Hannibal Sound and Fury
Cooper, Rand Richards
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...
...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...
...Peter and his wife, Nita, are deaf, as are their three young children...
...Stung by overbearing and casually cruel arguments 26 (What if you were a family of cripples, Peter's father asks—would you break your kids' legs...
...marian burkhart New York, N.Y...
...Jeffreys says that the pope does not really have an "act-centered morality...
...still you kept aside and let them all divide Him flesh from life...
...Marvin, S.D...
...This is not a story about medical technology, however, but about how we understand identity, community, and language...
...She wants to hear bears growl at the zoo, she says...
...Peter's brother Chris, however, is not, nor is his wife, Mari...
...By resurrecting an outmoded ethical category, Johnson does little to further the debate about Humane vitae...
...This is his language that is being wiped out...
...I am pleased to hear them...
...MATTHEW KOWALSKI, O.S.B...
...Way over the top, is director Ridley Scott's answer...
...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...
...He wants to kill me...
...May it not be precisely because the "purpose of a catemodern sexual ethics...
...With Clarice Starling still after him (played this time by Julianne Moore), and the Italian cops (led by a haggard, chainsmoking Giancarlo Giannini), and a horribly defaced victim, Mason Verger, who's spending millions devising lurid revenges involving wild boars, Lecter has lots to contend with...
...Of course not...
...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...
...2) confronted with stark nihilism, even Hollywood filmmakers can display moral revulsion...
...The fugitive Dr...
...Godfrey's opening sentences prepared me for a sentimental look at his ordeals as a single parent...
...Nevertheless, before drawing such a conclusion, we ought to at least represent the pope's position fairly...
...Well, Thomas Harris is a literary Steve the Crocodile Hunter...
...So, hey, if you can't find advancement in the FBI, why not tour Europe with a suave and cultured cannibal...
...But Demme had left his film teetering on the edge of pure camp...
...This animal is vicious...
...Fell (!) while giving lectures on Dante and holding a curatorship in Florence...
...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...
...and where to go from there...
...Aronson subtitles not just dialogue, but sounds, in brackets—-"[Ocean waves breaking]"—that inescapably emphasize how much a deaf person misses, a tantalizing world of experiences a child like Heather can literally only imagine...
...Second, Harris employs what I can only call a Steve-the-Crocodile-Hunter strategy...
...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...
...REV...
...and the best we can aim at is humility and imagination in the face of other people's persistent, hardwon otherness...
...An Oscar nominee for Best Documentary, Josh Aronson's Sound and Fury studies cochlear implantation, a potentially revolutionary surgical procedure that can bring a large measure of hearing to the deaf...
...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...
...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...
...DEREK s. JEFFREYS Green Bay, Wis...
...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...
...Sound and Fury explores an area where technology, politics, and identity exist in a profoundly dynamic relation...
...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...
...For the doctor, Harris employs two devices...
...Jonathan Demme's cunningly plain direction played the genre to perfection even as it winked away, showing us how to smile and squirm at the same time, prefiguring the I Know What You Did Last Summer and Scream schlock-shockfests of the decade to follow...
...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...
...Peter and Nita come to see the procedure as an assault on their identity...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...His Hannibal, its Hans Zimmer soundtrack thick with swelling opera themes, offers us the cannibal as celebrity...
...You abode still in your lie as they spiked Him to a tree stripped and hoisted up for all to see...
...What if we lose deafness in the future," asks a group of deaf people assembled by the filmmakers, "and there are no deaf people...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...As he dodges their lunges, he shouts at his audience, "Blimey, mates...
...The Silence of the Lambs succeeded through restraint, its energies all the more potent for being enclosed within the form of the thriller, as Lecter was enclosed in his cell...
...Silence was a terrific movie, chilling and slyly funny, with a lurking campy impulse (remember the Bon Appetit magazine in Hannibal Lecter's cage before he munches the two guards...
...The film follows two branches of a Long Island family, the Artinians...
...His power knows no bounds...
...Since these couples have already decided to separate childbearing from sexual pleasure, abortion becomes the natural solution...
...His thinking leads to a very confusing ethical point of view...
...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...
...Robert hannon Fairbanks, Ark...
...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...
...Let loose, both he and the film flail about wildly, his exchanges with Clarice conveying little of the taut, teasing thrill of when he was behind glass and wanted out...
...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...
...moments among young engaged and married couples not to be convinced of the Theology of the Body's great pastoral utility...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...who had such unerring, lethal taste...
...27 (Continued from page 4} personhood undermines the utilitarian reasoning pervasive in debates about artificial contraception...
...and gleefully tossing off lines like, "I may have to filet your wife after all...
