Hannibal Lecter, C'est Moi
To restate what should be common knowledge, Hannibal
is the sequel to Jonathan Demme's multiple Academy
Award-winning 1991 feature The Silence of the Lambs.
Both Demme and original star Jodie Foster opted out of
this second go-round in the relationship between
serial murderer Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) and
FBI firebrand Clarice Starling. Enter Julianne Moore
as Starling, and director Ridley Scott, who make
Hannibal gorier than Silence, sometimes a little
too much so for my taste (and I like to think I have a
pretty high tolerance for horror show splatter shots).
Nevertheless, Scott has a distinctive eye, and like
all his films, Hannibal is richly textured and
colored, with a host of shifting film stocks and
swoopy camera work that make it visually pleasing
throughout.
The question on everyone's mind, undoubtedly, is
whether the film "lives up" to its predecessor, but in
many ways, the question is immaterial to the film's
possible success and to its narrative. While alluding
often to Silence, Hannibal is different enough
that it stands on its own, most specifically in its
focus on Lecter, who has become one of the most
beloved fictional characters of the past fifteen
years.
Whereas Silence was peripherally about the
relationship between Lecter and Starling, and
largely about the diminutive Starling's attempts to
make it in a hyper-alpha male dominated profession,
Hannibal is nothing more, or less, than a
celebration of the Doctor's seductive malevolence. As
the character's immense popularity suggests, there is
something about Lecter that appeals to "us," there
appears to be some level on which "we" all wish we
could be a
little more like him, which is precisely what the
filmmakers are banking on. And this is, in the end,
the scariest thing about Hannibal -- its perverse
worship of the cannibalistic Doctor.
The story is pretty simple. It is ten years after
Lecter escaped, and bureaucrats and chauvinists at the
FBI have slowly beaten down Starling. She never
captured the prestigious post in the Behavioral
Sciences she so coveted, and has instead been
relegated to working street level drug busts. In one
of these busts, Starling is faced with a dicey
situation involving a criminal queen-pin, Evelda
Drumgo (Hazelle Goodman), and her baby, and the choice
she makes leads to her public humiliation in the press
and her betrayal by Bureau supervisors and
governmental watch dogs. Just then, the FBI gets new
information on Lecter's whereabouts, but also learns
that the person with the information, Mason Verger
(Gary Oldman), will only give the news to Starling. As
she is the only person to have developed a personal
relationship with the Doctor, and because of Verger's
stipulations, Starling is back on the trail, but with
a very short leash. The rest of the film is a pretty
standard game of cat and mouse among (principally)
Clarice, Hannibal, and the film's real arch-villain,
Mason Verger.
You see, in order to extol Lecter and assuage any
audience anxieties or guilt over their adoration of
him, Harris and screenwriter Steven Zaillian (David
Mamet is credited as writer for doing a first draft,
but Zaillian wrote most of the final film) wisely
offer us an even more evil, more despicable enemy in
Mason Verger -- well, at least Hannibal is not as bad
as him! Verger was the only one of Hannibal's
victims to be left alive, and his encounter with the
Doctor left him quadriplegic and horribly disfigured
(in one of the more gruesome scenes, we witness a
flashback of Verger cutting off his own face while
Lecter feeds the pieces to Verger's dogs). And so, it
is Verger who has been aggressively hunting Lecter
down, gives Starling the clues to get her started, and
concocts an elaborate plan to take his own revenge.
In order to make Hannibal look even better, the film
dwells on Starling's downfall within the Bureau.
Justice Department ladder-climber Paul Krendler (Ray
Liotta), in cahoots with Verger, works to disgrace
her. And there are any number of governmental
bureaucrats and FBI cronies who sacrifice Starling to
cover their own asses in response to the public outcry
over the debacle with the queen-pin. In contrast to
all this backstabbing by the law-and-order boys,
Hannibal's admiration of Starling and his sense of
ethical responsibility to his friends -- Starling and
former psychiatric nurse Barney (Frankie Faison) --
seems respectable indeed.
Hannibal further helps us see the "goodness" in
Lecter by showing us how deeply Starling's experiences
with him have affected her and how she has become more
and more like him. Starling admits to Barney that she
thinks of Lecter "thirty seconds of every day," and
that he is always with her, "like a bad habit." In her
very first appearance, Starling is sleeping in the DEA
van en route to the ill-fated bust. One of the
officers in the van queries, "How can she sleep at a
time like this?" Of course, we all know that one of
Lecter's trademarks and what makes him such a
successful and methodical killer is his ability to
remain calm. And later, facing her federal betrayers,
she asserts that their lack of confidence in her
"changes everything, it changes me." Changes her into
what, or more pointedly, who? Mrs. Lecter.
Hannibal does try to complicate, however briefly,
its own canonization of Lecter. In one scene, as
Lecter stands with his back to an open window, with
light and shadow playing across his features, his face
looks exactly like the mutilated face of Mason Verger.
Just as the moral and behavioral distinctions between
Hannibal and Clarice are muddied, so too are the
distinctions between Verger and Lecter.
What is it about the character of Dr. Hannibal Lecter
that is so alluring? Is it something to do with
his embodiment of the Nietzschean Superman taken to
one of its logical extremes? Perhaps it is Lecter's
absolute amorality conjoined with an ethics of
personal behavior and pretentious dedication to the
good life. Lecter is a good old-fashioned snob. He has
exquisite taste and impeccable style, and, whenever
possible, prefers to "only kill rude people." We all
gripe about the "idiots" at work and the "rude" people
we run into every day, so maybe on some level Lecter's
selective killings appeal to our own fantasies of
creating our particular vision of a better world, at
that same time that his character and lifestyle appeal
to our own champagne wishes and caviar dreams.
Whatever the reasons, Hannibal is clearly in awe of
its title character, and repeatedly suggests that,
like Clarice Starling and Mason Verger, we are all, or
would like to be, Hannibal Lecter.
