“Do everything that’s proper; I go in for that. Excuse my being so patronising. You say you don’t know me; but when you do you will discover what a worship I have for propriety.”
“You are not conventional?” said Isabel, very gravely.
“I like the way you utter that word! No, I am not conventional: I am convention itself.”
—The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James, 1881
Maybe he has the two senses of the word asylum conflated in that mildewy garbage bag full of New York City subway rats he calls a brain.
Why else would Donald Trump be talking so much about Hannibal Lecter?
They’re coming from all over the world, from prisons and jails, and mental institutions and insane asylums. You know, they go crazy when I say, ‘The late great Hannibal Lecter,’ okay? They say, ‘Why would he mention Hannibal Lecter? He must be cognitively in trouble.’ No, no, no! These are real stories. Hannibal Lecter from Silence of the Lamb. [sic] He’s a lovely man. He’d love to have you for dinner.
That joke was old in 1991, which may be the year Trump is stuck in. (Or maybe he is back in the 1980s, but not the 1950s, contra Maureen Dowd—there were no spray tans in the Eisenhower era.) People are always going on about “representation” in media. Polynesians have Moana, the Powhatan have Pocahontas (like it or not), and Lithuanian-American cannibal psychiatrists have Hannibal Lecter, who seems to be hiding out in Donald Trump’s head after escaping from the asylum—which strikes me as not an obvious improvement in his living situation.
The thing is, Hannibal Lecter is an exemplary character for our political times.
Or he was, anyway. Thomas Harris—writer of the novels that inspired the movies that inspired the television series that inspired the (I assume) action figures and board game—is one of those authors (and auteurs) who cannot be trusted with their own legacies. George Lucas is one of these, but, if you want a more highfalutin’ example, consider what a bad editor Walt Whitman was of his own work, turning out revised editions of Leaves of Grass that progressively disfigured the original work of shocking American genius.
The best version of Lecter is the one Harris first gives us, the inexplicable monster of Red Dragon and the more fleshed-out (if you will pardon the expression) epicurean nihilist of Silence of the Lambs. “Nothing happened to me,” he lectures the FBI agent interviewing him. “I happened. You can’t reduce me to a set of influences. You’ve given up good and evil for behaviorism. … You’ve got everybody in moral dignity pants—nothing is ever anybody’s fault. Look at me. … Can you stand to say I’m evil?”
Harris strongly hints that Lecter preys on human beings because he isn’t one, that his superhuman mind (the intelligence and degree of rationality that are “not measurable by conventional means”) and unusual anatomy (the extra finger, the maroon eyes) announce him as one step beyond the rest of us on the evolutionary ladder, Homo post-sapiens. Unfortunately, Harris and his epigones later fell victim to the impulse to moralize and psychologize Lecter, who turns out, in the end, to be the good sort of serial killer, who kills only those who somehow deserve it, if only for being rude. By the end, the character is only distantly related to the predator who, when dosed with sodium amytal by the FBI and asked about the whereabouts of a missing Princeton student, replies with a recipe for dip.
What Hannibal Lecter is not is a democrat. (Note the lowercase d, please—I do not mean this in a partisan sense.) Harris eventually makes him a literal aristocrat (of Sforza and Visconti extraction by way of Lithuania), but even plain old Dr. Lecter of Baltimore is a man who believes in—and sometimes homicidally enforces—classes and distinctions. He relieves the local orchestra of substandard musicians, torments a bent cop about his family’s scandalous history, and hunts rednecks for sport.
He is a more serious and sanguine version of W. Somerset Maugham’s ridiculous snob in The Razor’s Edge, who says on his deathbed:
We know from Holy Writ that there are class distinctions in heaven just as there are on earth. There are seraphim and cherubim, archangels and angels. I have always moved in the best society in Europe and I have no doubt that I shall move in the best society in heaven. Our Lord has said: The House of my Father hath many mansions. It would be highly unsuitable to lodge the hoi polloi in a way to which they’re entirely unaccustomed. … Believe me, my dear fellow, there’ll be none of this damned equality in heaven.
The snob in me notes that redundant “the” before hoi polloi, and also very much wants to explain to you that snob doesn’t mean what you probably think it does: A snob is not a haughty aristocrat but a person of modest origin (snob comes from an old word for cobbler) who affects aristocratic manners or tastes. But whether we’re talking about ordinary snobs or Henry Brooks Adams, people who notice certain kinds of social distinctions or who insist upon some undemocratic artistic or intellectual standard make a certain kind of man intensely uncomfortable.
We are permitted to notice some distinctions and to apply some standards but not others. An American man in Anno Domini 2024 is allowed to have very strong opinions about excellence in basketball players, for example, but not in cellists. You are allowed to say that you think Taylor Swift is superior to Dua Lipa but not that modern popular music is by and large primitive crap meant to appeal to people who have had no musical education. The notion that taste and judgment come from education and cultivation is dismissed as something important only to effete snobs who cannot feel the sublime joys that are natural to a Real American™ and who just don’t get boot-scootin’ or “brat” or whatever.
Donald Trump is, of course, a far cry from Hannibal Lecter—he is in every way an inferior man, but especially when it comes to matters of taste. Trump famously subsists on McDonald’s and KFC (a corporation so profoundly ashamed of its product that its officers took the words fried chicken out of the company name) and other junk that, as Lecter put it, “isn’t even food as I understand the definition.” Lecter likes the Goldberg Variations (and how has Jonah not published a collection under that title?); Trump likes “Rockin’ in the Free World” (as much as the author of that song despises him) or, if he is feeling uppity, the music from Cats. Trump favors $12,000 Brioni suits that he has trouble buttoning and wears them with ties that hang past his gut, leaving a tail so short he has to use Scotch tape to hold it in place. (He recently started buying longer ties.) Trump despises refinement of any kind and instead revels in vulgarity. The supposedly 30,000-square foot Trump Tower penthouse that is actually less than 11,000 square feet, with the fake gilding and by-the-yard frescos, the knockoff Louis XIV furniture, the general Liberace-by-way-of-Caligula aesthetic, etc. Some men wear a fake Rolex, but Donald Trump is a fake Rolex of a man. His admirers, of course, love that about him.
Trump is, among other things, an assault on the American upper classes’ sensibilities and expectations when it comes to good manners and good taste, not to mention liberal-democratic norms regarding decency in public office, the rule of law, not trying to overthrow the government after you incompetently lose an election to a doddering old turnip who barely could be bothered to campaign against you, etc.
The Democrats, of course, are Osmond from The Portrait of a Lady. They worship convention but feel themselves liberated from any binding moral code when it comes to the pursuit of their own selfish interests.
And where does that leave the American voting public? In need of advice and consolation from Hannibal Lecter, of course, and he offers these words of wisdom: “I have followed with enthusiasm the course of your disgrace and public shaming. My own never bothered me except for the inconvenience of being incarcerated, but you may lack perspective.”
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