...The cannibal doctor's very being presented an acid test, an initiation rite Starling had to undergo before her heroism could emerge...
...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...
...The ending, with Lecter free and feeling peckish, had sequel written all over it...
...Just understanding and acknowledging each other...
...Feeling pressured, Peter and Nita research the procedure...
...As couples, we communicate more, not less...
...That I ended up thinking the other side had the better arguments may simply be more proof that what we believe is, for better and for worse, a question of who we are...
...And we still love our partners and rejoice in our ability to demonstrate that physically...
...This is true enough, but I wonder if Johnson has really offered an alter44 chetical address" was to support, as I suggest, Humanae vitae...
...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...
...It is precisely the connection between birth control and abortion that Johnson seems to disregard...
...The joys of Catholic sex Luke Timothy Johnson's article left me with a nagging unease...
...The conversation grows testy...
...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...
...You can't help but feel for Peter and Nita, with their deepest motives put in doubt, and their own memories of having felt outcast as children pressed upon them by hearing people—they don't want to put their kids through that, do they...
...Still, you can't help but relish Anthony Hopkins as the Ghoulish Gourmet (a role he also played, to horrific rather than comic effect, in last year's Titus), and if s amusing to hear him crafting culinary double-entendres out of Dante, or to learn that he ate his first victim, a professional flutist, to improve the quality of the Baltimore Philharmonic...
...I wonder how this squares with the experience of believers...
...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...
...They visit a cochlear implant school, where a group of kids, all wearing the small box and wire that transmit signals to a device implanted below the skin, are learning to talk...
...But we have come far along a path honoring diversity, equating language (including sign language) with culture and identity, and turning "disability" into "difference," and it's hard not to hear something ominous in Chris Artinian's angry pronouncement that "deaf culture as they know it is done...
...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...
...I rather doubt that this generation's revisionists would have either...
...As a genre film, Silence was all about having your cake and, well, eating it too...
...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...
...But why should we assume that using a condom is different than periodic abstinence with respect to intention concerning childbirth...
...If your hearing culture was wiped out," Peter argues back, "hearing people would feel the loss and cry...
...REV...
...I wonder what the mystics would say about this...
...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...
...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...
...He is more in a position to address these issues than the pope...
...Well, if he does not, then his persistence in supporting Humanae vitae becomes even stranger, for that composition is strictly act-centered...
...Aye, Peter, ill from the load of your lie you wept and he bled dry from crown and 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...
...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...
...Godfrey's "Crowd Control" reimpressed on me how disparate elements can join to strike a blow to the solar plexus...
...Until very recently, the idea would have been seen as a triumph of medical science...
...But what does it mean to accept deafness when there's an option, a way out...
...Instead, they simply walked away from the project...
...ROGER J. LANDRY Fall River, Mass...
...There was certainly moral ambiguity in the fact that virtue had to be aided by evil to catch evil...
...Readings of Scripture that force it into a fortune-telling role do not have a good track record...
...Chris and Mari urge the procedure, but Peter and Nita are reluctant, and an argument begins—with grandparents on both sides weighing in—that tears the family apart...
...Jo McGowan's "Corporal Punishment" and A.W...
...He keeps setting characters much more odious than Hannibal on the trail of the doctor: a pedophile billionaire...
...In the end, some might well agree with Johnson...
...They did so in response to the belief that Christ died to save all of us— Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, and the handicapped as well...
...Vicious guard dogs cower at his approach...
...This to me is the real problem of native...
...We are more in tune with one another's desires...
...Why would you want to keep Heather in that world," the other parents ask, "and not broaden her horizons...
...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...
...Particularly evocative was the way Lector's malevolence, seemingly absolute and not reducible to psychological explanation, amplified our sense of Starling's goodness...
...When Peter urges Heather to sign the story the kids are reading aloud, she refuses, embarrassed— and Peter and Nita see it as the first, dread step toward losing her...
...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...
...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...
...From then on, the Artinians are on the defensive—against Chris and Mari, and against Peter's parents, who consider their resistance to the procedure irresponsible and selfish...
...Do these literary strategies work...
...This is borne out by documented facts: a high percentage of women seeking abortions were using birth control methods that failed...
...Strolling home at midnight after the movie, however, I found myself walking at the edge of the sidewalk, then right out in the street, well ai from shadows and alleys...
...that didn't fully disclose itself until Lecter's priceless dosing line, "I'm having an old friend for dinner...
...I would not be surprised to find them multiplied...
...and upon learning their infant son is deaf, Chris and Mari opt for cochlear implantation...
...I have no reason to think I would have had such courage...
...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 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...
