The Villain’s Past: Notes on Hannibal Rising and Hollywood’s Love of the Prequel
Rich Blecharz
“My mommy always said there were no monsters - no real ones - but there are.” -Newt from Aliens
Every once in awhile when I’m bored, I watch what I know is going to be a truly horrible movie. I don’t know why I do this. Maybe I’m morbidly curious, or maybe I’m a bit of a sadist and believe I deserve the punishment. One night a few weeks ago, I decided to watch Hannibal Rising, the prequel to Silence of the Lambs/Red Dragon/Hannibal. Now in my opinion, Silence of the Lambs is a classic movie, Red Dragon a decent one, and Hannibal, well, that one is kind of a mess. (For simplicity’s sake, I’m going to just leave Manhunter out of the discussion, even though it is the first movie to feature Hannibal Lecter.) I knew Hannibal Rising was going to be terrible, just from seeing the previews and having a basic idea of the story, but I felt compelled to watch it, just to see how bad it really was. I was not let down—it was awful.
But it did get me thinking about a current trend in Hollywood that really needs to stop: the need for prequels and origin stories that try to explain away the motivations and actions of iconic villains. Filmmakers now try to wrap everything up nicely in a little box, and crowbar in contrived back-stories so as to make us identify with the villains in some strange way. I won’t go into the nerdy details here, but does anyone still see Darth Vader as the galactic badass he was in the original Star Wars trilogy after seeing the ridiculous prequels? I try to pretend his origin story never happened, so that my favorite movie character stays the way I remember him as a kid: mysterious and the scourge of everyone who crosses his path. (Well, at least until it was revealed in Return of the Jedi that he was a feeble, broken old man under all that armor.)
Obviously many of these needless movies are the attempt of the movie studios to capitalize on popular franchises in order to make money, but I think it goes deeper than that. First off, the lazy screenwriting and weak origin stories are just another part of the dumbing down of America. If you’re a fan of Larry the Cable Guy or have ever seen a movie from the creators of Meet the Spartans (I use the term creators loosely in this instance. The hacks that brought you… might be a more appropriate phrase to use here), you can stop reading now and go watch your worn-out copy of Wild Hogs. Some people just need everything spelled out for them, and lack the mental capacity to use their own imaginations. Moviemakers are forced to pander to the lowest common denominator, or as I like to call them, stupid people, in order to fill more seats.
That being said, let’s get back to the adventures of young Hannibal. The basic plot of Hannibal Rising is that a gang of Nazis take Hannibal and his little sister hostage, and when they run out of food, eat his sister. Hannibal’s revenge on the Nazis ensues and he becomes a cannibal as a result. To digress for a moment, if I had a little sister, and some Nazi’s ate her for dinner, I think hunting them down and killing them would be quite a reasonable response, and wouldn’t make me crazy. Nor would it cause me to add human body parts to the list of things I like to snack on while watching television. So what is the audience to take from this back story? That Hannibal becoming a serial killing cannibal wasn’t really his fault, and he was merely of victim of circumstance? Should the audience pity him in some way? I don’t buy it. I like the Hannibal of Silence of the Lambs better, where there is no back story, no motivation. He is just insane and dangerous, and a whole hell of a lot more frightening. The audience doesn’t know how he got that way, and can use their imaginations to fill in the blanks. In my experience, the things I think of in my head are much more disturbing and scary that what anyone could put up on the screen.
Two examples of recent memorable villains with no origin stories include the Joker (The Dark Knight) and Anton Chigurh (No Country For Old Men.) The Joker is probably the most frightening of all. He has no motivation whatsoever to commit atrocities against the citizens of Gotham City other than to spread chaos and anarchy. He’s so insane that he doesn’t even seem to know his own past, as he repeatedly tells different versions of how he became disfigured to different characters throughout the movie. Money for personal wealth isn’t even a motivation in his twisted mind. Once he’s done using a giant pile of money to buy people off to do his bidding, he simply burns the rest of it. As he tells protagonist turned villain Harvey Dent/Two Face: “Do I really look like a guy with a plan? You know what I am? I'm a dog chasing cars. I wouldn't know what to do with one if I caught it. You know, I just... do things. The mob has plans, the cops have plans, Gordon's got plans. You know, they're schemers. Schemers trying to control their little worlds. I'm not a schemer. I try to show the schemers how pathetic their attempts to control things really are.” The Joker kills and destroys simply because it amuses him. There is no reasoning with a man like that. We as moviegoers aren’t meant to understand how or why he got that way, and usually, we are very afraid of what we don’t understand.
Anton Chigurh also lacks any background. He simply storms through No Country For Old Men, killing to get his particular job done, and sometimes just killing for no reason. The really disturbing aspect of his character is that he lives by some sort of warped “ethical” code: “No no. No. You don't understand. You can't make a deal with him. Even if you gave him the money he'd still kill you. He's a peculiar man. You could even say that he has principles. Principles that transcend money or drugs or anything like that. He's not like you. He's not even like me.” If he decides that the flip of a coin will determine if a character lives or dies, the character has to choose heads or tails. Chigurh even goes so far as to hunt and kill Llewelyn Moss’s innocent wife, simply because he promised Llewelyn he would kill her if he did not cooperate earlier.
Examining two terrifying villains that we don’t know much about brings me to the reason I think we are having all these sub par origin stories thrown at us. People just can’t handle the fact that humans are capable of horrible acts of violence and brutality. We need to be reassured that some external force caused us to act in such a manner, such as the trauma of an abusive childhood or Nazi’s eating of a sibling. We need a reason. We can’t be the sole cause of our own actions. We can’t be normal one day, and snap and kill our family the next. I’m not a scientist, but people forget that we’re still animals that have primal urges and biological processes that sometimes malfunction. No matter how smart we think we are, we’re not as evolved as we’d like to be. Just pick up a newspaper and look at all the random acts of violence described every day as evidence. There are people who like to do violent things for no other reason that they enjoy it. The concept of good vs. evil is a discussion for another column written by someone else, but everyone is capable of committing terrible acts against one another. That is what really scares people, and they don’t want to be reminded of that when they are at the movies. The movie 8MM, a guilty pleasure of mine, features a sequence that I think perfectly sums up the concept that some people don’t need a reason to commit terrible acts. In the scene, Nicholas Cage has found out the identity of the killer, nicknamed Machine, and he whips out this zinger: “Can’t get your mind around it huh? I don’t have any answers to give, nothing I can say is going to make you sleep easier at night. I wasn’t beaten, I wasn’t molested, Mommy didn’t abuse me, Daddy never raped me. I’m only what I am, that’s all there is too it! There’s no mystery. Things I do, I do them because I like them! Because I want to! “
So Newt’s mommy was wrong—there are real monsters, both in the movies and real life. The ones we know the least about are the ones that keep us clinging to our seats and occasionally invade our dreams at night. If filmmakers want to continue making movies that reflect the real world, they will stop trying to rationalize away the actions of these monsters. Everything doesn’t happen for a reason, and that is what people can’t admit to themselves. That, and we’re getting dumber as a society. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go and preorder my tickets for the new The Fast and The Furious movie…
Rich Blecharz was born a nice boy in Pittsburgh, PA. But something went horribly wrong and he grew up into a cynical, sarcastic and opinionated wreck of a human being. In his free time he enjoys watching reruns of The Golden Girls while drinking cheap liquor from a brown paper bag. He is an Aquarius, and enjoys long, drunken, moonlit horseback rides along the creek in his backyard. He also believes that the world now needs Hunter S. Thompson more than ever.
