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I think Thomas Harris, especially in HANNIBAL,
is one of the greatest philosophical novelists
of all time. If anyone would like to participate
in this project you will be welcome.
Below is a psychiatric analysis by a Jungian
physician, a good place to start from and
state my own point of view.
"HANNIBAL" by Dr. Ben Green
DBG: 2001 saw the release of Hannibal (directed
by the Englishman Ridley Scott) based on
the third Thomas Harris novel about Dr Hannibal
Lecter. It particularly matters to me what
is written about this sequence of works,
and so I deliberately did not include this
film on these pages immediately after release.
It matters because the Hannibal series of
novels and films depict something at once
A) simple and archetypal, but at the same
time B) quite complex in terms of internal
reaction. And it is society's acceptance
of Hannibal as a character and, furthermore,
as a hero that is of particular interest.
The broadest stroke of the films speaks volumes
about the demonic and fearful nature of mental
illness within our collective mind. Aliens
(as they used to be called) and their alienists
are grouped together as beyond reality and
on the whole nightmarish characters. GCM:
This gentleman must be a Jungian.
DBG: My judgment is partial, of course, since
I am a psychiatrist. I was asked by the Headline
publishing house to comment on the second
novel in the sequence, The Silence of the
Lambs. Plans were then in discussion to publish
a sequence of novels by yours truly featuring
a realistic and recognizable psychiatrist
as hero. The sequence was never published,
but the novels still exist, slowly mustering
dust and unread somewhere. My bone of contention
with the second novel's Lecter character
was his psychopathy and lack of remorse and
yet his finely attuned, almost prescient
sensitivity to the psyche of others. This,
I argued was an unlikely combination of personality
traits in a doctor. GCM: From my long-term
and intimate observation of doctors, including
psychiatrists, and numerous books of other
people's experiences
(especially Jeffrey Mousaieff Masson) this
is utterly ludicrous. Dr. Ben Green must
be either young or extremely idealistic and
naïve. As Doctor Hannibal Lecter compartmentalizes
his mind according to Matteo Ricci's "Memory
Palace" according to Jonathan Spence,
all doctors do this. You talk one way to
patients. You talk one way to your family
and friends at home. You talk another way
to other doctors. You talk another way with
administrators. And you talk another way
again with nurses. Each 'way' of talking
has its own separate code of ethics. This
realization is rarely consciousness. Each
code of ethics is designed to serve a specific
purpose, the doctor's. But that can be "doctor"
as "doctor", an idealized type,
or "doctor" as ruthless power manipulator.
None of the codes of ethics can rationally
integrate with each other. In this situation,
the doctor also developed several different
personalities to accord with each compartmentalization.
No, the doctor does not have an integrated
personality that can be designated as a whole.
They are not "traits", they are
whole mutual exclusions of each other just
like Wittgenstein's language games with the
same contradictions when their boundaries
overlap. It is when you observe a doctor
having a truly hysterical fit over what is
seen by the observer as an utter triviality
or as something totally unchangeable, and
known to be so by the doctor, that you realize
they are not sane like 'average' people are.
Disclaimer: This only applies in degrees.
Overall environment also makes a great difference.
Money, which is unimportant to no one, is
of immediate pragmatic or ambitious concern
to the physician every moment of his/her
life. Monetary and job security can make
a big difference. However, the same psychological/linguistic
structures are always necessarily in place
for the doctor to function. A doctor has
always placed himself in a trap unless he
ceases to be a doctor.
DBG: I also had some problems with minor
technical points such as Lecter's ignorance
of DSM diagnostic terms, but this was merely
hair splitting stuff. I just thought that
a serial murderer doctor was bizarre and
incredibly unlikely. GCM: Doctor Hannibal
Lecter was not a serial murderer. He operated
on ethical standards of good taste and politeness.
This is most clearly brought out in HANNIBAL.
