Even fictional people have to eat. Sometimes food reveals what we should know about a character, sometimes it\u2019s a pleasant pause in the action, sometimes it\u2019s crucial staging platform for exposition, and sometimes it\u2019s just a scoop of Ray Liotta\u2019s pre-frontal lobe, which they say is the seat of good manners. Food Fiction is an ongoing feature that looks at some of the most memorable foods in the history of storytelling.<\/p>\n
The reality of cannibalism is hard to handle. When the national news slowly revealed the extent of Jeffrey Dahmer\u2019s activities in the early \u201990s, nobody made dumb jokes about it\u2014not even dumb-joke-prone, late-night television hosts. We were respectfully horrified. And, when presented slowly and seriously, a close look at The Donner Party notes how the stranded travelers\u2019 slide into cannibalism has been considered the most terrifying PBS special of all time. In fiction, too, cannibalism is terrible when treated realistically. The threat of cannibalism in Cormac McCarthy\u2019s The Road is such a believable, vivid possibility that it makes every page almost unbearable.<\/p>\n
So why does every teasing dad in America love to make this slurping sound any time someone mentions Chianti?<\/p>\n
Poor fava bean farmers, they\u2019re marketing nothing but fiction\u2019s most notorious side dish.<\/p>\n
Why are that quote and slurp so tempting to turn into a joke? Jonathon Demme\u2019s Silence Of The Lambs is one of the most stylish, intense, and effective horror movies ever made, and Dr. Hannibal Lecter is our highest profile nurse-tongue-eating monster. Shouldn\u2019t it bother us to make light of it?<\/p>\n
And why aren\u2019t we bothered when Jay Leno\u2014normally a purveyor of anodyne humor\u2014uses cannibalism as a go-to laugh-getter, referencing the 1973 sci-fi classic Soylent Green? Depicting mankind in need of innovative thinking to keep everybody fed, the film introduces a processed food called Soylent Green, and as it turns out, \u201cSoylent Green is people!\u201d and Charlton Heston\u2019s reading of that line has so much oomph it somehow became code for managing to overact to the most horrible thing you can imagine, which, in Leno\u2019s defense, is funny.<\/p>\n
But we\u2019re whistling in the graveyard when we laugh, distracting ourselves from our fears by pretending to take them lightly. We\u2019re also playing around with something that\u2019s forbidden, which makes the laughter a little more high-pitched and nervous. Cannibalism is a fundamental transgression, fighting with incest for worst imaginable act. Storytellers cross a line when they move to cannibalism from mere \u201canthropophagy,\u201d the fancy term for consuming human flesh\u2014which includes people getting eaten by aliens or monsters. By choosing man-eats-man, a storyteller aims to get a certain rise out of their audience. Cannibalism is commentary on the savagery of society, it\u2019s an effectively shocking dramatic revelation, it\u2019s tragedy and grotesquery, and as we\u2019ve discovered, under certain circumstances it is giggle-inducing.<\/p>\n
Sometimes it\u2019s intended to be all of those at once. Stephen Sondheim manages to make murder and cannibalism both tragic and momentarily comic in Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street. He embraces the source material\u2019s \u201cpenny-dreadful\u201d horror at first, but then the plot deepens into a sad, sympathetic nightmare. Much of Sondheim\u2019s career has been spent looking for subject matter that his mentor, Oscar Hammerstein, might argue is an odd choice on which to base musical theater\u2014presidential assassins, pointillism, an Ingmar Bergman movie. But even Hammerstein would have to admit, there is something perversely winning in this pie shop business plan, pitched by Angela Lansbury to George Hearn as Sweeney, her \u201csupplier.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s so appalling that it\u2019s riveting. It\u2019s playful, too, even though it\u2019s full of menace and heartbreak, and with \u201cA Little Priest,\u201d Sondheim bonds us together in the guilt of enjoying all those macabre puns. He almost manages to win us over to the awful idea. Tim Burton\u2019s pallid movie version is generally well done too, with Johnny Depp brooding and Helena Bonham Carter scheming\u2014though Burton\u2019s production is designed for his vision of a movie screen, not a Broadway stage, where a little audience-friendly ham is usually appreciated. Thus, the bleakness of the movie can miss or muffle the fun hidden in the darkness: Watch Bonham Carter and Depp essentially miss the laugh that Lansbury and Hearn expertly wring out of the lines, \u201cHa!\u201d \u201cGood, you got it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Horrifying. Funny. Sad. Clever. Veering between those posts without exceeding our patience is a skill. Monty Python\u2019s Flying Circus knows right where our patience is about to give out and sends the fake audience to angrily call the whole thing off after John Cleese tentatively suggests getting some parsnips to garnish his mum.<\/p>\n
Of course the crowd is outraged at such a proposition\u2014naturally!\u2014but the audience\u2019s reaction comes off as intolerant and ridiculous. Yes, we were uncomfortable with the humor, but basically enjoying ourselves, and they interrupted and shut the whole thing down. It\u2019s goofy, what goes on in the lifeboat, but the piece ends up satirizing those who worry about the deadening of our moral sensibilities over something as silly as a skit or other work of art. <\/p>\n
Cannibalism in satire does get a reaction. Worlds shift every year as bored high schoolers deal with the twinkle in their literature teacher\u2019s eye when the realization dawns that, in \u201cA Modest Proposal,\u201d Jonathan Swift is suggesting the rich Irish simply eat the children of poor Irish. He\u2019s mocking his contemporaries\u2019 callous indifference toward the predicament of Irish overpopulation using gross-out humor two or three hundred years before any of us ever shouted \u201cSoylent Green is people!\u201d or W.C. Fields answered the question \u201cDo you like children?\u201d in Tillie And Gus with \u201cI do if they\u2019re properly cooked.\u201d<\/p>\n
