While engaging with Hannibal Lecter, both readers and viewers hesitate whether to root for him or not. They can appreciate his criminal wit and artistic taste, yet
they prefer to watch his performance from a distance (Westfall 2016: xvi). Apart from keeping the distance, the viewers are enabled to find the aesthetic pleasure in the gruesome game of killing owing to the fact that Lecter’s murders are de-picted as artistic performances. The outcomes of Lecter’s crimes, particularly his cannibalism, are scarcely represented graphically and shown to the spectators.
By virtue of this omission, the films let the viewers forget about this disturbing element of Lecter’s personality (Taylor 2014: 195).
Nevertheless, only by placing Lecter in relation to other characters can his image be transformed. Aaron Taylor contends: “The key here is relativity: we are asked to consider what the character is like in relation to other characters. Lecter’s potential for moral revaluation, then, is further buttressed by narrative strate-gies” (Taylor 2014: 195). These narrative strategies place Hannibal in opposition to other villains, who, to say the least, do not appear as sophisticated as Lecter.
Westfall argues: “ [...] in his anti-heroic presentation Hannibal Lecter appears as something of a superhero, but one willing to do what more traditionally heroic individuals are not: to kill in order to get what he understands to be justice”
(2016: xvi). Lecter demonstrates the kind of villainy which Taylor dubs “dark poetic justice” (2014: 194). By killing other villains Hannibal transgresses his own villainy, becoming the anti-hero with whom one can form an allegiance.
The question remains what type of allegiance it will be.
Murray Smith distinguishes two kinds of allegiance which can be formed between the readers/viewers and an anti-hero, which are partial allegiance and perverse allegiance. Unlike Smith, who believes that one can form a partial alle-giance with Lecter (in spite of his monstrosity), Taylor argues that the allealle-giance formed between the readers/viewers and Dr. Lecter will rather be of a perverse kind (because of his monstrosity). He claims that it is not Hannibal’s aesthetic nature or a tendency to kill the ignoble, like Krendler or Verger, that deflate his unpleasantness. It is the fact that the aforementioned tasteless villains do not measure up to Lecter’s wickedness and his standards of villainy that makes the readers/viewers form a perverse allegiance (Taylor 2014: 200).
In Scott’s Hannibal, this perverse nature of the viewers and the villain rela-tionship is presented in the scene when Starling is watching the photographs of disfigured corpses while listening to the recordings of her conversations with the doctor. Lecter’s voiceover encourages the viewers to acknowledge their own perverse nature by saying: “Don’t your eyes move over the things you want?”
Even though Lecter speaks to Starling, it is the viewers who move their eyes over
the photographs of mutilated bodies and do not turn off the film with repulsion (Taylor 2014: 195). Moreover, Taylor writes that Hannibal’s feral qualities do not repel our allegiance, but rather promote it: “During moments of violence – espe-cially random violence – he achieves a kind of magnificence that is awe-inspiring because it suggests that his evil is not containable” (Taylor 2014: 201). As regards Lecter’s personality traits, which one could consider positive, Taylor writes that they should not be perceived as the essential part of his character, since they cannot disguise Lecter’s true face: “Lecter commands fear, and fear is too primal an emotion to be assuaged by dressing up the bogeyman in gentleman’s clothes”
(Taylor 2014: 205).
Trying to choose which kind of allegiance the readers/viewers form with Lecter, one could answer: none of the above, or rather, both of them. The diagram below presents the third option with regard to the allegiance – the partially perverse allegiance. in spite of & because of
perversity
Figure 1. The diagram represents three types of allegiance that may be formed between the readers/viewers and Dr. Hannibal Lecter.
As far as the structure of Lecter’s personality is concerned, it is characterized by duality. Without a doubt, he is a cannibal, a killer, a monster and so forth, yet it is undeniable that he possesses a few merits that may soften our perception of him. These merits function mainly to humanize his monstrosity. According to Smith, who argues that the readers and viewers form a partial allegiance with
the villain, one may create a relation with him in spite of him being a cannibal and a brute. What one focuses on are the qualities of his personality which make him appealing (1995: 225–227). Smith diminishes the role of Lecter’s dark side.
On the other hand, Taylor strongly believes that it is precisely this dark side that allures and fascinates the recipients, engaging them with him. Therefore, according to Taylor, we form an allegiance with Lecter because of his perversity.
What one may propose is the third kind of allegiance – for the sake of no-menclature one can call it a partially perverse allegiance – which combines the abovementioned types. Lecter is a complex character and cannot be confined within any of the previously mentioned types of allegiance. It is neither his humanized side nor his monstrous one that fascinates the audience. At least not solely each of them. The readers/viewers do not engage with the character because his positive traits overweigh the negative ones, as Smith argues, nor does his humanized side serve only to highlight his monstrosity, as Taylor claims. It is the combination of the two that makes Lecter interesting and unique. Being only an aesthete, Hannibal Lecter would be just another sophisticated character; at the same time, being merely a cruel murderer would make him neither special nor worthy of all the attention and allegiance.
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