Hannibal - Profile of a Caricature

This is what passes for a "rational intellect" in today's world:

specimen wrote:

I believe ghosts exist. Exactly what they are I am not sure, but I do think they relate to previously alive people and carry at least some of the issues, emotions and thoughts of those people.

Too many experiences to mention, but many I found out later that other people had had similar experiences in the same place - same sense of the attitude of the ghost, etc.

Once I was lying in a person's bed and was visited by what I would have called a ghost except I thought the person was alive. The next day we found out the person had died. She seemed extremely annoyed that there was something, then clearly someone (me) in her bed. I was scared but not that scared. I mean she wasn't some scary movie ghost, she seemed precisely like an elderly lady annoyed to find someone in her bed. And then a confused elderly lady realizing someone odd was happening. Except she was light instead of flesh and blood.

I really freaked when I found out she had died the day before.

As far as eternal peace many consider ghosts confused or with unfinished business and if they are helped or worth through their shit then they can move on to eternal peace. I don't think this quite fits my beliefs, but I just want to point out that even if ghosts are real it does not mean that the only afterlife is wandering around in a white night gown moaning and scaring children.

The fear is palatable.
A need to retain this absent absolute, this Kantian thing-in-itself, the ghost in the machinery of human nature - the all unifying spirit, mystified, detached from reality.
Hannibal Lecter would have a field day with such a mind.
Emotion overriding reasoning, and then justifying its sensations...its sensationalism.

Only such a psychology would go to such lengths to pretend to sound more unemotional than it is.
It's "intellectualism' is meant to hide its emotional undercurrents...pretending a reasoning, where there is only emotion, based no anxiety/fear.

A symbolism I noticed about Hannibal:

Hannibal is an ultra-adept psychologist, essentially, to the point of (super)naturality.
The act of psychoanalyzing, in the conventional sense ( E.g., client lying down on a couch, psychologist sitting behind asking questions, etc ), is a form of mental cannibalism; the mind of the other is exposed to the psychologist, allowing him access to consume it. The psychologist is a consumer of ideas, or of the mind, appropriating them for his own purposes. In the movie Hannibal, it takes on a more physical, literal cannibalism.

Let me get some feedback of my theory.

First Hannibal as a character was aristocratic mind living in a prison. He was a intellectually superior and mentally healthier, but imprisoned by inferior minds, and put to insane asylum by insane people. The whole intellectualism and psychoanalyzing was a way to symbolize the aristocratic european men's fight against the nihilistic modern system. To keep fighting the system even you have no power, by building a barrier, and been able to control your mind. Even if you are not able to control your life in material sense, you can still have dignity by not giving your mind up. To keep yourself, and your honor. Even when you are not physically able to control your environment and put fear in your opponent, he does it with intellectualizing and having a mental superiority, and analyzing them bring their hidden secret into light.

Then when the books became movies, they needed edition, because that kind of story couldn't be told to people without "bad guy" losing. The system needs to prevail, and even entertainment needs to respect it.

Now what interest me is did Thomas Harris make this totally in knowledge, or was he writing from intuition in his books. There are many hints giving a way that Harris knew what he was writing, and nothing was accidental.

I've read on the net that Thomas Harris didn't give much interviews, and was kind of isolationist when it came to media. This probably because questions are asked, and not all questions can be answered politically correct, and a person doesn't want to lie and build wrong meaningfulness on his art.

So what happened with the young Hannibal, and the hannibal series? The money power got to him, and he needed to write, history for his character, which was not necessary. It just demystifies it, and makes the whole book dull. Especially when it comes to the motives behind Hannibal.

That about sums it up.

Still the books and the television series, so far, is a critique on Modernity.
Notice how unlike some douche-bags, around here, terror is not Hannibal's method.
He never makes the other scared, unless he intends to finish the job, and then only after he's surprised him.
He never kills indiscriminately, or just to kill.
He is not validated by his kill.
His kills are precise, selected and with a message.

Do you have the silence of lambs analysis video still somewhere? I remember listening it once.

But, of course, Hannibal Lecter is not a real person, and could never be a real person.
Harrison used him as an artistic device, a caricature, similar to superheroes, and gods.

He has crimson eye, was born with six fingers on one hand, supernatural hearing, the sense of smell to rival a bloodhound's, his heart-rate never rises...not even when he's biting off someone's tongue with his teeth, and his I.Q. is off the charts.
He's more of an alien than a human - an overman.

