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PostSubject: Hannibal Hannibal EmptySat Nov 24, 2012 12:36 pm

I must admit I didn't at first understand this film. All that stuck with me was the gruesome scene in the end.
So I watched it again, because it's Satyrs favorite movie. Twice actually. And I listened to the audiobook from youtube. I will give my interpretation.


To understand the character of Hannibal, one mainly has to focus on the other characters and how Hannibal interacts with them. This is to get a greater picture. So I will go by the characters in the movie:


Clarice Starling - She is an ambitious woman, who grew up in more poor circumstances. Secluded in the countryside. So she is unmodern, not a fashion victim of modern lifestyles, but more likely to be traditionalist. She is glad to have made it in the FBI and is climbing the career ladder. She is the other part of Lecter. They are in love with each other. The only flaw she has is that she trusts too much in the authorities. She uses her talents differently than Lecter. She wants to make her daddy proud. Which is a usual dynamic. She's still a bit in the judeo-christian worldview. She is not entirely focussed on her own advancement in life, but measures herself and selfworth in the respect others give her for doing her job well. This is her weak spot. And she becomes frustrated, vulnerable, angry and sad, when she realizes, that the ideal she held in her mind, of her employers, was an illusion. Hannibal is her mentor, who helped her overcome her fear in "Silence of the lambs" already.

Mason Verger
- He was a "victim" of Lecter. Of course Lecter is not human. That is important to understand, why he even kills people. Because they are not his kind. Like we eat meat of animals, so he eats human flesh. Verger is a decadent hedonist, a homosexual and a sexual pervert. After the incident, he turned into a Christian. He found "God" so to speak. Or claims so anyway. And uses it as a tool of power against Clarisse for example, to make her a guilty conscience for having killed people doing her police job. He is exactly opposite from Lecter. And the big opponent in this movie. In him we have the pervert, the homosexual, the Christian, the decadent hedonist. (In the book he is cruel to children also.) Lecter believing in an ideal of love between man and woman, being heterosexual, non-Christian, and a man who enjoys, but with sense and taste.

Barney Matthews
- He was fair to Lecter, when he was in jail. He was his guard. They talked. He wants to make a profit too. But shows guilt and cooperates with Clarisse.

Chief Inspector Rinaldo Pazzi - He has made a career. He is growing old and has a young beautiful wife, who is shallow and boring. So he has to spoil her with presents to keep her by his side. His weakness is his wife. He wants to conserve the present situation. He is afraid his wife might leave him. So he takes the opportunity to make a lot of money. For Lecter money is to survive, to have time for himself and to enjoy some nicer things too. But unlike Pazzi and Verger, financial wealth is not so overwhelmingly important for him, to let go of his ideals. Also he isn't just blinded by beauty like Pazzi, who makes a fool of himself, because of his much younger wife. Pazzi has no kids with his wife.

Paul Krendler - He is like Pazzi, just worse. He doesn't even have a girlfriend or wife that we know of. He is a chauvinist, a woman hater even, that harasses Clarisse. (Like many of the other men in the movie.) And he sells himself to the highest bidder. He likes sports cars and tennis. He too is exactly what Lecter is not. Lecter loves nature and he loves women. As they are representatives of nature. Even though he considers eating Pazzis wife. Probably because she's superficial and only materialisticly oriented.

Cordell - is Vergers assistant. He seems to have no backbone.

Dr. Hannibal Lecter - he is the most morally superior character in this movie. The audience is left confused though. Most people might not get it. It passed me anyway. Lecter wants to live a quiet life. He has to eat something. And most of our food, he doesn't even consider food. He has to live a somewhat costly lifestyle, because of his high sense of taste, to even bear the existence amongst humans. For him there has to be meaning, history and beauty. He enjoys art and music. We learn that he is by a slight bit not human. But superhuman. We have this theme in the vampire myth. So this imbalance keeps the storyline going. If Lecter was a human, we'd all realize, that he is the most morally superior character. But he isn't, so our judgment is clouded, if we judge him on human terms. But he has to still his appetite for human flesh somehow. And so he seeks out suitable persons. He is a moralist actually. He falls in love and wants to be with Clarisse. He is her mentor.

Of course Satyr has given a lecture on this.


Last edited by Laconian on Sat Nov 24, 2012 2:14 pm; edited 1 time in total
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PostSubject: Re: Hannibal Hannibal EmptySat Nov 24, 2012 1:23 pm

The film is a pale imitation of the book.

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PostSubject: Re: Hannibal Hannibal EmptySat Nov 24, 2012 2:17 pm

In what sense is it just a pale imitation?
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PostSubject: Re: Hannibal Hannibal EmptySat Nov 24, 2012 4:17 pm

The book explores Lecter's character in much more depth, including his vast mind palace which is not touched upon in the film.

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PostSubject: Re: Hannibal Hannibal EmptySat Nov 24, 2012 6:30 pm

The film ends in a politically-correct message:
You pay dearly for being different, and superior.

The film also does not get into the effect Hannibal has on the black orderly...showing some master/slave relating there.

The “imprisoned” Lecter is still more free than the negro
orderly, Barney (the name itself is symbolic: barn….barney) who is imprisoned
not only within a Judeo-Christian, European, nihilistic, world but also within
his own genetic limitations.
Lecter offers him a glimpse of freedom through Vermeer.
Barney, the African, decedent of slaves, American, sees, a little, through Lecter’s eyes, as Lecter appreciates light through Vermeer’s.

Light, the play of shadows, which is what Vermeer painted.

I wrote this a while back...
It is one between Detective Starling and the orderly Barney:
This scene never appears in the film.

Starling: I think you’re waiting for him to be a hot topic again.
What do you want, Barney?

Barney: I want to see every Vermeer in the world before I
die.

Starling: Do I need to ask who got you started on Vermeer?

Barney: We talked about a lot of things in the middle of the night.

Starling: Did you talk about what he’d like to do if he was free?

Barney: No. Dr. Lecter has no interest in hypothesis. He
doesn’t believe in syllogism, or synthesis, or any absolute.

Starling: What does he believe in?

Barney: Chaos. And you don’t have to believe in it. It’s self-evident.


Unremarkably Barney, a Negro orderly fortunate enough to be given a taste of European culture, through Lecter, displays the superficial awe of a simpler, more primal, mind when it is placed into contact with a higher culture as expressed in the art of Vermeer. His life’s goal, from then on, becomes to track down and to see, to visually witness, all the surviving paintings by Juhannes Vermeer, gaining, at the very least, a pleasure with the outcome when he could not fully grasp the underlying daemon at work.

Barney is given a gift by Lecter for his kindness, for the intuitive respect he offered him during his years of incarceration.
Later, in the book, Barney stumbles upon Lecter in Argentina, trying to add to his quest, but hides from Lecter’s keen senses knowing, again, intuitively, that the gift was for services rendered and for nothing more than that.
He is to Lecter no more than an animal that has been offered a taste of structure.
Most of the characters in the film are representations of
modern decadence and nihilistic despair, except for Hannibal.Starling becomes his protégé, or his unwilling project.
He
sees potential in her.

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PostSubject: Re: Hannibal Hannibal EmptySun Nov 25, 2012 1:20 pm

There is this one scene in the film though, where Hannibal is chased in north America. And Clarisse is following him. In front of the shopping mall they enter, there is a negroe musician. And Hannibal throws a coin in his hat, saying: "God bless you!" Some might miss the irony. I think the movie is well done still. I especially like the atmosphere that is created in the imagery and beautiful score.
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PostSubject: Re: Hannibal Hannibal EmptyFri Jan 04, 2013 9:56 pm

Hannibal, the Fairy Godmother: A 'progressive' view of Mentorship and murder.


"The Fairy Godmother

ADVANCEMENT, OF COURSE”

Early in Thomas Harris’s novel Silence of the Lambs (1988), Dr. Hannibal Lecter, psychiatrist, serial killer, and cannibal, makes a proposal to Clarice Starling, FBI trainee, through the bars of his cell.

“I’ll give you what you love most, Clarice Starling.”
“What’s that, Dr. Lecter?”
“Advancement, of course.”1
As usual, Lecter is right. Silence of the Lambs could be described in various ways—as a Gothic horror story, a detective thriller, or an oblique argument for vegetarianism. But if what matters is what Starling wants most (which is also what she gets), then the novel should be classified as a story of advancement, a modern-day Cinderella fable.

The fairy godmother of this Cinderella story is of course Lecter himself. Approached for advice in solving a fresh series of murders, he describes Starling to her face as “white trash,” then goes on to reward her for glimpses into her inner life by supplying riddlelike clues. Deciphering the clues, she will track down the killer, rescue the prospective victim, and finish her training in a blaze of professional glory. However diabolical his character may be, Lecter’s narrative function is thus indisputably benevolent: he bestows on the virtuous but disadvantaged protagonist the magical help that makes possible her advancement.

