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In The Silence of the Lambs a psychotic killer who dresses himself in his victims' peeled skin is on the loose. Locked away is a psychopathic madman, a cannibalistic former psychiatrist. The FBI needs one to catch the other.
To catch a serial killer it is necessary to think like one. Not a pleasant task, to be sure, even for the most seasoned law enforcement professional. One must immerse oneself in the minds of both the hunter and the prey, to anticipate both action and reaction, like an actor preparing for a dual role.
When Anthony Hopkins was asked by his agent to read the script for The Silence of the Lambs before being offered the part of Dr Hannibal Lecter, he refused. Although he hadn't read the book, he had seen Manhunter, the Michael Mann film based on the same characters, and was somewhat taken by the vivid characterization of Lecter.
"I didn't want to read it and get disappointed," he says. It was only when director Jonathan Demme flew to London to make an offer that Hopkins settled in to read the script.
"It was an electrifying part and for some reason I was able to identify with it," Hopkins recalls. "Not because I'm quirky like that, but I think those parts are very powerful, just like Shakespeare's Richard III or Iago and Othello. I don't have a propensity for evil, but I somehow sort of understood Lecter's mind. I don't mean that I understood it in an intellectual way, but I understood it intuitively"
Hopkins, who won an Academy Award for his chilling film portrayal of Dr Hannibal Lecter, denies being one for a tremendous amount of research.
"If I'm asked to do a part I just go ahead and learn it and do it. It's very anti-Stanislavski, but it's the way I work."
But he admits to having a gift for "playing monsters well. I understand monsters, I understand madmen. I can un derstand what makes people tick in these darker levels."
Monsters have long been a fixture of mythology and children's fairy tales. The need to be frightened, to safely dip into the inky recesses of our imagination seems a universal characteristic. Whether in dreams, literature or film, we can confront the beast within and escape unscathed. We may visit the darkness without being forced to live in it forever.
Perhaps the ability to remain detached allowed Hopkins to create the aloof, supercilious Lecter.
"Some actors make a great deal of doing tremendous research and that's good for them. For me, I can't do it. If I had probed all the depths and got too involved in it, it would have been unspeakable."
And far too real. As Hopkins notes, "We can give ourselves a fright, or hold our breaths and then we can go out into the sunshine or go out and get popcorn or whatever and go back to reality. I think it helps us to identify some thing in ourselves."
At what point does normal fantasy become deadly reality? What happens when the line between darkness and light becomes blurred?
For Hopkins to understand Lecter's mind was one thing, but to interpret it in a way that would create a fascinating character for the film audience was an entirely different challenge. There was still the risk that the audience would find Lecter revolting and turn their backs upon the entire film. Hopkins even had a fleeting thought that perhaps he shouldn't be part of something so satanic and so evil as Lecter.
"He is in my mind the personification of the devil, which is very seductive, and I suppose that in human mythology the dark forces of human nature are much more fascinating than the light.
"When you're playing an evil part like Lecter, you mustn't play evil. You have to play the opposite," says Hopkins. "You have to look for the charm, the attractive quality buried in there."
Finding the attractive quality of 'Hannibal the Cannibal' cannot have been an easy task. Biting off the tongue of a prison guard or eating his victim's liver with "fava beans and a nice Chianti" hardly qualifies as charming.
"But what he says is so witty and clever," Hopkins points out. "He is four moves ahead of everyone else. I just went to play the humor. I knew what he looked like, I knew the sound of his voice when I first read it, and for some strange reason I thought of Katharine Hepburn and Truman Capote."
Despite this capricious dismissal of his interpretation of the odious Lecter, Hopkins somehow managed to charm. He made us secretly silently and guiltily root for Hannibal. We knew, somehow that he wouldn't harm Agent Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) and that he, unlike the other men in her life, regarded her intelligence as her most attractive quality. We breathlessly awaited the next time dragon and damsel would stare into each other's eyes, each refusing to blink for fear of missing a nuance, a clue, a weakness.
Hopkins says that like Bergman's Seventh Seal, "they play a game together and he's quid pro quo. If Tom Harris writes another book... I would have Lecter say to Clarice Starling, 'You've got to kill me, you've got to destroy me, but I'm going to come after you. I'm going to outwit you, outsmart you, so you'd better be really clever because I want you to kill me, but you make one false move and I'll kill you.'"
Webster describes psychopathic personality as "an emotionally and behavioral disordered state characterized by clear perception of reality except for the individual's social and moral obligations and often by the pursuit of immediate personal gratification in criminal acts, drug addiction, or sexual perversion."