He also evades capture, in an age when policing techniques, available to the authorities, are sophisticated that nobody can evade capture after multiple murders.
And who would risk it, no matter how much you want to.

What separates an insane person from a sane one is not the desire to kill but that the desire is so strong that no cost will dissuade him from satisfying this desire.

No, Hannibal is a metaphor.
Taken literally by imbeciles.
Harrison used him to make a subtle, buy effective, commentary on modernity.

And, of course Satyr is not Hannibal Lecter.

For one thing, other than the previous supernatural advantages, to say you are Hannibal, or like him, would take away one of Hannibal's other advantages...his secrecy.
He seduces, gains trust, and remains hidden until it is too late.

Part of his m.o. is that he mingles unnoticed. nobody knows what he is...he is incomprehensible, though he appears common and average.

No Satyr is no Hannibal.
Violence is not something Satyr enjoys.
And no matter how much he, sometimes, wants to do some of the things the Hannibal character does, he does not have the cold-blooded sociopathic element to carry it out.

No, Satyr is too upfront with what he is and what he thinks.
Not, so much, the man behind Satyr, but Satyr the internet caricature.
The man would be more like the unassuming, average looking man, who appears like everyone else, but is not...at least in what he thinks as opposed to how he behaves.

Once more, the metaphor of Satyr, versus Hannibal and the connection, should be understood.

Hannibal can remain aloof, and calm.
He can kill to cleanse himself of the dirt.

But what of a more realistic Hannibal-type, living in the real world?
How would he cleanse himself, in such a world as this, when killing is not an option?

Hannibal, Lecter wrote:

I can feed the caterpillar, I can whisper through the chrysalis, but what hatches, follows its own nature and is beyond me. - [season2 ep.8]

What they dream of, the impotent, is a penis of infinite proportions, so that no other that was, is, or can ever be, could ever compare to.
The hungry man’s dreams of food cannot be matched by a full-bellied man’s, and the sexually frustrated fantasize extreme sexual encounters in proportion to the sexual frustration they are enduring.  
It’s the typical magnification of the weakling, exposing his inexperience with the real-deal, inflating the idea(l), lacking in him, using his imagination.
The imagination always uses what it has an experience with, and then exaggerates, or combines in fanciful ways, to compensate for what it has minimal, or no experience with.
The weakling having minimal or no experience with strength inflates strength by using his/her minimal experiences with it to a degree that would compensate for its absence in him/her.
(S)He exposes his weakness when (s)he does so.
The outcome is always so unrealistic and exaggerated that it can turn out to be a ridiculous caricature of what is possible – the impossible, or improbable, dealing with the present, and/or the possible.

This is, actually, a perfect gauge of the others essence: the more unrealistic and fantastic the projections, declarations, posturing, signalling the opposite as being present and possible.

Consider Hannibal’s honest expression of the limits of his own powers under that light.    
The superior mind never claims to have absolute control, nor would he claim that he is capable of attaining it.
Such a mind would know the extent of his powers within the world, and in relation to humanity.
Only a weakling would imagine a power it has no experience with in an either/or, absolutist, manner.
Hannibal, the caricature, admits, through the writer, or on behalf of the writer who is expressing his essence, the limits of his manipulative talents.
He is not conjuring up the other, and forcing him to behave in a way that goes against his nature, but he’s (re)cognized, seen, what is hidden, and pulls it out, not knowing what will happen when it comes out.

The key factor that determines the essence of the Hannibal caricature, besides his many extraordinary talents, is the fact that he is without a family.
He has no direct connection to his past, and so he becomes a wandering character, detached from the world, but with an insatiable appetite to reunite with it.
His Epicureanism is linked to this hunger for a connection, and it is also expressed in his search for kindred spirits: for friends.  
He is the opposite of the Abrahamic man.
Hannibal is lost but he wants to be found, whereas they are found and they want to be lost.
In the absence of any direct connection he, Hannibal, uses the only vehicle at his disposal: himself.
His body, mind, actions, are all directed towards this desire to (re)attach, to (re)connect from what he was violently pulled away from.
The tragedy is that he is too rare to find this connective tissue.
Those around him are like animals in comparison.  
He is like Tarzan, amongst the apes, living in a jungle full of beasts and feeling alone amongst them.
For him killing, and even eating, one of those other apes is not cannibalism, nor evil. He is not bound by their social dynamics, nor can he relate to their morality.
He hides, lies, toys with them, and none of it affects him on any level they would relate to – he is of another species; in this case a memetic designation.
Hannibal can afford to humble himself amongst them, because he has brutality to remove the insult, the “rudeness”; he, then, consumes it, absorbing the rudeness into his own Becoming.
Each morsel savoured and digested, then broken down, de-constructed, and copiously selected for usable parts – the rest are defecated back into the cesspool from where it came.

