Fright-con #41 - Hannibal Lecter: America's Favorite Cannibal

Hello, the internet, and welcome to this spinoff episode of Der Daily Zeitgeist, which we're calling the Iconograph instead of looking at the Zeitgeist through current events. On Monday mornings, we look at the Zeitgeist through the powerful pop cultural deities that are our icons, or now that it's October, the powerful pop cultural demons who are our Fright cons.

It's spooky season. You done it. Last week, we kicked things off with a man who wants to suck your blood. And this week, we've got somebody who wants to wear your face. The most iconic serial killer, I would argue, fictional or real. The most iconic cannibal. The number one villain on AFI's list of the best movie villains of all time. And he does it all with the personality of a cunty Dr. Frasier Crane. he's serving cunt in affectation and potentially at a dinner party. I'm joined, as always, by my co-host. He was once able to smell which variety of Old Spice body wash I was wearing through a plastic barrier. It's Miles Gray! Yes, Jack. You still enjoy Fiji, I see. Oh, you brush with Sensodyne. Yes, indeed.

Because the cold ice cream hurts your teeth. I'm glad your scabs have healed. You wear swagger because you're hoping the name will rub off on you and lend you some confidence. Yet you remain riseless and desperate. That would be amazing. That's like if a haunted house had a little room where you could go and just get read to filth by Hannibal Lecter. Yeah. That would be great.

Your shoes look like shit. He's so rude about her shoes in Silence of the Lambs. He's like, nice suit, but your shoes betray that you are a yokel piece of shit. Anyways, Miles, we're thrilled to be joined in our third seat by the host of the very funny horror movie podcast, Kim and Kat Stay Alive. Maybe they once ate someone's liver with fava beans and a nice Chianti and found it to be a terrible wine pairing.

It's Kim Burns and Kat from Porno! Kim and Kat!

Hello!

What's up, y'all?

We are in our element. We're so excited to be here.

Yes. Yes. Good. Good. Good. I mean, when we were like thinking, I'm like, who, who are this? We're some spooky people. We know.

We are spooky.

We're spooky. I did look it up. Apparently liver, fava beans and Chianti would be bad. The flavor is too intense for like the iron of the liver mixed with the high tannins of the Chianti overwhelms. And the fava beans, we'll call them police trying to solve a murder because they might as well not even be there. They disappear in the mix, if you know what I'm saying.

Are fava beans like lima beans?

Yeah, aren't they? Just like a more... that would suck if he was like with some Lima beans, come up with a different way of saying that. Um, similar, similar. And look, I guess I did watch sounds of the lambs again for probably like the 10th time. Um, I will say his cuntiness was the thing that I was most struck that I had like kind of forgotten the most.

He like keeps shitting on her shoes. Uh, when he interacts, interacts with the Senator, uh, whose daughter is like at the bottom of a well. He like says some of the most depraved shit, which I had remembered. But then at the end, he's like, oh, and by the way, Senator, love the suit.

I hope there's a drag queen somewhere that.

Is Hannibal Lecter.

Yeah, somehow that just reads you for Phil.

Yeah. But he's, I think he has a lot going for him in terms of, cultural demonic iconography i think uh like i said i do think he's our most iconic serial killer fictional or not i i think the competition is jack the ripper who he's like the babe ruth of serial killers i feel like it's like an old school but i will say oh yeah people.

Never seen like game footage of them yeah they only see pictures don't quite know yeah the legend yeah.

Um never yeah He hit some real home runs.

I'll tell you what. That's really funny that you say that. I was given in T-ball the nickname Jack the Ripper when I was like five by my T-ball coach, which suggests to me, yes, iconic, but I do think it's lost a bit of its malice over time if you're giving a fucking five-year-old. By the way, that was when I peaked at T-ball and baseball. I was obsessed with baseball.

I was good at T-ball because they keep it right there for you. And then once the ball started moving, not even like once the kids started pitching 70 miles per hour, once the coaches started pitching... I could not make contact with the ball at all. Oh, man.

That's how Kim sets up jokes for me. She just puts it right there.

There you go. Swing, swing, swing. Rip that thing. I'll cry. Yeah, I swing and they throw it into the outfield for me. Wow, man.

Holy shit, Jack.

You really crushed that one. Jack the Ripper over here, huh? He's looking at their dugout going like... Mom, who's Jack the Ripper? I know. Oh, man. I was like, call me Jack the Ripper. He played with Babe Ruth. The others, Manson is the other one that I think he's been diminished into like kind of weird little guy territory.

He didn't even do his own work.