In the pages that follow, I will be working from the premise that a broad range of narratives, fictional and nonfictional, can be described more or less as Lecter describes Starling’s. Whatever else these stories appear to be about, they are also about advancement. This book assembles an archive (perhaps less consistent than a genre, though I will use that term as well) composed of stories that can be shown to display a common problematic of upward mobility. Having chosen to discuss very few texts out of an almost infinite field of possibilities, I offer my choices up in the hope that, analyzed in my somewhat obsessive terms, they will also resonate interestingly in the much wider circle of texts around them. This pushy procedure will seem worth carrying out only if it can be established at the outset that these stories are doing cultural work of an unpredictable and significant sort—doing something other, that is, than peddling simple wish-fulfillment fantasies or the shopworn ideology of individual self-reliance we have come to associate with them. This is what I want to suggest by proposing Silence of the Lambs as a characteristic upward mobility story of our time and Hannibal Lecter as its unlikely fairy godmother.

What could be more characteristic of our time than a Cinderella story without a Prince Charming? Starling seems to seek only what she finds: the satisfaction of solving the case, getting the respect that goes with a job well done. What she loves most is professional success, sweetened only by the admiration of her colleagues and superiors. Even as late as 1991, when Jonathan Demme’s enormously successful film version appeared, viewers expressed surprise and elation that the Jodie Foster character seemed so uninterested in finding a suitable mate. As Elizabeth Young observed, “It is not that she is waiting for the right man to come along; rather, she seems utterly indifferent to any suggestion of romance as the film proposes it, in heterosexual terms.”2 Was it possible that a Hollywood blockbuster was really offering up a beautiful female star and yet eliminating from her ambitions any romantic interest, leaving only the striving to succeed? No, it wasn’t. But the moment did seem to mark a turning point in the erotic economy of spectatorship. The audience was not asked to forsake entirely its usual vicarious pleasures. Instead, it was invited to take those pleasures in a displaced and diluted form: as a series of hints, threats, and promises surrounding two older men, Lecter and Crawford, Starling’s boss at the FBI. Each is established in a position of superiority over her, with effects both vexatious and flirtatious. With each, Starling has intense and somewhat ambiguous if only intermittent and finally inconclusive relations. These not-quite-relations seem to replace the dynamics of romantic coupling that, from novels like Richardson’s Pamela to films like Mike Nichols’s Working Girl, had merged the protagonist’s advancement in her erotic bonding with a social superior and the promise of a new, socially elevated family to come. Rather than being wooed and wedded by her prince, one might say—taking the italicized term in a slightly more neutral sense than is customary—that Starling is patronized by her mentors. The activity of patronizing does not result in reproduction. Still, however disagreeable it may sound, it does not rule out some degree of seduction.

The historical shift from marriageable masters to unmarriageable mentors, a shift that could only happen once paid employment for women outside the home had become the rule rather than the exception, marks a shift toward greater gender equality. A prince, once wedded, would remain a superior. A patron or mentor, however intent he may be on preserving his putative superiority, is structurally obliged to allow the possibility of final freedom and equality. If for no other reason, this is true because, having helped raise the protagonist up, he will then disengage from the protagonist’s life and very likely disappear from the plot. This means that, though the mentor may engage less of the protagonist’s desire, and thus less of the accompanying desire of the reader, what desire there is is rerouted in a more democratic direction.

Appearances to the contrary, then, the mentor is a figure of (relative) democratization. This paradox accounts for why, though he is no prince, Hannibal Lecter is charming. His charm does not stand solely for the sexiness of power, a psychological fact that can never be safely neglected. Nor does it merely register a residual charisma that cannot be banished from the dominant bureaucratic rationality, though the Weberian vocabulary seems pertinent. His charm emerges at the exact point of power’s susceptibility, its mysterious but narratively necessary willingness to break its own rules so as to open up, however slightly, to aspiration from below. Without it, there could be no story. Since Starling needs the scientific expertise that Lecter possesses, the extracurricular murders that accompany his rule breaking show another, more sinister face of the world of experts she is so eager to enter. But Lecter does not block the entrance or in any way discourage her efforts. No matter how murderous he is, on the level of narrative function he remains first and foremost the fairy godmother, the one who enables and approves Starling’s accomplishment, even if that accomplishment trains and accredits her to come in search of criminals like himself. This is the source of his charm. And his charm pulls the story away from what might otherwise seem its proper destination.

I am not suggesting that Starling’s rise is all pull and no push, dependent on Lecter’s intervention alone and owing nothing to her own demonstrations of merit. That merit is much in evidence. But the true logic of her rise only appears when her merit suddenly coincides with Lecter’s susceptibility to it. One has to ask, therefore, what Starling offers that Lecter wants or needs.

An initial hypothesis might be that power is acquired, in Silence of the Lambs, by mastery over sex—in other words, that Starling acts out something like the Protestant work ethic, indefinitely sacrificing present sexual gratification in a quest for the higher if delayed good of social advancement. This hypothesis is supported by the manner in which Starling acquires her benefactor’s support: Lecter decides to offer his assistance, having initially refused, only after she is sexually assaulted or insulted by his sperm-throwing fellow inmate Miggs. As we shall see, this is a crucial type of scene for the genre as a whole. That is, it responds to the same causal logic as the benefactor. If the benefactor’s support is the cause of the protagonist’s rise, then one needs to know how and why the support itself was obtained. What was the cause of the cause?

Evidence for this hypothesis is also to be found in the narrative’s deep structure. Starling’s upward mobility is accompanied by the symbolic elimination of those two contrasting characters whose ambitions are expressed sexually, that is, the film’s two genuine villains, Buffalo Bill and Dr. Chilton. Chilton, the head of the asylum where Lecter is incarcerated, tries to take advantage of his position by grossly and gracelessly coming on to Starling. Professionally speaking, he is also Crawford’s ambitious and unscrupulous antagonist.3 This sexualized ambition, or ambitious sexuality, seems largely responsible for the fact that, as the credits scroll, audiences find themselves unexpectedly cheering the prospect that Hannibal the Cannibal is about to “have” the bureaucrat for dinner—a serious measure of the film’s achievement, and a hint, though finally a misleading one, about its politics.

But what about the sublimated or not-so-sublimated sexuality in the relationship between protagonist and mentor? Critics have disagreed about the presence or absence of an erotic subtext between Starling and Lecter. For Elizabeth Young, “Lecter sexualizes all discussions with Clarice in the guise of exposing her emotional interior. . . . Clarice, while clearly attracted to Lecter’s eroticized advances, just as clearly resists them” (Young, 9,12). Adrienne Donald, on the other hand, sees Lecter as an ideal mentor for Starling because of “his sexual indifference to her as a woman” (358). This erotic uncertainty again seems characteristic of upward mobility in our time. It reflects a narrative in which the goal of advancement has broken free from customary heterosexual bondings that refer explicitly or implicitly to marriage and the reproduction of the patriarchal family and for better or worse has come to reside increasingly in looser, half-formed relationships, neither biologically reproductive nor necessarily heterosexual, that seem to fit social units other than the family. Like the reproduction of the family, the reproduction of institutions, disciplines, teams, professions, and even corporations involves the eliciting and channeling of erotic energy, if not in the direct and literal way demanded by procreation. This is one reason why the fairy godmother can also be perceived as a “fairy” in the somewhat (but not entirely) modern sense of the word. Indifferent to the usual destinations of heterosexual desire, Starling aims the narrative of upward mobility at something less familial than collegial. Borrowing from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, we might think of this collegial alternative as “a vision of ‘family’ elastic enough to do justice to the depth and sometimes durability of nonmarital and/or nonprocreative bonds, same-sex bonds, nondyadic bonds, adult sibling bonds, nonbiological bonds, bonds not defined by genitality”(71).4 “Fairy godmother” is one of the items on the list of roles that Sedgwick associates with “queer tutelage”: “patron, friend, literal uncle, godfather, adoptive father, sugar daddy” (59). As a patron, Lecter is also something of a queer tutor. His indeterminate sexuality, which hints at an erotics of male-female mentorship while also drawing Starling into an atmosphere of campy homosexual performance, urges her toward a nonmarital, nonprocreative endpoint which seems to have more in common with a workplace or some other nondomestic grouping.

The central moment in the film, I would argue, is the one that reveals this rechanneling of desire away from reproduction and into the workplace. This is the “silence of the lambs” story alluded to in the title, a story that emerges in Starling’s final therapy-like session with Lecter. As Judith Halberstam writes, “The secret of her past that threatened all along to be some nasty story of incest or rape is precisely not sexual. Clarice Starling is the girl who wanted to save the lambs from the slaughter, who could only carry one at a time and who finally could not support the weight” (44). Making much the same point, Elizabeth Young credits Starling with a “refusal to give Dr. Lecter what he wants: the narration of a childhood experience explicitly involving sexuality (that is, the primal scene)” (12). The film’s titular secret is thus not a sexual but a professional secret: a secret about why Starling wants to practice her profession.5 In other words, it is something that need not have been a secret at all. Instead of the shameful memory of sexual abuse or Oedipal hatred that one might have expected from the narrative’s lurid atmospherics, we are given a story that Starling might tell voluntarily and even with pride. For it merely explains why she wants to do the work of rescuing the helpless for which she is in training. Indeed, it is a sort of myth of professional legitimation. By going through the University of Virginia and the FBI Academy, this myth tells us, Starling is not just climbing the social ladder. She is trying to alleviate the suffering of women like herself. Her efforts fuse the two motives together.

