6/99
I do not like thee, Dr Fell
Remember how Brian De Palma betrayed the fans of Mission Impossible and the characters in that series by turning Jim Phelps (played by Jon Voight) into the villain? That's what AP journalist turned thriller writer Thomas Harris has done with Hannibal (Delacorte, 486 pages, $27.95, ISBN 0.385.29929.x). It's obvious that Harris does not want filmmakers to take this sequel to The Silence of the Lambs and make another film; he has filled it with disgusting passages that one has a hard time imagining a filmmaker shooting in good conscience, and he has betrayed his readers and fans of Clarice Starling / Jodie Foster by…well, we will get to that. On the other hand, films such as Austin Powers and There's Something About Mary have shown that audiences have a hunger for the grotesque and revolting, and who knows how further jaded their appetites will grow in the three to seven years it may take to film the novel. If the book ever gets to the screen at all. Not only has Harris, who was paid $9 million by Hollywood for the movie rights, sabotaged the project by what happens in his new story, but the ownership of the Hannibal Lecter character and the confusing proprietorship of the rights to all the Harris entities both cinematic and novelistic is unduly complex, as only Hollywood can make it. Simply enough, with the creative team, from Jonathan Demme as director to Jodie Foster as star, all question marks at this point, the movie may never be made, as Nikki Finke warns us in a good summary of the legal dispute and the plot of the novel in Salon.
But let's pretend that Hollywood can make the film. What challenges will screenwriter Ted Tally face if he chooses to stay with the series (and he may be the only one to return, though we doubt if he would carry on without Demme and the others)?
The novel begins with a drug bust. FBI agent Clarice Starling squeals into a garage to hitch up with a task force of multi-agency cops and SWAT team members. This opener in many ways screams of the cinematic style of Richard Donner - Lethal Weapon, and could be effective on screen in the right hands (Demme has never shown much interest in that kind of filming, however, and Silence was a muted film, concentrating more on Starling wandering through dark buildings). The scene continues with a lengthy explanation of whom the cops are out to bust, and why, given to Starling in a cramped and hot undercover van bouncing down the highway. Starling, it seems, has dealt with their target, Evelda Drumgo, a black crack manufacturer and the widow of a major drug dealer. The scene is in many ways a reprise of some in Silence of the Lambs in which a reserved, self-contained woman is thrust into the resistant man's world. When the team arrives at the fish market that serves as the druggie's base of operations, Starling proves to be a competent yet compassionate cop. It turns out that someone (later we learn who) tipped the villainess -- and the media -- to the bust, and local television station helicopters videotape Starling from the air as she guns down various people, including Drumgo, who is carrying a baby, more or less as a shield, and who shoots and wounds Starling first.
This scene is effectively handled in that fast paced manner of American popular
fiction. Audiences should thrill when Starling reloads in mid shoot out while
the getaway car zooms past her ("She dropped the magazine out of the .45 and
slammed another one in before the empty hit the ground without taking her eyes
off the car"). Harris's writing style tends to be bland, shorn of poetry and
style, and can sometimes sound downright moronic ("The marshall gets in the
waiting car with his partner and when he sees Starling safely inside the house,
the federal car leaves"). Harris's doesn't exactly write with the deft compression
of Raymond Chandler or the passionate zaniness of James Ellroy. In other words,
he sounds just about like every other American pop novelist, from his idolater
Stephen King through Tom Clancy to Nelson DeMille.
Like Clancy, Harris aspires to techo-geekdom. He does a lot of research for his books, and damn it, he's going to get it all in the book! Thus we learn not just that Starling drives a Mustang, but that it is a "5.0-liter Mustang with steel tube headers." The car is cataloged as it pulls into her parking lot at the end of a long day. She shares what seems to be a duplex with Ardelia Mapp, the prerequisite black roommate a la Ally McBeal. They live together but they are not lesbians. Harris emphasizes that Mapp and Starling had "both had crushes on [John] Brigham when he was gunnery instructor at the FBI Academy." Brigham died in the shoot-out, and Starling is about to be blamed for it (I don't remember if Brigham is a character carried over from the earlier novels in the trilogy). This is a quiet scene, cinematically a good relief from the action of the opener, but perhaps goes on a bit too long and is perhaps too touchy feely for today's movie audiences. Careful viewers will recall that Ardelia also appears in a most minor role as a fellow FBI candidate in Silence and the actress who played her in other Foster films as well.