Yeah. And he's a shitty musician. Yeah. And then in the world of fiction. Yeah. Once you, once you hear Manson's music, you can't really go back to be like, wow. Huge aura killer. And then I think, The closest we have in the world of fiction is probably John Doe from Seven. He's pretty iconic, but nobody's making a franchise about him for a number of reasons.

He doesn't like give you the sort of affects that would inform other people's performances of serial killers or are like. perception of serial killers i think that the thing that hannibal lecter benefits from the most is being played by one of the greatest actors of all times in anthony hopkins because now you're not just like because i feel like before that like when she's walking through the that sort of like lurk weird prison whatever that uh dungeon that where she first meets him Do they.

Still keep people in dungeons? That was a question I had. I was like, damn, fool. You dug this out of the earth? It was 91, 92. We were like, yeah, sure, man. They're in a dungeon.

But I feel like those first serial killers she walks by were the versions we had before you get to peak Anthony Hopkins, who's just got a vibe, has a way of speaking, has this hyper-intelligence that is really off-putting, not just because he's a fucking murderer, He's completely.

Still when she walks in. That shit is so troubling. Yeah, he said he was channeling lizards and other reptiles.

Yeah, he gives meerkat as well.

Mmm, meerkat. The scariest animal of all. But anyways, I want to dig into... His relation to serial killers writ large, because I think it is one of the weirdest parts of our iconography. Like this show is we're always, you know, thinking about who we make icons, why we make them icons, how do they become icons? And I think one of the weirdest things is that serial killers are icons in the United States. Very strange relationship to Jeffrey Dahmer. Um, I didn't realize this, uh, kind of, I, I, I knew they were around the same time. The way it actually played out is silence. The lambs comes out in 1991 on Valentine's day for some fucking reason. Jeffrey Dahmer is arrested in July of that year. And then Silence

of the Lambs sweeps the Oscars like seven months after the Dahmer arrest. Oh, damn.

That messaging.

Tied up in there. Yeah. It's like all together.

Did Dahmer start before the movie or he was like inspired by it?

Yeah. Wow. You got started from me. I think he was inspired by the movie in the sense of, him saying that he was a cannibal. I actually don't know that he was actually, I think he, like when you dig into the details of the case, like he says he ate his, um, victims. But like when, when you look at the statement by the police at first, they're like, it doesn't indicate that. And so I think it was like, he was basically giving America what they want a little bit.

We'll dig into it. Yeah. For notoriety. He saw a wave. Yeah. He caught, he saw a wave and he took it. Rachel Dolezal of cannibals. I do think it's also interesting to just think about him in the context of cannibalism, because that is an obsession that I'm personally not like, I've always found it less interesting. I think that other people like people being obsessed with like the Donner party and like, The Alive movies, like, did you guys see Alive and then, like, also Society of the Snow, like, the new Alive movie?

No.

I don't think so. It's real. a meditation on, like, cannibalism in a way that I'm like, man, you guys are fucking so obsessed with this shit.

We have a lot of conversations about cannibalism on our show. And, like, we really. I'm super accepting of it. Like, honestly, I'm kind of like.

Like, if we're stuck out there, I'm eating you.

Yeah. Oh, you like that? I thought you meant like a murderous cannibal. And I'm like, do you? Yeah.

In all honesty, like, look at where we are in today's society. To me, it's like, let's put our cannibals to use because I've met a lot more people that deserve to be devoured than I have cows.

Yeah, that's true. You look at Elon Musk's big torso. Oh, yeah. gaming about the oregon meat that's grown in there it's.

Like it's like one of those looney tunes things where you see him and then he starts morphing into like a turkey on a.

Spit yeah yeah yeah exactly roast yeah i i feel like people in the 90s were really looking at each other and just seeing big ham legs steaming ham legs because like this came out in 91 alive came out like one year later people were just like Yeah. But what about cannibalism? Yeah.

Yeah.

Like those turkey legs at the Ren Faire. Yeah. So, yeah, I don't know. I was claiming like or I was like in my own head, I was like, I'm not into the cannibal stuff. But then I was doing the my notebook dump on the Dracula episode. And I was doing a Monster Mash power ranking of all the characters because I feel like those are our main monsters.

Right?

Right, who show up at the Monster Mash. Yeah, the monsters. If you show up in the Monster Mash, you are like one of our monsters. You're one of our core iconic monsters.

Yeah.