There is no reason to credit this revelation, as Young does, to Starling’s “refusal to give Dr. Lecter what he wants.” It makes more sense to give at least some of the credit to Lecter himself.6 Faced with this evidence of what Starling really loves, he neglects to be ironic. He does not suggest that her advancement in the FBI will be an unhappy ending, a consummation unworthy of her efforts. He is speechless. The film’s close-up of his expression when he elicits this avowal suggests that Lecter is deeply and strangely satisfied by discovering a nonerotic key to Starling’s character. It is the suggestion, in both film and novel, that he embraces this asexual, ethically generous interpretation of Starling’s deepest motives, and indeed derives from it something equivalent to erotic pleasure, that most clearly marks him, in spite of his bad habits with everyone else, as a good mentor to Starling.7

In short, the common ground on which Starling’s merit and Lecter’s susceptibility to that merit coincide, thus enabling and affirming her rise, is her sense of vocation. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a professional therapist (though no longer licensed to practice) approves the commitment of another would-be professional, her commitment to tend to those who are in need. What Lecter reassures Starling of by his interpretation of her story is that the “cool professionalism” she seeks is not, as Adrienne Donald thinks, “a vain flight from her white trash origins” (352), but rather a reconnection of sorts with those origins, an identification that is also a rescue, a rescue that is also an identification. “The corpse laid out on the table,” Judith Halberstam writes, “. . . is a double for Starling, the image of what she might have become had she not left home, as Lecter points out, and aspired to greater things” (42). According to Lecter, the corpse would also be proof that her aspiration to greater things is not an abandonment of those left behind or below, a proof that she advances, forward or upward, precisely so as to do something for them, and precisely because they are versions of herself, because she is what she must take care of. This professional creation myth demonstrates to anyone who might doubt it—and we have every reason to believe that readers and spectators will indeed be skeptical on this point—that her individual advancement will be in the interest of society as a whole.

References to the interest of society as a whole, like references to the common good, are most often made these days in a more or less cynical mode, as if we assumed that such claims could only be ideological, hence self-aggrandizing and self-incriminating. I’m not convinced that a post-Gramscian or post-Althusserian understanding of ideology should permit this assumption.8 If there is no privileged (that is, theological) position completely outside ideology, attempting to reconcile versions of self-interest with versions of the general welfare becomes something all social players are obliged to do. Making and defending claims like this is simply what we mean by political discourse. In this case, politics would have to be understood as involving the tricky, unending task of discriminating less desirable from more desirable claims—in large part a matter of timing and context.

The local context in which Lecter approves Starling’s claim, and thus some of the force behind his approval, can be gauged by a scene in which what we observe is a failure in this reconciliation between self-interest and the common good. As Young notes, when Starling finally enters Buffalo Bill’s cellar and finds the young woman he has kidnapped, Catherine Martin, the moment can be compared to “the terrified encounter between Jane Eyre and Bertha Rochester” (17). “As she enters the room, Clarice calls out, ‘FBI, you’re safe,’ a line so obviously incongruous—given the precariousness of her own situation at this moment—as to provoke laughter, while Catherine, hearing her leave, yells, ‘You fucking bitch!’ ” (17). I would like to draw a little circle around this fleeting moment and its allusion to the upward mobility problematic of Jane Eyre, to which I will return below. The basement encounter with Buffalo Bill’s intended victim, a kind of madwoman in the basement, can be seen as a beautifully miniaturized allegory of professional discourse in the moment of its failure to legitimize itself. It is an allegory, one might say, of the Reagan/Thatcher years, years that saw a frenzy of delegitimation aimed at “official” or credentialed, professional or state efforts to “rescue” private citizens. The grassroots structure of feeling that grew into a sense of its power in those years has of course continued, under different administrations, giving us among other things the Oklahoma City bombing and so-called welfare reform.9 As a result, we are still living with the powerful populist antifeminism, antiprofessionalism, and antistatism that are neatly joined in the misguided animosity of “you fucking bitch!”

A justifiably desperate Catherine Martin pronounces those words because she takes Starling’s apparent indifference to her as aggressive. This is an error, but in a larger sense, she has a point. Performing the rescue as her professional training dictates, Starling can also be seen as attacking the resistant, antistatist subject as such, the one who doubts the suitability or competence of official rescuers—especially when they are women, or presumed beneficiaries of federal legislation. The antistatist subject is ready in an instant to tear off the facade of impersonal officialdom and reveal a reality that is always finally personal. You can’t be a proper representative of the authorities, the logic would go. You’re just a woman like me. But if this is the logic, then Starling too is right. For by her impersonally aggressive rescue she is breaking down a resistance that not only stands in the way of professional advancement for herself, but also stands in the way of any progressive politics, any demand that the social welfare state fulfill and extend its long unkept and now ever more retracted promises—in short, any collective social advancement in the United States under our present unpropitious conditions.10 What the scene offers is another way of measuring the political achievement of Silence of the Lambs: its force as relatively successful propaganda, against a background of free-market antistatism, in favor of welfare-state institutions and at the same time in favor of the enlarged market for professional service and expertise that the welfare state has always implied—in favor, in other words, of the welfare state as a social space in which an individual can rise while doing good for others.

I am claiming that the paradoxical key to Clarice Starling’s upward mobility story is the welfare state, here understood very loosely as including all the state’s caring and rescue functions, even when these functions are carried out by the FBI.11 Here and throughout this book I will be asking the reader to see the welfare state as a personal matter. It would be absurd if Starling’s gender and sexuality were not implicated in the story of her advancement, for nothing could be more representative of the larger social changes in which that advancement participates. “At a moment in time when the federal government assumed greater authority over the distribution of resources,” Alice Kessler-Harris shows in her study of economic citizenship in and after the New Deal, “gender constituted a crucial measure of fairness” (6).12 Only the mutual dependence of these two shifting concepts—of fairness on gender, and of gender on fairness—can explain how deep into personal identity these changes go. To make sense of the policy shift “from staunch opposition to federal government intervention in the lives of most men (but not women) to eager experiments with government mediation of all sorts,” one has to see “how profoundly the expectations of ordinary people altered” (64). This alteration would have had to be profound—certainly profound enough to work its way into novels. It would have had to affect both the going sense of who, what, and where the mediators of power are and where, so to speak, one’s own story is located. What could be more personal?

In following Starling’s hunt for the killer and the self-searching conversations with Lecter that make the hunt successful, I’m suggesting, what audiences experience is a reworking of desire, an apprenticeship in the ambiguities and affective transformations that advancement within a bureaucratic frame has come to require. I am not suggesting that adjusting individual ambitions to the obliqueness of an emergent welfare state means learning to live without inequality. In many and perhaps most cases (though not in Silence of the Lambs, as it happens), the credentialed carer or rescuer thereby preserves and legitimates a social advantage over the one who is rescued—an allegory of the distance between welfare-state capitalism and any socialism that would deserve the name. I would argue that this new set of lessons about responsibility, social interdependence, and desire brings a net ethical gain even though, as is obvious enough, some of these lessons were equally necessary to capitalism’s emerging corporate form and to the civil/bureaucratic institutions emerging to constrain and contain it, or to save it from its own self-destructive drive to achieve short-term profit at all cost. It should not be shocking, given the fragility of welfare-state institutions in the era of globalization and privatization, that we are still in the process of learning, forgetting, resisting, and relearning these lessons.

This book will try to expand this counterintuitive linkage of fiction and the welfare state so as to cover a number of otherwise diverse upward mobility stories of the past two centuries. It will suggest that Silence of the Lambs is a recent addition to a long and largely hidden tradition of narratives that fill in the missing emotional landscape of life among welfare-state institutions, and that the apparent bleakness of this institutional landscape represents the imperfect historical form that we should expect even the most genuine progress toward social equality to take. Unsatisfying as it may be, this is the collective progress, I will argue, against which individual narratives of progress must be plotted.

Let me spell out a few further assumptions that underlie this argument. I understand the welfare state as a set of imperfect institutions, produced in part by management from above and in part by pressure from below, which also enters into the unfinished project of “social citizenship,” a phrase that Étienne Balibar has recently sought to revive.13 I see no need to disguise the fact that, alongside the sheer scholarly delight of discovering so unlikely a historical context for so pervasive a set of literary texts, I took some of the motivation for this argument from disgust at the partial dismantling and further endangering of the welfare state, as alluded to above, as well as from incipient attempts to extend social citizenship on an international scale, an effort to which Balibar is a useful guide. I will be assuming that upward mobility under capitalism is not restricted to the single option of playing and winning at the game of profit-and-loss and affirming the eternal fitness of the rules capitalism has laid down. History knows no such thing as a “free” capitalist market. Actual capitalist markets have always required immense infrastructural investment and the continuing support of various institutions, some of them classified as “welfare” institutions, like Lecter’s asylum, and others not, like Starling’s FBI. Yet in the broadest sense all of these institutions, even one as blatantly tarnished as the FBI, can be said to belong to the welfare state. All of them, while supporting capitalism, also interfere with it.14 The reality of the interference can be measured by the wrathful corporate will to dismantle and defund that such interference incites. In this context of dismantling and defunding, the persistence of the Foucaultian school in interpreting the welfare state as an apparatus of domination based on hypocritically benevolent surveillance seems to me open to new and sharp questioning.

