Cannibalism: A tale as old as thyme
BY ELLIE GURINI
Cannibalism is often used as a device within horror to separate the characters from a social hierarchy. They do this either by dehumanising them or elevating them above the other characters. For example, the 70s ‘cannibal boom’ films featured mainly cannibalistic tribes, presented as completely animalistic and other to the Western protagonists.[1] Alternatively, characters such as Hannibal Lector are portrayed as being affluent and engaging in cannibalism due to their own desire. This article will focus specifically on Hannibal as he is in the NBC series Hannibal, and comparing his portrayal to other cannibal-based media. Please note this article will have spoilers for the series, as well as the book Motherthing, as well as some description of specific fictional cases of cannibalism.
Vegan Amy Roberts claims in a review of Hannibal that she ‘can’t separate one flesh from another.’[2] This seemingly stems from her disapproval of the morality of eating meat, but also serves to show that the series makes very little distinction in friend or food. One thing I found while watching Hannibal is that he seems to create his own social hierarchy at his dinner table. For example, he shows a great deal of respect to Jack Crawford, whom he treats as an adversary in a sense. We see him antagonise and push against Crawford throughout the series, however we also see him feed him his victims. We could view this as another taunt, a way to make the detective complicit without his knowledge, thus below Hannibal himself. However, I think it’s worth considering that he feeds him another person. Hannibal considers people as a product, yet he still entertains Crawford as an equal within these dinners.
As stated, Crawfords lack of knowledge or consent to his participation still paint him as inferior to Hannibal. One character we see that Hannibal explicitly cares for and views as an equal is Will Graham, who the show seems to follow as much as Hannibal himself. Graham starts as a man of the law, who helps Crawford solve crimes by getting into the mind of the killers. As the show progresses, he strays from this role and his place within society, mainly due to Hannibal himself. Specifically, we see Hannibal treat Graham as an equal when he believes him to have killed journalist Freddie Lounds. The two of them prepare a meal together, with Hannibal joking that Will can ‘slice the ginger,’ referencing Lounds’ red hair. Whilst the specifics of their relationship changes from this point, Hannibal still seems to consistently regard will as an equal from this point forth.
Now we’ve discussed some characters Hannibal favours via cannibalism, it’s time to discuss those he doesn’t. For this, I’ve specifically looked at Abel Gideon and Mason Verger. Gideon claims to have committed murders of the Chesapeake Ripper, aka Hannibal himself. In theory this should be a good thing, but Hannibal is characterised by his pride in his murders, and sees this as someone claiming his glory. Additionally, Gideon attempts to turn Graham against Hannibal. As a result of this, Hannibal kidnaps Gideon and force feeds him his own cooked leg. This leads to a bit of confusion when considering power dynamics, as the ‘food’ in this situation is also the consumer. Blurring the lines between the two could be a critique on Gideons false claims; he wasn’t a cannibal, but he is now. Hannibal has turned (part of) his lies into the truth.
Verger is a character who seems to have sadism and power similar to that of Hannibal himself, however he handles himself in a gawdy manner. Hannibal’s issue with him likely stems from him putting Will in danger but could also be related to the way he treats his sister, given how Hannibal was shaped by his own sister’s death. Whilst in a therapy session, Hannibal offers Verger hallucinogenic pills, and convinces him to maim himself and feed his body to Graham’s dogs. This exemplifies Hannibal’s power in one of the most extreme ways seen within the show; people don’t even have to be dead for him to stop seeing them as people. Plus, Hannibal doesn’t deign him worthy of being eaten by himself, only the dogs. This could also relate to Vergers actions towards Graham; Hannibal can’t feed him to Graham himself, so the dogs are the next best thing. Following from this, Hannibal doesn’t end up killing Verger, leaving him to live permanently scarred, both physically and by the knowledge that Hannibal bested him.
Ainsley Hogarth’s Motherthing represents cannibalism in a similar way, in the sense that a narratively powerful character eats another less powerful character, and their death is related more so to the consumption of their flesh than the ending of their life. It’s a rather romantic tale, wherein our main character Abby feeds her husband Ralph. This is similar to how Hannibal often feeds his victims to people he likes, or how Hannibal specifically kills one man in an attempt to gain attention from Graham. Within Motherthing, Ralph has fallen into a depression after his mother’s death and, believing them to be haunted by her mother-in-law, Abby goes to a psychic who agrees and advises her to ‘feed him something, take care of him.’ Abby fixates on the notion of finding the perfect meal to bring her husband back to her, so they can move on with their life and form the family she always yearned for. This leads to her murdering Janet, a woman who abandoned her mother at the care home Abby worked at, and feeding her to Ralph. Abby thinks ‘wet gets itself on you if you touch it, travels and breeds, alive and dangerous. Dry is dead and looks that way,’ in regards to the flesh changing texture as she cooks it. In this passage, she barely seems to see Janet as an animal, let alone a human, with her later even reducing the corpse to a ‘masticated lump’ on Ralph’s throat as he swallows. She’s elevated Ralph to the point wherein this is completely within the realms of acceptable behaviour in her eyes, with her claiming Janet was ‘forced to use her worthless, wicked life to save one of the greatest men in the entire world.’ This ironically is how I see Hannibal’s view of himself on occasion. For example, we see him refer to Graham as the ‘lamb of God,’ an analogy for Jesus, knowing full well that he is the person who shaped Graham into what he is, thus making him a God. This acts as a way to justify their cannibalism.