And so you've got Frankenstein, Dracula, all over that motherfucker. Oh, yeah. That song is a great example of like Dracula essentially becomes the main character of the Monster Mash. They even make room for his son. He appears in the monster mask. Oh yeah. But you got mummy, you got ghoul, you got wolf man, you got zombie. Um, Igor shows up and I was realizing that like all of my top ones for being like most iconic spookiness are all cannibal monsters.

Like it's, it's vampire, it's Dracula, it's zombie, it's wolf man. It's like anybody I'm afraid of getting eaten by is the one that I actually take seriously as a monster. Whereas like, Frankenstein is like a bonk-based monster to me.

But do we know his diet?

We don't, but it's not a core part of his mythology that he comes after you and eats you. Okay. Like Kyo, maybe?

Yeah.

Speaking of Dracula, this might be less interesting to you guys.

But have you seen the Jonathan Daly video?

I'm so glad you brought it up. I'm so glad you brought it up.

Dracula?

No, what?

This might just be going around with the the ladies.

Oh was it from the uh like the novel like yeah like the book audiobook.

They're doing an audio i saw that yeah that was like that was.

The reading of it has anyone seen my face.

Yeah you were like flushed.

Dracula really shot to the top the.

Way he was talking and just the way she was like He's like, drink it in. And I was like, whoa. What is this? Wait, what is this? Who is this?

Okay, so Jonathan Bailey, Fiero in Wicked, or the oldest brother in Bridgerton.

Sure, okay.

Okay, he is doing an audio book of Dracula.

With Ella Purnell. From Yellowjacket.

Yeah.

Oh, another fucking big cannibal show. Cannibal shit. Cannibal shit. Yeah.

So, I mean.

Cannibal shit. That's my rap ad. That's your big drop.

Cannibal shit. Cannibal shit. So, yeah, he's just, like, reading, but somebody whipped.

Out a camera.

Bless him.

And.

It's good. Just like hot people reading feels like it should be a type of YouTube video.

Yeah.

I finally understood what it was like to be like a familiar to a vampire. I'm like, yeah. Keep talking that shit. Keep talking that shit.

I'm like, I don't know who you are, sir, but okay.

Yeah.

It's, um, you're welcome for turning you on to that.

Hmm. Anyways, let's get into the research for Hannibal Lecter. Are you guys... I guess before we get into it, though, I'm curious to hear, are you guys fans of Sons of the Lambs, fans of Hannibal?

Huge.

Yeah. Big.

Yeah.

We actually.

So the... You tell them, Kat.

The mental hospital that he goes to in the movie Shepard Pratt was, like, on campus where we went to college.

Yeah.

Well, like, across the street, but, like, they built... The one with the dungeon?

Yes.

The one we were just talking about?

You turned right and we took the same road to Shepard Pratt and then where I lived at University Village.

And then you just crossed the street and that's Towson.

You guys were born to this. Yeah.

And I used to swim laps at the Shepard Pratt pool. Wow.

And what else?

Oh, my great-grandmother spent some time there.

Possibly in the dungeons.

Hey.

Yeah.

Wow.

With what's his face?

Where is it? Where in the country is it? Yeah.

With Baltimore.

With. Yeah.

My great grandmother was rumor has it in Shepard Pratt with F. Scott Fitzgerald's wife, Zelda, who really is the one who wrote Great Gatsby. But let's throw her in an insane asylum instead.

She's crazy the way she's always making stuff up and writing it down. Exactly. She's a great author? Nah, she's probably a witch or something.

Exactly.

That's so wild. First of all, I do love that it's like... he's our most sophisticated fictional he is america's sherlock holmes like he's our most sophisticated genius and we're like where do we make him from i don't know baltimore right okay all right hon hello i've been working on getting rid of my baltimore accent yeah Yins understand, hon.

You going down the ocean, hon?

He's going down the ocean. I had his liver with some fava beans in a diet cake. Right. So the AFI did declare him our greatest movie villain of all time. He barely beat out Norman Bates and Darth Vader. Um, even though I will argue he's not really the villain of this movie and like, no, the, the power of this movie is it allows you to root for, a serial killer who eats people.

A guy who artistically flays a man at the end and we're like, yay!

It has some of my favorite tropes from movies. That one where it's like, wait, he took like 45 minutes to hang that guy up there and like design the room with his entrails and then get the lighting right. Like it has such dramatic lighting. It is very impressive. The way he used the bunting as wings. Right. It's gorgeous. Yeah.

Original artwork.

Critical thinking like he's I mean, what's not to love social commentary?

Yeah. I also love that he does the thing that all geniuses do in these sorts of movies where he does word jumbles where it's like he's put it using like anagrams. It's like. It's just, you know, people love their little word puzzles in the newspaper. They love the idea of a serial killer who's like, and I've hidden the killer's name in this word search. Using, yeah. Yes, it can go upside down. And diagonal.