Since the hypocrisy is often real, the benevolence is always limited, and the opportunities for misunderstanding are endless, let me repeat: I am aware that the welfare state is not the sort of ideal that deserves to dictate all of one’s political commitments and aspirations. This is a point that is well marked within Silence of the Lambs itself. The film ends in the Caribbean, where Hannibal Lecter, aftercongratulating Starling on her success by telephone, is in hungry pursuit of the asylum director, the film’s unpalatable and therefore eminently edible bureaucrat. The Caribbean or Third World or global south, one might say, is where one finds oneself when one gets off the phone with the FBI, where there is neither FBI nor welfare state. There the contradictions of the welfare state can be exported, and the inevitable collision of values between Starling and Lecter can be evaded or at least postponed. It is the place where Lecter and Starling would not need to be separated by bars, where Lecter would only eat those who richly deserve to be eaten, where “bad” professionals would be eliminated and only the “good” ones would remain. All of which is of course once again to use neoimperialism’s familiar double standard so as to make a space elsewhere for what cannot happen at home.

I will have more to say at the end of this book about the line drawn by the international division of labor between countries that can and cannot afford some semblance of a welfare state. It is arguable that this line traces some of the most urgent and delicate political tasks of the coming decades, including the challenge of negotiating critically with a new American nationalism. The best arguments for nationalism are those that appeal to the solidarity embodied, at its best, in the welfare state. This book was written in part because I am so concerned that the political project of the welfare state, as a set of real historical accomplishments as well as still energetic impulses begging to be extended further, seems to have been prematurely given up for dead by everyone but the new nationalists. I have sought to respond, after my fashion, to Fredric Jameson’s somewhat reluctant imperative in his “Five Theses on Actually Existing Marxism”: “the Left is . . . today placed in the position of having to defend big government and the welfare state, something its elaborate and sophisticated traditions of the critique of social democracy make it embarrassing to do” (4).15

This task is especially pressing for American intellectuals, and especially embarrassing, for two additional reasons. First, because we ourselves depend so heavily on the legitimacy and the financial support of the welfare state. And second, because the welfare state is a cross-class project, the historical result of popular demands for protection combined with the rising influence of technocratic expertise. Thus it is the closest thing we have had to an ideological synthesis, a defensible common program in which the glaringly different interests of the poor and needy, on the one hand, and elite experts, on the other, can even appear to be resolved. I look forward to the day when a better one will have replaced it.

“I DON'T WANT TO BE PATRONISED”

Focused as it is on a professional career woman, The Silence of the Lambs is very much a text of its times. It hardly seems coincidental, given its attention to the potentially abusive power and the sexual ambiguity of older, institutionally powerful men, that the film version came out in the same year as the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill hearings, with their sensational testing of society’s recent and still fragile will to resist sexual harassment. For me, as for Rosemary Bray, whose memoir Unafraid of the Dark is discussed in a later chapter, it was a scandal that public opinion permitted Thomas to set his story of self-reliance against the dependence of his “welfare queen” sister, and this scandal provided another topical motive to rethink the ubiquitous opposition between upward mobility and the welfare state.16 And yet how topical is a figure like Hannibal Lecter? No one who has ever encountered the female Gothic, from Ann Radcliffe to Rebecca, will imagine that Lecter’s show-stealing, attractive-repulsive prominence is entirely unprecedented. Though stories closely resembling The Silence of the Lambs remain rare, though we do not often see the husband/master entirely replaced by the mentor, though this shift from master to mentor is both incomplete and likely to remain so, figures like Hannibal Lecter are not a recent literary phenomenon. Nor is their entanglement in narratives of advancement. Consider, for example, Lecter’s resemblance to the older male criminals who oversee the protagonist’s rise in such masterpieces of the realist bildungsroman as Balzac’s Pe`re Goriot and Dickens’s Great Expectations. In the first, there is the gay and charismatic master criminal Vautrin. Like Lecter, Vautrin is a man of almost superhuman knowledge and ability. Like Lecter, he offers his services to the ambitious (male) protagonist for reasons that seem obscure but hint strongly of sexual attraction. This is an attraction for which the novel, like The Silence of the Lambs, will find no outlet. Yet it is Vautrin who explains to Rastignac his eventual ascent in the Parisian world and in a sense presides over it even after he has been arrested and banished from the plot. In Great Expectations, there is another patron who is also a criminal. The moral center of the plot is generally agreed to be the passionate bond between Pip and Magwitch, the secret source of the funds that make Pip a gentleman. Once again, a taint of criminality hangs over the hero’s upward mobility. Why should these patrons be criminals? Why is it that in both cases the hero’s emotional entanglement with these criminal patrons upstages their somewhat pro forma passions for trophy women? If we cannot call it love, what can we call the bond between them?

A bond that is not quite hot enough for love is also characteristic of another set of patrons, again represented in both Pe`re Goriot and Great Expectations. Balzac’s Mme de Beauséant inexplicably invites Rastignac into her exclusive and much-coveted circle, providing him with a stock of social capital he can trade for further advancement and thus accomplishing much of what Vautrin had planned for him. They do not sleep together, but thanks to her he will have the choice of a mistress who resembles her. Dickens’s Miss Havisham merely pretends to be Pip’s patron, concealing from him the criminality of his true patron. In both cases, the Older Woman is a kind of front for the Male Criminal. But she also helps account for the power the two categories of patron share. Like the homosocial bond between older and younger man, the bond between younger man and older woman stands apart from the cycle of biological reproduction that has traditionally channeled and legitimated desire.17 Her age and position make her unmarriageable. Unavailable for the production of offspring, she cannot be the object of a desire that aims at constituting a new family unit, which is to say a unit that would put her at a disadvantage. The ambition that passes through her will look criminal, for it cannot be an ambition that aims at reproducing society as it is. The desire for her and the desire for her patronage, two desires that frequently meld into one, define the protagonist’s upward mobility as a paradoxical project, one that leads both into and away from the status quo.

These two desires are more likely to be indistinguishable in the novels of Balzac and Stendhal. Miss Havisham, who in a French novel would have been a bit younger and Pip’s lover, in England must spin off a younger and more acceptable appendage as a receptacle for romantic desire. (Woody Allen’s Bullets over Broadway, which rewrites Great Expectations as well as Sunset Boulevard, foregrounds both categories of patron, the gangster-who-supplies-what-the-protagonist-lacks and the diva-of-a-certain-age, and comes closer to the French model in its treatment of the latter.) But Estella’s much-emphasized coldness is a sure sign that, structurally speaking, her identity remains that of her adoptive mother, the woman traumatized by unconsummated marriage who turns therefore against marriage itself and the society of which it is paradigmatic. To reject the option of joining with the hero to found a family is not to rule out love. But it means that love will look different, and will prefigure a different sort of society. The coldness of the unmarriageable female— what René Girard calls, apropos of the love between older woman and younger man in Rousseau and Stendhal, “cerebral love”—is a figure for ambition that is not merely illegitimate in the eyes of the social order. It is a figure for ambition in pursuit of a different legitimacy.18

As I have suggested, the ambition of the lowly can be imagined as legitimate only if power is imagined to be something other than a united and impenetrable front, a sovereignty that is both inviolable and homogeneous. The outlandish and sensational bursts of imagination that go into shaping the figure of the patron seem intended to solve this problem, to present power as contradictory and thus permeable. The patron must, by definition, possess the power to raise the protagonist up. By definition, possessors of power are defenders of the social order from which they benefit. But by raising the protagonist up, the social order would seem to be violating itself. Why would it ever do such a thing? Older Women and Male Criminals are imaginary solutions to the paradox. They are ways of imagining a hierarchical social order as simultaneously resistant to democratic transgression and deviously willing to permit or even invite it. Logically speaking, they are at the very center of the upward mobility story, for they and only they attempt to explain how it is possible for upward mobility to happen, or to go unpunished.19 Factoring in again the social interdependence on which all supposedly independent effort depends, they make the upward mobility story more believable and more interesting.

It is the intersection of my formal interest in the mentor/mediator, as a sort of catalyst inciting or supervising the passage from origin to destination without entering into the end product, and my historical interest in the gradual emergence of the welfare state, as a context that makes some sense of these figures and their narrative effect, that narrows the otherwise unmanageable field of texts that must be consulted. There are of course upward mobility stories, in the broadest sense of the word, as early and as far abroad as one cares to look. In his quest for the origins of the English novel, Michael McKeon offers an upward mobility narrative from 1701 (from a dialogue by Charles Davenant), then trumps it with another (Thomas Deloney’s Jack of Newbery) from 1597.20 Even the unstable balance between indulging and chastising the desire for mobility (for McKeon, “progressive” and “conservative” readings) goes back at least that far. The overcoming of obstacles and the satisfaction of desires for greater prosperity, security, and so on are most likely cultural invariants to be found wherever there is storytelling. Why not include in the same category freed slaves in classical antiquity, folktale variants of the Cinderella motif, younger sons under primogeniture, and a wealthy nineteenth-century German-Jewish parvenu like Rahel Varnhagen as described by Hannah Arendt?21 A rigorously comparative study that would have something to say about all of the world’s literary traditions would of course have to specify with precision the social context in each case, including the nature of the social obstacles overcome (class, caste, slavery, or whatever) and the forces and vulnerabilities that allow for their overcoming. This is beyond my own capacities. I also have some suspicion as to whether, at that planetary level of historical and geographical abstraction, a coherent object called upward mobility can even be said to exist.

