Hannibal - Profile of a Caricature

The Hannibal Trilogy, as written by Harris, represents a revelatory movement.

An unraveling of modern mythologies.

To unravel what lies twisted and coiled, concealed in its Gordian knot - a knot that refers back to itself, creating a loop that must be severed - an act of violence, of violation - an intrusion.
An undesired perpetration being rape.

Ethical standards prevent such acts, forcing the actor into an assertion of will - the rude, in their concealment, and trickery, considered polite and proper, must be unraveled by an act of rudeness, by one who lives outside their social evaluations of propriety.

Their shamefulness, their feigned humility, a ruse to remain tangled and concealed.
Their are ethical in impolite ways. The act replaced by words of violence.
The knot must be cut by Alexander who has been placed in a predicament - the impropriety of the hypocrite other, offering a ruse of politeness, is unraveled by the blade that cuts through the pretentious complexities - right down to the heart of the matter - revealing, uncovering, exposing, disclosing…remembering.

In my view one of the best iconic depictions of a human forced to live within these Modern circumstances.

There are three versions of Harrison’s representations each with its flaws and perspectives.

Manhunter…

…a more realistic representation of a manipulative genius with no great part in the events, other than an insightful interpreter.
The character, in this version, holds no big role in the story being told.
He is subdued, captured, a caged potential, having squandered its promise, and now lashing out from within its containment.

Nostalgia Critic

But, someone out there thought the character held a promise worth releasing from the cage to watch him run free on the screens of our projected discontent.

Hannibal Rising…

…a last moment insertion that demystifies the character for a modern audience.
Here the character is given a motive, reducing his supernatural appeal.
He becomes another “victim” of Naziism, here given an indirect cause.

The young Hannibal falls in love, and is hurt, offering us the typical version used to explain that which goes beyond the “normality” of the “healthy” mind.
A female, is once more, the underlying reason, that pushes the immature mind over the edge, where Nazism had placed him.

Hannibal Lecter - The Origin of Evil

[url=But, at least, we get a glimpse into the nature of a mind that bullies bullies, as a burgeoning aesthetic taste, feeling disgust towards the vulgar - what later is to be called the “rude”.
The wounds are anesthetized with a thickening scab.
Hannibal’s unemotional empathy is rising to confront the cultural anesthesia of culturally produced dullness.

The Silence of the Lambs

…the first in the trilogy that would revamp the Manhunter themes.
Where Manhunter remained realistic, the Silence of the Lambs version of Hannibal enters the realm of the extraordinary, the fantastic.

Red Dragon…

…completes the trilogy.
Hannibal is a mature bon vivant; both hunter and hunted.
The story reduces the character to something the audience would consider palatable.
Not only is he given a typical justification, along the lines of those used to dismiss racism, sexism, homophobia, and anti-semitism, but he is amputated as a message of cost/benefit.

In the Harrison story Hannibal escapes into the masses, having seduced the girl. He lurks amongst us, wearing many faces.
In this variation Hannibal is marked for life.
He wins by losing.

His supernatural condition, marking him with six digits, is finalized with the loss of the entire hand, and of the girl.
Loneliness, amputation, the high price of being extraordinary and unwilling to serve, to direct your gifts towards helping the masses, the herd.
A wolf if it does not become a dog, must be disabled, and castrated.

The loss of the hand is the symbolic disability; and the loss of the female a castration.

Hannibal Lecter trilogy

The trilogy leaves us with a sense of loss: a story unfinished, an anti-hero marked but out there, somewhere, taunting us, threatening our contentment, our dull appreciation of aesthetics.

This brings us to the most recent reincarnation of the caricature, the personality with a new character.

Hannibal…

…enters into the mythological.
Young Hannibal and old Hannibal are refurbished, into a svelte, handsome, symbol of the ideal Demon.

All retain a continuity of personality with only the character shifting according to the producer/director understanding.
Hannibal, the T.V. series inserts the personality into a world of symbolisms: role reversals, mystical world, extraordinary circumstances.
A world of ideas…memetic landscapes.

Hannibal as the overman.

An exploration of the character, using all three variations, but focusing on the latest, will help us delve into the underlying ideas being symbolized.

Hannibal is the Demon, the Daemon…a Pagan monster, challenging our Judeo-Christian world views.
as a Demon he resides in all men and women: imprisoned, retarded in his development, in hiding.
The greatest trick played by the Devil, as someone said, is convincing the world he does not exist.

Hannibal as a representation of a personality resides within us all, as the untamed, the natural, the private man.
He is not as sophisticated in all his manifestations, but he is always present.