Diabolical.

The new version, he's like, tell me, Agent Starling, do you play Wordle? Yes. Yes. Oh, my God.

You know he plays Wordle.

You know he plays Wordle. Every day. But you know he's probably doing it with, like, somehow in, like, two letters every time. Oh, for sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Super annoying.

It's so annoying playing Wordle with Hannibal. The first version of Hannibal Lecter we got was played by future Succession star Brian Cox. I have not seen Manhunter. Have you guys seen Manhunter?

No, but that blew my mind when I read that. I was like, holy shit.

So Manhunter is an adaptation of the novel Red Dragon, which also later gets remade again with Hannibal Lecter in it. It is optioned by Dino De Laurentiis, who like owns the rights to the book and the characters. And he comes up more than anyone else in our icon episodes for some reason. This producer, Dino De Laurentiis, who made like all the Stephen King movies and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle movies and did it all in like North Carolina, just like created his own little weird Hollywood down there.

I love that for him. So he hired Michael Mann to make this movie. It was a massive flop. The Hannibal Lecter is like kind of just a side character. They misspell his name. L.E.C.K.T.O.R. Oh, he keeps being like, fuck off. They change the name of the book. Because Dino De Laurentiis thought that people would think it was a, quote, chop-socky movie from Hong Kong with the name Red Dragon.

I did wear my Red Dragon.

Oh, wow.

That is a sick shirt. That's dope. Is that Wrexham? It's Wrexham.

But I was like, oh, they're the Red Dragons.

Hey, shout out another Welshman. Yeah, exactly.

There you go.

Yeah. Or he was concerned they would think it was about communism.

So what year did that come out?

Out?

That was 86, I believe. Yeah.

Huh.

The movie tanks. And so when Thomas Harris writes the sequel to Red Dragon called Sounds of Lambs, he owns the rights and was like, yeah, no, thanks, buddy. Nobody can make a successful one of these movies and just like doesn't even read the fucking book.

No.

And so it's just it's not going to be made until an actor by the name of Gene Hackman comes through. and was like this character speaks to me i not only do i want to play hannibal lecter i want to direct this even though i'm not a director so it starts with gene hackman developing it to be the director and play hannibal lecter or he's like if that's too much maybe i can step back and be jack crawford which he would be good as jack crawford the fbi director um And then his daughter read the book and told him, Daddy, you're not making this movie. Really?

Which is. All right. So that's a fucked up thing. for her to have done she fucked her dad big time yeah for him to tell that story he sucks so bad like to be like yeah i would i would have been hannibal lecter if my dumb daughter hadn't convinced me not to such a shitty thing like how do you recover from that yeah i convinced my dad not to do silence of the lambs.

Or like it could be one of those things where like he he somehow didn't do it. And he's like, it was just easy to be like, yeah, my daughter was like, this is sick. So I can't do it.

And I'm trying to be a good dad. You know what I mean? That's why, that's why I'm not.

Totally.

It is, uh, as the script is going around, it is interesting. Like, now it's easy for us to forget because every TV show is basically Silence of the Lambs. Once Silence of the Lambs came out, it just took over. Like all TV shows became FBI procedurals with like the most disgusting shit happening in every episode constantly. But like when the script is going around, people aren't just like turning it down. They're like turning it down with extreme prejudice.

They're like, how dare you send this to me? What really the fuck do you think I am?

Uh, so like currently throwing up.

Gagging as they turn it down. Um, Demi's first choice for Hannibal Lecter was, did you guys know this? Do you know who it was?

No.

Sean Connery.

Which I didn't see why they would pick him for it, but I don't think it would have been.

The right choice. It would have not worked at all.

But I can see why.

Why do you think Connery would have been good?

He also has the quiet power vibes.

That's true.

I don't think he would have gone the way that Anthony Hopkins did.

That's kind of what Demi says, is that he has this quiet, fierce intelligence, which is Purely depicted through nonverbal means because if you see him talk, you're like, not that much fierce intelligence if you see him talk under his own power without a script and talk about what he thinks of women. Not the most fierce intelligence that you've ever seen. But Connery turned it down and said that he thought it was disgusting and wouldn't dream of playing that part. So again, it's not just like, you know, we've chosen to go in a different direction on this one.

They're like, this is fucked up, man. What are you thinking? Send this to my client. And so he goes to Demi's second choice, which is Tony Hopkins, as he keeps calling him. I do think just on the Connery thing, because Sean Connery has been haunted by turning down many roles. He's always like, The Matrix and Lord of the Rings.