The absence of a family eliminates seriousness from his options.
He is a child playing with manimals, and his only motive is self-serving.
There is no one left in the world for him to care for; to limit his choices.
He is his own.

Ready to move-on at any moment, Hannibal acquires a provisional application for his sophisticated tastes.
He places nobody above himself, and suffers no one there.
When he does sense a shadow looming overhead he seeks to disperse it with his breathe, or to escape its rude presumptuousness.
He is second to nobody, and he will not accept another placing him there.

This makes his every choice a whimsical experiment and all his relating dances on the edge of a blade.
He is injured, but he is never dealt a deathly blow.
One moment he is totally immersed in the pleasure of a dish he diligently prepared himself, in his well-stocked modern kitchen, and the next he’s leaving behind the paraphernalia and embracing months of living on-the-run – because what truly matters is not left behind by him; it is never forgotten.
Everything he needs, he already has.

There is very little of human liquidity, in Hannibal, except for the blood and the gore.
No anality, and very little of human liquid discharge outside of the vengefulness against it; reflecting, I suppose, the creators and writer's own dispositions.
A distaste for the out-come, and a romanization of the in-come.
The faeces are left on the slab.
Only choice morsels are selected and digested.
The rest is left to rot.

The erotic scenes, the sex-scenes, themselves are clean, pristine, dry, like Hannibal's kitchen.
All refuse is left behind, or included in the brew and ingested, out of sight.
Everything is "clean", though what precedes and what follows is full of excrement and filth.

Hannibal assimilates the liquidity, turning it into form and function, and what he cannot he leaves behind to "let nature sort it out".

It is why Hannibal appears a-sexual.
You are never sure about what sex he prefers, if he does have a preference.
His tastes are left on the dinner table, where he transforms them, after he's selected the parts, into a form he considers idea(l).
The nastiness, vulgarity, osmotic dissonance of humanity is left outside his pristine memory palace.

He smells, with his sophisticated palate, and then digests the prey before he ingests it.
Swift's coprophilia is never a part of the process.
One is left to believe that Hannibal himself never defecates.
He has externalized this digestive process.

With Hannibal the protestant metaphors are inverted, de-bowled, skinned and displayed.
The devil's anal liquidity, his odoriferous nastiness presents itself as dry, contained, secret, unmoving.
This external dryness contrasting against the organic mess he leaves in his wake; his delicate palate and sensitive nose an instrument of releasing the most terrible smells and dirtiest parts of the hidden human body.

Hannibal is encased within a living sarcophagus (Greek for "flesh eater"), containing a churning, bubbling internal liquidity – an Apollonian image keeping secret a Dionysian essence.
He, literally, consumes, the metaphorical flesh of the already dead and rotting, encasing it within his own mausoleum - his "memory palace".
The internal bad smells/tastes seek external perfumes and delicacies to deodorize them.
The rude are exposed for what they are, by spilling their guts for all to see; revealing the hidden truth beneath the charming exteriors, the social faces.
Hannibal does not deny his internal nature; he hides it, using it to uncover the nature of others when they begin to believe in their own pretences.
He feeds (s)wine to swine, knowing they cannot tell the difference; knowing they cannot (re)cognize in other what they've denied in self.

The good Christians, the secular humanists, the Protestant, hard-working, capitalists, are revealed.
The inversion of Christian Protestantism... where it is the ones who reject liquidity (Flux), who hate life, who admit that Satan is ruler of this world casting, as saviour in their play, an immutable, static, God as the annihilating first-responder, who are the ones being forces to see, to taste, to bear witness to what they are beneath the shallow veneer.
Through the reality-principle, death, Hannibal affirms life, and the pleasure-principle; he puts it in its rightful place, giving it a perspective that has been forgotten.
He is the stoic grim-reaper, sphinx-like ripper, cutting away the brain-dead brush to make way for new seedlings to emerge, feeding on the carcasses and entrails.
   


Who are the rude?  

The ones who have been protected from the cruelty of nature, growing an untested arrogance within a insecure soul; the image-makers covering up the essence of their own depravity; the ones with an undeserved sense of entitlement, demanding of others what they could never provide for themselves; the ones who have found in the neurotic schizophrenia of modern nihilism a safe-heaven to express their illness, packaging it as a new kind of  health - a progress in what health ought to be.

