There aren’t many plot twists better than the one in “The Silence of the Lambs” where the psychopathic psychiatrist Dr. Hannibal Lecter — he of the refined high-cultural palate and voracious appetite for human flesh — slips out of FBI custody by swapping places with one of his victims. To complete the illusion that he’s been savaged (as opposed to the one doing the savaging), he wears the poor guy’s cut-out face like a Halloween mask. Suffice it to say that the good doctor has a gift for making narrow escapes — he even transcends his creator.
“Hannibal Lecter got away from Thomas Harris,” according to author Brian Raftery, whose new “Hannibal Lecter: A Life” examines the character’s origins and manifestations across 40 years of books, movies and television shows, beginning with his extended cameo in Harris’ 1981 bestselling novel “Red Dragon” and forward into a post-millennial present tense where he has been sequelized, franchised, ripped-off, parodied and invoked — quite bizarrely — by apparent superfan Donald Trump.
“Like a lot of Boomers, Trump knows the hits, pop-culture wise,” Raftery explained via Zoom. “In the speeches where he mentions ‘the late great Hannibal Lecter,’ he’s also riffing on Frank Sinatra, or Billy Martin, or Johnny Carson — he knows his audience likes the hits.”
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The apparent perversity of juxtaposing showbiz titans with a literary and cinematic cannibal belies the latter’s authentically massive stature. Raftery’s observation that Lecter is a genuine household name — and that his fame moved the goalposts for the kinds of fictional figures understood as anti-heroes — serves as the jumping off point for a thoughtful, entertaining piece of pop scholarship.
“One of the things I really like doing is writing contextual criticism,” said Raftery, whose previous book “Best. Movie. Year. Ever.” examined a series of crucial American movies from 1999. “It’s a dream project for me to look at multiple industries and to have a character who existed in all these different mediums. Like, there was never a Hannibal Lecter cash-in album, but that’s the only thing that was really missing in the story.”
“Hannibal Lecter: A Life” is divided into five sections, each of which contains deep dives into different aspects of Lecter’s character or legacy. In broad strokes, the arc that’s being traced is that of an uncommonly memorable peripheral creation moving gradually out of the shadows and into the mainstream spotlight. In “Red Dragon,” Lecter is a supporting player, interacting with FBI profiler protagonist Will Graham on just a few short occasions. By the time Harris began writing “The Silence of the Lambs” a few years later, however, it was clear that Lecter’s cerebral sophistication and uniquely lucid cruelty existed at the centre of the author’s fictional universe. His role was expanded in that book just enough to make him a star — a beneficiary of Harris’ most poetic flights of sadism, and of his readership’s embedded sympathy for the Devil.
“One of the things that made Lecter unique as a cultural figure was his intelligence,” Raftery said. “After ‘Silence of the Lambs,’ there was this idea of the brilliant serial killer as almost a rock star.”
“The Silence of the Lambs” sold more copies than “Red Dragon,” and its film adaptation was similarly perceived as superior. Where Michael Mann’s “Red Dragon” adaptation, titled “Manhunter,” got mixed reviews — both on the whole and for Brian Cox’s reptilian interpretation of Lecter (called “Lecktor” in the film for no good reason) — Jonathan Demme’s “The Silence of the Lambs” won five Academy Awards and turned Anthony Hopkins into a legitimate genre movie icon.
Erudite, upright and unblinking behind gelignite eyes, Hopkins — whose casting, as Raftery explores, was based on a combination of merit and good luck after a half-dozen A-listers passed — conjured up one of the great contemporary performances. Even people who’ve never seen “The Silence of the Lambs” recognize the sound of the actor’s voice (and the flicking of his tongue) in the role. In a pre-Internet era, Hopkins’ acting nevertheless went viral.
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“Even now when I read (“The Silence of the Lambs”), I see Hopkins and Jodie Foster delivering the dialogue,” Raftery said. “I almost wish this could have been two books: one about (the FBI’s) Clarice Starling and one about Lecter. But as far as cultural figures ago, Hannibal just towers above most other creations.”
The most compelling section of Raftery’s book finds Lecter suspended in rarefied air, with nowhere to go but down: the long-delayed — and fanatically anticipated — publication of Harris’ novel “Hannibal” in 1999. “That book arrived around the same time as ‘Star Wars: The Phantom Menace,'” Raftery said, “and there’s a weird synchronicity between them as work that people had been waiting for forever and were then disappointed by.”
As its title suggested, “Hannibal” represented a deeper plunge into its namesake’s subjectivity than ever before. It was epically long, spectacularly disgusting, and, for many, a betrayal of its predecessors, especially in its ending, which recast Lecter and Starling as lovers (albeit with the assistance of psychotropic drugs and hypnosis).
“There’s a great 350-page book in there,” said Raftery of “Hannibal,” whose desultory reviews are excerpted in the book. “All of the real-world rigour from the first two books … it’s just missing.”
The fraught reception of “Hannibal” sets up the second fascinating half of Raftery’s book, in which Lecter is consistently — and through no real fault of his own — slipping through publishing and Hollywood quality-control filters (both at once in the writing and shooting of the dreadful, portrait-of-the-serial-killer-as-a-young-man saga “Hannibal Rising”), before being resurrected by showrunner Bryan Fuller on NBC’s cult prime-time series “Hannibal,” a show even more faithful to Harris’ florid prose than Demme’s best-picture winner.
“It’s a little too grotesque for me sometimes,” says Raftery of the TV version, which starred Mads Mikkelsen as Lecter. “But as an adaptation, it’s amazing. It’s faithful to specific lines of dialogue and characters from all of the novels, just throwing them together. It’s a perfect mind meld of sensibilities, but when I talked to Fuller, he said that he’d never heard from Harris.”
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Indeed, Harris’ elusivity is felt throughout “Hannibal Lecter: A Life.” While Raftery was able to secure interviews with several key figures, including Mann, the famously press-shy novelist declined to participate.
“If I could get him for one question,” Raftery said, “well … I’d have many questions. But I really do want to know if (the novels) “Hannibal” and “Hannibal Rising” were his attempt to reclaim this character, or if he was trying to alienate fans.”
In a way, Harris’ absence is the best thing that could have happened for the project. As Raftery notes in his own afterward, there’s something to be said for an artist who cultivates a sense of mystery.
Meanwhile, as a study of a monster who contains multitudes, Raftery’s book feels definitive. To paraphrase its subject’s own affectionate assessment of Clarice Starling, it proves that the world is a more interesting place with Hannibal Lecter in it — especially when he remains at large.
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