Eat The Rude: In The Mind of Hannibal Lecter

There were times when TV series touched me and characters crawled under my skin. But never have I been so shocked and thrilled at the same time as I was when watching Hannibal.

Hannibal is one of the most twisted and loving characters I absolutely enjoyed. And I can like characters, but I can rarely enjoy them.

His mind is what makes the series great and gets your blood pumping while you pull your hair out. His mysterious paths, immutable controlling abilities, exclusive taste in classiness, and lack of empathy makes him a special cocktail of emotions for the audience to digest.

His appearance left an impression on me, and I was urged to reevaluate reality and think about the reasoning behind his actions. Does he see the world the same way we do?

Twisted Sense of Reality

To understand Hannibal, it’s most important to understand the relationships he forms during the series. He builds a playground in which he uses other characters as pawns, blending their lives in a massive meat sausage. And it’s interesting to see not a single character in the series has joy in life. Except for Hannibal. In his twisted sense of reality, he finds joy in doing what he does.

The mind games he plays with others make him a master of puppets, an evil mastermind enjoying the discomfort he makes. But the question remains: Is Hannibal’s sense of reality twisted? And what does one consider twisted in the world?

Everything we consider “normal” is often a crafted social norm. Our society is made of such norms to justify the reasonable and keep us all in place. When someone like Hannibal acts upon his on sense of reality, we consider it sick and twisted. But is it?

As Michel Foucault says in Madness and Civilization:

What desire can be contrary to nature since it was given to man by nature itself?

Hannibal is a fan of the unorthodox, and he points that out often. As the matter of fact, he almost never lies, and he always keeps his promises. If that’s not a definition of a good man, I don’t know what is.

If you pay close attention, you’ll see that he always says the truth. With one exception. And that is when he puts himself in another form of reality: Hannibal lies about the meals he presents to his guests. When preparing the meal, he uses recipes that require a certain type of meat. He follows the recipe with a single twist — he puts human meat, and then untruthfully presents it.

But what kind of lie is that? Can we consider it a white lie?

In all his awfulness, at the given moment, he only cares about the guests’ and his own satisfaction. And one could easily freak out if they’d know what’s on the menu.

This may sound like a “fun fact” of some sort, but I think that his capability of lying in this situation explains his twisted goals. If I’d go for a fun fact, it’d be something like this:

Every piece of music playing in the background or listened by the characters is atonal. Except for the killers. Hannibal’s taste in music conflicts his actions. There are a few more characters listening to “calm” music. One of them is Tobias — also a killer.

It’s interesting how these details stay in your mind after giving the series a thought.

And that’s connected to Hannibal’s vision of himself. In all his distortion, he considers himself God.

A Perverted Form of God

Killing must feel good to God too. He does it all the time, and are we not created in his image?

It’s no secret Hannibal likes to play God.

He’s not just about taking life, he’s about controlling it to please his curiosity. To influence one to understand his inner self, to push one’s boundaries and see how far will one go to achieve the goals, to challenge the nature of a human being and offer salvation. These are the actions he’s interested in and enjoys doing.

Hannibal’s not God. He wouldn’t have any fun being God. Defying God, that’s his idea of a good time. There’s nothing he’d love more than to see this roof collapse mid-Mass, choirs singing… he would just love it, and he thinks God would love it, too.

He’s all about being in control. Almost everything that happens in the series is somehow influenced by him, just like the world is influenced by a divine being.

What brings one closer to God? Taking lives.

The Joy of Killing

The concept of killing is not impulsive. At least not for Hannibal. His actions are deliberated, his logic justified.

Hannibal does not kill, he makes art.

He does it to express his emotions, to create something new, to feel the power of life and play God. Almost every person who died under his hand or influence, had an opportunity to change the course of their actions, but it was up to them to decide their faith.

But what drives him to kill?

Hannibal kills and schemes out of curiosity. He can’t resist the urge to see how will a certain crime affect the others while he sits back and enjoys the show. He’s curious if he can get away with the murders. You can almost feel his pure satisfaction after he brutalizes corpses and day later he’s invited to analyze the crime scene and find the killer.

And that’s just the beginning.

When his murders become obvious, no one can prove that Hannibal did them and that excites him even more. He’s watching and waiting for Jack’s team to catch him, but it’s just not happening. He’s setting up the murders and, even though everyone knows he’s the killer, the evidence always point to someone else.

At the beginning of Season 3, Hannibal starts killing for other reasons. He’s killing out of sadness because the recent set of events left him heartbroken and he needs to find himself again.

But it’s not just about the killing, is it?

Cannibalism

Before we begin, you must all be warned. Nothing here is vegetarian. Bon appetit.

In the very first episode, we’re facing a cannibal who has a slightly different reason to eat people. He does it because he can’t bear the burden of being a murderer. His philosophy is: if he uses every part of the human body, it’s not murder. He’ll eat the meat, stuff the pillows with hair, make tools out of bones, etc. But Hannibal’s not like that. He has his own reasons.

Hannibal doesn’t feel remorse for his victims. He takes pleasure in consuming people he believes deserved to be consumed. There are moments when he considers someone “rude”, therefore cooking them to serve a better purpose.

There are quite a few factors he considers when choosing the people he will serve.

