NICHOLAS WAPSHOTT: Lecter's evil allows US to picture new age of terror

AS IF Americans did not have enough to worry about, Hannibal Lecter returned to the nation’s movie theatres last night.

Sir Anthony Hopkins’s screen cannibal made his long awaited reappearance in Red Dragon, a prequel to Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal. The serial killer in the leather muzzle has come back to continue his reign of terror at a time when Americans are already immersed in a mood of suppressed anxiety.

A shadow hangs over American life as the economy falters, the stock market continues its slide, pensions melt away and the tedium of living with the everyday inconveniences of the War on Terror try the patience. Television news keeps up the chorus of woe, plotting hour by hour the slow but seemingly certain road to war with Iraq.

Diminishing stock portfolios and continuing market volatility have wiped out or reduced every person’s sense of worth, in every sense. The picture is grim, so is this the time for grim pictures? There was much debate after September 11 over what Americans would want to watch. Would it be escapist fantasy? Was entertainment itself at an end? In different eras, films have become responses to and emblematic of the age. In the 1930s huge audiences went to the movies each week to take their minds off the Depression and unemployment. Back then, Busby Berkeley musicals and oddball comedies offered light relief.

In the 1940s and 1950s, when the dangers of the Second World War gave way to prosperity and the Cold War, film noir offered a dark response to growing wealth, a search for insecurity as well as a representation of perceived enemies. Westerns became allegories for the debates about nuclear annihilation and sustained American values.

Now America has no need to create enemies from the black lagoon, although its citizens certainly have an appetite for entertainment. In these uncertain times Americans are going to the movies more than ever before as a means of temporary escape from their troubles. Box offices are taking $90 million (£57 million) a week.

Today’s enemies are obvious, and for entertainment there appears to be an appetite for something that will engage current anxieties. The success of films such as The Panic Room (last week’s hottest rental), in which Jodie Foster is trapped in her own home by violent burglars, and One Hour Photo, in which Robin Williams plays a sinister film developer who threatens the intimate lives of those whose photographs he prints, suggest that anxious times have brought forth anxious movies.

Americans will more than likely go to see the latest adventures of Dr Lecter this weekend. The summer rash of sequels has been disappointing, with the new Austin Powers and Men in Black episodes showing waning creativity. But Silence of the Lambs and its successors are a markedly different proposition. Like the James Bond series, they make a first-class and reliable movie franchise, and Hopkins is the key to its success.

His ponderous intonation, his Welsh enunciation, his intense attention to character, his very presence on the screen as the chilling Hannibal Lecter, turns what might have been a laughable horror into something truly disturbing. The terror that he exudes is the perfect unrest cure for those who live quiet lives in calm, contented suburbs. While Homer Simpson, the sofa sloth, is one sort of American, at least as many are good, God-fearing people such as the Simpsons’ earnest neighbours, Ned and Maude Flanders.

When President Bush used the words “axis of evil” and “evil-doers” to describe Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and the al-Qaeda terrorists, sophisticated Americans scoffed at his simplicity. The comparative morality of the 1960s generation does not allow such clear terms. For progressive thinkers there is no such concept as inherent evil.

Everything and everyone can be explained, everyone can be improved. But the Flanders knew what the President meant. George W. Bush is that unusual religious phenomenon, a born-again Methodist, and he was fully aware of the effect his words would have. A large number of Christians in America have taken their faith back to the fundamentals and have a clear understanding of the difference between “good” and “evil”.

For them Hannibal Lecter is a perfect example of an individual consumed by evil. They will go to see him on the screen to study evil at close quarters and to enjoy a controlled explosion of excitement mixed with dread. They will return home shaken but safe.

The film will not help them to recognise a terrorist, but it may offer them a welcome insight into the intelligence of evil. What has proven so puzzling and alarming to Americans about the September 11 hijackers is the clarity of their thought, the certainty of their mindset and the meticulousness of their operation.

What Hopkins expresses so well in Lecter is that evil often consumes bright people and that eloquence and reason are no guarantee of goodness. For American audiences, it is important that Hopkins, like so many Hollywood screen villains, is British. He seems like an American in most respects, but he is part of another world. He speaks perfect English but remains an outsider. In that respect Hannibal Lecter is an ideal contemporary villain, living quietly in the midst of the community, waiting for his moment to strike.

The same suspicions have in the past inspired witchhunts, against American Japanese in the Second World War and closet communists in the Cold War. This time there is little xenophobia and no Senator McCarthy to orchestrate the search. More than 5,000 terrorist suspects have been lifted from their homes and have yet to be charged or, in many cases, even named. Their fate has been left to John Ashcroft, the Attorney-General, and those concerned with civil rights.

In this new age of anxiety, it is little surprise that an excitable woman in Florida mistook three medical students for terrorists and had them arrested. The surprising thing is that similar events have not happened more often.

I don't agree with all his conclusions, but have at them. I do think however that Lecter is a perfect baddie in the way this article describes - in this era, our villains need to be more than evil, they also have to be insidious.

Regards, Ivan

Boy, does this guy take the winding road in order to bash "trad America?" It's bad enough to resort to utilizing the second sequel of a sick, slick piece of cinema as a vehicle to try and pigeonhole the collective psyche of the greatest nation on earth, but after suffering through how horrifyingly dismal is America, we also get Tail Gunner Joe and John Ashcroft tossed into the stew as archtypal villains.

A combination of supercilious snickering over someone else's perceived problems, sophomoric stereotyping, and sniffling disdain probably paints a reasonably accurate picture of Mister Nicholas Wapshott. And one need not be a member of Mensa to appreciate the impeccable "progressive" train of thought he brings to this piece.

Pop psychology is a fun to dabble in, but when I did it, I dispensed the dreck between beers in the dorm, and was neither compensated nor put in print.

Pity, that.

Edward of Skid

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