Next we learn that the tabloids are all over the Starling shoot-out. This is unlikely, and as a former journalist Harris should know better. National tabs don't care about cases like this one -- but reality video television does, and so the reviser of this sequence for the screen will turn it into the more visually active act of Starling seeing herself on something like When Busts Turn Ugly.
Briefly, we are reintroduced to Jack Crawford, whom Scott Glenn played brilliantly in the previous film. He's jogging with Tunberry, the head of the FBI (agents jog a lot in the world of Thomas Harris). The scene exists solely to introduce a motivation for Crawford to save Starling's career a few pages later. At this point Starling receives an encouraging letter from Lecter. He attempts some mind control on her, and she goes along with it. Letters aren't particularly cinematic in this kind of film, so Lecter's good wishes may come in the form of a tape or videotape, so that we can at least hear the milky voice of Anthony Hopkins as Lecter (whom we aren't going to meet up with for many more pages). By the way, all of Harris's novels are really about mind control, even the first, Black Sunday, which features the Oswald like manipulation of a Vietnam vet. Lecter is merely the supreme master of mind control, using drugs, hypnosis, and sheer charisma to manipulate and control human beings, whom Harris views as fundamentally weak and predictable.
Then we briefly meet the novel's real villain, Mason Verger. We don't
quiet yet know why we are meeting him, and this scene will probably be cut in
order to recreate the meeting-Lecter-in-the-dungeon-of-an-insane-asylum suspense
scene of Silence when Starling meets him later.
It turns out that Crawford has quietly planted the seeds of Starling's rescue, which entails letting Mason Verger know that Starling has received a letter from Lecter. Verger is a deformed but still living victim of Lecter, Lecter being the real hero of this novel because he only kills other serial killers and naughty cops. Lecter, when he was still a respected shrink and his evil doings unknown, was sent Verger, who was a young child molester. With the use of drugs including LSD, Lecter put Verger in a state of complete slavery to the point that he obeyed Lecter's order to cut off his own face with a shard of mirror and feed it to two dogs. He also cut off and ate his own nose. By the way, this all happened well in the past and the screenwriter won't have to bother to show it; the horror of it will simply be recounted to Starling. Anyway, Verger, the heir of a corrupt meat packer, now lies, deformed and paralyzed, in a special unit on his family's estate. He has no lower jaw. He has but one eye, without a lid and which is kept moistened by a monocle contraption. The skin of his face is gone. He has assistants who round up poor kids, whom he scares and mind controls into crying, their tears sopped up so that he can drink them as martinis later.
What he does have is a thirst for revenge, and the bulk of the plot entails his efforts to track down Lecter so that he can kidnap the man and watch as two genetically bred killer hogs eat him alive over several days. Anyway, Crawford gets Starling assigned to his behavioral unit, and tells her about Verger. It's good to meet him again (and awful that Harris makes him die of a heart attack in a throwaway reference near the end). There is a well wrought, interesting tension between the two.
By the way, around this time, Harris lets loose with a terrible attack on the internet. he writes, "In cyberspace at least, interest in Dr Lecter remained very much alive. The damp floor of the Internet sprouted Lecter theories like toadstools and sightings of the doctor rivaled those of Elvis in number. Impostors plagued the chat rooms and in the phosphorescent swamp of the Web's dark side, police photographs of his outrages were bootlegged to collectors of hideous arcana. There were second in popularity only to the execution of Fou-Tchou-Li." I don't happen to know who Fou-Tchou-Li is, and a quick peek on the internet revealed nothing to me, but I find it curious that Harris, who barters in outrage, should find the internet distasteful. That's Savanarola calling De Sade black.
