The rationale, I suppose, is that Lecter must be truly evil—and therefore truly fascinating—if he is clever enough to maintain such control over his surroundings, and such a chokehold on his truncated emotional spectrum. Yet “evil,” as we define it, often has little to do with control. Violence and cruelty are far more likely to issue forth from a lack of autonomy as they are from confident mastery. This has been the case even in the most fantastic of past fictions—even, in fact, in Hannibal Lecter’s past narratives.
....The concept of inborn psychopathy is one the public has grown deeply familiar with in the years since Hannibal Lecter became a household name. It populates not just our fictions, but our discussions of all manner of crime: dismissing someone as a “psychopath” or a “sociopath,” essentially removing the weight of their actions from society’s shoulders, is as convenient as it is comforting—and seems so much more scientific, and so much less cruel, than calling someone a “monster.” It is a conclusion so easy to draw, and a privilege so easy to abuse, that one almost has to assume we have abused it. If we know that psychopaths exist, little restrains us from assuming they commit every crime that troubles us. Yet “the concept of the psychopath,” Janet Malcolm memorably argued, “is, in fact, an admission of failure to solve the mystery of evil—it is merely a restatement of the mystery—and only offers an escape valve for the frustration felt by psychiatrists, social workers, and police officers, who daily encounter its force.”
....Believing in psychopaths, like believing in fairies, is a paradoxically comforting fantasy. It means trusting that the psychopath is a creature apart from humanity, and that whatever harm he can wreak on society cannot, by its nature, come from within society. Society, instead, can define itself against him: we are good where he is bad, empathetic where he is empty, passionate where he is cold. If we believe in psychopaths, we may feel less pressure to believe that a “normal” person may also, under certain circumstances, commit atrocities. We can, in fact, attribute whole swaths of shameful history—genocide, state-sanctioned torture, massacres, war—to a supposedly “rare” demographic. And perhaps this is why we harbor enough fondness for psychopaths to stuff them into every orifice of our entertainment: their cruelty saves us from contemplating ourselves.
- "Can ‘Hannibal’ Ever Be More Than a Beautiful, Gruesome, Comforting Fantasy?" by Sarah Marshall
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