Special Agent John Douglas of the FBI's elite serial crime unit pursued some of the most notorious serial killers of our time and was the model for Jack Crawford in The Silence of the Lambs. In his best-selling book, Mind Hunter, he cautions "Don't make the mistake of confusing a psychopath with a psychotic." True psychotics, he explains, have lost touch with reality and don't commit serious crimes very often and when they do, they are usually so disorganized that they are caught relatively quickly.
Conversely the psychopathic Lecter is a pitiless, lethal machine in total control. "But highly civilized," Hopkins says, with a trace of admiration. "So sane, in fact, that he's slipped over into insanity. It's like one of those James Bond movies Goldfinger - where Bond says 'You know you're mad,' and he says, 'No, Mr Bond. Let's just say that I'm abnormally sane."
Doctor of Criminology Susan Fellows, whose mentor was the late Jack Whitehouse, one of the world's foremost criminal police bibliographers, sees less clear definitions of psychopath, psychotic and sociopath. "I have a problem with psycho and path. It means 'sick mind' and somebody who has a sick mind isn't really in touch with what he is doing, in my opinion. What I find intriguing is the sociopath, be cause it indicates somebody who knew better, who had options, who had a mom, a grandma, a teacher who said this was right and this was wrong and somewhere along the line made a clear choice. Whether it was cognizant or not I cannot really speak. You see, I am basically a sociologist - I don't know why people do what they do, I just know what people do."
Psychopath or sociopath, how does one go about portraying a pernicious personality like Lecter? It's not enough to just act crazy.
Where do you begin to develop a character whose mental machinations are a mystery even to psychiatrists and criminologists?
"The name Lecter had an effect on my inner workings," Hopkins recalls. "Lecter sounds like a shiny ebony box full of killing instruments. While I was reading the script I would close my eyes and repeat the name Lecter, Hannibal Lecter, and I gradually built a picture of him sitting in his office as a psychiatrist dressed in a black suit, black shirt, black tie and black shiny shoes... immaculate. Playing Bach on the sound system while interviewing patients."
And what of the sexuality of Lecter? "I wanted to get a sort of sexual ambivalence about the man," says Hopkins, "...that he is not one thing or the other, but he's everything. And I think in ambivalence there is power."
From the moment we see Dr Lecter we are drawn to his power, his control. Director Demme asked Hopkins for his ideas on how Lecter should be seen for the first time, after giving the audience such a build up.
"I'd had a hunch the night before and I said... I'd like to be seen standing right in the middle of the cell, waiting for her. I know she's there, I know she's coming. It's like that dark fantasy when you're a child and you come into a room and you know you're not alone and then you look on the wall next to you and there's a huge spider," Hopkins says, punctuating his words with a shudder.
If Lecter is the spider, Agent Starling is the boldest of flies. From the beginning of the film there is a subtext of sexual tension as each of the male characters, from entomologist to prison guard, reveals his attraction to Starling with an overt pass or merely a glance at her legs as she walks by.
Lecter, however, greets her with cool amusement as if he knew not only knew she was coming, but as if he can read her mind, and even that he knows why she was selected by the FBI serial killer expert Jack Crawford. Just as Crawford has an uncanny ability to get inside the murderous mind, so does Lecter possess the ability to inhabit the mind of the investigator. Starling was deliberately chosen to elicit a specific response and Lecter seems aware of the intent. He willingly accepts the manipulation, but for different reasons than the obvious sexual overtones.
"Of all people, they send in this young girl. I think it amuses him that she actually stands there when everyone else is terrified," says Hopkins. "She actually confronts him. I think he admires her and he becomes fond of her, and in his own strange way he loves her." He seems as intent upon probing her innocence as his inquisitors are upon under standing the complexities of an intellect which has turned its focus toward the heinous.
A psychiatrist is trained to heal minds; to help us understand our deepest fears. We expect the doctor to possess great insight and control, to be able to see what we cannot see. Clear perception. The words used in the definition of a psychopath. The doctor must have a greater understanding of what drives us to do self-destructive things. Clear perception.
More frightening than any open threat is to think that because of the psychopath's ability to perceive reality so clearly he or she may be wandering around with the general public, seemingly benign. In fact, they are among us, and unless we somehow become intimate with one of them, we may never know them for what they are. They occupy the murky depths of the fear of the unknown.
Our fascination with the macabre ranges from the instinct to slow down at the scene of a traffic accident to the delight of being frightened by a horror movie. It's not only the fear of the unknown. Sometimes the suspense of knowing can be much worse, as in Hitchcock's Psycho.
"It was psychological terror," Hopkins says. "When Vera Miles says, 'I'm going up there [to the house]. What can an old woman do to me?', we're thinking 'Don't go up there,' because she's going right into our nightmare, she's going into the darkness of our own minds."
Perhaps our fascination with horror addresses a need to be frightened out of our minds--the scariest place of all.