The present book concerns itself mainly with the United Kingdom and the United States, and to a lesser degree France, in the period since 1800, and even within those limits (in some respects no doubt too loose) it is obliged to be impressionistic. The year 1800 marks not an absolute origin but a relative point of departure, much as it does for Raymond Williams in Culture and Society. The Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution, dramatic stages in the respective development of capitalism and democracy, generated objects of culture in which anticapitalist responses are often difficult to tell apart from antidemocratic responses, and impulses to achieve more democratic representation may easily be confused with impulses to liberate the market. These cultural confusions extend to the development of the state. Like culture, the state arguably assumes its modern form in the years following 1800. In his history of the eighteenth-century English novel, John Richetti argues that the state in the modern sense could not exist in the eighteenth century because “society” in the current (that is, nineteenth-century) sense did not exist. Instead, there was “a constellation of distinct spheres of influence, a loosely federated collection of interests and smaller social units” (5–6).22 The same would have to be said about the state. Richetti cites Anthony Giddens to the effect that “Britain in the eighteenth century is not yet a modern nation-state but rather what Giddens calls a ‘class-divided’ society in which large spheres ‘retain their independent character in spite of the rise of the state apparatus’” (6). After 1800, the rise of the state apparatus accelerates (again like culture) because that apparatus is asked both to serve capitalism and to manage its contradictions, among them its contradictory effect on democracy. Again, this is not a process that calls out for unconditional approval. David Lloyd and Paul Thomas make an eloquent case that the theory and practice of culture since the early-nineteenth century should largely be understood as a “supplement” to the state, concerned with breaking down popular desire for autonomy and resistance to representative government.23 Unlike Lloyd and Thomas, I do not read the Reform Bills of 1832 and 1867 primarily as contributions to “the considerable work of disciplining and pedagogy, such that the emergence of the citizen may seem inseparable from the efficacy of another kind of reform and another mode of pedagogy, that of the reformatory” (58). Resisting the metaphorical slide that begins by identifying the state with the school and ends by identifying it with the prison, I hold that prisons are part of the story (indeed, quite a large part, to judge from narratives of upward mobility), but they are not its definitive point. But I too see culture as working along with and on behalf of state formation. I will try to show much the same linkage to the state in a number of nineteenth-century works of fiction.

If apologies are not in order for taking on too little material, perhaps I should apologize for taking on too much. The phrase “welfare state” does not seem to have been used before the 1930s. Those few books that have made the risky link between the welfare state and literature, like Sean McCann’s Gumshoe America and Michael Szalay’s New Deal Modernism, both published in 2000, have solidified their case—to me, both brilliant and utterly convincing—by restricting it to a decade or so.24 Yet there is also something to be said for a moderately more expansive historical scale. As Daniel T. Rodgers shows in Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (1998), the great break with laissez-faire policy began in Germany in the 1870s, then crossed the Rhein, the Channel, and the Atlantic in a fascinating pattern of back-and-forth exchange. The national trajectories are distinct. Yet Rodgers’s experiment in transnational history works: a common object emerges into view across a geographical space that has been stretched and a durée (seventy or eighty years) that is longer than is usually claimed for Progressivism. Without pretending to the same richness of historical detail, I too am interested in stretching the dimensions of the welfare state. If the nineteenth century largely believed, as Norman Barry notes, that the market itself could not possibly be a cause of so-called social problems (29), and thus differed dramatically with the twentieth-century opinion that produced the New Deal and the Beveridge Plan, it is also true that under close inspection the earlier period reveals the slow, diffuse cultural preparation that eventually made it possible to break with this dogma. Hence the two centuries can fit gracefully enough into the same temporal frame. Instead of a sequence of relatively discrete developmental stages, then, as would be appropriate to a fine-grained treatment of social policy, this work of cultural criticism offers a sort of moral X ray, capturing a hidden skeletal configuration that helps explain long-term symptoms. Though my subtitle lays claim to history, that term is meant to be seriously qualified by its modest preposition. Perhaps a more accurate word would be anatomy.25

If the modern state did not exist before 1800, neither did the modern patron. It is only the rise of individualism that gives people a vocabulary in which patronizing registers as a violation. And it is only when enough people register that sense of violation that the patron’s ambivalence-producing interference in the upward mobility story becomes possible. Consider the history of the word patronizing. “To patronize” originally meant simply to act as a patron toward, to protect, support, favor, encourage. There was no suggestion of any affront to the dignity of the one patronized. The more familiar adjectival form patronizing gets a new lease on life only at the point, around 1800, when the word acquires its present pejorative meaning: displaying an air or manner of superiority and condescension. The OED gives an example from Disraeli: “Spruce . . . had a weakness for the aristocracy, who . . . patronised him with condescending dexterity.” And a still more paradigmatic one from Dickens: “I don’t want to be patronised.” The word acquires this pejorative meaning when the rise of democracy opens up possibilities for upward mobility and, with them, an uncertainty as to whether the distance between superior and inferior is indeed being disregarded or erased. Something similar happens to the near synonym condescension. Originally understood, without prejudice, as a voluntary abnegation of a superior’s privileges, an affable disregard of differences of rank or position (OED), condescension has come to mean making a display of one’s affability that, whether intentionally or not, reminds the recipient of one’s superiority by and while appearing to forget it. It too could seem neutral only while the distance between superior and inferior remained absolute and unbridgeable. Both terms have come to refer to an undesired and annoying appearance of democracy only since democratic leveling entered the realm of realistic possibility.

On the other hand, the modern relationship with the patron is not all annoyance. Nor is it adequately characterized as self-abasing love. Arendt quotes Rahel Varnhagen’s parvenu husband, who tries to “‘honor myself in my superiors, so as to track down their good qualities in order to love them’” (237). “Making a strenuous effort to love,” Arendt comments drily, “where there is no alternative but obedience, is more productive of good results than simple and undisguised servility” (237). One would prefer not to obey at all. But if one has to obey, then better to disguise the servility (even to oneself) as love. Better, that is, to transform it into love. This is the logic of a social world (the Prussian nobility around 1814) whose hierarchy is still relatively stable. In England, France, and the United States, though each was on a somewhat different timetable, having come through different revolutions, the alignments of power were shifting more rapidly, the transitivity of roles was at least a theoretical possibility, and the sort of emotional bond one finds between protagonist and patron—love is not the right word, but there may not be one—is correspondingly unstable, unpredictable, creative. That bond begins in a mixture of annoyance (that one must obey at all) and seduction (by a role one may not merely benefit from, but perhaps come in one’s turn to occupy), and it goes on from there.

In elaborating on this correspondence between power and emotion, I do not claim to detect a consistent and full-scale allegory linking the novel’s love stories to political theory. The sorts of literary effects I am talking about are too partial and fragmentary. Focusing on characters, functions, and relationships that occupy the somewhat neglected middle ground of these texts, texts more frequently and more readily grasped in terms of protagonists and final destinations, I am content to solicit respectful attention for what might be described as fiction’s figurative dimension, its ability to transcend its own social horizon and to do so not in the interest of an ahistorical utopia, but as a further imaginative development of desires and energies that are already at work within that horizon.

One final qualification. In making the case that there exists something like a genre of upward mobility stories, I will be insisting that a certain number of texts that are not usually seen in terms of class (like The Silence of the Lambs) make better or richer or more urgent sense if class is factored back in. This insistence is all the more necessary when these texts give a prominent place to gender, as in The Silence of the Lambs, and if the difficulties of gender are accompanied by racial, ethnic, or postcolonial issues, as in the writing of Jamaica Kincaid. But my point here is not to argue that class trumps all other considerations.26 It is by no means clear that the concept of class should have such interpretive authority, even over upward mobility stories. It is the weakness of the concept of class, its historical inability to structure from within the daily experience of the people to whom it is supposed to apply most urgently, that in large part leads me to this project. Stuart Hall’s description of race as the mode in which class is lived is also true, if less universally, for upward mobility stories. These stories provide a narrative vocabulary, theoretically tainted and imperfect but extremely widespread, in which class has been and continues to be experienced. If there is authority in experience—even an authority shared with professional interpreters—then the discourse of class has as much to learn from these persistent commonsense narratives as it has to teach them. One thing it has to learn from them, at least as they are interpreted here, is its own dependence on the state, which cannot be seen as constituted by class identities and interests without also being seen as constituting class identities and interests."

Bruce Robbins: Upward Mobility and the Welfare State

_________________
Hannibal 610

"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*
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PostSubject: Re: Hannibal Hannibal EmptyFri Jan 04, 2013 11:17 pm

The central point in the first film (Silence of the Lambs) is not the experience with the lambs.
This comes as a follow through of what happened to her dad.
A law man...a hard working, good man...slaughtered like a lamb.

She spends her youth trying to lead her father's life, trying to vindicate his death.
At the this point the only relationship, of any spiritual depth, she (Sterling) can have is an incestuous one with her dead father.
The pagan spirit shines in her.

Hannibal enters as a liberator.
He eventually frees her from her father's failures and his slaughter in the service of a system of decadence.
But she must learn this the hard way.
Her fellow officers are scum, and her boss faces a tragedy, making his life a road towards emptiness.

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PostSubject: Re: Hannibal Hannibal EmptySat Jan 05, 2013 8:28 pm

Satyr wrote:
The central point in the first film (Silence of the Lambs) is not the experience with the lambs.
This comes as a follow through of what happened to her dad.
A law man...a hard working, good man...slaughtered like a lamb.