He was supposed to play Gandalf and Morpheus, I think.

Morpheus.

Oh, wow. Yeah. And he turned those down. And I do think like he fucked up turning those two down. I don't think there's a world where like he I think he would have sucked as an actor. I don't think the movie works at all.

No.

It's funny thinking of like having Sean Connery in the red pill, blue pill scene rather than like.

You take the red pill. Hey, that was good.

I wonder if that would have just put off that whole thing from being some kind of conservative sort of meme, too.

I don't know. This guy's kind of dorky, dude. I think he kind of worked fine in that role. As Morpheus? Yeah, as like a... authority figure who's just, like, mysterious and, you know, I could see him working there. Although, him in sunglasses seems weird to me. But maybe they lose the sunglasses.

The little nose bridge sunglasses are so silly.

But he went from Connery right to Hopkins. Hopkins, again, like, easy to forget this, but he was not... A big actor at the time. He was a character actor who was mainly known for the stage. In 1980, he had been in The Elephant Man, and that was kind of the last successful movie that he had been in. He was in, like, I'm just going to read a list of the movies he was in between The Elephant Man and Silence of the Lambs. A Change of Seasons, The Bounty, The Good Father, 84 Charing Cross Road, The Dawning, A Chorus of Disapproval, Desperate Hours. And like there are three year spans where he's in nothing during that period. And then he's in Silence of the Lambs. So they're like he doesn't really have a major career. And then like

after this, he's in Howard's end and like starts just being like the main go to actor. But like he was not having a very successful career prior to this movie. And then there's a great there's a great anecdote. where at Orion Pictures, one week before they start shooting, they do a read-through of the script, and Hopkins has found the character. And Demi says, after which a producer responded to Hopkins' performance as if he were the Kool-Aid man, whispering, Oh, yeah.

Now, did they consider the Kool-Aid man for Hannibal Lecter?

Right. I mean, it's an interesting, I could see him in that room. Could see her walking in and the Kool-Aid man is just standing there.

He'd bust right out, though.

He'd do bust right out. That is the thing with him. Yeah. Let's take a quick break. We'll come back. We'll talk more Tony Hopkins about his method and much more. We'll be right back. And we're back. We're back. And just taking a step back because of all the rejections, like being with extreme prejudice. Jodie Foster was far from the first choice. And in fact, she was lobbying for the role.

She like saw it. She had a clear vision. She was like, oh, this is actually perfect for me. I'm going to win an Oscar for playing this role. So she's all over. She's like, just get me in the room. Get me in the room. Get me in the room. And Demi is like anyone but her for a long time. His first choice is Michelle Pfeiffer. Michelle Pfeiffer does the thing where she's like, it was a hard choice, but ultimately I've decided not to go with it. But like Meg Ryan, Laura Dern are also offered the role before Jodie Foster.

It would.

Be hard, but I could see a world where like some of those worked. I do. I do feel like those are the ones where you got to be like, fuck, That was a miss, guys. That was a miss. Although, I mean, who knows? Jodie Foster is so good in this role.

Yeah.

Maybe nobody. Yeah. Yeah. Those all just feel like two movie star-ish, you know? Yeah. And I also, yeah.

I mean, for me, Meg Ryan is just a little too, I don't even consider this a dig because it's necessary for certain things. She's a little too aware of the camera for me. Whereas, like, I feel like what Jodie did was like, we weren't even, like, the camera wasn't there. Like, she was just.

Yeah.

In it to win it. You know, I don't know that Meg Ryan does it for me. Meg Ryan's just.

Also not an FBI person to me.

I could see Michelle because she has an intensity to her, but also she doesn't seem as not quite FBI agent the way Jodie Foster can. It's funny because when you compare them all, you kind of see where the margins are that made Jodie Foster absolutely the perfect pick for this.

Unfortunately, Laura Dern drives me nuts, but for no discernible reason. She just drives me crazy.

Brian, the editor, has chipped in with Laura Dern too tall. To which producer Catherine said, I think you mean Laura too darn tall.

That was beautiful.

You know what it is with Michelle Pfeiffer. I can't not picture her performance in dangerous minds. She's like, these people have dangerous minds, you know, like, I don't think I bought her as tough in Dangerous Minds. Coolio comes out. I can't not picture her pulling up to Hannibal Lecter in that first scene and just taking the seat and turning it around backwards and sitting on it. All right, let's wrap. Let's wrap, Lector. Yeah.

As I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I take a look at my life and she's like, uh-huh.

