'Hannibal Lecter: a life' by Brian Raferty
Anthony Hopkins thought he was washed up in Hollywood. And then his agent called and asked if he’d like to audition for a part in something called The Silence of the Lambs …
In Hannibal Lecter: A Life, film historian Brian Raftery traces the history of cinema’s unforgettably disturbing villain, a character that took on flesh with Hopkins portrayal. Raftery’s book is also a sketchy biography of Silence of the Lambs’ author, Thomas Harris, a man almost as mysterious as the demonic doctor he created.
A bestselling writer with his first book, Black Sunday (1975), Harris has sat for only one interview, at the start of his literary career, and appeared just once on television, a 2019 cable access show on Long Island. FBI agent Clarice Starling, played by Jodie Foster in the 1991 Silence of the Lambs film, is the protagonist. But despite her outstanding performance, and the relatively few pages of the novel-screenplay occupied by Lecter, it’s Hopkins’ mad, man-eating psychiatrist who engraved himself on the imagination.
Lecter first appeared as a secondary character in Harris’ second novel, Red Dragon (1980), and made his screen debut six years later in Manhunter. When David Lynch turned down the picture (he called it “completely degenerate”), the project fell to Michael Mann. Although Manhunter was an adaptation of Red Dragon, the name was changed for fear movie audiences would dismiss it as a kung fu cheapie or a thriller about insidious East Asian agents. Lecter’s role in Manhunter went to British actor Brian Cox, who invested the character with what Raftery calls the “moral and emotional vacuum” Hopkins built on when the part came to him.
Manhunter faded fast from movie screens, and movie-literature agent Bob Bookman had a hard time in Hollywood selling Harris’ next novel, The Silence of the Lambs, despite being a bestseller. Improbably, Gene Hackman toyed with directing and cowriting the picture before it came into a final set of hands, an almost as surprising choice, given that director Jonathan Demme was best known in Hollywood for the romantic comedy Married to the Mob.
However, Demme’s resume was already eclectic, and included Roger Corman B flicks as well as the greatest concert film ever, Stop Making Sense. With The Silence of the Lambs, The director had the good sense to avoid slasher-exploitation cliches, to leave the most disturbing scenes to the imagination, and to see it as a woman’s picture—Clarice Starlin’s ascent in a toxic male atmosphere. And yet, most of us left the movie remembering Anthony Hopkins, the gentleman cannibal, the acute analyst of human vulnerability, the smartest man in the asylum called planet Earth.
Raftery is correct to associate Lecter’s mass cult success as a symptom of ‘80s anxiety surrounding violent crime generally and serial killing specifically. After all, the release of The Silence of the Lambs coincided with Jeffrey Dahmer. Raftery gives voice to those who worried that the film’s popularity represented a public plunge into morbidity, the commodification of pathology. Ultimately, he seems to agree with Stephen King’s assessment: “If Hannibal Lecter isn’t a Count Dracula for the computer-and-cell-phone age, then we don’t have one.”
Hannibal Lecter: A Life is published by Simon & Schuster.
