I read Red Dragon and Silence Of The Lambs sooo long ago(couldn’t have been more than 15) that I barely remember anything except the plot in general.
I have seen Manhunter several times and have more memory of it, and Lector while clearly intelligent and cultured is not portrayed as someone the audience would cheer for. Unlike later Lector that punishes assholes he is more like a run of the mill serial killer/rapist? I remember his crimes being brought up in dialog and it is said he did horrible things to college girls who were his students before murdering them. Would seem hard for anyone to think his victims deserved it.
Then the film SOTL, where Hopkins gives such a charismatic performance of Lector that he becomes an audience favorite.
I have more memory details of reading Hannibal, and now Lector is not only the main character it is clear we the readers should be cheering him on. His first kill is a corrupt cop, and the main “villain” is a disgusting violent pedophile who raped his own sister and wants revenge on Lector for disfiguring him. Again his villains are so vile we cheer him on to kill them. I later read somewhere the author Thomas Harris intentionally wrote Hannibal as a sort of sarcastic fan service because he was sick of people loving Lector.
So when exactly did Lector go from murdering and torturing innocent young girls, to a force of divine punishment killing human scum? Or at least the audiences perception of the character?
Well, Silence of the Lambs (the movie) ends with him gearing up to take out Chilton, who’d been presented to the audience as a petty jerk, so I guess that’s when the audience was to start overlooking the four people we know he killed in his escape. The novel ends similarly, except he’s killed even more.
MANHUNTER, excellent movie though it was, changed the character of Hannibal Lecter from charming uber-psychiatrist & cannibal to coed-killing college professor.
SOTL, book & movie, softened Lecter somewhat from RED DRAGON - he finds in Clarice someone he at first toys with, then becomes interesting in, and comes to actually care about. He’s infuriated at Multiple Miggs’s insult to her & avenges that. He helps her find Jame Gumb . And finally, we know he’s going to dispose of the contemptible Dr. Chilton.
In my case, never. I’d have been perfectly fine if Mason Verger had killed him, though feeding the bad doctor to the swine was too much even for me. And neither Chilton nor Krendler, odious as they were, deserved to become Lecter’s dinner.
Yeah, he never became sympathetic to me. I’ve only seen the movie of Hannibal and was :rolleyes: at the idea that things were so oppressive to Clarice that running off with Lecter is attractive. I believe that’s how the book is written?
I think that the real switch over came when Anthony Hopkins played Lecter with Jodi Foster as Clarice. He was dashingly handsome, cultured, brilliant, ballsy and daring-he was an extremely strong character, and, when Clarice fucked him over with her fake deal, he took it in stride. This shows that the only thing that he wasn’t in control of was his being in a prison, and, he soon fixed that. Chilton came over as such a dildo that the audience was rather looking forward to him getting a good lashing, and, Lecter didn’t disappoint, and could even joke about it.
Jodi had a respect for him, and, she could see, and tell everybody, that 'the one thing that he doesn’t do is lie".
I think that the Foster version also shows some kind of romantic tension between the two.
The book Hannibal is worse than the movie, Clairice not only eat still living boss’s brains out of his skull with Hannibal she voluntarily joins him in his life of murder and cannibalism.
The end is someone spotting and recognizing the affectionate couple years later in Europe.:rolleyes:
Like I said the book seems to be a sarcastic “take that” to fans of Lecter.
In the book, Clarice’s state of mind at the end is complicated. She was hit by a tranquilizer dart, Lecter nurses her back to health, put her into a post-hypnotic state where she is bound to him but if deep inside, she wished to be free, she could free herself & he would let her go.
Barney the psych ward attendant, who was always polite to Lecter, and who made a fortune selling his “relics” on the Internet, with his blessings, was the one who saw the couple, I thought in South America.
The book was sent, pre-release, to Director Jonathan Demme, Jodie Foster, & Anthony Hopkins. All three were reportedly surprised at the ending, but Jodie was outright offended by it.
My take (especially from the book) was that Lecter takes revenge on Miggs because of disgust at his “rudeness”. And his interest in Clarice was basically twofold - first, on a coldly clinical level, prodding for vulnerability, and secondly to play games with. Oh, and thirdly to manipulate her for whatever personal advantage he could get.
Chilton was more than just a sexist creep. He interfered with a murder investigation for self-promotion of his career and profit. His interference almost scuttled the search for Buffalo Bill, and resulted in Lecter’s escape.
Also, in the novel SOTL, he briefly tried to pin the escape on Clarice. Crawford is shown responding over the phone to someone relaying Chilton’s claim that she may have unintentionally slipped him the object which he fashioned into a handcuff key. Crawford checks with Clarice and pushes back against the accusation.
While Lecter’s targeting of Chilton was IMO the first instance of someone we hate becoming Lecter chow, the novel *Hannibal *made Lecter more sympathetic by showing the atrocities he experienced during his childhood.
This was a change from what Lecter had been portrayed as previously: in the novel SOTL, Clarice tells Lecter in the asylum that she wants to understand what happened to make him like he was. Lecter responds, “Nothing ‘happened’ to me. Can you look at me and stand to say I’m evil, Agent Starling? You’ve got everyone dressed up in moral dignity pants”.
In Hannibal, I think Harris also wants us to compare Lecter’s deeds with the institutional evils perpetrated by “respectable” parties like the FBI and Paul Krendler in their scapegoating of Clarice.
I believe some one at the FBI or Justice Department annoyed Thomas Harris.
Booth Tarkington’s young protagonist Penrod falls into an author’s trap when writing his detective novel of having the antagonist become the protagonist.
I always admired him from when I read Red Dragon in its first paperback release. He was so intelligent and malevolent that it was impossible not to admire the purity of his evil.
Yes. Killing and eating people is incredibly glamorous. And it was terribly amusing when Letter set up that poncy git Will Graham to be mutilated.:rolleyes: