In the Belly Of the Beast
The Meaning and the Madness of Hollywood's Serial Killers

By Stephen Hunter
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, February 10, 2007

There's really only one question about serial killers: Why?

Why do some men kill -- again and again -- without remorse, seemingly for the pleasure of self-expression?

Great writers have tried to answer it, but it's so naked and unsubtle an issue, it appeals more to cruder minds, and so it's more commonly studied by gifted hacks like the American thrillerist Thomas Harris. He's made a career out of one serial killer, Hannibal Lecter, the erudite intellectual and aesthete, gourmand and oenophile, Italianophile and opera lover, a plump charmer with eyes as deep as space beyond Pluto, who likes to eat people, occasionally with fava beans and a nice Chianti.

Now Harris is offering his origins story of Hannibal the Cannibal in double format, as a book (released in December) and movie (out this week) sharing the title "Hannibal Rising."

Yet, by no force more powerful than coincidence, two other movies that examine the origins of that particular manifestation of serial slaughter also occupy, or soon will occupy, the marketplace. Guillermo del Toro's brilliant if bleak fairy tale cum political parable, "Pan's Labyrinth," is a serial-killer movie if only by powerful inference. Then there's the far more workaday examination of the squalor of an actual serial killer, the nut case calling himself "Zodiac," who haunted San Francisco in the late '60s and early '70s. He is thought to have killed at least five people and to have corresponded, a la Jack the Ripper ("Jack's a saucy boy," that one said of his work in 1888), with the papers. That story is told in the March docudrama "Zodiac," by the director David Fincher, who once rode the serial-killer gravy train in "Seven."

What we end up with is an odd Orion's Belt of serial killers in various modes expressing various meanings: Hannibal is, of course, the most romantic version, with his love of canto and concerto, his knowledge of cooking sherries and Renaissance architecture, his insistence on eliminating only the less refined from the water hole. In "Zodiac" we get a more proletarian and, since it's fact-based, more realistic serial joe. Zodiac actually tries to sound florid in his letters and via his affectations like including cryptograms, but that's a self-delusion: He's mean, squalid and ignorant and he kills without grace or wit, with gun or knife at close range, then runs away. Ugh. He's about as elegant as the clap and unfortunately a lot more lethal. Finally, there's Capt. Vidal in "Pan's Labyrinth," who goes about his killing and torturing without a lot of self-consciousness. He's trying to accomplish a certain thing, and if human obstacles present themselves, they must be eliminated; but the application of death to life is no art form for him, it's simply a means to an end. Of the three, he's the most terrifying; more sadly, he's the most common.

Of the three, certainly Hannibal is the most fun, a kind of inverted Sherlock Holmes, a man of such wisdom and insight and didactic dynamism that he mentored not only lesser serial killers but also two FBI agents: Will Graham (played by William Petersen in "Manhunter" and Edward Norton in "Red Dragon") and most famously Clarice Starling (played by Jodie Foster in "The Silence of the Lambs" and Julianne Moore in "Hannibal").

Within those movies (and books) was the quest for other serial killers. The far more prosaic and far less interesting Francis Dolarhyde, featured in Harris's "The Red Dragon,"was assembled in the usual fashion: high IQ, isolation, physical disfigurement, violent parental abuse, self-loathing transmogrified into deadly vanity, obsessive personality and fantasies of omnipotence. You know, one of those. Then there was the twisted mutant Jaime "Buffalo Bill" Gumb, from "Silence of the Lambs," killing young women because he wanted to wear their skin. Ugh and ick. He was seedy, ultra-creepy; he was the unromantic version.

I find Hannibal fascinating: a genius killer so smart that he can deconstruct crimes at warp speed and pay out his findings to his law-enforcement tormentors in exchange for small gifts, and possibly, eventually, the leverage to escape. He has a Superman gestalt going; watching him is like watching Michael Jordan go one-on-one against a dwarf, and the pleasure isn't in his victory (which is assured) but in the utter grace and sweatless precision of his victory.

That said, he's a hoax.

His transformation into serial killer is somewhat dubious. Seeking to give him as exotic a background as possible (to match and explain his exoticness as a killing specimen), Harris gave him an exotic background out of an Eric Ambler novel, Eastern European flavorings tinged with the most romantic view of the Orient, seasoned in the most violent spasm in history. And what a pedigree: He's formed by the Ashkenazi Jewish tradition (his tutor, Jakov), the European knightly warrior tradition (his ancestor, Hannibal the Grim, a great knight of the late Middle Ages), then stewed in Japanese aestheticism (his uncle's wife, Lady Murasaki, a Japanese aristocrat) and Western empiricism (his French medical training). This weird blend explains his erudition, his education, his courage, his will -- but not his pathology. That is the contribution of World War II, where in the caldron of the Eastern Front, trapped between German and Russian armies (and assailed by psychotic freebooters to boot), he caught a bug of mass murder when, after being hideously orphaned by war, he watched his beloved little sister slain and devoured by hungry human wolves.