The two parts of man: the ying/yang…the natural and the artificial, the ideal and the real…the private and the public.
In the image above it is the public face that remains in shadows, and can be anyone.
The private, secret part is illuminated, brought into the light with that glaring smirk.

Muzzled, but not silenced.
Teeth give way to words, and feminine tactics.

Mediterranean goat horns giving way to North American elk…tree roots growing upwards, into the space of possibilities: seeking, hungry, cutting into crevices, exploiting fissures.

The civil, uncivilized.
The domesticated untamable.

Life is agon: struggle, suffering.
A stress upon the organism
stress= suffering/pain.

This, would be considered a level of “trauma.”
Attrition on the ordering/becoming of the organism.

In sheltering environments this stress never exceeds the endurable (the median level of endurance) - and only becomes apparent in the adolescent stage, when the individual realizes that he will not be able to remain honest and true to his nature, as he could as a child.
It is the weening stage, when the individual is pushed to deal with the world on his own.
This is the first “traumatic” psychological event, usually accompanied by a rebelliousness (anger, sadness), spurred on by hormonal changes which are going on at the same time.
It’s the stage where the individual realizes what parts of himself he will be able to express, and which parts he will have to repress.
A successful self-repression produces the “normal” type - the repressed parts expressing themselves subconsciously, through dreams, sexual fantasies, neurosis.
The less complex a mind is, the less he has to repress.
The"trauma" is lower.
A simple mind will adjust much more easily, as there will be very little about him to adjust in this way.
Birds, having bird-brains, can live for years in a tiny cage.

In physical trauma, if death does not follow, there’s scarring.
A thickening of the tissue; an increased numbness due to destroyed or buried nerves.
Trauma indicates an experience survived - it is worn with pride, unless one is born and raised as a spoiled, pampered, brat, trying to preserve that pristine skin softness of the child.

Without trauma, on some level, there is no growth.
To build a muscle you must stress it, traumatize it, tear it, so that when it heals it heals bigger, stronger, thicker.

We live in an age where that youthful, soft, smooth skin, lacking scars, is worshiped.
An age where controlled, artificially induced stresses are preferred.
This indicates how we cope with psychological stresses.

A man-child is not a man who involves himself in childish things, but one that involves himself in childish things in childish ways.

There would be no issue of dealing with imbeciles in a world where protections were absent - there would be no need for debate and endless conversations over who deserves what, and what “justice” means.
Only in an environment where weakness is preserved and allowed to propagate - valued as a virtue because it is malleable - would there be a need to justify why this is “good”, and only then would there be a need to give the products of this sheltering reasons to feel proud of what they are - values to find self-esteem in, new definitions to make them “normal”, where the term is flattering.
A mind what has not faces traumatic events, never grows up.
It doesn’t have to.
those that do face traumatic events, not all deal with them in the same way.

Courage is not the absence of fear, it is a result of how one deals with it.
A protected mind, is not courageous when it has never faced death, or if it remains ignorant and naive.
And those who do face fear, some run and some fight - fight/flight.

And so a child of divorced parents may turn out to be a criminal or become the president of the United States, and a child born and raised in harrowing condition of poverty, violence, death, may becomes fucked-up or may become brilliant.

To accuse anyone of fear, is stating the obvious; to ignore it in yourself, is disingenuous and hypocritical; to see fear in hate but not in love, is delusional; to use fear as an accusation, is naive.
The adversity is the necessary ingredient for a do or die scenario to unfold - sheltering is an atrophying; stagnation founded no comfort, predictability, certainty.

The martyr, bears witness to the exposed, the revealed - to revelation.
He is existence witnessing itself in the midst of its existing.

His six digits a sign of his overcoming of the human: higher intellect, higher sensual perception…higher tastes.
The vulgar is rude, in that it disturbs his aesthetics, not his morals, for he is above those as well; the primitive, the base, assaults his tastes, like a bad odour.

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He does not pass a moral judgment on it, because morality refers to a common taste.
He passes a personal judgment on it, as it has been determined by his inherited past, as it was shaped by his personal experiences.

The monster is an omen, a warning of things to come.
It’s abomination in relation to the observer’s needs.

This monster is one of man’s vanity.
An creature emerging in the urban jungles; a product of pollutants, both material and genetic - pollution of physical and mental, the mind/body inseparable though divided noetically via forgetfulness, denial.
Hannibal is a product of genetic mutations, adapting to human environments - a purely Modern monstrosit

Masculine, in its internal control, and seductive to the feminized modern, because of it.
A Dionysus hiding in an Apollonian veneer - a duality of style and brutality.
He does not make others do anything.
He convinces them by reasoning with their dominant Dionysian side…hidden but not controlled, because it is denied, and by being denied it is unknown.
He appeals to the part the modern rejects as already overcome.

