Eat the Rude: The Psychology of NBC's Hannibal Lecter
Every Fannibal knows that NBC Hannibal has adopted “eat the rude” as a motto, not only for the show itself, but also for its titular character. Hannibal makes plenty of references to this unspoken motto throughout the show - “It was a particularly chatty lamb,” he says of one dish (which we have to assume is human). “That was rude, Miss Lounds,” he’s told Freddie on more than one occasion. “We evolved the ability to communicate disappointment to teach those around us good manners.”
I have a theory about Hannibal’s obsession with politeness, and I’ve never seen anyone write this out before. Analysis below the cut.
Let’s get one thing straight: Hannibal Lecter does not understand normal human morality.
Morality, granted, is arbitrary (at least from an an atheist point of view - and as far as I can tell, Hannibal is working from an atheist point of view). Without a higher power to pull the strings, without the final moral judgment of heaven and hell, there is no real advantage to morality. The Western world runs on capitalism, on appearances and shallow charisma, on money and privilege. Sociopathy is, in our society, an advantage.
But the appearance of sociopathy is not.
Humans, scientifically speaking, are social creatures. We evolved to survive in packs. From a mercilessly scientific point of view, humans are only programmed to love because it gives us the greatest advantage over our environment, over our prey, and over those animals who might have been our predators. It’s scientifically proven: Take a human away from human society, and he goes insane.
Hannibal Lecter, then, is what happens when the pure, cold, amoral logic of survival collides with the ingrained need for companionship. Hannibal has three main traits, three main sides to his character, all of which conflict with one another to create an engine for both charisma and self-destruction.
One: Hannibal cares deeply for his own well-being.
Two: Hannibal is resourceful in the extreme.
Three: Hannibal, like almost all humans, is a social creature.
These traits sound useful, even moral, on the surface. We’d all like to be socially capable, resourceful and clever; we’d all like to love ourselves. But Hannibal’s specific problem is that his traits are extreme. Hannibal’s self-love is greater than his love for anyone else, so great that he (like Narcissus, like Lucifer) cannot see past it or even consider compromising. Hannibal’s resourcefulness equates to complete ruthlessness - nothing gets between Hannibal and what he wants, especially not pesky human morals. Hannibal’s social nature manifests as extreme curiosity about others.
But traits one and three are necessarily incompatible. Hannibal loves himself completely, but cannot truly love anyone else. He is so devoted to his own interests, his own way of life, that he cannot sacrifice even minor details of his own aesthetic for anyone else. He would rather give up other people’s lives, even the lives of those he wants to consider “friends,” to continue being himself. He considers being himself, being true to himself, to be of the utmost importance.
But here’s the kicker: He does consider certain people his friends.
He does consider himself to be a moral being.
Hannibal Lecter is human, and like all humans, he wants to believe that he is in the right.
“Eat the rude” isn’t Hannibal’s badass catchphrase; it isn’t his supreme dark lord tagline. “Eat the rude” is, to Hannibal, what passes for a moral code.
See, Hannibal may not be moral in a typical sense, but he grew up in a society with other humans. He knows that people have these things called morals, he knows what most people consider to be moral actions - rudeness is immoral, politeness is moral, more on that later - and he knows that as a human, he’s expected to live by a set of rules himself. But there’s a gap or two in his understanding of this phenomenon called morality. Namely, he’s shallow, as sociopaths tend to be. He sees the surface of things, but not what’s underneath. He sees what other people find moral, what other people look for in a friend or an employee or a lover, but he doesn’t see why. Most of us will agree with the statement that “what you do - within reason - isn’t as important as why you do it.” (Killing a guy for money is wrong, but killing him to keep him from burning down an orphanage is right.) Hannibal doesn’t understand this at all - to him, what you do on the surface is more important than the underlying reasons.
Rudeness - an aesthetic grotesquery, a social blemish - is therefore a terrible sin in Hannibal’s book. It doesn’t matter that Marissa Shore was being rude because she was emotional and her mother was in the wrong; it matters that she was being rude. It doesn’t matter that Freddie isn’t all bad, that she saved Chilton’s life and warned Jack about the condition of Bev’s body; it matters that she takes rude photographs.
Hannibal is incapable of seeing beyond the surface; he’s incapable of maintaining more than a superficial relationship with another person, or of adhering to anything more than the pretty facsimile of a moral code. Hold Hannibal Lecter’s soul up to the light, and you’ll find that it’s paper-thin, translucent, insubstantial. Hannibal Lecter has no substance. He has only his polite smile.
But, being a social creature, he wants more.
He wants to understand why others do the things they do. He wants to be the kind of person Will Graham would truly consider a friend. He wants to have a soul, to be a part of society, to be truly human. This is why he pokes around in Will’s psychology - not because he’s a sadist, not because he’s bored, but because he wants to understand. Will Graham is not only an intellectual experiment to Hannibal Lecter, but an experiment in moral substance. Will Graham is Hannibal Lecter’s ultimate question mark: How does Man’s mind work?
(In the end, of course, this curiosity will ruin him. His slow dissection of Will Graham’s mind brings Will close to him, tips Will off, allows Will to set pieces in motion to bring about Hannibal’s downfall. Hannibal is the proverbial cat whom curiosity kills. His commitment to his own curiosity, to his own aesthetic, to his own need for understanding, is what will put him away. This is his tragedy: He loves his own mind too much.)
All his life, Hannibal has been on the outside looking in. This is not to say that he deserves sympathy, that he should be pitied, that there is anything good in him. There is not. There are few shreds of humanity inside Hannibal Lecter, and those shreds are tentative and only half formed. Like the Adversary of Milton’s Paradise Lost, Hannibal is a combination of the desire to understand and the absolute inability to understand.
And this is how Hannibal Lecter reconciles himself with himself.
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