She spends her youth trying to lead her father's life, trying to vindicate his death.
At the this point the only relationship, of any spiritual depth, she (Sterling) can have is an incestuous one with her dead father.
The pagan spirit shines in her.

Hannibal enters as a liberator.
He eventually frees her from her father's failures and his slaughter in the service of a system of decadence.
But she must learn this the hard way.
Her fellow officers are scum, and her boss faces a tragedy, making his life a road towards emptiness.


Yes. I know.

I was looking at another aspect of Hannibal. As a Gothic Predator, and the figure of a Byronic-hero... who,
"owned that smile, it oft observed and near, waned in its mirth, and withered to a sneer." (lines 299-300)

How does he make her emerge?

Fosterage is an ancient I.E. tradition.

"While the verb atállō is hardly attested at all, we have numerous examples of atitállō, and it has a much more precise sense than “rear, feed.” Certainly it is used together with tréphō ‘feed, bring up’: e.g. Il. 24, 60 “I fed him and reared him”; but we may also quote Odyssey 18, 323: “she had brought him up like a child.” These two passages contain the essential significance: “rear like a child,” that is, as if he were a member of the family, which was not actually the case. In all the examples the verb is exclusively applied to a child who is not one’s own child, like Hera for Achilles’ mother (Il. 24, 60). It was never used in speaking of one’s own child. Hesiod also takes it in this sense (Theog. 480).
We now see what this verb refers to. It denotes an institution which is known under the scientific term of “fosterage,” the use of a foster-parent. This is a very important custom, particularly in Celtic and Scandinavian society, and it was the rule in the case of royal children. Noble families had the custom of entrusting their children to another family to be reared until a certain age. This was a real relationship, often stronger than the blood tie, which was established between the two families." [Benveniste]

Its interesting how the greek word 'atitallo' - to Feed and Rear someone not your own, mirrors a context with Hannibal as a Cannibal and his attempt to raise someone. The last scene with the gothic gourmet is striking.

The whole of Hannibal, with his extracting her out of past-authority, his supplanting mentorship, and letting her be [the cutting off his hand is perhaps his acknowledgement of her self-possession when she possesses his hand in a 'to the end' kind of determined ultimatum], is like an alchemical initiation, the typical three-stage liminal ritual:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liminality#Arnold_van_Gennep

1. Nigredo, a blackening or melanosis. - Death of the old self from the world.
2. Albedo, a whitening or leucosis. - Catharsis/Purification.
3. Rubedo, a reddening or iosis. - Re-integration into the world.

I've just started on this; pg.18-22 look totallly interesting; Hannibal as an intruding Invader -
http://books.google.co.in/books/about/Dissecting_Hannibal_Lecter.html?id=SQqqX1EIG2gC&redir_esc=y

I'm reminded of Euripides' Bacchus; the Dionysian figure makes women abandon their domestic authority [fathers/husbands] and makes their womanhood come out...

Question is, is Hannibal also the story of a woman who makes a man emerge from the Shadows? He takes risks for her. Something about her makes the monster demonstrate things for her. She makes the monster De-monstrate, as in un-monsters him,... maybe...


"The mentor-neophyte relationship is also designed to eliminate dependence on authority structures, unlike the parallel religious relationship between guru and proselyte, which merely transfers existing dependency. Its characteristic feature remains the so-called direct method, which rejects verbalization - even the most enigmatic - and attempts to break through the orderliness of reason to basic convivial impulses. Zen manifests itself in spontaneous acts, but evaporates once interpretation tries to discern meaning or significance within any action. Regaining the experiences of life's instantaneousness constitutes its essence. The direct method attempts to propel the neophyte into the flow of life and unmediated experience. Language and ideation are too slow to grasp such instantaneity. Hence, the neophyte must be somehow shocked into abandoning interpretation and other inculcated forms of standardized response. Occasionally, these shock tactics assume the form of tempered violence, but more commonly they consist of unexpected responses and behaviour. When a neophyte asks for elucidation on a profound doctrinal opint, for example, a master may "reply" by undertaking a simple everyday task or leaving the room. Such actions are intended to have a demonstrative, rather than symbolic, effect. Indeed, if the neophyte attempts to interpret the meaning of the action, the moment - of direct existential contact and the spiritual illumination which accompanies it - has already been lost, and dependency will continue. However, should the neophyte respond by spontaneously participating in the playful stratagem instigated by the master, the cycle of dependency will be broken. The former no longer needs to rely upon the latter for guidance, for after continued practice the two effectively become equals. The moment of "coming alive," or becoming existentially sensitive, achieved through the direct method, gradually develops into a perpetual sensibility, and sparkles through passages recording meetings between Zen masters." [John Moore, Anarchy and Ecstasy]

Hannibal picks Marcus Aurelius. "Go back to First Principles. What is a thing in itself?"

At the final dinner scene, he is not simply talking, he's demonstrating Aurelius literally; deskinning brain tissue and exposing the other what he is in himself... she doesn't flinch. She partakes in the spontaneity and de-monstrates him.

This scene can be called a Koan.


_________________
Hannibal 610

"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*
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PostSubject: Re: Hannibal Hannibal EmptySat Jan 05, 2013 9:13 pm

The scene of him severing his hand is not part of the book. It's a Hollywood add-on meant to display the cost for being such a "beast" amongst the "good" people of this fine earth.
In the book the final dinner, where he cooks the brain, is the night before she and he elope, as it were, never to be seen again...except for the accidental sighting of Barney in Argentina.
No details are given.
One is left to hypothesize that tasting the brain woke up a repressed side of her. Feeding off of a man she considered her inferior but was forced to submit to and to tolerate, must have been exhilarating.
Remember, they do not consume the entire brain, but only choice parts of it.
The scene is more of a ritual...a hunter consuming the morsels of his kill.
It is meant to symbolize the crossover from the Modern definition of "human" to a different, higher, more refined one.
They feed on this "human" as they would on a pig.

I want to correct something in my earlier posting.
The central theme in the movie is Hannibal and his relationship with the modern world.
The matter of Clarice is more of a side-plot.

You get the sense that Hannibal was caught because he got tired....and felt alone.
He never tries to escape until Clarice enters the scene.

At that point he gets a motive, a purpose...the typical sexual pull.
But she's not a mere sexual object for him. In the book the sex is never stated, as it is in the movie with those subtle scenes of his fingers brushing across hers or him passing his hands over her sleeping head and her hair.
In true modern, Hollywood style, it is all reduced to primal sex.
In the book there is something superior at play.
That Clarice is female and Hannibal is male is a minor factor, which only explains why she is more easily taken by him.
Her relationship to her father is the added factor.
For Clarice Hannibal is the father she wished she had had.
Is there sex involved? This is left to the imagination of the reader. Is Clarice liberated from her past, from her culture, enough to go for that Freudian taboo?
Nobody knows.

For him she's potential...just as is the officer who arrests him.
Hannibal actually tells Will Graham that he sees potential in him.
"How did you catch me Will?" he asks taunting him, wanting him to accept what he feels, wanting him to break.
But Graham has too much invested in the system already.

Clarice not as much.

So, the sexual element is really coincidental...and due to the father daughter dynamic.
Graham is more resistant because he's a male.

"Go back to principles" means go back to nature.
Think...what is man, why does he evolve, how...etc.
No need for complexity. Things are simple.
Complexity is more of a way of hiding what is self-evident.

Recall how Christians, or any moron given over to a self-flattering, escapism, uses the concept of complexity to hide his own ignorance. He implies what he cannot deliver.

Human nature?
Too complex to say.

Females?
Far too mysterious.

Race?
Inconclusive...appearance and sensuality do not apply: it's all too complex.

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PostSubject: Re: Hannibal Hannibal EmptySun Jan 06, 2013 11:45 am

Hannibal, given his history of losing his sister, is also a huge dilemna - Is he a
Mourner or a Melancholic in exile?

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"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

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*Become clean, my friends.*
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PostSubject: Re: Hannibal Hannibal EmptySun Jan 06, 2013 7:15 pm

Of course, but he has the means to escape if he wishes to try.
He doesn't until Clarice enters the picture.
He is content to live in his Memory Palace.

He has nothing to prove to her or anyone.
It's only when she exposes herself, shows some trust, shows potential, that he takes her under his wing, though she knows it not.

He is already more free than the ones outside and he cares not for their opinions and judgments.
Remember how he reacts to their psychoanalytical tools trying to place him in a box?

His escape serves a dual purpose...the one you mention is a secondary one.
The others are insignificant chattel to him. He is happy to live in isolation from them...in his cell.
It protects him also. It protects him form their clamor and their stench.
He turns himself into a recluse, an eremite.
He decides to help her only after she shows him, tells him...exposes herself to him.
Her sex is a secondary, but still an important factor.

Let us say that Freud's views were correct and that there is a sexual element in father/daughter and mother/son relationships...why is this shameful?
A man learns from his mother, as well as from his father, how to be a man.
From his mother he learns how to treat females and what kinds of females are best for him.

No, the test is of her free-will, her spirit.

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PostSubject: Re: Hannibal Hannibal EmptySun Jan 06, 2013 9:55 pm

Hannibal has no knowledge of Clarisse before she visits him in prison, yet he is inside and is content.
He did not place himself there for her, because this presupposes prior knowledge of her existence.