The distinction of the Hannibal caricature from the real-life manifestation of this same personality, is one of inflated proportions.
He does not fear the consequences, in the way a normal man would, because he exceeds the norm to a degree which makes him immune to them.
Still, the definition of a psychotic is not the thought, the motive, the potential, but the acting out of it, despite the possible price.
He acts out his nature, because despite the socioeconomic price inflations, he is willing to pay it, or is confident that he will avoid payment.

A real psychotic never considers the costs, or overestimates his own talent of evading payment.
He is psychotic in his hyperbole.

The Hannibal Lecter caricature becomes a venting vehicle for all those repressed intentions.
The masculine having become illegal, is forced to use only feminine methods.
The act is priced out of his range, leaving him with words.
he can only become aggressive using them.
This is also being restricted now.
The words must become evermore artistic, metaphorical…evasive.
He must hide, deeper and deeper, increasing his isolation - he is quarantined with peer pressures and with social condemnation.

Only the most out-of-control, those who have too little will or too great a masculine drive, unleash this Thymotic energy…and pay the price for it.
The rest content themselves with these artistic expressions of rage.
They are allowed so as to depressurize the increasing pressurization.

The simple use athletics (sports as a vehicle of vicarious playing on a high level), pornography (sports as a vehicle of vicarious fucking on a higher level), to release the masculinity they are not permitted to express.
as repression persists, the level of vicarious depressurization must be raised proportionally.
Time is on the side of the socially eugenics enforcer: slowly feminization will eradicate the elements that made the man what he was, leaving behind a female with a penis, with only a slight difference in behavior.
Along with it all that man creates, innovates, as a byproduct of his libidinal need to dominate, to control, to use.

Will technologies and techniques compensate for this masculine loss, as they have with other aspects of masculine superiority, through the usage of weapons and tools and machines?
We cannot know.

Machines and mechanics have already made the masculine obsolete in the area of procreation…can it do the same for creation, creativity?

Nobility

Elitism refers to the presence of a excess of the noble principles in a an individual, which would then incline him/her to relate to a group of individuals who are alike.

The type has manifested in different way, throughout history.
The environment determines how this psychological type will express itself in any given time-period within particular socioeconomic circumstances.

As a theatrical example of the type, presented in an exaggerated, and a symbolic (metaphorical) form to pronounce the traits and how they would express themselves in a Modern (urban, western, capitalist - nihilistic) environment we have Harrison’s Hannibal.
A perfect caricature, presented in three distinct modes: young man/man/old man.

The killing and eating is a metaphor.

He does not kill out of passion ad indiscriminately…and he does not kill all.
He actually finds some who he thinks have potential and attempts to mentor them…to teach them, to cultivate them - to free them from their domestication.

He does not want to change the world because the world is perfect as it is.
He simply shifts his sense of self.
He has a refined sense of identity.

Of all the actions that reveal how human, all too human, Hannibal is, is his desire to make of his killings a symbol.
A symbol sophisticated enough to be read by a sophisticated mind.

His “design” is only valuable if an other, on his level, can share in it, and read it.
Dialogue is sought, amongst the dull.
He does not want to converse with the masses, but with that one who sees beyond the blood and the brutality.

Loneliness still pulls upon him.
He is not yet god, but a fallen angel.

And by “human” Hannibal understands something more than the sexual, the procreative, because he shows a distinct indifference towards sexual intercourse, and for using his talents to seduce females into his bed.
He is beyond Freud, and his Jewish decadence.
Sex, for him, is but another tool, another insight into the prey, to be used to accomplish his goal.
Sex as a means, not an end in itself.

The practice of cannibalism can be evaluated from various perspectives.

The hunter has first pick of the prey’s most tender and, therefore, tastiest parts - the natural right of the hunter.
But this was only important when hunting was conducted as a group, a party, activity.

It is, also, an old practice where the victor assimilated the vanquished into his own becoming, thusly honoring him, and reaffirming his domination over him.

Finally, and most importantly in my view, Hannibal’s cannibalism is not cannibalism at all when considered from outside modern mythologies and popular attitudes.
Being a more evolved version of human, a super-human, as it were, feeding on the lesser would not constitute a feeding on his own kind.
Hannibal is in search of his own, he does not associate with those he is forced to interact with.
He is a hypocrite in the sense that he pretends to belong to them, with them, when he feels so utterly alone, unable to relate to their vulgarity, their rudeness.
He does not feed on them, he indulges in fine dining, selecting the most particular parts of nature to savor.
He is refining himself by sharpening his consuming practices.