...a corrupt, lecherous Justice Department bureaucrat...
...And I, bowed, do hide, for daily my briny will salts His side...
...Hannibal opens with an FBI drug bust lifted straight from a Don Siegel action movie, and turns into a gruesome farce, a la Delicatessen or Re-animator, with Lecter rifling a hospital pathology lab for cooking utensils (more opera music...
...Clarice is still an agent but vilified in the press for a drug bust gone wrong (though she herself behaved irreproachably...
...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...
...It begins seven years after Silence...
...Initially Nita looks into it for herself, but benefits are much less dramatic for adults, an audiologist informs her...
...but never fear...
...Naturally, the FBI puts her on the trail of Hannibal...
...Ten years on, Lecter—now a marquee name on the FBI's Most Wanted list, his personal artifacts coveted by collectors (his copy of Joy of Cooking fetches $16,000 at Sotheby's)—is living incognito in Florence, giving literary lectures while scarfing down the odd meal (very odd) when the mood moves 25 him...
...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...
...various thugs and assassins...
...Or is it a way of life—a culture—we should protect...
...PAUL A. HOTTINGER Downers Grove, III...
...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...
...God will hear you...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...I never knew you didn't accept deafness," he says to his parents at a backyard barbecue where the argument rises into open war...
...Vehemently Peter objects...
...Well, so will I." Aronson treats all sides with remarkable even-handedness, letting us see how an observation that spells relief and triumph to one set of parents— "I don't think she realizes she's deaf," says the girl's mother at the cochlear class—sparks deep anxieties in the other...
...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...
...JENNIFER POP1EL Green Bay, Wis...
...But my point about genocide was linked to the absolute prohibition of condoms, including for people with aids...
...Whatever it loses in subtlety, Hannibal makes up in morbidity, and ends by giving "high-grossing film" a whole new meaning...
...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...
...Why can't the consensual use of a condom be as holy an act as the consensual avoidance of fertility...
...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...
...Not merging...
...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...
...If you had a cochlear implant," her grandmother tells her, "you could talk on the telephone...
...In my view, Richard Alleva's reading of the film [see page 23], with Lecter and Starling as good and evil facing off across a moral chasm, gives Silence a Miltonic seriousness that misses its underlying horse laugh, the way it joined murder with manners in the figure of Hannibal the Cannibal, who cut through the fat of our pretensions to the bone of our hidden truths...
...an avaricious Italian police official...
...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...
...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 Rand Richards Cooper VERY DIFFERENT SENSES 'Hannibal' & 'Sound and Fury' When I saw The Silence of the Lambs I was living in a European city where violent crime was virtually unknown...
...Moreover, I have witnessed too many joy-filled "Eureka...
...Landry praises what the pope had said about pleasure and the rest in 1960...
...When vulnerable but dauntless FBI agent Clarice Starling engaged the brilliant, lethal mind of Dr...
...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...
...In their mounting reluctance, we sense a deep fear that hearing will alienate their child from them...
...Staring at each other, fascinated...
...Good and evil...
...JULIAN IRIAS Davis, Calif...
...What on earth can make any creature this malevolent...
...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...
...At the cochlear class, a parent dismisses sign language as "a crutch" that will hinder her child...
...Then came Hannibal, a book that concluded the trilogy but also played havoc with the peculiar accomplishments of its predecessors...
...Maybe I will...
...Certainly, not everyone who uses natural family planning will find it easy...
...What strategies does the author deploy to get from point A to point Z and to make all this believable or at least acceptable...
...In what way is God's image connected to the human body...
...Is Johnson sure that "absolutely everything we can learn about God must come to us" from our bodies...
...Is deafness a handicap we should strive to eliminate...
...was that rattled...
...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'm still looking for answers...
...To nondeaf people, cochlear implants present a good so selfevident, they hardly feel it needs explaining: "freedom, opportunity, and the key to the world," says Chris Artinian...
...Lecter is 23 now posing as Dr...
...Instead he offered a gentle argument for the large family, that carried all the more weight for avoiding the hectoring arguments of church apologists...
...Yet it was certainly the movie version that made that relationship more than vivid, made it almost mythic...
...When Peter and Nita tell their bright, adorable six-year-old, Heather, about the operation, the girl decides she'd like one too...
...LUKE TIMOTHY JOHNSON Large families & ideas I was pleasantly surprised by two pieces in the February 9 issue of Commonweal...
...My experiences lead me to believe that the answer would not be as dismal as the author assumes...
...Through an interpreter, they question the parents of a cochlear child, asking whether they bothered to find out about the deaf world "before you just went ahead and did it...
Vol. 128 • March 2001 • No. 5