DBG: This opinion, of course, was proved
wrong. As I was opining to Headline, Dr Shipman
was working single-handedly down the road
from where I live dispatching far more people
than ever written about in the gothic pages
of Thomas Harris. The hoary adage that truth
is stranger than fiction was sadly proved
right again. So, why do we at the same time
like Dr Lecter and also feel repelled by
him? We somehow will to him to survive and
continue, but we abhor his atrocities, even
if they are executed with murderous skill
and an eye to the artistic. The uncomfortable
truth is that Lecter is our Shadow - this
true of and uncomfortable for all of us,
but especially for psychiatrists who might
identify with him even more closely. The
Shadow lies within us, [our dark side as
portrayed in the Star Wars series - which
George Lucas based on the archetypal books
and research of , itself based on the writings
of Carl Gustav Jung - an example of how psychiatry
has sometimes had a reciprocal role with
cinema] and we must integrate our own dark
impulses with our 'ideal self'. GCM: This
is Jungian terminology. Since Doctor Hannibal
Lecter operates upon rational standards,
and does so quite explicitly to Clarice Starling
and then politely listens to Clarice Starling
at the end of HANNIBAL as she does the same
for him, that he can rationally communicate
to others, then such 'archtyping' is completely
inappropriate. DBG: Perhaps the identification
process with Hannibal is akin to a form of
Stockholm syndrome in which the victim, after
prolonged exposure to the aggressor, eventually
identifies with him. GCM: There can also
be identification because you conscious recognize
fundamental resemblances of value systems.
DBG: Or is there something very dark and
murderous within each of us? Is this what
is truly disquieting about the heady archetypal
brew that is the Hannibal series? One of
Ridley Scott's most brilliant aspects as
a director is his use of lighting and shadow
in his films. His previous films include
Alien (1979) and Bladerunner (1982). Hannibal
makes great use of the light and dark in
the key scenes set in Florence. Sunny scenes
of Hannibal living the life of a bon viveur
and gastronome alternate with dark rainy
streets scenes where he murders a gypsy and
the policeman Pazzi. When he first attacks
Pazzi it is in the art museum/library where
Hannibal is hiding out as a curator. Lecter
has just delivered a seminal lecture, he
projects a slide showing the execution of
one of Pazzi's ancestor's, and as he does
so he advances on Pazzi. His shadow towers
above Pazzi on the screen as Lecter moves
forward in the projector's light to drug
him. Pazzi is murdered because he has sold
Lecter for a considerable reward. Lecter
reminds Pazzi before his death that an ancestor
was killed for a similar betrayal. In this
way Lecter justifies his murderous actions.
Pazzi is stained with the sins of his ancestors,
with Original Sin? The parallel of course
as far as Pazzi is concerned is with Judas,
but is Lecter in anyway a Christ-like figure?
The novel is more complex than the film,
and in a way this is understandable, some
of the concepts put forward in the book would
be difficult to translate for the screen.
For instance, Lecter takes refuge in his
Mind Palace, an exquisite architectural edifice
that exists in his mind alone, and in which
he place imaginary objects to fortify himself
'spiritually' and also to help him arrange
his memory. Differences between the novel
and the film include minor details such as
Lecter's preferences in terms of musical
instruments and major factors such as whole
sections devoted to the psychodynamic aspects
of Lecter and the detective Starling's childhood,
and the romance between the female Starling
and the male Lecter (an echo of Beauty and
the Beast). In the novel Lecter plays the
harpsichord and the theremin (an early kind
of electronic instrument from the mid twentieth
century where the movement of the hands in
space produces an unearthly wailing sound
- you will have heard music including a theremin,
but perhaps not realized it) and in the film
he plays the more accessible pianoforte.
In the novel there is considerable space
devoted to Lecter's early childhood relationship
with his sister. She dies in a wartime atrocity,
GCM: The retreating Germans in Lithuania
in 1944, cut off from supplies, ate her in
pragmatic need in the face of starvation.
DBG: and the seeds for Lecter's negation
and his transference to Starling are sown.
The film excludes these psychodynamic explanations
(inserted late in the day in the Hannibal
series of books). The scenes in which Lecter
tries to help Starling psychologically by
unearthing literally (not figuratively in
psychotherapy) the bones of her late father
have also been omitted in the film. In the
novel, the relationship between Starling
and Lecter develops (at times ambiguously)
into a romance. Readers did protest at this
development, pointing out that Starling would
not blur boundaries in this way, and the
film portrays her as a sterling, straight
officer of the law, albeit with a grudging
respect or even affection for Lecter. GCM:
Starling has a fundamental value as honesty
by which all other values, situations, and
people are judged. In this, she is exactly
like Doctor Hannibal Lecter. The utter violation
of legal procedure by Krendler violates the
most fundamental value in her soul as well
as the oath they both swore and, except for
Jack Crawford and a very few others, she
is the ONLY one that holds to it consistently.
