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.