Now, on page 50, we finally get The Journey. Demme and Talley made great
use of jogging paths, labyrinthine hallways, asylum corridors, and maze-like
basements, among other sites, to represent Starling's transitional passages
to enlightenment and to symbolize the insanity of the psychopath. Here, Starling
drives out to the Verger farm in north Maryland. This is another maze scene.
First she meets Verger's lesbian sister Margot, who gallops up on a horse garbed
in the "manly" fashion of jodhpurs and riding boots. Every time she appears,
Harris is careful to remind us how her jodhpered thighs swush together. Mainstream
novelist though he is, Harris is not without psychological insight. In the Crawford
scene Starling muses to her boss that "It's hard and ugly to know somebody can
understand you without even liking you." Here, as Margot takes Starling through
the maze of structures that take them deeper to the meeting with Verger, Harris
notes that there "is a common emotion we all recognize and have not yet named
-- the happy anticipation of being able to feel contempt." That's good.
Margot assumes that Starling will be freaked out by Verger, and is ready to
be amused.
So, finally Starling meets Verger. This will be a key scene in the film, and must be played with all the juice that the first Lecter-Starling meeting had. How to suggest the horror of Verger's body without driving away all the women audience members or prevent kids from getting in to see it at all? That will be the challenge, and the easy solution is to follow the Val Lewton standard of mere suggestion, of quick flashes and so on (the scene does take place in a darkened room). In her dialogue here, Starling sounds like herself from the movie (though Harris has supposedly never seen any of the movies made from his three previous books). When Verger tells her about the conspicuous eel in the corner, he asks her, "It's common name is the Brutal Moray, would you like to see why?," she answers "No," quickly, and the effect comes off the page amusingly, and you can see how Foster will play it well.
This is the scene wherein Verger tells Starling how Lecter manipulated him into self-mutilation. It should play well, especially with good musical accompaniment, and Foster listening with suppressed horror -- at both Verger, whom we are made to feel deserved his punishment, and Lecter. As we know from soap operas, villains all too often become the heroes, and this is the first hint that Lecter is a force of cruel justice, the real object of Harris's affection.
It turns out that Lecter was born with an extra finger that he had to have removed and the next section of the book is a wild goose chase with Starling looking for medical records that prove that an x-ray in Verger's possession is of Lecter. The point of this is not clear, since Verger already knows what he needs to know -- but it does dictate that Starling revisit the dungeon at the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, where Chilton teased Lecter (a connecting scene with with Chilton's surviving nurse girlfriend should be dropped for economy). This attempt to recreate the tension of the first film should be irrelevant, as we have the same thing in the meeting with Verger. In any case, Starling goes to the now abandoned hospital, and we have a scene reminiscent --nay, replicating -- the one in the first in which she goes to a storage unit and gives the guardian a number to call if she doesn't come back soon. Here, she browbeats a guard into staying past his relief time. She then snoops around in the basement, where she finds file cabinets in Lecter's old cell, and the medical evidence she needs. She also encounters Sammie, the madman who replaced Miggs in his cell, after Lecter talked Miggs into killing himself after throwing his sperm in Starling's face. Next she tracks down Barney (originally played by Frankie Faison), the guard who supervised Lecter. It turns out that Barney has been silently selling his Lecteriana on the market. He has an x-ray she needs. It's all irrelevant, and just an excuse to slip in Barney, who later shows up as Verger's nurse, and has some quasi-sexual encounters with Margot.
