Cannibals in Hollywood
from The Blood Poets, Vol 2, by Jake Horsley
It’s really an insult to the audience, but the audience basically doesn’t know it’s insulted. I shouldn’t put it that way. Let me put it: The audience may even enjoy being insulted.
—Pauline Kael,
Coversations
Is there any spectacle more
depressing than that of a pulp-trash movie with aspirations of greatness? Not since The Exorcist has a film offered up sleazy gore and cheap
thrills with such a hallowed, humorless aura of self-importance as Silence
of the Lambs (1990). No
doubt the director, Jonathan Demme, believed in the worthiness of his material
here; but as a result—in his attempt to enshrine this schlock as
art—he’s embalmed it instead: the film is a mummy. Schlock horror
like this should be gloriously, irreverantly unpretentious and disreputable, not
all done over with this turgid veneer of piousness. Quite frankly, it takes all
the joy out of pulp, and makes you wonder—whatever happened to good,
honest trash? Demme is about the very worst director imaginable for this
material, which is taken from the Thoman Harris bestseller, and concerns a
super-intelligent, wholly malevolent, predatorial cannibal-psychiatrist named
Hannibal Lecter. The plot of the film—which is less important than the
central conception (conceit) of its monster-”hero”—is more or
less interchangeable with a thousand other psycho-thrillers-cum-police
dramas-cum-slasher flicks. It’s a non-too-subtle combination of all
three: the FBI agent here, being female (Agent Starling, played by Jodie
Foster), doubles for the “final girl” common to Halloween-type movies[1]; her relationship with the killer Lecter
(Anthony Hopkins) is basically a variation on the standard “psychic-link
between hunter-and-hunted” familiar from so many cop thrillers.
Silence of the Lambs actually gives us two psychos for the price of one: Lecter
, who is
encarcerated for most of the film and serves as Starling’s “psychic
consultant” in all things schizoid, and “Buffalo Bill,” a
deranged homosexual busy stalking and slaying females in order to build himself
a body-suit from their skin (and, more importantly, to give the movie some
conventional suspense-sequences). Lecter helps Starling track this sicko down
and destroy him, at which point Silence becomes what it always was, your basic stalk
‘n’ slash chiller, with additional, queasy, quasi-Freudian
overtones. At its most primitive level, if we conveniently ignore all the
muddle-headed metaphysical psycho babble about “the nature of
evil,” and the lame attempts at characterization, Silence is an old-fashioned monster movie.
The difference here is not only
that it’s been made by Jonathan Demme—once upon a time one of the
leading American filmmakers of quirky, spirited human comedies (Citizen’s Band, Melvin and
Howard, Something Wild)—but
that the monster in question is played by the venerable British thespian,
Anthony Hopkins. Both men, to put it bluntly, should have known better. Silence
of the Lambs is something
like what you would expect from a Masterpiece Theatre rendition of The Texas
Chainsaw Massacre—it’s
ghoulish in all the wrong ways. A movie that makes your flesh creep, your heart
pound and your stomach turn is one thing—in its own way a noble and
perfectly admirable accomplishment (Texas Chainsaw Masssacre was the work of art that Silence isn’t); but a movie that does all of
the above and,
at the same time, wants to win oscars for doing it (and what’s more, does win them![2]), that presents itself as a
“serious,” mainstream work aspiring to classic status, and wants to
be embraced by the general public as such —that’s another matter.
It is, in the most basic sense, a fraud.
