Digesting "Hannibal"

Two noted authors discuss an unspeakable love, how the critics got it wrong -- and the semiotics of brain eating.

By Gary Percesepe and Frederick Barthelme

Mar 3, 2001 | We saw "Hannibal" on two different nights in two different cities. When we started exchanging e-mails about the movie, we realized that the critics had it all wrong. We began to think maybe we should try to get it right. We didn't, exactly, but we decided we'd share our e-mails in the hope that our dialogue -- which continues -- might at least advance the discussion from where it has been. Neither of us has read the Thomas Harris book on which the movie is based, and readers who have not seen the movie are advised that some pertinent plot points are discussed in detail below.

Frederick Barthelme: So I saw "Hannibal." Loved it. Thought it a sublime love story. It's the best Ridley Scott movie since "Blade Runner," which single-handedly defined the look and feel of "future" movies for the last 20 years, and which, like this one, managed to make a simple story hugely complex and defining. (Will anyone ever forget Rutger Hauer saying, "Time to die," releasing the bird, or telling Deckard the things he's seen -- "Troop ships on fire at the edge of Orion"? Answer: No.) And, as "Blade Runner" was in its moment, "Hannibal" is the best-looking movie in years, showing us new ways to see. The "Blade Runner" look was all cinematographer Jordan Cronenweth, I've been told, the future and rain and glitter and advertising that take your breath away. And here again the "look" of the film is a visual elaboration of the themes: "Hannibal" is all about the adoration of light, the elegance of shattered sound, the shadowed beauty of the world we live in but never really see.

What is odd is that I anticipated hating this movie: Of the two previous entries in this series of films based on Thomas Harris novels, I enjoyed but was no big fan of "The Silence of the Lambs," and I thought "Manhunter" quite good, a better version of the B-picture, and in that film I've always felt Brian Cox easily a better Hannibal Lecter than Anthony Hopkins. (This argument rages on, apparently.) But that changes with "Hannibal," a stunning and tricky movie that almost every reviewer seems to have watched with head up arse, because Hannibal isn't a B-picture thriller/horror flick. It's amazing that no one noticed! From the opening it's a stunner -- the credits are great post-Raygun stuff, as evocative and graphically delicious as I've seen in a while, and I even thought I might leave when they were done to save myself the wretched experience the reviewers seemed to suggest was next.

But we stayed. I was not sure about Julianne Moore in her first scene -- the talk around the car hood -- but then she got better. She is sure-footed on-screen, and much more a pleasure to watch than Jodie Foster, who was maybe too butch in the role (or were they saying that's characteristic of female FBI folk?) but less a player than this Clarice, and nowhere near as cinematically supple. Where Foster is all business, Moore is all nuanced womanhood -- all the systems are operational and going at full click. From first to last the movie tells you what it's about and what it isn't about, and what it isn't about is the comic-book grotesquerie that the reviewers seem so hotted up over. Even the loopy brain scene is more Grand Guignol out of "Saturday Night Live" than anything else. And besides, the sautéing is tasty.

Gary Percesepe: I saw "Hannibal" as a love story too, one with real teeth. For me, having not read the book, the tip-off that this was a love story was the hair. To me, it's automatic with the hair. Hair we are. If it's long hair, and brushed against lightly, it's what French theorist Roland Barthes might have called a "cultural code" for romance, a universal signifier that clues even the clueless and says, "Yo, over here, we're working this way." And it's odd, because my instinct when hair comes on the scene too early in the love story is to lose interest; it's all too transparent, too easy. I become a resisting reader -- is this the postmodern condition, the exhaustion of decoding sign upon self-referential sign, or just a former fiction editor tired of seeing writers who put the woman's hair in the first paragraph as a way of taking a shortcut on characterization? Whatever.

Next Page: How did they keep straight faces during the brain-eating scene?

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