This section putters out with some mind numbing detail and then we get to the next major passage, which is set in Florence. Here Lecter has resurfaced as Dr Fell, curator of something called the Palazzo Capponi. We also meet Rinaldo Pazzi, an investigator who failed to bring down Il Mostro, a lovers' lane serial killer ("The Italian sense of irony was strong in Pazzi"). When he stumbles onto the presence of Lecter, he decides to "sell" him to Verger, who has flyers up all over Europe offering a rich reward for information. Lecter, with his incredible acuity, senses that the Quantico trained cop has made the connection, and lays a trap for him. This sequence culminates in a replica of Lecter's escape from the law in Memphis in Silence, and Pazzi is disembolwed and flung down to the street from a great height. This sequence is Martin Cruz Smith country, much too long and boring, and too long to go without Starling, Crawford, or, really, even a good death. A potential adaptor will find this the hardest portion to work into the script in that it is essentially a whole new story on its own, separate from the main story. A wise way to condense it, if it is even necessary, would be to make Pazzi's mission a success — he does lead Verger to Lecter (and Lecter can be shown under the end credits following the newly rich Pazzi down the alleys of Jamaica).
OK, so where we're trying to get to is the grand confrontation between Verger and Lecter. As it happens, after escaping and killing Pazzi, Lecter decides to sneak back in to America. (There is a supposedly funny scene on an airplane between Lecter and a kid who takes his paté, that will require some acute casting, writing and directing to succeed). Now three people are hunting each other: Verger hunting Lecter, Lecter stalking Starling, and Starling tracking down Lecter via his expensive tastes in cars and wine. Just as she is about to narrow her focus, Lecter is nabbed sneaking around her car.
Starling figures out who did the kidnapping, and gets out to the Verger
farm in time to see Lecter suspended in the air, having his feet gnawed off
by two enormous hogs.
A potential screenwriter will have to deal with a lot of subplots in this portion of the book. For one thing, Margot is plotting against her brother; and Barney has come to work for Verger, where he seems to fall in love with the buff sis. Eventually she makes him a gift of the famous Lecter tooth mask, and that should be a moment in the film when some members of the audience, their minds controlled by Harris and the director, should break out in cheers of recognition, exclamations that will be disturbing to the rest of the audience. Also, Krendler, using info supplied by Verger, gets Starling placed on administrative leave.
Anyway, now we are at the farm. There's a shoot out that is slightly cinematic. Verger fails again. Margot, who wants to be the heir to the Verger estate and raise a child with her lesbian lover, decides to feed her half composed brother to his pet eel -- another scene that could bear suggestion rather than explicitness, or get junked altogether. All the scenes with Verger and Margot feel very childish if not cartoonish, and could be reduced and in some cases simply dropped.
Lecter or the hogs get everyone else. Meanwhile, Starling, who was knocked out with the sedative missile of an air rifle, is finally in Lecter's clutches. He spends the rest of the book drugging and hypnotizing her in an effort to mind control her into falling in love with him, a love he hasn't had since his sister died (Harris's acute grasp of psychology fails him in his efforts to give us an "explanation" for the evil of Lecter).
This is probably the most "controversial" passage of the book and may be unfilmable. Also, it betrays the character of Starling, making her Lecter's compliant love slave (although Foster as played this kind of role before, in Dennis Hopper's weird handcuff and underwear movie, Backtrack). As a gift to Clarice, guess who's coming to dinner? Lecter kidnaps Krendler and wheels in his duct-tapped body. We soon learn that, though Krendler is alive, Lecter has sawed off the top of his cranium , and Lecter takes the lid off his head with a flourish, like a waiter delivering the baked alaska, and with a long spoon scoops up bits of Krendler's frontal lobe to pan fry for Starling's delight. Eventually, Krendler's mind runs down and dies, like Hal 2000. Clarice gives Lecter her tit to suckle.
In the epilogue, the now wealthy Barney sees Lecter and Clarice at the opera in Buenos Aires and flees. Starling is still drugged and hypnotized, and still Lecter's love slave. Harris tries for a little Nabokovian modernism by writing, "We'll withdraw now, while they are dancing on the terrace -- the wise Barney has already left town and we must follow his example. For either of them to discover us would be fatal."
If Harris wanted to sabotage a film adaptation of his book, he couldn't have thought of a better method. This ending will be a major challenge to the book's adapters. But given all the people who either won't do the film, or own a piece oe chances are that it will be an abysmal disappointment to all.
For more info on Silence and some links to Jodie Foster, visit either the Thomas Harris web site or the Lecter fan club.
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