Home Cooking
LONG, MICHAEL
Home Cooking Hannibal Lecter and the aesthetics of cannibalism. BY MICHAEL LONG One hesitates to burden entertainment with philosophical baggage. The great majority of moviegoers are wisely after...
...The great majority of moviegoers are wisely after the mindless pleasure of the thing...
...Who could be more immoral than a brutal serial murderer...
...To set the paradox in high relief, the author portrays the conflict at its extreme...
...In this sense, he says, the best people can also be the worst people...
...Meanwhile, Clarice Starling is watching her once-promising FBI career slide into an abyss, courtesy of a scorned, lustful boss and the politically correct proclivities of the system...
...He is an expert in everything...
...With some of the richest and most popular characters in recent fiction, the movie version of Hannibal should have been great entertainment...
...As disappointing as it is to spend eight bucks on a movie and not get your money's worth, it's also a pretty big letdown to see a mainstream book with such an interesting philosophical bent get its heart hacked out as a film...
...The examination of Starling's evolution, the thing that carried the book and the first film, is abandoned in favor of putting her in a few cliched situations and showing her with a concerned look on her face...
...Given the popularity of The Silence of the Lambs, the author could have compiled his grocery lists and still sold books, but he did not take any easy way out...
...It took a decade for Harris to bring Michael Long is a director of the White House Writers Group, a strategy and public-relations firm in Washington, D.C...
...Complementing him, Starling turns out to be of humble background but possessed of an inchoate appreciation for beauty, which Lecter recognizes, enjoys, and exploits...
...And that turns out to be a surprisingly weak tale...
...Understand this idea, and one understands the entire novel...
...Julianne Moore takes over as Clarice Starling (a role for which Jodie Foster won an Academy Award in The Silence of the Lambs...
...The narrator observes, "The first step in the development of taste is to be willing to credit your own opinion...
...The character incorporates elements of real-life Wisconsin serial killer Ed Gein, a figure whose story has been mined for years by numerous slasher movies...
...He reserves his violence for those who offend his sense of culture and beauty...
...They want respite from worry, work, and the occasional screaming kid...
...The key to the story comes when Starling begins her search for the cannibal— by taste, so to speak...
...The director Ridley Scott has failed to support his story...
...In the end, Starling uses Lecter's insight to catch the killer, and the two assume an ironic relation of personal, mutual respect...
...Here she finds constancy greater than human systems offer...
...In The Silence of the Lambs, a serial murderer is killing young women to skin them and assemble his own "woman suit...
...They don't want Kierkegaard's Either/Or...
...By tracking the purchases of these rare items, Starling will narrow down Lecter's location...
...The real people introduced in The Silence of the Lambs are replaced with caricatures in Hannibal: Lecter plays cat-and-mouse with his victims, Starling is a cookie-cutter cop, the bad guy who brings them together is one of those Phantom of the Opera-faced guys too bizarre to be believed (though, in the role, Gary Old-man makes pretty good use of some occasionally silly material...
...To drive home his point, Harris pours immorality into the cultured Hannibal Lecter...
...Yet some books and movies don't make sense without the baggage, and so it is with the newly released film Hannibal, made from Thomas Harris's novel of the same title...
...Devotion to beauty can exist without morality...
...The success of the film version of The Silence of the Lambs made a sure thing of the sequel, but Harris seemed to exploit that advantage by making his book hard to love...
...And who could be more honorable than this elegant, erudite, and utterly consistent man with a superhuman appreciation for beauty...
...Also, of course, the extremes are what make the book a good read, if extreme shocks are your thing...
...In the end she rejects the FBI—and conventional morality itself—and joins up with Lecter—not as a killer per se, but as a friend and lover united with her former foe by what she now considers the highest calling: the commitment to beauty...
...He created a moral kaleidoscope in which the reader could make the case for either the danger of an immoral world or the colorlessness of an artless one...
...The book is fantasy, of course.Lecter is preternaturally powerful and brilliant—his knowledge of Italian history and ancient dialects alone approaches the impossible...
...that it is among the highest callings...
...He leaves no doubt for the reader that the pursuit of beauty ought to matter more than morality...
...forth a sequel, only his fourth book in twenty-five years...
...Hannibal is a ripping fantasy, far more than Harris's first two Lecter books...
