Now that's a post!
Closeups. Lots and lots of them. That was Demme's secret weapon, something he borrowed from the masters like Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles.
And let's not forget his mentor, and the FBI Director in
Silence, King of B Movies, Roger Corman. I agree Demme's style in the film is perfect because of the intimacy of those closeups and because he deftly switches from grounded, straightforward, almost documentary-like storytelling to aggressive, intimate, hyper-realized moments, often in closeup. There's numerous examples, the deep closeups on Lecter's eyes during the lambs reveal, Clarice and her fellow trainee cutting back and forth going over the case in closeup with dark backgrounds, pretty much anything in Buffalo Bill's dungeon, but the best example is actually a deleted alternate take of Lecter discussing Bill where the scene actually transitions from Lecter clinically breaking him down as seen/heard in the film to the lighting slowly changing and the camera slightly moving in and around his face as his timbre and intensity increases and the scene turns red until Lecter appears as Satan himself. It's really weird! So I get why he cut it because it was too much and took you out of the movie, but it goes to show the way he contrasts those two styles in the film otherwise actually serve to make each better and the film more real, intimate and visceral.
Originally, Dr. Lecter killed people for no reason other than his amusement or if they got on his nerves
Re-reading the Hannibal novel now, I feel like Thomas Harris could have stuck to Dr. Lecter's roots by having him mutilate and cripple Mason Verger not for raping those kids but for offending his personal sensibilities.
Agreed, and I'd take it a step further and, if he cared at all, have Lector tacitly approve of Verger's monstrous behavior as the only redeeming quality of a bore. The only part of it that rings true for me is that Lecter sees Verger as a lesser creature than him, and that while they, particularly the killers, might fraternize on some level, they're also a threat to each other, like apex predators. Lecter wouldn't see Verger this way, but as a lesser monster to prey on himself for his amusement. Making Lecter into some kind of relative moral avenger with a traumatic childhood that perfectly explains his behavior by definition demystifies him. I prefer the interpretation that whatever Dr. Hannibal Lecter the human is or has been, he was born, he was a baby, he grew up, went to medical school, is incidental to his true nature or what's inside, which is fundamentally different from a human being, like a human vessel possessed by a demon, walking among us. More simply, I think the explanation given in Silence is perfectly sufficient, "He's like some kind of vampire."
Hannibal's ending essentially weaves those two storylines of bereavement to a full circle by making Lecter and Starling menders of each other's hearts.
It's not without thematic merit or clever storytelling execution, though at best I still think it a bit muddled and it does a disservice to both characters. And it really doesn't work for me practically, where Starling has essentially been chemically lobotomized with drugs if I recall, at least to start. That would otherwise have appeal to me as a tragic end, but playing it like she's at all complicit, or later happy, rather than another of Lecter's victims makes it a disturbing end for her character in a completely different and undesirable way. To the point about Lecter, better that he simply maims or kills her too, proving there's nothing fundamentally different, or redeeming, about that relationship for him, and certainly not for her. It's cool that Harris basically wanted to "go there" and do the ending we secretly wanted but he couldn't dare, it's still unique and I'm glad it exists, but on another level it also doesn't work, and ultimately just seemed like a way to shoehorn them together and give Lecter a win and a twisted happily ever after because the story is called "Hannibal" rather than "Verger" or "Starling" (a change is emphasis which may have better served all).
"Death Stalks the Night" was a formulaic tale of a square-jawed, tall and handsome guy saving a blonde bombshell chick from a demented killer. It was high on gun-toting/two-fisted action, but short on brains. But one thing that stuck out to Harris, the one thing that he really liked, was the story's villain, the Acid Killer. The villains is what he found most compelling and interesting about pulp fiction tales.
Thomas Harris wanted to learn to write pulp stories, but with high-quality literary prose.
And he kind of succeeded - Dr. Hannibal Lecter was as closest we'll ever come to seeing a high-brow pulp villain. One can argue that Dr. Lecter progressively devolving into cheesiness in the last two of his novels was not so much a "degradation" of his character but as reversion to its potboiler pulp foundations.
Very cool info and analysis. I think it goes back to what we've been saying about Lecter working better as an almost neutral evil figure looming large and working his machinations in the background, on a level other characters can't match despite, or because of, Lecter's practical disadvantages (like being imprisoned, or being insane as Will once said). Putting him in the foreground without limitations and trying to explain him ruins that because we shouldn't be able to comprehend him and there's no tension because he has no peer. The same thing happened with another of pop culture's great pulp villains that also transcended to be one of the best in cinematic history: Darth Vader. Both were at their most powerful when given little actual screen time but casting a shadow across the whole story. Once you put the light directly onto them, make them the main character in fact, they start to resemble those boring, square-jawed heroes Harris didn't find as compelling, and worse, no opponent of theirs could seemingly be a match for them, nor could they live up to the potential of their own mystique. By trying to explain or expand on what makes them so interesting, and intentionally or not make them less uniquely one-dimensional and more understandable, they also become more average. So Lecter went from being the ideal, high-brow, literary serial killer of fiction to an anti-hero slasher one might include alongside Jason or Freddy Krueger.
I finished reading Red Shadows. Aside from a lot of racial insensitivity, it was a decent pulp story. I’m looking forward to reading more of Howard’s stuff.
I've said it before, but if you haven't already read Howard's Conan. It's great, and save for a few stark examples there's less racial insensitivity there. Sometimes Conan even seems to experience prejudice as a Cimmerian, except when he's in the jungle and becomes the great white hunter by default.
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