In \u201cblack comedy,\u201d cannibalism is often a perverted expedient for dealing with an inconvenient corpse. In Eating Raoul, our antiheroes have a body to dispose of\u2014so they serve him for dinner. Making that the title of the film should warn us what we\u2019re in for, but it comes off mostly an excuse for trotting out a bunch of outrageous behavior, some of which is amusing. In Fried Green Tomatoes At The Whistle Stop Cafe, our heroines also find themselves with a body to dispose of, so they serve the ribs of the man-who-had-it-coming-to-him to the officers in charge of the investigation. It\u2019s not meant to be funny in the way Monty Python or W.C. Fields is funny, or wacky, like Eating Raoul, but it\u2019s pleasantly ironic.<\/p>\n
Secretly serving a human is a relatively common tactic for revenge, from the Greeks and Shakespeare to the late night movies parodied by The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Dr. Frank-N-Furter serves bad-boy rebel Eddie (played by the actor and singer Meat Loaf, whose name oddly predates his character\u2019s fate) to most of the cast in a display of contempt for almost everyone. It\u2019s all meant to be a winking tribute to B-movie schlock, of course, but when Tim Curry whisks back the tablecloth to show Eddie\u2019s gory, partially-eaten corpse, it\u2019s rather intense, or at least revolting. Still, this is black comedy, so during the terrible meal, before the tablecloth comes off, the officially unofficial midnight-movie script indicates the crowd should yell, \u201cOh, not Meat Loaf again!\u201d<\/p>\n
But black comedy and nervous laughter disappear when the audience isn\u2019t given a chance to release its discomfort with cannibalism. When Helen Mirren\u2019s character force-feeds her dead lover to his murderer, who happens to be her husband, in The Cook, The Thief, His Wife And Her Lover, she\u2019s punishing and humiliating her rotten spouse before executing him. Director Peter Greenaway wants you to feel the intensity of this revenge on a man who has spent the film cruelly consuming the lives around him.<\/p>\n
Then there\u2019s Suddenly, Last Summer. How many theatergoers showed up for Tennessee Williams one-act play in 1958 thinking the Pulitzer prizewinner would \u201cgo there?\u201d It\u2019s a mystery story, and audiences were on the edges of their Broadway seats to learn Catharine Holly\u2019s suppressed memories of what really happened to her cousin while the two were on holiday, and why her aunt wants Catharine lobotomized. When the climactic revelation comes, it can tip into melodrama, and requires a Redgraveian level of acting skill to deliver the ghastly scene movingly. That\u2019s what the BBC got from Vanessa Redgrave\u2019s daughter Natasha Richardson in an early \u201990s production. But the movie version turns into a confusing mess, because movie studios in the late \u201950s were too nervous to coherently present a story confronting society\u2019s attitudes toward homosexuality by unsubtly having a gay character killed and eaten by urchins with \u201cgoblin mouths.\u201d<\/p>\n
The details of the act itself are what bring on the squirming, whether it\u2019s the details of those street children devouring Catharine\u2019s cousin, or the matter-of-fact leftover planning of Monty Python\u2019s starving sailors. The squirming comes when we really have to think it through.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s what makes the demented savoring of human meat by Thomas Harris\u2019 Dr. Hannibal Lecter so unforgettable: He forces us to really think it through. Not only that, Harris removes every potentially understandable excuse for eating a person\u2014desperation, revenge, expedient body disposal, deadpan satirical suggestion\u2014and allows Lecter to approach the act with a connoisseur\u2019s discriminating taste and no shame. Lecter is intrigued intellectually by the moral questions, energized by the possibility of being creative in a relatively unexplored medium, and amused by the puzzle solving required to perform and enjoy cannibalism\u2014especially since both the law and our natural impulses tell him he can\u2019t.<\/p>\n
He can if he wants. He\u2019s a hedonist. And in fiction, we\u2019re always drawn toward the hedonist.<\/p>\n
Initially invented to help detective Will Graham track a serial killer in the novel Red Dragon, Lecter was that story\u2019s most memorable character. Harris brought him back in the novel The Silence Of The Lambs, but sadly, Lecter descends into punning absurdity once he escapes bondage in Lambs. By the time he\u2019s scooping out Ray Liotta\u2019s pre-frontal lobe in Ridley Scott\u2019s screen adaptation of Harris\u2019s Hannibal, Lecter is bordering on camp. He is no longer a disquieting, mesmerizing monster. Anthony Hopkins\u2019 doctor becomes a scary, goofy, effete, cruel nutjob.<\/p>\n
So how lucky we are to have this Hannibal TV series. Right there in prime time on a major TV network, Hannibal is essentially clawing back the character, re-establishing him as fiction\u2019s most unsettling consumer of census workers. Mads Mikkelsen\u2019s Hannibal is an interesting, clever, suave, amusingly fastidious fellow. He\u2019s a treacherous charmer.<\/p>\n
Of all the distressing visuals in the new series\u2014the flayed skin, the pierced-by-antlers victims, the awful visions of detective Graham\u2014the most distressing are the calm use of the simple meat grinder, a nicely presented plate, a fork, Mikkelsen\u2019s mouth in close-up, and that civilized napkin-touch to his face. Images of the pained, tragic victims of violent crime are upsetting, and that napkin-touch is just so utterly wrong. Hannibal the TV series again forces us to consider something so obviously incorrect it didn\u2019t even make the list of Ten Commandments\u2014God himself doesn\u2019t like to talk about it.<\/p>\n
No wonder we\u2019re curious.