As an extension of his contra-bully bullying Hannibal acquires the dress and the practices of the group he will integrate within, becoming inconspicuous.
In an urban environment he dresses and behaves as an urbanite, integrating into the professional, specialized, class, preferring to cull the strongest rather than the weakest members of the herd.

This act alone constitutes an act of nobility.

The choice accomplishes two goals:
It increases the challenge, to him, and it increases the possibility of finding his equal, his kind - increased potential of feeding both mind and body on “higher grade human”.

Harrison’s Hannibal Lecter caricature represents a surrealistic depiction of a world underlying the “real” everyday one.
The events depicted, and the characters populating its world, are extraordinary extensions of the ordinary; an internalized reality, warped, and moody, reflecting self in a shimmering lake, that distorts everything into monstrosities.

Hannibal, in the movies - the Hopkins version - is the inversion of the Hannibal, in the television series - the Mikkelsen version.

Hopkins/Hannibal is expressive, passionate, over a cold, calculating, controlled internal psychological structure.
Mikkelsen/Hannibal is cold, reserved, calculating, controlled exterior, over a passionate psychological structure.

The evolution of the character, besides being a different interpretation, reflecting the creator’s own relationship with the Harrison character, represents a natural growth process: the younger Mikkelsen/Hannibal growing into the the more mature Hopkins/Hannibal.
The growth reflects the natural process of confidence, and indifference, which accompanies maturation.

We witness here a slight reversal between the public and the private man.
The private man, in Mikkelsen/Hannibal, becomes the public man in Hopkins/Hannibal…without there ever being a complete reversal.

Factoring in the unleashed passions of the young/Hannibal, with his reckless abandonment to his passions, we find in Mikkelsen/Hannibal, a young man’s willful attempt to gain control over them - resulting in an over-compensating external control, hiding a pressurized internal private man, revealing himself in those acts of brutality.
Hopkins/Hannibal, after years of cooling down the volcanic eruptions of his past, is now able to express his passions, albeit in subtle ways, because he has gained control of them.

Mikkelsen/Hannibal is Narcissus peering into the distorted, by the reflective pool, image of his own private face; his internal world is a product of the real world, witnessed by a pure, noble young heart.
Hopkins/Hannibal has become the reflecting pool, now mirroring the distorted world back to any eyes that might see it - bear witness to it, be the martyrs of its reality; an mature man who remains indifferent to the outcome.

The Hannibal Trilogy, as written by Harris, represents a revelatory movement.

An unraveling of modern mythologies.

To unravel what lies twisted and coiled, concealed in its Gordian knot - a knot that refers back to itself, creating a loop that must be severed - an act of violence, of violation - an intrusion.
An undesired perpetration being rape.

Ethical standards prevent such acts, forcing the actor into an assertion of will - the rude, in their concealment, and trickery, considered polite and proper, must be unraveled by an act of rudeness, by one who lives outside their social evaluations of propriety.

Their shamefulness, their feigned humility, a ruse to remain tangled and concealed.
Their are ethical in impolite ways. The act replaced by words of violence.
The knot must be cut by Alexander who has been placed in a predicament - the impropriety of the hypocrite other, offering a ruse of politeness, is unraveled by the blade that cuts through the pretentious complexities - right down to the heart of the matter - revealing, uncovering, exposing, disclosing…remembering.

The violence of the many upon the one, is confronted, in this series with a response.

The individual, retaining “innocence” in his ignorance, participates in the mechanism, in the shared identity which forces repression and pretense, as a survivals strategy, upon the individual.
The individual, through professing to be complex and unique and special, and an individual, remains trapped in the shared idea(l), the abstracted identifier - whether it be God or Humanity or some vague abstraction he cannot fully define or describe.

His “individuality” passes through the communal standards, and is confronted, in Hannibal, with an authentic manifestation of what it never dares to consider - it calls it a monster.

