A feast of flavors

How many Hannibal Lecters are there?

Well, that depends on how many you've gone out and met. The first one I met was a small man with six fingers on one hand. The second was a man with a subtle, sinister smile and who sometimes made a lisping, slurping noise when excited (and he looked a lot like Odin from the recent Thor movies). The third had darker hair, a much bolder voice and pronounced the first syllable in 'privacy' as in 'prim.' The fourth was a young man, and I followed him through the sort of childhood that would either make a sane person hope for the end of the world or drive them to nudge it along toward that end. The fifth I recently made the acquaintance of, and he's a quiet, cultured man who moves through his life with a slow, deliberate grace.

All of them are killers, and none of them would blink while they cut you open and browsed through your insides like a housewife at the local farmer's market.

Makes you wonder. There's only one source, regardless of the inspiration for that source. So where did they all come from? Why, from you and me of course. Let's take a moment and feel pride in our creations.

Why did Thomas Harris give the good doctor his initial traits, small, with slicked-back hair, limbs possessed of wiry strength? Well, Harris encountered a real-life killer who looks a bit like that, only at first he didn't understand the crimes the man had committed. I'm pulling this from Wikipedia, so there's likely a richer story behind it, but every good character has multiple roots, and you and I only have so much time here. Harris had a gut-level experience that was back-dated with the word KILLER in bright, bold letters, and he picked details from that experience with the intent of us putting our own KILLER stamps on his character, on his book. We were the target audience. I'd say the technique worked rather well, wouldn't you?

If we work chronologically, the next incarnation comes from Brian Cox working in front of a camera for the film Manhunter. He has a some of the physical traits, but we never see him kill anyone, despite all the backstory we're given about the bodies he's left in his wake. Instead, this Lecter is a button-pusher. He sends our hero running out of the room in a panic with a few well-placed points of conversation, and the tortured, murderous psychopath who slaughters whole families admires Doctor Lecter. These facts are presented to us to make us think, 'Christ, if this man can do all this while he's locked up, what would happen if he could get his hands on people?' What indeed.

Now we come to Mister Hopkin's portrayal. Yes, in a movie where you don't have a powerful actor there are some things that you can do to compensate for it, and hell no I'm not saying Cox's performance is sub-par, by any means. But Hopkin's Lecter has enough presence to blow all the other characters in Silence Of The Lambs out of the water. The accent he speaks with alone is just creepy, and the quiet monotone that it's delivered in makes me think of an audio recording of The Facts In The Case Of M. Valdemar I heard many years ago, the voice of the dead speaking to the living. See you soon, it whispers, at all of us.

Then there's that boy, that fine young Hannibal. (Nope. Couldn't resist) We see him portrayed with more than one actor's face, but there's only one that we associate with the cold dread that the name Hannibal inspires. Give me a contrary opinion if you want to, but that face is a little... Off. It's odd in the same way that Christopher Walken's is, handsome, but not something a lot of us would want to open our eyes to in the middle of the night. This Hannibal starts off his life a little better than most of us, which adds another dimension to the intelligent personae that's consistent through all the incarnations of our anti-hero. He gets dealt a bad hand of cards in his life, but presses on, though the part of that boy that might have once been able to laugh at himself seems to be missing. He wanders through life until he has a new family to replace the one that was killed, and for a moment maybe we get to believe that the rest of his life could have been lived 'normally.' He kills before the opportunity to avenge his little sister's death presents itself, but only after being insulted and bullied by someone bigger, stronger, and dumber than himself, and I think that qualifier is important. For all his skill and rage, this future icon is still a boy. We can enjoy stories about evil kids, but how many good or successful ones are there that don't have the child infected by some outside element, be it extra-terrestrial or supernatural. Innocence and childhood are intertwined icons, and if this handsome blond boy had begun his grown-up life already indulging his murderous urges, he would have lost our sympathy. As a character, Hannibal needs our empathy. This is one of the bigger challenges facing everyone who re-imagines him.

Of course we also have the latest and certainly not the least. In the TV series, Hannibal seems inhumanly poised and cultured, so much so that I think the only reason we can believe in him as a person is because we walked into this story already knowing the characters. Using my in-depth research techniques (browsing IMDB when I can't sleep) I discovered that Mads Mikkelson approached the role with a fresh perspective, playing this charming killer as if he was the devil. If you watch the series you'll see that the character does a good job in this role. He tempts, and it might even be said that he fulfills the traditional duties of the devil, dealing harshly with those who transgress. Though it might be more accurate to say that he does the work that we wish the devil would get around to, chopping up that asshole who cut us off on the highway and making that snooty clerk at the DMV regret being so rude. That's the key.

I'm not trying to just gush here about how engrossing Hannibal is as a fictional character, I do that in private. This is peeking into the whys and wherefors behind the fact that a lot of people (myself included) are willing to pay money to read and see this man's story. Hannibal is an anti-hero, like any other bad guy we root for. But the intensity of his actions make it hard to admit why we like him. I think a lot of us have moments where we would love do exactly what he does, kill some person in our lives who offends us (not hurts us, offends us) and express such pure contempt for that person that we eat them. I try to avoid getting too graphic here, but let me address an unspoken fact that would be a part of Hannibal's life if he existed in the real world: his digestion. We all know what goes up must come down, right? Well, what goes in must come out. Imagine all those faces of Doctor Lecter, each taking care of personal business, remembering their meals and remembering the preparation. These men would be smiling while they sat.

But we never see, or even hear about that. Why? Because while our egos would love to lead us on an exploration of alternative cuisine, those same egos don't want us within a thousand miles of all the complications. Lecter went to medical school. Look around, because it's not difficult to find horror stories about that experience. Have you ever smelled the insides of a mammal that's been opened up? How about had fluids from those insides splash over you, soaking down into your socks? Once the good doctor removed the delicacies he was after, there would have been a hundred and twenty more pounds of person to dispose of, minimum. That weight comes from bones, blood vessels, organs, and goopy stuff inside those organs. Yeah, the movies never show our well-mannered gentleman dealing with bowels.

By not showing that, it lets us gloss over the ugly bits of reality. We get the good without the bad. The gourmet meal without having to pay the bill or wash the dishes. Obvious, right? The trick is knowing which is which, what to serve and what to toss in the trash and hope our neighbor doesn't get nosy. If I had the secret to that, well for starters I'd be getting paid for these words you're reading. But I can at least recognize when someone gets it right, like with the good doctor. I can think about what I like and what buttons it pushes inside me. I can put all that in my own blender, hit puree and see what I end up with. Dinner is served.

By the way, I'm eating while I write this. Eating meat.

While I write.