Realize there's nothing left.

Oh my God. Wait, can somebody do that? Can somebody, can we just like get those? Can we make that somehow?

Can we make some? Yeah.

Yeah.

I think we can.

I mean, Coolio passed away, unfortunately. So we'll have to have a stand in.

Oh, other people who are considered that there's always like a crazy long list of people who are considered. I'm just going to read off a list. And then there are two names who I'm like, interesting. OK, so the people considered for Hannibal Lecter besides Sean Connery and Tony, David Bowie, Harrison Ford, Robin Williams, Charles Grodin, Steve Martin, Tom Hanks, Jeremy Irons, Al Pacino, Bill Murray and Warren Beatty.

Too many comedians.

Yeah.

I don't even know what list you just read me.

Rest in peace, Robin Williams.

But what? I mean, like, one hour photo was terrifying. That's true. You know what I mean? He's a good creep. He could have played Buffalo Bill. He couldn't have played. He could not have played. I could see Jeremy Irons as a collector. Jeremy Irons is the one that makes the most sense out of there. David Bowie also, in a weird way, is like unnerving enough.

Steve Martin is the craziest thing I've ever heard.

Tom Hanks is also like they hadn't figured Tom Hanks out yet. Takes off his shoes and puts on his house shoes. They really didn't know. Okay, so that was shot in 91.

So right before that, he had done the Bonfire of the Vanities, Joe vs.

The Volcano, Turner and Hooch, the Burbs, Punchline, Big, Dragnet. They hadn't figured him out yet. They were like, this guy wants to be in dark stuff. And it's like, no, not quite. No, no. Although I will say, so we'll get to it. There was a lot of protests against the... anti-trans uh you know depiction of buffalo bill and just like the general vibes of the movie like you know and there are people who defend against that but i think you watch the movie now and you're like there this is this is fucked up like yeah for this to be a depiction of somebody who is like The movie goes out of its way to be like, he's not actually trans. He's just real messed up. He thinks he is. And you're like, hold on. He sought treatment.

You know what I mean? Yeah, exactly. And they're not like, the system failed him. They were like, he's too fucked up to even get the trans thing going.

Right.

But there's a lot of backlash to that. There are protests at the Academy Awards. one of the protesters kicks a cop in the dick which was funny i appreciated that shout out to them.

Sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do you know.

We've talked a lot before about you know in our indiana jones episode about you know movies that were controversial in their time for being what we now recognize is like completely fucked up like temple of doom for instance just and like gestures to all the brown people in indiana jones exactly And the way that George Lucas responded to that was like, people are going to attack you forever.

You know, just, not learning the lesson and then proceeding to with the star Wars prequels, just be like, and now all of my favorite racial racist stereotypes as, as aliens. Um, Jonathan Demme listened to the people who were criticizing him and was like, my next movie is going to take on LGBTQ plus issues and made Philadelphia as his next movie with Tom Hanks. Really? Yeah. And that's like where that movie came from was he was like, yeah, I've, I get it. It is fucked up. And like, I'm going to try and do better next time. And he made Philadelphia.

When do we ever?

Yeah.

That's so rare.

Because it's interesting, too.

I mean, like, I think he really took on, right, the depiction of trans people, especially in the late 80s, early 90s, sort of like, they're kind.

Of weird, spooky people.

I don't know if they're not dangerous.

We don't know.

And I think also, too, it sort of became an overarching depiction of trans people because, you know, you would see it as jokes, too.

People would be like, all right, Buffalo Bill.

And say stuff like that, you realize it's coming from there, but to then take that on and say, let me actually give something that will be constructive.

And when you listen to a lot of the conservative talking points about trans women who are actually trying to harm women and stuff like that, and it's like, where is that coming from? It could be coming from the fact that one of the most iconic trans-adjacent characters in pop culture history is Buffalo Bill you know and so like when Jesse Waters talks about trans women like I guarantee like he is picturing fucking Buffalo Bill in the back of his mind it's so funny like I watched this when I was.

Too young to have seen it alright and for whatever reason, like, he was just a bad guy to me.

Like, he.

It didn't even, like, occur to me that he was trans, which I guess is, like, kind of good. Like, it's not until we're, like, talking about it that I'm like, oh, right, he was, like, trans. Like, that was part of it, you know? So it's... But it's like, yeah, that's the only... characterization that.

You have there's no sensitive depictions of.

Trans people i didn't even think about that yeah.

So the blank check podcast did an episode of silence of the lambs years ago and they talk about uh anthony hopkins's process which i thought was cool because he is anti like method he's not like he's like yeah no i don't like i don't stay in character The whole time. K.K.