...Lecter is revealed to be quite a respectful gentleman, as psychopathic cannibal psychiatrists go: a cross between Tom Wolfe and an automated slaughterhouse...
...The FBI decides that the best chance to catch him is to interview the captured serial killer, Hannibal Lecter, a dapper psychiatrist with an almost otherworldly intellect...
...Could a scene so repugnant have worked in a movie...
...On the hunt for Lecter, she realizes that the surest way to catch him is to follow his signal trait, his passion for culture and things beautiful...
...Should it even have been considered at all...
...The only things that Lecter will not deny himself are the finest things...
...This study draws out and develops her own spark of taste...
...That was Harris's point...
...This time around, though, Starling is written as—or maybe just edited down to— a single dimension, bounced from abuse to abuse...
...Its forerunner, The Silence of the Lambs, was a well-received thriller that managed the difficult feat of transcending its own genre...
...But without the delicious, squirm-inducing ambivalence of the book, the movie leaves us with a bloody fairy tale in which a serial murderer pursues his unrequited love for the woman who is trying to catch him...
...Forced to think like her enemy, she becomes like him (a theme chillingly explored in Harris's second novel, Red Dragon...
...For instance, in the climax of the book, Lecter offers up his lover's enemy as a dish served cold: He carves the still-conscious villain's brain into slices, sautes them, and serves them on a plate...
...But this swapped-out ending betrays the source material, eviscerates the story, and renders meaningless what has come before...
...And after it was made into an Oscar-winning film, its central character, Hannibal Lecter (brilliantly played by Anthony Hopkins), ascended to the ranks of instantly recognizable cultural phenomena...
...A man once driven to achieve freedom at any cost is far less threatening when reduced to knocking off a flautist to improve the sound of the local orchestra...
...Issued in the spring of 1999, Harris's book was the publishing event of the year...
...Starling grows stifled within it and must join him if she, too, is to thrive...
...As an orphan who has gotten ahead only by following the rules, Starling doesn't take long to see that the pursuit of beauty is a more faithful and timeless occupation than service to the faithless suits who have iced her career...
...As Starling begins to trust her judgment, she realizes she is just as smart as—in fact, superior to—the people she follows and the systems she trusts...
...It takes a strong stomach to recognize the metaphor in the original image...
...His interviewer is an FBI trainee, Clarice Starling...
...here is something that will never fail her because it comes from within...
...This opens the door for her to create a private moral landscape—a region that Lecter has happily occupied for quite some time...
...Characters run from scene to scene with little reaction and even less motivation...
...What is now in its place is patently inferior and ultimately nonsensical...
...is a connoisseur beyond reality of all things elegant...
...The movie could have lived up to the book had the filmmakers followed Harris through the territory he charted...
...The exception is the police inspector in Florence played by the Italian actor Giancarlo Giannini...
...In Hannibal, Lecter is now a fugitive living it up in Florence, serving as curator of an ancient Italian library and indulging his taste less often for human flesh than for art, music, and gourmet food...
...He anticipates nearly every move against him...
...It's not for everybody, and it may not be edifying for anybody—but it's what the author did...
...morality can exist without beauty...
...Harris, who despite his choice of subject matter writes an elegant prose, delivered an unexpectedly difficult novel, brimming with some of the wildest gore ever found in a mainstream release...
...His long silences and wonderful, expressive face evoke more emotion than even the grisliest gore in the film...
...Without knowledge of the previous movie or the two books, there is almost no reason to care at all about any of these characters...
...That Lecter and Starling end up as lovers in the end left many readers cold, yet the elevation of art above morality was the message of the book across every single page: Lecter thrives outside conventional morality...
...But Starling's immersion in culture changes her...
...Lecter forces her to make a bargain: her personal remembrances in exchange for leads with which she might catch the killer...
...But in the movie the scene is cut short, played solely for its shock value...
...Maybe, maybe not...
...Anthony Hopkins returns as Lecter, though the villain is not nearly so chilling out of his cage...
...But it's not...
...Hannibal thus becomes a story about a woman who experiences profound betrayal by the systems of government and society, and who comes to reject those systems in favor of taste—even if the cost is rejecting the moral code of the rest of the world...
...has planned for contingencies seemingly years in advance...
Vol. 6 • February 2001 • No. 23