Whilst we’ve spoken a lot about how Hannibal is elevated above other characters, whom he dehumanises, we haven’t much discussed the dehumanisation of Hannibal himself within the show. This happens rarely, and tends to be through the eyes of Graham, who often hallucinates or dreams about a stag-like figure representing Hannibal. This is almost ironic, given that stags are prey animals for hunters, which is referenced many times within the show. It’s worth noting that Hannibal does act as Graham’s prey within the show. This is done unknowingly at first, when Graham is investigating the Chesapeake Ripper, like the rest of the police force, but more so within season 2 when we see Graham get confirmation that Hannibal is who he thinks he is. Once again, Hannibal regains control by turning himself in in season 3, knowing at this point that Graham would have let him go if only to be rid of him. Despite the obvious power play within this move, it is very much a declaration of Hannibal’s priorities in the sense that he would rather be trapped and seen by Graham than to be free and forgotten by him. This is a big contrast to previous seasons where Hannibal accuses Graham of trying to take his freedom. Still, despite casting himself into a more powerful light, this dehumanisation stands, just with the reaffirmation that the animal Hannibal represents is a predator.
This dehumanisation of a cannibal is possibly a more familiar topic to many of us, relating back to 70s films such as the ‘cannibal boom’ Italian films [1] and classic American flick The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The first genre is more broad, but tends to focus on Western travellers encountering tribes which had previously had no contact with outsiders, who then track them down, killing and eating them. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre admittedly follows a pretty similar set up, except the villains don’t represent a foreign tribe, but the lower class. It also makes its villains disabled in the case of Leatherface, who is nonverbal throughout the series. This is likely to add a communication barrier, making the victims more helpless, whilst also separating the cannibals from the victims who represent the average American college students. Franklin is also disabled, but in a way which restricts his motion, not his mental capabilities, serving to entrap the group further. Bernard however notes that Franklin ‘blurs the boundaries between the middle class noncannibal and the working class cannibal,’[3] after having unknowingly, yet joyfully, committing an act of cannibalism. This could mean that Franklin’s disability acts as a mirror to Leatherface’s, with them each being outsiders within their respective groups. In this case, I believe the purpose of cannibalism is to dehumanise the working class, as it is such a taboo.
I’ve mentioned the 70s movies as a whole at the same time, as I think they serve the same purpose of undermining the cannibals (and thus the groups who they represent), opposed to Hannibal and Motherthing which undermine the victims (except in the case of Grahams hallucinations). Does this mean that less traditional cannibal stories endorse the actions of the villains? No, I don’t think so. Both Hannibal and Motherthing have a very limited point of view. Hannibal follows Graham, who later becomes Hannibal’s co-conspirator, and is set in a social circle wherein Hannibal has seemingly dictated every decision such that Graham (and thus the audience) sees him in a specific way. Motherthing is quite explicitly told by Abby, an unreliable narrator, who is struggling with her grief and possible other mental health issues. She hyperfocus’s on her husband and being the best wife for him. I think it’s likely that cannibalism within this book is simply a means to show the disregard she shows to everything outside of that relationship, including morality and concern for others. As we know, she dehumanises Janet through cannibalising her, but we also tend to see that she holds no close relationships outside of that with her husband within the story. This could be a criticism of the way society views wives and mothers as wives and mothers before they view them as people, which is supported by Hogarths mentions that ‘I don’t think the idea of traditional wifely duties is gone.’[4] Through her act of cannibalism, Abby’s settled fully into her role as a woman who loves Ralph and forgotten her identity as a woman, and person, without him. When asked what inspired this book, Hogarth mentions that it focusses on caring for a mentally ill person in ‘a traditional marriage where the woman is tasked with being responsible for her husbands health in every way.’4
Hannibal takes a similar approach of using his murderous ways to feed those close to him and lure in Graham. That being said, I believe Hannibal’s control over the way audience see him through tricking Graham represent the image he has curated for himself within society. That, combined with his affluent nature, leads me to believe that part of his cannibalistic nature acts as a criticism to what people can get away with in a capitalistic society if they appear the correct way. This is almost antithetical to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which explores what happens if people outside of the norm engage in such taboos. All of these combined show how cannibalism can be used to criticise and disregard social hierarchies and structures, although the 70s films normally use them as a way to criticise societies the filmmakers aren’t as aware of.
[2] Michael Fuchs & Michael Phillips (2018) “It’s Only Cannibalism If We’re Equals”: Carnivorous Consumption and Liminality in Hannibal, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 35:6, 614-629, DOI: 10.1080/10509208.2018.1499344
[3] Mark Bernard (2011) Cannibalism, Class and Power, Food, Culture & Society, 14:3, 413-432, DOI: 10.2752/175174411X13046092851073
[4] Allison McKnight (2022), “A Haunting Mother-in-law Experience”, The Big Thrill, Up Close: Ainslie Hogarth - THE BIG THRILL
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