Sam is very anti-method, by the way. That is where we land on method acting.

Good. Yeah. I love the line from Olivier, Sir Lawrence Olivier, when he was acting opposite Dustin Hoffman in Marathon Man. And Dustin Hoffman was like in his like weird, you know, method shit. And he said, have you tried acting, my dear boy? And that seems to be where like Anthony Hopkins comes from. His method, though, is I do think it's interesting just in terms. It's not that he doesn't prepare.

He reads the script like up to 200 times. until he can't not remember the lines so it takes like no effort for him to like remember the lines and then uh according to people yeah that's just like right yeah doing your homework and then according to people who worked with him he takes up he gets into like once they finalize the costume he gets into the costume has someone take a polaroid and then just like stares at that polaroid for like 10 to 20 minutes. And then like, that's like when he becomes the character, which I thought was fucking cool.

I love that.

Yeah.

It's actually way more terrifying than even method. I'd be like, Hey bro, why don't you just like pretend for a second?

He's like, leave me alone. I'm looking at my Polaroid. Oh shit. Yeah. All right. Do you Tony? But I do the, the difference is that he doesn't need to stay in character. And I just want to, I just, sent a clip, a YouTube clip, Miles, if you don't mind playing that for the class. Miles, would you play that?

Why don't you share it with the class? Why don't you share that with the class? It looks really funny. So this is from the set of Silence of the Lambs. It's Anthony Hopkins looking down, covered in blood, from the scene where he's about to murk the yokel FBI agent.

This one is for you, Agent. Now you, Paulie, let's go for it. Rocky V. Let's do it now. Guy goes on the fucking box.

He just does like a riff on Rocky V. I love it. Sorry, and I do just, there's one right immediately after that. That's an accidental blooper that I do just want to play because it's just one of my favorites. I think they should have left it in this way. Freeze!

Put your hands on your hips.

It's the climatic moment where Jodie Foster catches Buffalo Bill and pulls her gun on him and says, freeze! Put your hands on your hips. And then it's like, ah, fuck. Oh, that's incredible. When I dip, you dip, we dip. God, I just have to... I just get so....

Horny for great acting like that was just like him just doing the like why are you doing an impression of Sylvester Stallone right now like what are you.

Doing you're incredible and she's remember this man has a Welsh accent like that's I just, I'm going to do a whole podcast on just that clip that you showed me.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's because it's, I think it's like, it's one of those things, it just shows such mastery of your art form.

Yeah. It's like, I guess I can throw away one and do a joke about Rocky. Yeah.

Let me just, let me try this character out really quick just for a second, have fun and get right back into it where like method actors feel like, bro, if I let go of this shit, I'm fucked, bro.

I can't even, I can't find that motherfucker again.

So I'm going to have to be them For the whole time, because I don't actually have the same control over this as Anthony Hopkins, who's like, watch this one.

What do you want to see? You want to see Sammy Davis Jr.

Now?

Right. That's it.

Come on.

You tried acting my dear boy it's just like this is the thing that i'm good at and i have fun with it's not like uh this is like i'm fucking dying up here right for my like nobody can mess with my it's like here you know what you know what i bet the crew would get a kick out of is if I just did a weird Rocky riff for a second. Yeah. Because I can, because I'm a generational talent as an actor. Another, just a brief aside about the weird country that we live in. I was Googling around for details of his method. And so I typed Anthony Hopkins method for getting, I was going to complete into character and Google suggested Anthony Hopkins method for getting money. Anthony Hopkins method for getting out of debt.

Anthony Hopkins method for getting a job. And my favorite Anthony Hopkins method for getting pregnant. Yeah. I mean, method.

For getting, it's just like completely disregarding the Anthony Hopkins part.

Oh, you must be talking about the Anthony Hopkins method for getting pregnant.

Yes.

Yes. Yes. Yeah. You go have a salad at coyote.

Do we know for sure that Anthony Hopkins can't help us with our finances.

Or our fertility? Yeah. He has a YouTube channel. He's been giving financial advice for the last 15 years. The other, probably the most iconic thing. I am in my Hannibal Lecter drag in the sense that I'm in a white t-shirt. White pants? No, my pants are not bright white. Hiked up to your belly? Tucked in white t-shirt, hiked up to your belly. Slick back hair. Oh, yeah. Slappy steaks. Anyways, the most iconic, like, part of his look is the mask. The, you know, that he gets rolled out in. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

With the, like, muzzle over it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They tried... Fencing and hockey masks after going cannibal muzzle shopping at Dick's Sporting Goods.

