I read the book
Alleva, Richard
To St. Peter (After Herbert) The cock crowed as you denied all and let them all deride Him while you fled to hide. You abode still in your lie as they spiked Him to a tree stripped and...
...Marvin, S.D...
...I am pleased to hear them...
...Rather, it puts us in the position of the Roman mob watching gladiators and beasts kill each other...
...In what way is God's image connected to the human body...
...Actress Jodie Foster, scriptwriter Ted Tally, and director Jonathan Demme, no matter what disappointment they felt with the literary quality or cinematic potential of the new book, could have signed on and then reshaped the story to their taste...
...As I wrote of the film in this magazine (April 5, 1991), "As Starling probes Lecter for clues, Lecter probes Starling for the roots of her need to save people...At this moment, the viewer has a glimpse of good and evil eternally staring at each other across an impassable force field that lifts this movie above the common run of melodrama...
...My experiences lead me to believe that the answer would not be as dismal as the author assumes...
...By resurrecting an outmoded ethical category, Johnson does little to further the debate about Humane vitae...
...Upon Hannibal's publication, three of the four filmmakers who had covered themselves in glory (fame, great reviews, Oscars) by making its predecessor, The Silence of the Lambs, into a movie, and who had every reason to lick their chops over the prospect of repeating their success with a sequel, announced they would have nothing to do with it...
...But it is a sad fact of life we have to learn before becoming truly adult that an evil source can engender a good outcome and vice versa...
...What the book's language lacks in stylishness, Hopkins has in every part of his physique and physiognomy, in every shade of his gloating, unforgettable voice...
...Instead he offered a gentle argument for the large family, that carried all the more weight for avoiding the hectoring arguments of church apologists...
...God will hear you...
...Instead, they simply walked away from the project...
...But how could a writer who perpetrates a sentence like, "As he backed into the shadow across the street, his nose was last to disappear" be up to the task...
...And I, bowed, do hide, for daily my briny will salts His side...
...Tom Donlon 22 Richard Alleva I READ THE BOOK 'Hannibal': Nearly undigestible Bef ore Rand Cooper reviews Hannibal, I would like to recall something unusual that happened before this film adaptation of Thomas Harris's novel went into production...
...What was this author to make of a fictional world in which one can only root for villains against other villains...
...I wonder how this squares with the experience of believers...
...Readings of Scripture that force it into a fortune-telling role do not have a good track record...
...2) confronted with stark nihilism, even Hollywood filmmakers can display moral revulsion...
...But the gusto of goodness must never die...
...Much, much transpires, the conclusion presenting us with a Clarice who has joined the doctor in a cannibal feast and is now his constant companion as they savor the delights of Europe together— good food, fashionable clothes, museums, nights at the opera...
...But Doyle could resurrect Holmes...
...D 25 (Continued from page 4} personhood undermines the utilitarian reasoning pervasive in debates about artificial contraception...
...There was certainly moral ambiguity in the fact that virtue had to be aided by evil to catch evil...
...But Christians reading the New Testament as a source of divine revelation may demand more of a proposed exegesis than that it be sincere and interesting...
...Johnson's failures to contextualize the pope's thought within its corpus as a whole and to understand the purpose of a catechetical address seem to be at the root of his embarrassingly off-base criticisms and misunderstandings...
...I wonder what the mystics would say about this...
...This doesn't create suspense since we don't care about any of his victims...
...Second, Harris employs what I can only call a Steve-the-Crocodile-Hunter strategy...
...And we still love our partners and rejoice in our ability to demonstrate that physically...
...Godfrey's "Crowd Control" reimpressed on me how disparate elements can join to strike a blow to the solar plexus...
...Worst of all is Clarice...
...Consistent ethic Luke Timothy Johnson does offer some salient points in his critique of Pope John Paul II's theology, which he describes as "abstract" and idealistic...
...For example, Johnson's focus on the use of the rhetoric of self-control causes him to miss the larger point: many of us who follow church teachings do so joyfully and find that it has brought greater, not lesser, pleasure and happiness to our lives...
...That was the key to the success of the Lecter-Starling scenes, which were so powerful that they pretty much overcame the flaws of the rest of the book: its occasional plot absurdities, the flat writing, a certain gratuitous nastiness...
...DEREK s. JEFFREYS Green Bay, Wis...
...This is borne out by documented facts: a high percentage of women seeking abortions were using birth control methods that failed...
...In the end, some might well agree with Johnson...
...5 McGowan, by juxtaposing the general chaos of India's earthquake with the particular and personal moral challenge of a public interrogation, managed, for me at least, to convey how bewildering our world is and how great events find reflections in our everyday life...
...Good and evil...