I don’t think this
dubious end has ever been accomplished in any case, and the films that attempt
it, such as The Exorcist
for example (and, in a different way, Poltergeist) invariably tend to end up as niether art nor
trash, but some uneasy hybrid which neither nature nor art (but only commerce)
intended.[3] Silence of the Lambs is a horror movie for all the family to see, not because it’s less disgusting or offensive than other horror
flicks (it’s considerably more so, I
think), and certainly not because it’s more artful, intelligent or
thought-provoking, but simply because the production values, and the
credentials of those involved, are so much “higher” than is
generally expected from a horror flick. But what kind of recommendation is
that? (Enough for the critics, apparently, who hailed the film almost
unanimously as the classic it so desperately wants to be; of course they did,
their strings had been pulled!). Jonathan Demme, as I say, never belonged in
this genre to begin with, and his direction here displays a singular lack of
taste or finesse, and, most crucial of all, of imagination. He’s a proficient and skillfull filmmaker, and he gets the
desired effects alright: he puts on the thumb screws and just keeps on
twisting. But the film creates a kind of knot in your gut, and watching it is
like being caught in a vice: it’s an enormous relief when the
film’s over. There’s no mischief or joy in Demme’s work here,
he seems to honestly believe he’s taking us into some metaphysical realm
and showing us the true horror at the heart of our existence (Silence of the
Lambs aspires to being the Apocalypse Now of horror movies). But all he’s really showing us is that
he can be as crude and ruthless at exploiting his audience, at creating in them
a sense of dread and discomfort, as the next hack. He seems determined, with
this film, to dispel once and for all any rumors (which he imagines to be
circulating) that he’s a “light-weight” moviemaker. And Silence is heavy alright—it lands on us like a mill-stone round our
necks, and there’s nowhere for us to go but down.
Anthony Hopkins, on the other
hand, had already proved himself to be totally at sea in the horror genre, with
Richard Attenborough’s Magic (1978—another example of the pitfalls of
embalming pulp with excess “artistry”). Here, he’s
considerably better off, and I suppose his performance is perfectly
accomplished, assured, and effective for what it is. What it isn’t, however, is the least bit imaginative, or
even remotely convincing. Hopkins plays Lecter as your standard, pop-eyed,
leering loony, only with the added twist of being superintelligent to boot (all
his leering is just his way of showing off, apparently, making sure we never
forget that he’s baaad). Hopkins as Lecter is like Peter Lorre’s M after twelve years of Scientology
“clearing”—he’s the psychoid-as-illuminoid, the
serial-killer-as-übermensch, Hollywood’s very own answer to Charlie
Manson.[4] We seem to be honestly expected, in some hip,
nihilistic, new-age, more-amoral-than-thou brand of doublethink, to admire this
fruit-cake cannibal for the “purity” of his acts, or the clarity of
his throught processes, or maybe just for his basic charisma and
self-confidence, as “the most evil bastard in town.” Who knows, in
fact, what Demme and Hopkins and the scriptwriters intended? One thing they
most certainly did not
intend was for Lecter to take us any closer to understanding the nightmarish
reality that gives rise to serial killers, and in which the killers themselves
indubitably exist. When it comes to being an exercise in empathy or compassion
for the disgust and misery of such men that drives them on to “the evil
they do,” Silence of the Lambs is about as close to M as I Spit on Your Grave is to Casualties of War.
Lecter is a movie monster, so
there’s never the slightest pretense of (or attempt at) making him human.[5] And Lecter has this much in common with
Godzilla and King Kong and Freddy Krueger—he never once seems to have any
doubts about what he does. He never questions his own nature, and he is as a
pure and unsullied as a tiger hunting his prey. Like the alien on board the
Nostromo, Lecter revels and wallows in his own evil, and takes unabashed
delight in doing it. He’s so wholly committed to his nastiness that
he’s practically a demonic force; and yet, at the same time, Hopkins
plays this force perfectly straight, as though somehow he believed (and
expected us to believe) that people like this actually exist, somewhere
(outside the wet dreams of movie executives). But either Lecter is the devil,
or he’s just a man—the film can’t have it both ways (Usual
Suspects did, but Silence isn’t subtle enough for such
amibivalence. And, if he’s the devil, then alright, so we’re
watching good old movie hokum, and let’s get on with it. But if
he’s a man—and of course this is how Hopkins plays him (what else
can he do?)—then, as we saw with Frank Booth (and as I think we all must
know, intuitively at least, from experience of the evil we’ve done), then he’s got to be
just about the most abject, miserable, slavering, self-loathing, tormented
wretch of a man that ever disgraced God’s sweet Earth. Or do you think
that Ed Gein was really an unsung rebel genius, that Ted Bundy had real
“style,” that Peter Sutcliff was a “real happening
dude”—or that David Berkowitz, deep down, felt really groovy about what he was doing? If they were
“happy,” these people, if they were really strong and smart and
cool and hip, like Lecter, then what were they doing dismembering and devouring
women and children?
