I watched Hannibal this evening. It’s a bit of a let-down after the excellent The Silence of the Lambs, but in a hard-to-place kind of way. Perhaps you see just a bit too much of the nutters: in the original Anthony Hopkins famously got an Oscar for little over sixteen minutes of acting. Perhaps it’s the subtle, barely-present, implied psychopathy which makes it more plausible and twisted, just like they should never have shown Sauron in The Lord of the Rings.
Cannibalism is a bit odd. For example, famous fast-food-based film Super Size Me made me really fancy a McDonald’s by about half-way through. In fact, just looking at Morgan Spurlock’s French-fry-stuffed face on Wikipedia is making me quite peckish. I’m pretty sure this wasn’t the intended effect of the documentary.
Hannibal, however, didn’t give me a craving for some gourmet-cooked human flesh. Perhaps it’s because, unlike Hannibal “the Cannibal” Lecter, I’ve not got a handy rhyming name; I don’t think ‘Statto’ rhymes with any ethically dubious or criminal activity (or indeed much, apart from ‘gateau’), so I’m probably safe.
That said, recent high-profile German cannibal Armin Meiwes doesn’t have a name which rhymes with much, either (the German word for cannibal seems, unfortunately for my theory, to be ‘Kannibale’).
His case is a truly weird one. He advertised for a meal on the Internet and, upon getting a respondent, invited him back to his home where they lopped off his penis and flambéed it to eat together. More confusing even than the case is that the media felt it necessary to tell us the exact cooking method; perhaps they were worried that the news-reading punters would identify with him a bit too easily unless it was specified. “Oh, he fried the bloke’s knob with some onions, that’s understandable!” would ring the merry discussion around the pub table, “Let’s not go for a kebab this evening, let’s pop home and eat one-another’s extremities, just like that really normal German bloke!”
I am thinking of making a film called Cannibalise Me where I eat nothing but human meat for thirty days and see if it has an adverse effect on my body. Apply here.
Note to police/Polizei: I am not really. Please do not arrest me.