Who are the rude?

Those who under fake smiles snip and covet, and cast needles to bleed-out what makes them see themselves; those who learn words, parrot ideas, mimic behaviours, attempting to wear an others skin, as they would any other garment, to pretend that what is covered no longer exists - it has been overcome; those who in their desperation to deal with their inheritance purchase blades and learn techniques, to silence and forget; those who in their thick insensitivity practice delicacy, and adopt good tastes, which they could never appreciate.

Hannibal Lecter does not hunt for sport.
He is the opposite of a sport-hunter.
His kills are chosen and planned carefully, and each one is staged; displayed in a particular manner, sending a particular message.
Each one has a purpose and a meaning.
None of his victims are random.
The pleasure of the kill is not the central motive. Killing is not a hedonistic obsession, for him.
It is a side-effect of his main purpose.
Like his cooking, it is ritualized because the pleasure of eating, of satisfying a need, is not the main goal.
Killing, for him, is also a ritual with a design in mind.
The design, as Will calls it, is the object/objective.
He selects the victims with this design in mind
He does not kill just anybody, for the sake of killing, for the thrill of it, and when he consumes parts of his victims it is also a ritualized homage to them.
Each part selected to be consumed is not accidental.
He tells Will, in one scene, how he is careful about what he eats.
Eating is not for the sake of eating.
It is meaningful, for him.

Despite being mocked for my "obsession" with this Harrison character Ι proceed, knowing that art, in this Μodern Αge, must use ambiguity to express truths the masses cannot stomach nor comprehend.
I consider Harrison's Hannibal a Modern Age Hamlet, an Atigony....full of metaphorical significance the simpleton cannot perceive because of the blood and gore he is represented with, to make the tale popular to the many - to make him marketable.
The Modern is only interested in popular narratives and so the only artistic caricatures he can accept, because they are presented to him with a definition, are the older ones.
He can use those to pretend to be intelligent and sophisticated, because he is truly simple and dull.

He turns to the quirky to pretend he is not like the others, the shock and awe tactic, or he settles for the academic, the culturally accepted, to regurgitate, indicating his own quality, and in the meantime, as with philosophy in general, the world passes him by and he remains blind to it.  
It is right there, and all he can do is discuss about it through an other; experience it via a proxy.

And so what is the central attribute of this Hannibal character?
The special abilities are symbols of his difference, but the singular trait that distinguishes him is his willingness to be alone.
He is among the herd and yet not controlled by herd instincts.

Only a "monster or a philosopher..." and Hannibal is, most certainly, both.

endlessly fascinated

Quote :

W: They tell me you were hard to find.

B: That was the idea.

W: Thank you for visiting me in the hospital, and for what you said.

B: I didn’t say enough.

W: Now’s your chance to say it all. (You’ve been granted immunity, blah blah.) Let’s talk about Hannibal Lecter.

B: Some psychiatrists are so hungry for insight that they may try to manufacture it. How deadly that can be for the patient who believes them.

W: You were Dr. Lecter’s psychiatrist; he wasn’t yours.

B: I told myself that. But I was under Hannibal’s influence, and what he did to you made that abundantly clear.

W: You were attacked by a patient who was formerly under Dr. Lecter’s care. That patient died during the attack. The report said he swallowed his tongue.

B: It wasn’t attached at the time.

W: How exactly did your patient die?

B: I killed him. I believed it was self defense, and to a point it was. But beyond that point, it was murder. Hannibal influenced me to murder my patient. Our patient.

W: You weren’t coerced?

B: What Hannibal does is not coercion. It is persuasion. Has he ever tried to persuade you to kill anyone? He will, and it will be somebody that you love, and you will think it is the only choice you have.

W: How would you catch him?

B: Hannibal can get lost in self-congratulation at his own exquisite taste and cunning. Whimsy. That will be how he will get caught.

And between Jack and Bedelia:

J: So you managed to avoid prosecution.

B: Sure did, bitch. (I’m pretty sure I heard her say this.)

J: I gave you every opportunity to tell the truth. But you ran.

B: How do you think the FBI could have protected me? You couldn’t protect Will Graham. You still can’t. Nothing makes us more vulnerable than loneliness, Agent Crawford.

J: Will’s not alone.

B: No, he’s not. Hannibal thinks Will is a killer. Do you still believe he is your killer?

J: I have to believe.

B: Hannibal’s only crime I witnessed was influence. Influence works best when we’re unaware. Will Graham has been very aware.

J: Meaning?