Evil creates misery and misery
breeds evil. The concept of a self-aware psychopath just doesn’t wash,
and only in Hollywood—where every screenwriter fancies himself a
psychologist and a mythologist and just about every other --ologist there
is—could such crap ever hope to pass for realism. Hannibal Lecter “has” no conscience, that’s the key to
his character. Okay, Griffin Mill had no conscience either, and Robert Altman
and Michael Tolkin and Tim Robbins made a pretty good case for the existence in
the real world of people like Griffin Mill. But could anyone in their right
mind ever for a moment imagine that it might be “cool” to be this creep? Would they really be tempted to
emulate or admire someone so obviously, palpably damned as that? The Player was a comedy, of course, and Tim Robbins is
an appealing, ingenious actor (Mill even had a cool job), but even so there was
nothing even dimly attractive about the character. Hannibal Lecter, on the
other hand, like Freddy Krueger but for totally different reasons, has become a
sort of cultural hero. His pictures are hanging on young girls’ walls,
and young boys joke and laugh and fantasize about how “cool” it
would be to be
him—a man-eating serial
killer psychiatrist. Women find him sexy,
stimulating, fascinating; boys find him hip, mean, cool. The movie encourages
this bizarre perception (only conceivable I think at this precise period in
history) without a trace of irony. There’s nothing of the scathing,
disturbing moral implications of hero-worship found in films like Taxi
Driver, or even Natural Born
Killers. And there’s most
definitely none of the darker, more frightening implications of madness and
depravity of films like M, Blue Velvet, or to a lesser extent, Se7en. What there is is a slick, shallow,
sensational but wholly unconvincing portrayal of a madman who is superior to
everyone else around him, not merely because he’s nastier or meaner or
funnier or more brutal (as with Freddy), but because he is superior! (Lecter is even superior to
Starling, who goes to him for instruction; the critics who hailed the film as
“feminist” are more loony than the filmmakers.)
When kids choose Freddy Krueger
as their “hero,” I think they know more or less what they’re
doing, and I’m pretty sure that, although they think Freddy is
“cool’, they don’t actually emulate him or want to be like
him; they merely take a perverse delight in his wickedness (and a perverse
delight no doubt in their parents’ dismay over their choice of heroes).
And surely no woman exists who seriously considers Freddy sexy or attractive
(though he might be good for S & M fantasies). The point is, Freddy’s
not meant to be real, in any case, he’s not there to arouse our curiosity
about serial killers, and he’s not there to make us think. He’s
only there to scare us silly and make us afraid to go to sleep at night (and
make us laugh at our own fears). Hannibal Lecter is an altogether different
phenomenon, and I think an altogether more disturbing one. The popularity of Silence
of the Lambs isn’t
only an indication of our lowering standards in movies, our willingess to be
hoodwinked by hacks pretending to be artists (or artists who have descended to
hack-work), and to swallow junk-food whole as if it were a gourmet meal. And it’s
not merely proof of our readiness—or need—to accept two-dimensional
cardboard cut-outs as authentic characters, or third-rate melodrama as
“deep” character study. It’s something rather more
frightening, an indication that we have become so jaded and corrupt, so down on (an in) ourselves that we’re ready
to accept a hyper-intellectual, utterly unfeeling, polymorphously perverted
murderer as basically superior to ourselves.
