others, the fact that the viewer is allowed to like Hannibal Lecter and even accept what he does despite its being a horrific crime makes the viewer feel less guilt over his or her own repressed thoughts or desires. Hannibal Lecter gives the viewer the chance to realize subconscious thoughts through him and to accept that, despite our cultural advancements, basic human nature is still very much a part of us.
To be sure, many aspects of the Hannibal Lecter character have led to his popularization. The on-screen presence of Anthony Hopkins in the role, the wonderful directing of Jonathan Demme in The Silence of the Lambs, the complex and round characters created by Thomas Harris are all contributors to the success of the Hannibal Lecter series of movies. However, the character's success is ultimately up to the movie viewer, and Lecter has become an American icon in part due to his ability to represent many of the repressed desires of American culture. While most audience members do not have the actual desire to become a cannibal, Hannibal Lecter still represents the type of person they want to become, much akin to Maslow's “self-actualized man.” Lecter is someone who is well-learned, self-educated, confident in his abilities, and in touch with all aspects of his nature, both the intellectual and the primal self. And, whether most viewers would admit it or not, he is, in many ways, the type of person we are encouraged to be. |