B: Meaning maybe Mr. Graham doesn’t know himself as well as Hannibal does.

J: Will has more reasons to see Hannibal caught than any of us.

B: If you think you’re about to catch Hannibal, that’s because he wants you to think that. Don’t fool yourself. Don’t fool yourself into thinking he’s not in control of what’s happening.

What is intentionality here?

Very interesting; thanks for explaining.

Imbesil and the likes of Whitehead, etc. have called just this the "Experiential fabric" or the Experiential "substance"; naturally organization is no intention at the inorganic level.

Level 6 is maybe what we know as ESP - extra-sensory perception; Hannibal with the extra-sensitivity.

What is lost and Hannibal has, is empathy that exceeds the family unit.

He is empathic but this does not make him positive towards the ones he empathizing with.
His empathy is that of a hunter, a warrior.

With moderns empathy crumbles the ego, and he is absorbed by otherness.
Judeo-Christian Morality.

Hannibal's ego, his sense of self, is so powerful that ti remains intact, unmoved, by the empathic experience.
He can enter the other's mind and be disgusted by the contact.

Will exhibits this ability but for him it results in a gradual confusion between who he is and who the other is.
He can empathize, as well as Hannibal, but his ego is too fragile, too Christian.

Hannibal wants to teach him how to remain distinct during the empathic experience.
To feel what the other feels, and see what the other sees, and still remain aloof towards it.

Satyr wrote:

What is lost and Hannibal has, is empathy that exceeds the family unit.

He is empathic but this does not make him positive towards the ones he empathizing with.
His empathy is that of a hunter, a warrior.

With moderns empathy crumbles the ego, and he is absorbed by otherness.
Judeo-Christian Morality.

Hannibal's ego, his sense of self, is so powerful that ti remains intact, unmoved, by the empathic experience.
He can enter the other's mind and be disgusted by the contact.

Will exhibits this ability but for him it results in a gradual confusion between who he is and who the other is.
He can empathize, as well as Hannibal, but his ego is too fragile, too Christian.

Hannibal wants to teach him how to remain distinct during the empathic experience.
To feel what the other feels, and see what the other sees, and still remain aloof towards it.    

Yes; Emotional contagion is not empathy; Will is contaminated by two conflicting disgusts - the disgusting person the victim was, and the disgusting things the 'killer' - Hannibal does, although he can empathize and feel the aesthetic in the latter's kill.

Another pair of conflicting disgust is at his own feminization [it felt good to kill, he admits], and his moral disgust that he is not disgusted being so immoral.

A growth from younger to elder Hannibal.
Younger Hannibal cries at the recital. His external coldness, control, is revealed as holding back an internal passion.

The elder, Hopkins character, is the reverse.
He can display his passion, because internally he is detached, cold, unmoved.
He appreciates the recital academically.

There is a scene in Hannibal, the TV series when he is asked "What have you done?"
He answers..
"I took my person suit off."

The private personality and public character, interchanging...
The latter existing among characters, caricatures, most of which have no sense of the personae, their own repressed, denied, personality.
The former, risking itself every time it exposes itself in public, and even in private among others of its own kind - intimacy. The private space becomes another public space, of (inter)active identities, imposing themselves upon other; forcing a limit upon the others choices.

Hannibal feels the pressure, but does not give-in to it.
He chooses why and when to impose these limits upon himself, knowing he can escape, flee, disappear.
How many, of us, can do the same?

What I envy about the mythological caricature of Hannibal is that his blade can never be doubted, the manimals can never mock and jeer him for long; their (c)rudeness does not go unpunished, nor is there anyone left to accuse him of resentiment and the "projection" of insecurities.

He is calm, stoic, controlled; a rubber face over a volcano, because he knows.

He convinces, he does not coerce, does not debate, does not argue, because the reality, he represents, is inescapable, undeniable.
Those remaining unconvinced he consumes, in tasty morsels, selectively harvested.

Alas, we mere mortals, cannot make his grand symbolic exits, taking off his "person suit".
We can only exchange it for a new one, and hope nobody noticed.

Satyr wrote:

Harrison, Thomas wrote:

Hannibal: I've always found the idea of death comforting. The thought that my life could end at any moment frees me to fully appreciate the beauty and art and horror of everything this world has to offer.

The overman celebrating his victory over his own nature...as temporal becoming.
He no longer resents his nature, his temporal essence, but is comforted by it, because it opens up vistas of perception denied to others.
Existence as an opportunity to see.

If only Hannibal knew about recurrence.