The final moment of Silence is the moment which cemented my contempt for
the movie. Until then, I’d been willing to go along with its hokey,
post-modern gothic pulpiness and ignore its paltry shots at profundity. But
when Lecter escapes from jail (in the film’s most tawdry, obscene
set-piece, a scene that reaches new, almost religous heights of the grotesque)
and is roaming free, and we are clearly being encouraged to feel glad about the
fact, I began to have more serious doubts about the film. Lecter is stalking
the psychiatrist who tormented him while he was inside, intending to enact his
grisly revenge upon him, and he calls up Starling and—the notorious last
line of the movie—tells her “I’m having an old friend for
dinner.” When I saw the film (and I’m quite sure this is the
standard reaction), the audience burst into grisly laughter, which was followed
by (horror of horrors) applause!
I’m tempted to leave it at that—what could I possibly add,
to further persuade you (dear reader) of the depravity of our times? But
perhaps you need no persuading, and you will say (at least if you enjoyed Silence) “Oh, it’s only a movie.”
But what does that little word mean, “only”? A movie is still a movie, a small
figment of life, which contains and defines and reflects, and to some extent shapes, our feelings and attitudes towards life.
And if so, Silence of the
Lambs showed me, at last, that the
audience is so utterly, cynically bored and disgusted with their lives (and
with society as a whole) that they can take a perverse, almost suicidal
pleasure in seeing it all come to pieces. A depraved maniac wandering free as a
bird, enacting his sick revenge
upon a society which he holds only it the utmost contempt, as beneath him, such
an idea seems to be met with the approval, if not delight, of this audience.
And the film itself seems intended to curry such approval, by playing upon our sense of despair
and disgust with ourselves (when our disgust should rightly be reserved for the
movie we’re watching). The audience acquiesces with this point of view
(and it is the point of view of the film, not just its protagonist—that’s my
whole case): it is all too willing to turn society over to the manaic. But it
doesn’t seem to be aware, this audience, this mass (or perhaps it simply
doesn’t care), that by doing so it is only putting is own neck on the
chopping block. By looking up to the genocial killer on the screen in rapt
wonder and glee, the public is betraying its own suicidal tendencies: the
predator, after all, is being loosed into their own lives; as “innocent bystanders,”
they are his most logical prey. Or does it expect, this mass, that the demonic
force will be placated and soothed by its own meekness and admiration for
it? If so, it’s a logic fit
for the nuthouse. Doesn’t the lamb also look meekly and silently upon its slaughterer, as if upon a friend, as the
knife comes down?
*
[1]. “Final girl” refers to the last survivor in the slasher-flick who finally defeats the “boogeyman.” See Carol J. Clover’s Men, Women and Chainsaws for a full explanation of the term.
[2]. The film swept the Academy Awards like no other film in recent memory: awards for best actress (Foster), actor (Hopkins), screenplay, direction and Best Picture.
[3]. Alien may be an exception, but then I hardly think those involved with it were aiming to win any Oscars.
[4]. Manson was himself heavily involved in Hubbard’s Scientology courses, and “graduated” as a “clear” (i.e., enlightened one) before he embarked on his career of terrorizing society (he aimed his attack specifically at Hollywood). Manson apparently used the tricks he learnt at the Church of Scientology for “reprogramming’ his own “disciples’ and conditioning them to his genocidal policies. Manson was no prodigy, however, and the resemblances to Lecter are superficial at best. (For more “facts” and speculations on Manson’s Hollywood connections, see Chapter Two of The Blood Poets)
[5]. Phil Synder writes: “The problem with Hannibal is that he’s presented as a “real” guy, where in truth he has more in common with a monster, more specifically, a vampire/werewolf combination. It’s Nightmare On Elm St. taking itself seriously. Hannibal is a cold, inhuman figure who combines the traits of the superhuman with the sub‑human monster. He has a super‑intellect and the hyper‑sensitivity of an animal. He seems bloodless like a vampire, cold and calculating, yet he attacks like a wild animal. He hisses like a snake, he stares like a predator. Hannibal is a Psychopath who has transcended humanity but has remained human, therefore he turns this film from realism to fantasy, while fooling viewers into thinking he’s ‘real.’ Maybe that’s why people took to this film —it made them believe that monsters could indeed be real.” The Great American Psychopath