...But my point about genocide was linked to the absolute prohibition of condoms, including for people with aids...
...He keeps setting characters much more odious than Hannibal on the trail of the doctor: a pedophile billionaire...
...By the way, though certain passages of the book of Revelation are commonly used to support interpretations of the Rapture, the notion itself is drawn from 1 Thessalonians 4:17...
...So now we can see why the three filmmakers walked away from Hannibal...
...Robert hannon Fairbanks, Ark...
...Aye, Peter, ill from the load of your lie you wept and he bled dry from crown and side...
...Eureka moments I trust that Luke Timothy Johnson is too good a scholar not to be profoundly embarrassed that he failed to read Wojtyla's Love and Responsibility before penning his "A Disembodied 'Theology of the Body.'" In this 1960 work, the future pope convincingly establishes the "embodiedness" of his teaching on human sexuality, including a positive discussion on the role of pleasure in the conjugal act, the sheer candor of which was considered by many contemporaries as beneath the dignity of a prelate...
...Yes, Lecter dispatches monsters worse than himself in this latest book, but what of it...
...What was he to make of Harris's newly hatched misanthropy...
...Godfrey's opening sentences prepared me for a sentimental look at his ordeals as a single parent...
...As for Clarice, her final defection from the FBI is prepared for by Harris through his depiction of the agency in this postRuby Ridge era as rotting from within and willing to sacrifice its best agents on the altar of political expediency...
...Well, Thomas Harris is a literary Steve the Crocodile Hunter...
...To evoke the real horrors of World War II as a rationale for the outre atrocities of a melodramatic concoction like Lecter is tasteless and borders on moral irresponsibility...
...Since these couples have already decided to separate childbearing from sexual pleasure, abortion becomes the natural solution...
...Why doesn't the professor provide a consistent ethic of sexual behavior taking into account the experience of married people, homosexuals, and those who are single "yet whose erotic desires find no legitimate or sanctified expression...
...Finally, in regard to the Theology of the Body, I found one of Johnson's principles rather hard to accept: "Human bodies are part of God's image and the means through which absolutely everything we can learn about God must come to us...
...When vulnerable but dauntless FBI agent Clarice Starling engaged the brilliant, lethal mind of Dr...
...What strategies does the author deploy to get from point A to point Z and to make all this believable or at least acceptable...
...Carroll's irony The ultimate irony of James Carroll's theories [see Robert Wilken's review of Constantine's Sword, "Dismantling the Cross," Janurary 26] about the inevitability of Christian anti-Semitism is that those Christians who risked their lives to save Jews did so not in spite of their faith but because of it...
...Johnson wants church teaching to be based in ordinary life experience, but let him consider this basic problem: If a population of 1 million couples is using artificial birth control, one year the normal failure rate will result in at least fifty thousand unwanted pregnancies...
...Do these literary strategies work...
...Fell (!) while giving lectures on Dante and holding a curatorship in Florence...
...How can Harris redeem Starling...
...This, it seems to me, would go beyond repetition of the platitudes about access to a lover's body and the benefits of sexual enjoyment to a discussion about the real experiences of people who have made a serious attempt to conform to doctrinal standards...
...First, he does precisely what so many readers rightly praised the novelist for not doing in the previous installments: he gives Lecter a psychological motive for his malevolence, a World War II atrocity in which the boy Hannibal realizes that his sister has been killed and devoured by soldiers...
...Staring at each other, fascinated...
...Every single thing I complained about has been eliminated...
...We are more in tune with one another's desires...
...Just understanding and acknowledging each other...
...various thugs and assassins...
...Jodie Foster is not only a good actress but a fierce feminist...
...After writing all the above, I went to see the movie...
...JULIAN IRIAS Davis, Calif...
...Moreover, I have witnessed too many joy-filled "Eureka...
...If natural family planners, surprised by pregnancy, are then open to God's will concerning a birth, why should we assume that those using condoms who are surprised whould then seek an abortion...
...Perhaps it's the general intellectual numbness of coming off a hotly contested election with its high polemics, but I find personal reflections by such sensitive narrators more persuasive these days than the closely reasoned certainty of experts...
...For the doctor, Harris employs two devices...
...PAUL A. HOTTINGER Downers Grove, III...
...Readers can withstand all sorts of narrative nuttiness if highly textured, agreeably mannered writing projects the story into a cloud-cuckooland with a topsy-turvy morality of its own...
...He is the chief reason I will go to see the new movie...
...Is Johnson sure that "absolutely everything we can learn about God must come to us" from our bodies...
...p.s...
...Nevertheless, before drawing such a conclusion, we ought to at least represent the pope's position fairly...
...The joys of Catholic sex Luke Timothy Johnson's article left me with a nagging unease...