Hmmmm. Convincing? Not as convincing as either Dolarhyde or Buffalo Bob, whose squalor seems to spring from more conventional wells: abusive parents, physical disfigurement, isolation, morbid sensibility, high IQ, low self-esteem and finally abundant opportunity. Worse, Hannibal's transformation is inappropriately insulting to the millions who went through experiences as fully depraved (read any concentration camp survivor's memoirs) as young Hannibal, yet managed to rejoin society, put aside their trauma, and have decent, productive lives. The tragedy of World War II in the East wasn't the death of Mischa Lecter and the construction of Hannibal Lecter; it was the death of a hundred million innocents.

Still, you can infer Harris's meaning from this. His explanation of Hannibal is a play between nature (his high IQ, his extraordinary capability) and nurture (he is, after all, suckled on mass murder by the war). Absent either, he's okay. With both, he's a monster but a monster who (at least in the books) gets the girl. It's almost anti-Freudian (not that that's a bad thing) in that it blames external influences when it's almost always some twisted torrent between parent and child, usually in the form of a toe of a boot, that creates these bad, bad boys.

With the Zodiac killer, we are on far more familiar ground. Again, it helps to remember that a romanticized version of this invertebrate already exists: In Clint Eastwood's career-making 1971 hit "Dirty Harry," a serial killer calling himself "Scorpio" is haunting San Francisco. A young actor named Andy Robinson got the role (and the irony is that his performance made the movie work, far more than Eastwood's).

Robinson, handsome in a pretty way, had a satanic intensity that seemed lit from within, and the strangest voice, deep and lispy at once. He flirted with effeminacy (Scorpio to Harry when Harry is ordered to drop his .44 magnum: "My, you have a big one!") His wide, sensual mouth yielded moans of pleasure or screams of pain in great contrast to Dirty Harry's impassive, phlegmatic mug. He was the serial killer as camp stylist, and it's a seminal moment in "Zodiac" when the San Francisco cops charged with running down the killer go to a screening of "Dirty Harry" and see their own efforts exaggerated to cartoon scale.

The serial killer that emerges from "Zodiac" is closest of all to the demented Buffalo Bill. "Zodiac" is based on the book of the same name by Robert Graysmith (played by Jake Gyllenhaal), who became so obsessed with the case, he quit his job at the San Francisco Chronicle and essentially dedicated his life to finding the guy the cops couldn't locate. For his troubles he was awarded a bestseller, a respected career as a true-crime writer (several other books followed) and now this movie.

Problem: His serial murderer isn't very interesting. Take away the illiterate braggadocio of the letters to the newspaper and the secret-code games, he wasn't much beyond a common street thug who robs and occasionally kills. He's a mundane figure, a dime a dozen in any big city on Earth. He depended as much on the clumsiness of the police as his own overrated "brilliance" to avoid capture.

Capt. Vidal (Sergi Lopez) in the Oscar-nominated "Pan's Labyrinth" is, as I say, the most terrifying. In his way, he stands for the greatest serial killer of modern times: the state. He might be called a duty killer. He seems to have no obsession with it, or no particular need for it. But his problem is vanity: He sees himself as the center of existence, as the towering ego of his times, as the one who knows and represents. He would never consider himself evil but rather an earnest servant of civilization. It troubles him not a whit to eliminate those who stand before him in opposition, mainly the ragtag motley of Republican guerrillas left over from the Spanish Civil War (which ended in 1939) whom he now hunts to the death in the bitter year of 1944.

The story is presented from a child's point of view, and 12-year-old Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) is the only one who realizes immediately that the handsome, commanding, masculine man, who has rescued her poor mother from the desolation of widowhood, is really far more evil than anything in her fairy-tale fantasies. But Capt. Vidal's predations -- unlike Hannibal, who is theatrical, or Zodiac, who writes letters -- are not charismatic. Though his body count is much the highest, his more typical kill is the execution of prisoners, without ritual or sadism or pleasure. It never occurs to him that such a thing is wrong. He confuses self and state as one; everything else is malleable otherness, of no consequence. His identification with the Generalissimo's monolithic apparatus is so total that when he kneels, dispassionately puts his Luger muzzle to the temple of a wounded guerrilla and pulls the trigger, it seems not to register, much in the way that squashing a bug would not really register in the consciousness of most men. He doesn't hear the screaming. He may enjoy it, but he's not -- this could be argued, I realize -- really a sadist, in the sense that he is getting sexual gratification from inflicting pain. It's ego. It is how Vidal makes his mark upon the world, by making his mark upon the flesh.

Unlike Hannibal and Zodiac, he doesn't kill because he has to or wants to, but because it's an occupational necessity. It's part of doing business. What defines him isn't the death he delivers but the uniform he wears and the bravery he takes such pride in, his warrior lineage, which he pines to deliver intact to his unborn son.

So we have three films about boys who like to snuff from a good hack, a cutting-edge modern filmmaker and a great artist. (Of the three movies, "Pan's Labyrinth" is the most satisfying, and, by far, the best.) What, in the end, do they tell us about this most blasphemous of human behavior? They don't have many answers, but taken as a whole, it's a nihilistic message. The consensus is that such things will not fade away. You only have to look at the front page to see how depressingly accurate they are.