"Hannibal"

For a character who has assumed the place of uber-boogeyman in the pop imagination, Hannibal Lecter has almost no resonance. The bastard offspring of the old EC horror comics and George Sanders' bitch refinement, Lecter can serve up a big "Boo," but that's about it. The murderous characters that unnerve us the most are the ones we can feel close to, the ones who make us feel protective of them, make us realize what human traits we share with them. No one has ever captured those qualities better than Anthony Perkins playing Norman Bates in "Psycho." And though he's a very different character, the middle-aged businessman in Donald E. Westlake's devastating novel "The Ax" who, after he's laid off, resorts to killing the competitors for the job he desperately needs, makes us feel the horror of seeing murder as necessity (talk about a thriller that really represents our contemporary dark side; nothing Harris has written can touch "The Ax").

Hannibal Lecter doesn't need our solicitousness or our empathy. He's not even all that good a boogeyman. Hopkins is saddled with the weight of the half-baked conceits Thomas has placed in the character. For all the forced, malevolent high-spiritedness of his performance, you can't cut loose and be evil when you have to symbolize our shared darkness. And who buys that anyway? Who really sees a reflection of their sins or failings or whatever in a cannibal?

Nothing Hopkins does in either movie makes me break out in the nasty little giggle I do when remembering Boris Karloff in "The Mask of Fu Manchu" pouring salt into the mouth of a man dying of thirst and then apologizing -- as if he made a mistake. And nothing Hopkins does is as believable or as creepily genuine as the first movie Lecter, Brian Cox in "Manhunter," Michael Mann's film of "Red Dragon" (the one movie made from Lecter books that, humorless as it is, doesn't act as if it's dealing with anything more profound than a serial-killer thriller).

But if Hannibal fails as boogeyman, he does no better standing in for society's collective evil. In this age of serial-killer redux, where are the Hannibal Lecters? Hasn't anybody noticed that real-life monsters like Ed Gein, John Wayne Gacy -- who John Waters once called "the worst-dressed serial killer" -- Ted Bundy, John List and Jeffrey Dahmer all tend to be bland and blobby and inarticulate?

There's nothing new about movies and crime stories that take pleasure in bad guys. But the master criminals of old serials and movies, characters we rooted for even though we knew they were "bad," have been replaced, in Harris' wildly popular books, and in the fascination with real-life monsters, by the master serial killer. And there's considerable difference in taking pleasure in a thief like Raffles, or even a good-guy sadist like James Bond, and delighting in Lecter's mutilations and killings and devourings.

In his recent book "The Blood Poets" the critic Jake Horsley caught the craving that Lecter satisfies in contemporary audiences. Horsley called it the cravings of a movie audience "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 apart before them. A depraved maniac wandering free as a bird, enacting his sick revenge upon a society which he holds only in the utmost contempt, as beneath him, this idea meets with the approval, if not plain delight, of the modern audience ... The audience acquiesces with this point of view ... it is all too willing to turn society over to the maniac ... it's a logic fit for the slaughterhouse."

"Hannibal" is the essence of that logic of the slaughterhouse. Better than any movie, it can stand for the debasement of pop entertainment. That's not because it's violent or because it's a horror film: From the original "Scarface" and "Frankenstein" to "The Matrix," some of the best popular movies have always and will always be violent entertainments. "Hannibal" instead represents what happens when mainstream Hollywood studios -- two in this case, MGM and Universal -- adopt the tactics of the exploitation films they once shunned, and do so with all the money and gloss at their disposal.

Remember Nixon saying, "If the president does it, that means it is not against the law"? Well, Scott appears to think that if he shows us man-eating boars and spilling guts and cannibal gourmet dinners, and if he does it with studio production values, and if his source is a writer who has won not inconsiderable acclaim, then the result is not a crummy horror movie. Scott will undoubtedly get by with this farrago; audiences will almost certainly make it a hit, and that's almost enough to make you accept his and Thomas Harris' crummy view of humanity. The two of them are like the story's wild boar trainers: They've turned their potential audience into murderous swine. They're convinced that if they lure us in with human screams, we'll come a runnin', happy to gobble up whatever they've placed in front of us, to foul ourselves rooting around in the guts and the shit.

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