INTERPRETATIONS

Czesl/aw Mil/osz and Ted Bundy, as ’cooked’ by Thomas Harris: The Creation of dr. Hannibal Lecter

Cannibal Hannibal Lecter (elected for the greatest film villain of all times) first appeared in the film Manhunter by Michael Mann (1986, screen adaptation of the novel The Red Dragon by Thomas Harris; where he was impersonated by Brian Cox), but the character had entirely evolved with Anthony Hopkins in Demme’s film Silence of the Lambs (1991). In Hannibal (2001), third adaptation of the so far last Harris’s book, Ridley Scott made an effort to ruin the character, but the series was very much saved by the young director Brett Ratner and his The Red Dragon (2002, new adaptation of the first novel from the series). Thomas Harris’s main model for Hannibal was real life serial killer Ted Bundy, however, he was a personification of American trash culture, with no intellectual depth. Harris made no allusions as to the role models for Lecter’s intellectual refinement, but the author of the text accidentally discovered that Czeslaw Milosz in one photography bore much resemblance with Lecter, while in Milosz’s novel In the valley of the river Issa, he also found many similarities with Lecter’s biography. The author of the text also found links with the serial in Czeslaw Milosz’s essays, not just with the character of Lecter, but Clarice Starling too, so that it is possible that Harris imagined Lecter as the dark side, and Clarice as the bright side of one and the same symbolical ’persona’.

Ante Škrabalo