I'm just offering my take on it.

For me Hannibal is in jail because he chooses to remain there.
The subsequent events prove that he has the will and the mind to escape.

She enters the scene after his relationship with Graham leads nowhere.
She gives him a motive to escape.

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PostSubject: Re: Hannibal Hannibal EmptyMon Jan 07, 2013 10:59 am

"Prison with bars" and "Prison without bars" is an essential difference I heard David Icke make in one of his talks. Modernity itself being a prison, just without noticible bars. I also read some of Michel Foucaults "Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison" years ago. He narrates the history of how people were still physically brutally punished in the middle ages. How common that was back then. And how the shift came about, with Jeremy Benthams Utilitarianism and the Panopticum Prisons, where surveillance was (is) the essence of the punishment and the taking away of any privacy and of course being locked away, "doing time", like Lecter in the movie. Some pictures of the Panopticum Prisons:

Hannibal Bentham
Hannibal Harouromain
Hannibal Neufforge
Hannibal Stateville

Modern violence is more subtle than in earlier times. The electronic tag (ankle monitor) was the next step. I just thought the other day that mobile phones are already electronic tags, people carry with them by "choice".

To me Lecter is in this regard also a representative of an earlier age. He shows us with his brutality, the counterpart to what we don't perceive in the more subtle brutality towards prison inmates today. (How he is tortured with Bible Television for example.) He is a teacher, an eye-opener for the modernized audience. Remember how he asks for a "view", some trees in front of a window. I look at the character as purely fictional, but the whole artwork narration by Harris draws him as an antipole of modern nihilism (also as the victim of it, I tend think too, that he is not completely voluntarily imprisoned, missing a reason to flee until meeting Clarisse of course is a factor to be considered, too). Showing us something that we lost: our senses, our instincts, our nature (that includes violence if or freedom and well-being are violated.) Lector shows through his suffering the perversity of Modernity. That he is not always in complete charge shows the 3rd part of the Trilogy: Hannibal.

One question for you Satyr: Why do you not consider the Prequel by Harris? (The 4th book, that narrates Lecters Childhood)
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PostSubject: Re: Hannibal Hannibal EmptyMon Jan 07, 2013 11:20 am

The next step in this imprisoning process was training the prisoners to be trapped in their own minds.
In this sense Lecter is free.

Atrophy is what creates dependence. Specialization makes sure that nobody has the ability to become more independent than is acceptable. This makes him a perpetual slave or someone who must endure the punishment.

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PostSubject: Re: Hannibal Hannibal EmptyMon Jan 07, 2013 11:32 am

Satyr wrote:
The next step in this imprisoning process was training the prisoners to be trapped in their own minds.

And this is the reason why meditation: even the tibetan buddhist kind towards the void or the Indian kind towards an all-encompassing deity, is not a vacation from reality. Even if it may look like that from the outside. It's survival training in the insanity of modernity.
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PostSubject: Re: Hannibal Hannibal EmptyMon Jan 07, 2013 12:00 pm

Starling would have been a side project for Lecter, but his real partner would have been an aristocratic woman, someone of much higher breeding. Starling was so base, so transparent. Not uncommon at all. I found her character to be quite dull and pedestrian, and as Lecter sensed, not more than one generation away from poor white trash. I can't imagine that Lecter, beyond the minor psychological issues that made her interesting in the first place, would not have grown acutely bored of her.

But I guess her leg up made some in the audience feel good about themselves.

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PostSubject: Re: Hannibal Hannibal EmptyMon Jan 07, 2013 5:08 pm

I tend to agree. What I suspected at first was that "just" Anthony Hopkins memorable performance was all there really was about the movies. But I have only so far listened to an audio book of Hannibal and seen the 3 movies. (Watching the fourth one tonight.)

I am not so excited about the character of Hannibal as such, but more with Harris' way of capturing modernity in these novels. This is what passed me first, just watching the movies. I'd like to take the focus off of Hannibal and get a more holistic view on the whole context of the story.

Therefor Foucault "Discipline and Punish" (that I very much recommend reading it's a socio-psychological analysis of our time):

Foucault Discipline and Punish

I just have a very vague definition of fascism in my mind. But Punishment used to be more fascist and today it is more socialist. And I am not sure, which is worse. Which I guess was Foucaults purpose to write the book: to get people doubting modernistic progress. Hannibal represents the part that got lost in modern societies, the fascism (discrimination). The nature side, the animalistic side. All that is repressed and supressed today. He can flee in his mind, like Winston in 1984. That's where he is at his best. To me he represents the balance, the moral in the immorality. And the others represent the immorality in the judeo-christian morality. But I would not put him too high up there. He is merely an antogonist. But not just to Clarisse or any single character, but all of them combined. Take the Mason Verger. (I don't remember the book.) But it seems like they both liked art or something and so even they shared some identity ( a shared affinity for art) otherwise there wouldn't have been communication in the first place. I'd rather look at Lecters weaknesses to understand him, than his obvious strengths. He is a loner. He doesn't fit in well with others, because he exceeds in most every field. I feel compassion for him. A lot stays implicit. I haven't gotten to the core of his "cannibalism".

Quote :

Cannibalism (from Caníbales, the Spanish name for the Carib people,[1] a West Indies tribe formerly well known for their practice of cannibalism)[2] is the act or practice of humans eating the flesh or internal organs of other human beings.

If he isn't human, than he is falsely considered a cannibal. He is just a carnivore, like many humans also.
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PostSubject: Re: Hannibal Hannibal EmptyMon Jan 07, 2013 5:37 pm

He eats those not of his kind.

In the book he is born with a red tinge to his eyes, acute senses, and six digits on one hand...plus a superior intellect.
He is not of the same species as the humans he eats.

Like Tarzan eating gorilla...or choice morsels.
A return to a primal state where feeding no the choice portions of your enemy imbues you with their spirit.

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PostSubject: Re: Hannibal Hannibal EmptyMon Jan 07, 2013 5:46 pm

From the encyclopaedia definition he is not a cannibal.

Laconian wrote:
Satyr wrote:
The next step in this imprisoning process was training the prisoners to be trapped in their own minds.

And this is the reason why meditation: even the tibetan buddhist kind towards the void or the Indian kind towards an all-encompassing deity, is not a vacation from reality. Even if it may look like that from the outside. It's survival training in the insanity of modernity.

The question I ask myself constantly is : am I giving in to modernity. I like to think of riding the tiger of modernity, like Nietzsche according to Evola. Towards this forum, I think the political Right-Left paradigm has to be shattered some more. I haven't read Marx, but like Tarpley says: "class conscoisness" is what Libertarians (and from my view many right-wingers, without money) are missing. Too much "elite talk" may cloud the clear vision. Clarisse grew up poor, but I think so did Lecter. He has class-consciousness, he sees similarities between her and him. Does that make him a leftist? No, but he isn't pretentious either. Clarisse is the most noble character by far, after Lecter.
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PostSubject: Re: Hannibal Hannibal EmptyMon Jan 07, 2013 5:58 pm

Therefore, it is a matter of some innate form of nobility.
The Platonic Philosopher King but without the rules against having a family or owning property to hold him in check.

This goes beyond class. Class is an economic construct that buys into the Marxist worldview.
This is about a splintering off of a mindset, an attitude, a set of principles...a meme, for lack of a better term.

We are going beyond genetics also...building upon them.
A meme that does not deny the gene, the past, but harnesses it to a particular ideal.
An Ideal that confronts the Modern...swims against, across, sometimes with, the current.

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PostSubject: Re: Hannibal Hannibal EmptyMon Jan 07, 2013 6:20 pm

Satyr wrote:
Class is an economic construct that buys into the Marxist worldview.

Yes, but we have to go by some identification markers. Nothing is accidental. So from the outer identification markers we work our way upwards. "Authenticity" is a "marker" of a highly developed person in tibetan buddhism. (The kind I got to know.) I very much recommend Hitlers "My struggle", the first chapters. He felt compassion with the poor, because he was poor himself and felt with the socialist rethoric. It were their proposed solutions that he opposed vehemently. But the conservative party that was robbing the poor, was even further away from his viewpoint. To me he was a heartfelt politician. If I look at these Libertarian "poor, but sexy" types: "Modernism" yells at me at maximum volume. (Our friend Aurini for example.)

For me it's not so much about belonging to a group, but about individuals. Group-think is always dissatisfying for me. But class-consiousness is part of consciousness and doesn't restrict me from developing higher markers in addition to that. It also doesn't prevent me from being open minded towards rich people (in my case, being poor myself), like it probably would with some leftists. This i wouldn't call consciousness at all, but discrimination by economic class. That I oppose.
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PostSubject: Re: Hannibal Hannibal EmptyMon Jan 07, 2013 7:13 pm

Two factors.

There's a difference between old-money and new-money.
Old-money inherits the past, and takes advantage of a system that provides balance by preventing too much social disruption.
The system is made to offer stability. It protect hierarchies and if it permits some social climbing it is a as way of reinforcing the facade of liberty.
This also creates a buffer between the haves and have-nots by supporting a middle-class which can hope to ascend, while fearing to descend into poverty, and the poor, who now only envy the middle-class, while the upper-classes remain hidden or are anonymous.