It’s important to notice that he likes to share food with his invitees. He perversely enjoys watching other people consume the food he makes (whether he likes the person or not), and he does it with pleasure. He doesn’t just cook the meat, he’s making a feast every time. The exotic recipes he executes are far from ordinary.

The Tongues en Papillote, the Osso Bucco, the Flambéed Ortolan are only a part of his culinary journey he prepares for people he’d like to eat. Just like people feed snails a certain type of food since they can carry the taste, Hannibal does that with people. There are some characters very dear to him. And, when he plans to eat them, he “stuffs” them with the finest food he can prepare. They’ll taste better. And it’s all about the taste, is it?

The ultimate example is Abel Gideon. Falsely accused of being The Chesapeake Ripper (and taking credit for Hannibal’s work), he feeds him the ultimate seasoning — himself. As he dissects Gideon’s body parts, he serves them to him. Prepared with care and skill, Gideon eats his severed limbs to serve the ultimate purpose — being eaten by God himself.

One might say that Hannibal’s purpose revolves around cannibalism, but I’d say it’s just one of his manifestations of love. And love can have different forms.

What Is Love?

Will: You hitched your star to a man commonly known as a monster. You’re the Bride of Frankenstein.

Bedelia: We’ve both been his bride.

Hannibal takes very little interest in sex and his vision of love contradicts inherited emotions people usually have. It’s often said that a psychopath isn’t capable of having a successful relationship, but Hannibal questions the phenomenon we call love. He has an absence of emotional connection with almost everyone he interferes with, but his ability to empathize with others is remarking. And that’s something he received as a gift from Will.

The series challenges our perception of feelings and manifesting emotions. Focusing on abnormal minds, we see there is no true otherness, just our perception of emotions we consider normal. The kind of love Hannibal feels for Will is just as unusual as most of his actions towards others and himself are. In all its wrongness, Hannibal wants the best for Will. He wants him to face his true self and rise above his fears to receive salvation.

This may sound odd because they even tried to kill each other a few times, but it’s all for the sake of a higher cause. According to Hannibal’s psychoanalysis of Will, he has a cocktail of disorders illustrated as pure empathy.

Will and Hannibal — a touchy love story with a pinch of mind control and indoctrination.

The Controlling of The Mind

Hannibal’s not satisfied with killing and eating the prey. There’s much more to it than one can identify as “common killing”.

He has a wide set of characters under his influence. And it’s all about curiosity. The thrill of not knowing what they’d do in certain circumstances excites him. Although this may sound contrary to his vision of himself playing God, one must understand that Hannibal does not consider God an ultimate being. If God were almighty, it’d be illogical for him to be curious since he’s almighty and all is in his control.

God can’t save any of us because it’s… inelegant. Elegance is more important than suffering. That’s his design.

The most important aspect here is time. He’ll wait for weeks, months, and even years to see how one will behave according to the hidden influence he’s been implementing throughout the time. Just like the “seasoning” he does with his food, the influence grows over time and in the end Hannibal enjoys the fruits of his labor. Several times he points out his opinion that God enjoys our suffering, then he does the same thing. And that’s the key thought. He makes the characters do the wrong thing themselves, and then he justifies their actions, focusing on the feeling they get when doing the wrongs.

How does he do it? [MAJOR SPOILERS BELOW]

Will

When Will killed for the first time, Hannibal made sure Will realized that he actually wanted to do it. Throughout the series, Hannibal makes sure Will works under his influence, even though he’s not talking to him or influencing him directly. Their love/hate relationship made them try to kill each other many times, and yet they ended up killing their common enemy and throwing themselves other the edge together — facing death (maybe).

Both a father and a friend figure, Hannibal’s feelings for Will left him scarred many times.

Jack

Hannibal tricks Jack to believe all kinds of things. He toys with the Guru on many levels. The most worked out one is Jack’s relationship with Miriam Lass. After Jack is convinced she was murdered by the Chesapeake Ripper, Hannibal makes recorded phone calls to usurp him, then presents him with her severed arm, and in the end he gave him Miriam alive. Alive but broken as hell.

The trick is that he’s poisoning her mind to the moment when she became one of his tools and shot Chilton, leaving him scarred.

Bedelia

The one that needed special seasoning. Hannibal never had the opportunity to eat Bedelia. She was aware that she was special to him and, in some way, she used that against him. She avoided her death a few times and learned how to handle his wrath.

In season 3, we find out how she managed to do that. She often drugged herself and sometimes even killed with Hannibal to please his expectations and keep him occupied. But what happened in the end? After the heartbreaking ending of Will and Hannibal falling of the edge, we see a very interesting scene. Bedelia sits alone at the table, getting ready to dine, and as the camera moves around, we see her cooked leg on the table. This scene is left for us to interpret. For me, the logical sequence of events puts her in such a position that she couldn’t handle leaving things undone. She was aware that Hannibal waited so long to eat her. And in the end, she does it herself.

The End?

There’s so much more we can discuss regarding Hannibal’s psychological profile and the relationships he has built with other characters. Analyzing Hannibal was a pleasure to do, but it’s not complete without analyzing the context, evaluating other characters, and talking about the Season 3 ending.

God, was that satisfying to watch.

I’d also liked to write more about the series since I enjoyed them very much, so let me know how you feel about that. Leave a response and recommend this Story if you liked it!

Also, read my fiction for free on https://dominikcdurst.com/