But the individual’s ignorance cannot support his presumed innocence, by the common laws it adheres to.
The “victims” of 9/11, participating and enjoying the benefits of living within a system that exploits other nations, cannot claim innocence, when their cars are fueled and their fridges are full and their fees are paid from this exploitation.
Their ignorance cannot save them from the repercussions of their actions - as no benefit is without a cost.
Ignorance only protects the individual from the awareness that might cause it stress, anxiety/fear - modernity is characterized by the worship of childishness; citizens living in perpetual adolescence, oblivious to all except immediate gratification of needs.
Unfortunately, for them nature, the world, reality, call it whatever you like, cares not about human contrivances, such as justice, fairness, innocence, shame, good/bad intentions…

An “individual” participating within a group that depends on exploiting and manipulating resources should not seek refuge in ignorance or some well-intended motive.
Stupidity is not a defense.
And if one identifies with a communal abstraction, giving it a name within which “individuality” is permitted to express itself in superficial symbolism, then along with the power through association one must also accept the costs of such an association.
The violence, bullying, done upon an individual participating in a group, is not excused by his/her declared ignorance or good intentions.

This is what Hannibal forces upon each member of the altruistic society to confront: their denied, forgotten culpability.
Their “purity” is uncovered, their knots of complexity are unraveled, their lies are exposed.

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.

To be alone is the human condition. We all live and die alone.

To be lonely is not the same.
Value is a temporal designation.
I place my dignity above any wretched hedonistic life.
I choose to live as a man, even if that means living alone.

But alone is a relative term.
Tarzan lived amongst the apes, and still felt alone.

But he did not have the internet to help his cry reach further into the jungle.

This is the space I’ve managed to carve out of the jungle, calling to those who seek humans in a forest full of manimals.

Ideas, Ideals, are now about what is most marketable; what has the most popular appeal.
What has the most popular appeal is what is most base, the simplest, the lowest-common-denominator, for then the appeal is more broad, touching upon a core instinct.
So, Democracy, votes “reality” in.
That which is popular is “true”, that which is not, is not true.

Of course, because the majority, the median, is simple, you can manipulate it, particularly since this appeal to the base is an appeal to an innate quality that requires no thinking or consciousness.
The usual suspects are targeted: sex, fear.
Then, the ones doing the manipulating sell the idea that the masses are far too complex, they have no nature to bind them, and so they cannot be manipulated.
This creates the illusion of free-will while at the same time it denies access to the very methods which the manipulation uses.

The culture of the buyer is reduced to that of choosing between different versions of the same cheap crap.
Love is so cheap it has lost all value.
It has no cost, no risk…it is a disposable toy in the hands of retarded minds, children.

Accept Jesus into your heart and you shall be saved…or accept the Ideal Modern man into your mind and you shall be protected from all that nasty badness we call existence.
Your compassion and love and loyalty is worthless…so spread it around and hope it gains some value by participating in a communal cesspool of worthlessness.

Why would I offer my friendship to a pathetic wretch whop sells himself to the highest bidder, wanting only to belong to the many?
What value would my friendship have then, if I offer it so thoughtlessly and indiscriminately?

Is Tarzan a sociopath because he cannot adjust to chimpanzee hierarchies?
Would a chimp doctor diagnose him as ill?

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.

Pain is not value.
Value is what resists entropy - what is more timeless.

Suffering is no end, and neither is pleasure …both are interpretations, how the brain interprets variation of need.
And need is no end; need is the sensation of entropy upon an organism, a self-organizing entity - a life-form.

Suffering/Pleasure are two extremes of what the organism experiences as need, which is its interaction with a dynamic world, as ordering/becoming experiencing the Flux.

A distinct behavioral difference between Joker and Hannibal is Joker’s suicidal nature.
Both are not afraid of dying but one actually doesn’t care if he does.
The extravagance of appearance is supposed to draw attention to the drama unfolding - a “look at me” call, whereas Hannibal wants to disappear in the herd.

One is chaos, reaching the level of absurdity, the other is controlled passion.
An economy of movement - eloquence.
Hannibal’s home is spotless, organized, like his mind - the opposite of chaotic.

Joker is out for vengeance, a wake-up call to all who believe in order.
Hannibal is a culling machine - a wolf weeding out weakness form a herd he does not identify with.
He contributes to their health.

Joker considers himself and Batman “freaks”.
Hannibal considers himself healthy, superior, not of the same kind.

Joker’s Thymos is a hyperbolic rage, expressing itself in laughter.
Cynicism is Joker’s main trait.
Hannibal is erotic.
His rage is focused and precise - surgical.
He seduces, more than he slaughters.
Joker cannot seduce…he is ungraceful, lacking class, and refinement - a man who never grew up.

Joker is base and vulgar.
Hannibal can enjoy the finer things in life.

Joker needs attention.
His joke is public.
Hannibal avoids it.
His game is a private one.

Joker destroys; Hannibal designs.