New-Money become the proof of the system's openness and freedoms.
They ascent by first surrendering to the system and its -principles and its ideals.
They become poster-children of systemic health...like the lottery publishes the against extraordinary odds few winners but not the many, many losers.
They become celebrities, taking the pressure off of old-money and their wealth and control.
Individuals to emulate, to envy and to imitate. or hate, by those who want to be amongst them...the masses.

Marxism simply changes who is on top and the rules of the game.
Wealth is replaced by idealism...the Party heads, the loyal to the communist ideals, enjoy favors.
The middle-class is eliminated because the illusion of no-classes prevents rebellion.
The privileged are those that surrender to the shared principles.
The principles are Judeo-Christian. They fail because they are fantastic, extraordinarily anti-nature and anti-reality and anti-world...Utopian.
The ideal citizen is a mindless drone... replacing the Capitalist mindless hunger, relentless need: animalism...the Zombie.

The ideal Marxist/Christian is ego-less....selfless....needless...eternally in the service of the whole: an ant, a bee, a termite.
The ideal Capitalist is insatiable appetite, endless hunger, the absolute void feeding and feeding on matter seeking redemption...seeking release from need, most of which is artificially induced.
A controllable manimal.
His just rewards are materialism and hedonism...the escape.

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PostSubject: Re: Hannibal Hannibal EmptyTue Jan 08, 2013 4:53 am

WWII left a trauma with my grandparents and parents generation. (Which of course also got partly passed on to my brothers/sisters and cousins generation.) Especially the decades after that. The guilt, the "collective guilt".

My grandfather struggled with the Hitler regime. We were very rich (old money), like royalty, with a house, like a castle, servants many many rooms and all. I've seen a picture. We lost it to Russia/East Europe in/after the war. When we became poor and had to work hard to even survive. My father knew some starvation during his childhood. And my grandmother during WWII. My ancestors around 1900 and before, were proud people. I know a picture of my great great grandfather, where he looks like Napoleon or Bismarck in a generals uniform. (Really of the highest decoration, no medium level. I am talking: King/Ruler or one of the closest ranks below that.)

Very much like Hannibals background actually, just on the other side of the war (but rejecting the Hitler regime) and with the difference that Hannibal is my fathers generation. (I started listening to the audio book of the Prequel to the Trilogy, by Harris). The Memory Palace. Got to really keep that up. The narrations from parents to children about their childhood and parents. The ancestor tales. I wish I knew more about my families past, than the pictures. We even have a family emblem (crest? I don't know the exact english translation). Modernity is when the past is devalued. Stolen and replaced by superficial progressive goals.

My father looks down upon my modernized endeavours (tibetan Buddhism or some Philosophies). I tell him these are tools to make a better living, survive better, a (of course lesser) replacement for what he doesn't offer me: stories of his past. My past, our past.
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PostSubject: Re: Hannibal Hannibal EmptySun Jan 13, 2013 12:47 pm

Hannibal is the one who overcame himself and god, in Silence of the Lambs. (That is the part in which he transforms the most.)

Not just god! When Clarisse asks him if he is capable to be as precise about himself as he is about her, he simply isn't interested.

To analyze others, you have to know yourself. Otherwise it's just about collected data. What modern science is today, with no sense or tools to relate the data to reality. (And confused blurred mystic terminology, with no well defined meanings for words, see the Hubbard criticism towards: psychology.)

See Scientology Guideline on How to study

Psychology becomes mysticism (Poetry. Little more precise than Nietzsche, but not much.)

How well you know yourself is constantly proven, by how well you are able to manipulate others towards your goals and needs.

So Lecter proves, that he knows himself.

In "Hannibal Rising" the actor is more slawic, with little more asian eyes than Hopkins, who looks greek, like Satyr on his picture.

So we have East and West meeting. In the book (audiobooks are all on youtube) he had a jewish (intellectual) teacher.

I wonder what would have happened if Hannibal had studied Hubbard instead of Freud.

He wouldn't have been in jail. He would have solved his childhood traumata. And his revenge that followed. And become "clear", free to roam all of his Memory Palace.

There is a development within Hannibal. The quest for love. Something he failed to reach in "Hannibal Rising" and finally achieved in "Hannibal". This is what makes him likable. He never gave up. He was struggling in 3 parts and at the end of "Silence of the Lambs" he freed himself. He achieved his goal in "Hannibal". So he cured himself. He used the "torture" in prison, to cure himself of his demons.

His memory palace, is what is called "auditing" in Scientology. And it's different from just remembering. It is not Psychology either. It is about painful memories that are hidden. That cannot be reached by the avarage mind under normal circumstances in the outside world, because they are supressed deep within the sub-consciousness. If Hannibal is an overman, then he is a "scientologist".

Prison was a forced ascesis. He knew he had to overcome his cannibalism. He agreed with the profiles, the psychiatrists wrote on him. He didn't complain. So he saved his energy towards other goals. Like escape.

Doesn't he write in "Hannibal" to Clarisse, how life outside has made him weak?
The Memory Palace was his trainings camp, not just a refuge.
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PostSubject: Re: Hannibal Hannibal EmptySun Jan 13, 2013 6:30 pm

Laconian wrote:
Hannibal is the one who overcame himself and god, in Silence of the Lambs. (That is the part in which he transforms the most.)
One does not "overcome" self....as self is the sum of the past and the past cannot be escaped.
One accepts self, and seeks to improve self, by using the past to nudge, to will (free), self...this is (inter)activity.

Your Scientology persistence makes me think you are here to proselytize minds into your cult.

I am not interested in any religion which uses the childish stupidities of Scientology, or Christianity, to seduce simpletons and weaklings.

Hubbard was a grifter...a charlatan.
An easy affair, it seems, in a world of feminized, idiots and sheltered children raised on fantasy and escapism.

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PostSubject: Re: Hannibal Hannibal EmptySun Jan 13, 2013 8:06 pm

I am no member of Scientology or any other cult for that matter. I think cults are a necessary evil today however, to preserve something more than mere academic knowledge. Namely some practices. Ways to apply knowledge. I even agree with your assessment of Hubbard, but cannot dismiss him that easily, because he had access to psychiatric government research materials no one else had.
But I will stop it.

_________

Cannibalism in my opinion is a replacement for sexual intercourse.
Lecter was a virgin, sexually inexperienced until Clarisse. Sexually dysfunctional in freudian terms. Caused by the horrors of his sisters murder and in desperation and half-unconscious starvation eating some of her flesh himself. His whole journey can be looked at as a way of self- preservation. Survival. Love is what frees him in the end.

We have different concepts of the self. He becomes more ego-less, by caring for Clarisse. This is his last escape from the nightmares of his past and his final victory.
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PostSubject: Re: Hannibal Hannibal EmptySun Jan 13, 2013 8:13 pm

No need to "stop it" if you have a conviction.
Defend it!!!

The psychiatry stuff aside, what about Hubbard inspires you?
Was it his ability to seduce so many?
I can tell you...it is not that difficult in a world, like this one.

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PostSubject: Re: Hannibal Hannibal EmptySun Jan 13, 2013 8:36 pm

Yes, at first it was that. When reading the biography "Bare faced Messiah" in 2006 or so.

I like the "Axioms" today. I think they are brilliantly clear and short. I like how well the language is defined. No mysticism, no room for guessing. All well agreed upon. Dianetics is what I like. The religious part was brought in later, and is already part of the cults decline in my opinion. Even the high-level drop-outs all praise the successes of the starters in the cult. I am taking a communication course in the "church". As a not-member. There are a bunch of "self-imporovement" courses you can take as an outsider.

I plan on buying the book "Scientology 0-8". Which is like a encyclopedia of all the Charts and Axioms and so on. Pretty dry and partly difficult to study (at first). But worth it.

Dianetics is based on "Survival". Scientology developed later, and thinks from the "Thetan". Where man equals spirit and not body.

So I don't want to advertise on here. But I understand how it was easy to seduce the many back then. The time for Gurus is over.
Cults however will stay a while longer in my estimation.

So I am not crazy about the man Hubbard. But his work. I admired his vision. He put a lot of effort in his work and some of the methods are simply brilliant. That's why it's hated so much and slandered. This "Avatar" (Harry Palmer) is an offshoot, using a more humanist approach. I think Hubbard can be quoted saying he wasn't human. Maybe there is even audio of this. So there is plenty to discredit Scientology. In my opinion the whole criticism has made the church better. And over here there is less hype. The upper levels are all in the USA anyways. And that's when people agree to give up some of their human freedoms and rights, for the cause of self-improvement. (Not that some criminal stuff didn't happen, where people were held against their will or had to work under terrible conditions, even teenagers. I especially have an eye on how they treat their children, when I am there, but it's good from what I've seen so far.)

Instead of Scientology I advertise, (Serge Kahili King) 7 Huna Principles, here in short

Quote :

1. The World Is What You Think It Is.
2. There are no limits.
3. Energy Flows Where Attention Goes.
4. Now Is The Moment Of Power.
5. To Love Is To Be Happy With (someone or something).
6. All Power Comes From Within.
7. Effectiveness Is The Measure Of Truth.
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PostSubject: Re: Hannibal Hannibal EmptySun Jan 13, 2013 9:52 pm

"I don't consider Psychology a science and neither did Doctor Lecter."
- Barney in the very beginning of the movie "Hannibal'
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