...I think perhaps with more admiration about an incident recounted in a letter to the New York Review of Books by an Israeli who survived the occupation of Poland...
...moments among young engaged and married couples not to be convinced of the Theology of the Body's great pastoral utility...
...Clarice is still an agent but vilified in the press for a drug bust gone wrong (though she herself behaved irreproachably...
...You abode still in your lie as they spiked Him to a tree stripped and hoisted up for all to see...
...It begins seven years after Silence...
...But why should we assume that using a condom is different than periodic abstinence with respect to intention concerning childbirth...
...Maybe I will...
...Then came Hannibal, a book that concluded the trilogy but also played havoc with the peculiar accomplishments of its predecessors...
...And it was to the credit of Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs, though neither was ever anything more than dassy pulp fiction, that they contained and dramatically demonstrated this truth...
...As these petty monsters gang up on the grand monster, we root for the grand monster to eat his tormentors, much as I long for those formidable animals to eat Steve...
...This to me is the real problem of native...
...I rather doubt that this generation's revisionists would have either...
...They did so in response to the belief that Christ died to save all of us— Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, and the handicapped as well...
...This animal is vicious...
...Well, if he does not, then his persistence in supporting Humanae vitae becomes even stranger, for that composition is strictly act-centered...
...The cannibal doctor's very being presented an acid test, an initiation rite Starling had to undergo before her heroism could emerge...
...Evil, as Shakespeare taught us in Richard III, can be magnetic, intelligent, attractive...
...Jo McGowan's "Corporal Punishment" and A.W...
...An old woman on a crowded trolley in Warsaw, at a time and in a place where one could trust almost no one, replied to the anti-Semitic diatribe a fellow passenger was delivering by saying, "Hush up...
...Besides, how are we to forget the innocents that the doctor killed in the previous novels...
...marian burkhart New York, N.Y...
...Almost all of Jonathan Demme's major films, from Citizens Band to Beloved, express a belief in the unpredictability and improvability of human nature...
...But even in his analysis, a dismissal of current theology would have to involve a serious attempt to confront the realities behind the church's teachings...
...Not merging...
...Jeffreys connects my poor grasp of the pope's overall position with my suggestion that the church may be in danger of colluding in genocide...
...Alleva's rapture It is irenic of Richard Alleva ["Beam Me Up," January 12] to seek no quarrel with the idea of the Rapture or even with the LaHaye-Jenkins interpretation of it...
...Turning this plucky, caring, ail-American heroine into Eurotrash may be the worst thing an author has done to a character in the history of popular fiction since Conan Doyle launched Sherlock Holmes over the Reichenbach Falls in the embrace of Professor Moriarty...
...May it not be precisely because the "purpose of a catemodern sexual ethics...
...As he dodges their lunges, he shouts at his audience, "Blimey, mates...
...Until the critics of Humanae vitae address this, John Paul II will continue to win the philosophical argument while much of the population simply ignores him...
...I have no more objection to those who choose this path than I do to those who choose celibacy, in or out of marriage...
...As couples, we communicate more, not less...
...LUKE TIMOTHY JOHNSON Large families & ideas I was pleasantly surprised by two pieces in the February 9 issue of Commonweal...
...Melodrama needs simplicity...
...I do this to make two points: (1) morality and aesthetics not being separable, a philosophical disease, nihilism, can wreck a literary form, such as melodrama...
...Though Steve keeps assuring us that these encounters will enable him to "publish valuable articles in nature journals all over the world" (in your dreams, Steve), I keep hoping that his foot will slip and he'll be devoured by some lovely, dignified predator who then will finish off the camera crew for dessert...
...ROGER J. LANDRY Fall River, Mass...
...His thinking leads to a very confusing ethical point of view...
...Ted Tally began his playwrighting career with an interest in heroism: his first major play was about the explorer Robert Scott...
...Lecter is 23 now posing as Dr...
...MATTHEW KOWALSKI, O.S.B...
...Yet it was certainly the movie version that made that relationship more than vivid, made it almost mythic...
...Of course, if Harris had had the literary style for it, he could have turned Hannibal into a piece of stylish perversity, something along the lines of an Aubrey Beardsley drawing accomplished with words...
...Roger Landry and Jennifer Popiel offer testimonies concerning the joy brought to couples who are introduced to papal teaching on sexuality or who practice natural family planning...
...He wants to kill me...
...I have no reason to think I would have had such courage...
...still you kept aside and let them all divide Him flesh from life...
...But if these are the pope's sentiments, why is there no trace of them in the multiple addresses making up Theology of the Body...
...What is pertinent is a reexamination of the moral issue in light of medical disaster, not a reexamination of the pope's entire corpus to justify the church's present stance...