The whole structure of the legal system is
portrayed as corrupted and duplicitous inherently
and thoroughly. To accept this situation
would be a blatant violation of self-honesty.
DBG: In the film, although she is drugged,
it seems clear that she has formed and close
affective bond with Lecter who take her to
the opera and so on, with her turning her
back effectively on the FBI and her past.
The novel implies that her role in the police
is a defense mechanism linked in to the complex
about her father. In undoing this Lecter
frees her and the way is open for her to
leave the neurotic attachment to the police
and begin romance with Lecter. Would Jung
approve of this 'coniunctio' between the
anima and animus? Something doesn't feel
quite right, and the movie perhaps because
of this emotional dissonance rejects this
subplot. GCM: Rationally, meeting the only
person that fully shares her fundamental
values (and is still living), she made the
only choice she could, and quite consciously
so, though there was initial resistence from
tradition, custom, "vulgar understanding".
GCM: Gone too is some of Harris' atheistic
polemic. He denies God several times in the
book and this post-Millennial fare implies
that mankind has gone beyond good and evil
in a Nietzchian way. DBG: Lecter is some
cannibalistic monster who devours his victims,
GCM: As a Vietnam combat veteran (two tours
of duty) told me in the context of cannibalism,
"You do what you have to do." Doctor
Lecter does not have to eat them, but then,
in those circumstances and considering his
gastronomic curiosity, why not? Doctor Lecter
is not a creature of mere custom and tradition
and habit and inherent timidity. And if you
were one of the Germans in Lithuania in 1944,
what would you do? Or a Japanese soldier
on Leyte Island in 1944 (FIRES ON THE PLAIN)?
Or a ranger cut off from supplies and the
rest of his platoon in the middle of the
Vietnamese jungle with only some dead Viet
Cong around? DBG: absorbing their thoughts,
souls and bodies like some black hole absorbing
surrounding stars. It is a dreadful Universe.
GCM: This is silly. DBG: If any body is in
charge instead of God in Harris' Universe
it is some dreadful Sethian demiurge who
allows atrocities to happen and recur (the
death of Lecter's sister is repeated figuratively
in his murders or tableaux). It is a bleak
and frightening universe offered by Harris.
A weltanschaung that is even more frightening
that Lecter, who is surprisingly a hero.
His murders do achieve some logic or ethical
basis. GCM: Why is there so little said of
this extremely important point?
DBG: His asylum nurse Barney points out (in book and film) that Lecter only murders 'the rude', the inconsiderate, and the devious Judas like figures represented by Pazzi. The sentence of death for rudeness seems rather disproportionate however, and in the end I am personally repelled by this warped and profoundly pessimistic philosophy. It is a world without God. The Shadow remains however. This is a very grim fairytale where good is conspicuously absent and evil plays freely. GCM: "Rudeness" is a violation of personal rights and respect. The common Englishmen that finally found a voice that could be heard during the English civil war essentially said the English nobility and Anglican clergy were "rude" in all possible senses and extensions of this term and acted murderously upon their judgment. Social oppression is never a fairy tale and every doctor is acutely aware of social oppression whether they take advantage of it themselves, or see others do it to others and are outraged (as Doctor Lecter was), or because the stupid, tasteless, and bumbling interfere with and judge and try to kill superior beings such as himself. This "superior being" of Doctor Lecter is not only realistically based in his own repeatedly proven abilities but also in the realization that dead with totally erase his consciousness of all his acts and judgments and make him equal to everyone else, the dirt. DBG: In the wake of the fictitious Hannibal and the reality of Shipman we are left bereft - where have the heroes gone? Notes: Stockholm Syndrome - in 1973, four hostages were taken in a flawed bank robbery at Kreditbanken in Stockholm, Sweden. At the end of their captivity, six days later, they actively resisted rescue. They refused to testify against their captors, raised money for their legal defense, and according to some reports one of the hostages eventually became engaged to one of her jailed captors. | ||||
 MORE BY MOORE ON HANNIBAL LECTOR |
