Morality Death Match:
Lecter vs. Chigurh

2 comments

1. James J. O'Meara says:

   May 11, 2022 at 2:59 pm

   Great piece, much food for thought here.

   Colin Wilson’s novels, especially the ones from the 1950s — are also excellent examples of using fiction to explore moral situations.

   “Chigurh is hunting money, but not for himself. For him, retrieving the drug-deal stash is the performance of a duty chance has thrust upon him, and he must perform it unswervingly, guided as he is by a moral compass pointing exactly at the opposite pole to other such devices. When Carla Jean asks him why she has to die, he replies that he made a promise to her husband before he died — which was to kill her. This is simple moral consistency, albeit as a negative print.”

   Chugurh’s notions of duty — “a rigid adherence to an inexorable moral program” –remind me of what Richard Taylor, in his book Good and Evil, said about Kant’s duty-based moral theory: “If anyone said to me that he lived his life by the Categorical Imperative, I would regard him with as much loathing as if he had confessed to habitually drowning small children, just to watch them squirm.”

   Readers of this webzine will recall, perhaps with some weariness, that I much prefer the film Manhunter and the characterization of Lektor (as it’s spelled there) by Brian Cox. Demme’s version is too hammy and operatic (in the bad sense, or is there any others?), suggesting the Phantom of the Opera and sexy versions of Dracula. (Not to knock Hopkins’ performance, he’s doing his job, enacting Demme’s version). There’s no way this guy could function as a psychoanalyst, or even as a orchestral society board member (that’s why he kills the flautist who hit a wrong note); he’s simply too obviously evil. (They could have called him Dr. Hannibal Evil).

   Cox’s Lektor is a normal guy, just a bit pretentious about his status (his colleagues are “from cornfield universities”). It’s believable that he could have killed a Princeton student, while Hopkins’ guy would never be let near a student, and if he was, the student would have immediately run away. In fact, Lektor was being consulted by the FBI, and Graham only realized he was the killer when he found a book on war wounds in Lektor’s office.

   Moreover, as between Lechter and Chugurh, while Chugurh’s notion of duty may be effectively sociopathic, I don’t think Lechter has a moral compass at all, like a predatory animal (note his slicked back hair and steady gaze).

   The whole “he only kills rude people” is, as Clarice would say, “too hokey for Lechter.”  sure, he kills people the audience wants to see dead, authority figures like Dr. Chilton, or the two cops, or bad guys like Miggs or Mason Verger, but how “rude” were the German tourists he kills (off screen, of course) just to steal their car? Lechter probably improvised that “discourtesy is unspeakable to me” line when Miggs assaulted Clarice, knowing it would impress her. The tourists were simply in his way, so he dispatched them, like a sociopath.

   By contrast, Manhunter‘s Tooth Fairy is simply truly evil; “he butchers whole families to pursue trivial fantasies.” No guff about making the world a nicer place. Yet Graham is also able to articulate some real moral complexity:

   Will Graham: This started from an abused kid, a battered infant… There’s something terrible about…

   Jack Crawford: What are you, sympathizing with this guy?

   Will Graham: Absolutely… My heart bleeds for him, as a child. Someone took a kid and manufactured a monster. At the same time, as an adult, he’s irredeemable. He butchers whole families to pursue trivial fantasies… As an adult, someone should blow the sick fuck out of his socks… Do you think that’s a contradiction, Jack? Does this kind of understanding make you uncomfortable?

   There’s nothing like this kind of moral complexity in Demme’s film; just some crowd-pleasing stuff about “male gaze” and globalist PR about how the FBI was bad when mean to MLK but now they’re good because they go after real bad guys (like Trump or the alt-right).

   There’s a YouTube guy who does film analyses under the name “Collative Learning” who devoted one to Demme’s Lechter, and concludes that the character is not “complex” but simply incoherent: there are no super-smart, super-charming sociopaths. As you say, they are simply “tawdry figures not rounded out by great novelists.” He points out that in the second edition of Silence, Harris adds a preface where he talks about all his research, and admits that Lechter is unusual, but says that he found, and met, one real live Lechter type; of course, he can’t reveal the real name.

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2. Robert Wallace says:

   May 11, 2022 at 8:28 pm

   Superb piece, Mark. Thank you. What fascinates people about villains like Lecter is why they do it, i.e., their morality. Lector also possesses charisma, the eternal force of attraction.

   There is also a subconscious awareness that our society is deeply rotten, which nurtures a temptation to “burn it all down.” That is the magnetism of Ledger’s Joker, whose ideal is chaos like Lecter. The charisma is present once again.

   “Moral philosophy, in my view, is largely a waste of time after Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morals.” I could’ve written this sentence myself—one of those books that healed my intellect through something like electroshock therapy.

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