...As he suggests, we ought to revisit this encyclical, and we may end up concluding that John Paul II's personalism cannot support his opposition to artificial contraception...
...What on earth can make any creature this malevolent...
...And he would be infinitely helped by the scriptwriter Steven Zaillian and the replacement director Ridley Scott if they could create a landscape in which Hannibal Lecter and Clarice Starling could once again face each other across a moral chasm, fighting each other, fearing each other, respecting each other, appalled by each other, but never, never merging...
...That Zaillian and Scott have (reportedly) jettisoned the novel's conclusion is a good sign...
...But there are other stories, voiced by people of equally deep faith and love for the church but with quite different experiences, and I would like them to be heard as well...
...Disappointed As someone who believes in Humanae vitae but also agrees there is room for further development in this teaching, I found Luke Timothy Johnson's essay disappointing...
...Since Alleva's own concerns have to do with the verisimilitude of the Left Behind series as thrillers, he is certainly entitled to be selective in his quarrels...
...Certainly, not everyone who uses natural family planning will find it easy...
...Why can't the consensual use of a condom be as holy an act as the consensual avoidance of fertility...
...Of Silence's four award winners, only the most notable one remained to make Hannibal, Anthony Hopkins...
...In point of fact, has the author actually been willing to listen to and learn from people who give witness to the magnificent grace available to those 43 who foEow the church's teachings on sexuality...
...JENNIFER POP1EL Green Bay, Wis...
...a corrupt, lecherous Justice Department bureaucrat...
...Particularly evocative was the way Lector's malevolence, seemingly absolute and not reducible to psychological explanation, amplified our sense of Starling's goodness...
...If the idea of a child so traumatized by his sister's killing that he himself imitates her destroyers has any validity, it needs real psychological exploration, not the superficial 24 and opportunistic handling Harris gives it...
...Of course not...
...If Hopkins can make the doctor the same malefic imp he gave us in Silence, he may succeed in taking us to a cloud-cuckooland with a morality of its own...
...This curt abstention was startling but, though the three obeyed the unwritten Hollywood rule of not publicly badmouthing abandoned projects, I think it is easy to guess at their motives once you have read both The Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal...
...Lecter within his maximumsecurity cell in order to track down another serial killer, the relationship projected "chemistry" long before it found its way into a movie...
...Landry praises what the pope had said about pleasure and the rest in 1960...
...Matthew Kowalski makes the point that allowing artificial birth control would lead inevitably to abortion, since for people whose sexual activity already excludes the thought of having a child, "abortion becomes the natural solution...
...Naturally, the FBI puts her on the trail of Hannibal...
...I think of Jan Korski skiing across the Alps, a consecrated host in a pendant on a chain around his neck, to tell the Allies who couldn't have cared less what was happening at Auschwitz...
...REV...
...It is precisely the connection between birth control and abortion that Johnson seems to disregard...
...I would not be surprised to find them multiplied...
...Just a small point in response to Popiel: I think that I called the pope's theology "deductive," whereas I would prefer a theology that was more "inductive...
...I'm still looking for answers...
...The fugitive Dr...
...Without taking up the philosophical issues behind his "deductive theology," I would push Johnson on his concluding claim that "we must, in all humility, be willing to learn from the bodies and the stories of those whose response to God and to God's world involves sexual love...
...This is true enough, but I wonder if Johnson has really offered an alter44 chetical address" was to support, as I suggest, Humanae vitae...
...The author replies: Derek Jeffreys and Roger Landry think that I have misrepresented Pope John Paul II because I did not take into account his other writings on the subject of human love, or grasp the "purpose of a catechetical address...
...an avaricious Italian police official...
...He is more in a position to address these issues than the pope...
...REV...
...So, hey, if you can't find advancement in the FBI, why not tour Europe with a suave and cultured cannibal...
...Jeffreys says that the pope does not really have an "act-centered morality...
...For those of you fortunate enough not to have a nine-year-old who forces you to watch TV nature shows, I must explain that Steve is an idiotic Australian Crocodile Dundee clone who blunders into swamps and jungles all over the world, jerks perfectly well-behaved and self-respecting rattlesnakes out of their nests, and pokes innocent hippos and sharks in the snout just for the sake of getting them to attack him...
...Paul Hottinger asks why I don't work at all this stuff I said needed doing, since the pope is a busier guy than I am...
...The first of Harris's books featuring the genius serial killer Hannibal Lecter, Red Dragon, did well with both the critics and the public, but it was the second, The Silence of the Lambs, which brought the author into his kingdom...
...What could a feminist make of a heroine who ditches her own heroism to become the Galatea of a monstrous Pygmalion...
Vol. 128 • March 2001 • No. 5