And Jason was like, get out of my territory, bitch.

It's really funny. You can like see these pictures of him in these like fencing masks and beekeeping masks that they had like tried that are like really weird.

Beekeeping.

Yeah.

Interesting.

Yeah. It's just got a screen over it. Like that's going to stop him. Yeah.

Yeah.

And then the cage of basically an umpire's mask. Then they went to an ICU nurse who designed NHL goalie masks in his spare time. Excuse me? And was like, hey, weird combination of expertise, but could you create us a cannibal muzzle? And he was like, yeah, okay. Oh, here, he's like, you want this one? I already made it.

I make these. Yeah.

Because that makes sense because it's so reminiscent of like a j like a hockey mask yeah it's like jason-esque too that i didn't even realize that was designed by someone who was making a hockey mask right.

And then he sent it to them the idea was that it was gonna like be painted and uh i think painted black and he tried it on and they were like oh no that's actually it like because it's like kind of flesh toned and yeah it kind of looks like leather a little bit.

Yeah yeah And remind me, it is just, it's like this. It's like the half, it's like a half face.

With like a little mouth cage. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mouth cage.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay. Here's Billy Crystal wearing it as he's hosting the Oscars that year. No way.

Yeah.

I remember that. Anyone looks good in that. I know.

I could be like, Billy Crystal could have been Hannibal Lecter when I see his face.

He does look pretty menacing.

Oh my God. And then Meg Ryan could have been.

Yes.

Oh my God.

Could you imagine that kind of casting?

We're like, hey. Harry Met Sally. I got a totally new vibe.

For the two of them. Totally new take.

It is a bit of a rom-com, I will say. I mean, there's some sexual tension there that, as we'll find out, gets consummated in the sequel novel in a horrible way.

It's really, we're going to get, yeah.

Weird.

Very strange. But anyways, in terms of pop culture, I mean, this movie took over the world. you know, Billy Crystal was the host of the Oscars. He gets wheeled out in the mask. Unfortunately, it did not stop him from singing one of those Oscar medleys. But Jim Carrey, so all three of the main Jim Carrey movies, or I guess not three of the four, because the mask did not, as far as I know, have had a mask silence of the lambs reference other than being about a mask there's him with meat on his face and cable guy saying hello Clarice silence of the lambs.

Actually he has chicken skin on his face the first thing he just goes is.

Silence of the left which is so dumb when they're at medieval times yeah um dumb and dumber both of them are talking about like an attractive person walks by and say i'd love to eat her liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti.

And they both go yeah uh ace ventura he says finkel's newspaper clipping uh covered room is cozy if you're hannibal lector um and then also that movie has a transphobic villain And Jim Carrey actually consulted with Anthony Hopkins when preparing for the role of Ace Ventura. He was like, yeah, so like I'm because Jim Carrey is like the opposite of what we were saying earlier with like people who don't take acting seriously. He like takes that shit seriously.

So seriously. So I the way I found out about Anthony Hopkins saying that he like kind of channeled lizards and reptiles for the role is from Jim Carrey because he was like, I do animal work. And so Ace is a bit of a bird. And I asked Anthony Hopkins like what he is. And he told me he was like more lizardy. Wow. But he was obsessed with Sounds of the Lambs. There are other people who are obsessed with Jonathan. Well, no. What's his name? Taylor Thomas.

Jonathan Taylor Thomas, David Foster Wallace, the guy who wrote Infinite Jest. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. David Foster Wallace is like that. That's the best novel that's ever been written. Like you think you think Sounds of the Lambs is like the best book of all time. And the Simpsons are obsessed with Sounds of the Lambs. But like really every everyone in comedy was obsessed with making Sounds of the Lambs references.

Then and to this day, I still remember Mr. Burns being wheeled out in the lector mask in the monorail episode of The Simpsons.

Yeah.

I found this highlight reel of pop cultural references to Sounds of the Lambs. And it's like a lot of, you know, sitcoms and, you know, friends and, you know, just doing the fava beans. There's also Garfield threatening to eat a cat's liver with fava beans and a nice Chianti in Garfield 2, A Tale of Two Kitties. It's in a lot of kids pop culture. Sure. Kind of fucking crazy. Yeah. I mean, it was one of those things too.

I remember when it was, the visual was everywhere. I didn't see it because I was probably like eight or seven when it came out. But I saw like a couple years, once it got on tape, I remember seeing it and everything just.

Went whoosh over my head. Yeah.

But I remember, so then, because then all I came away with like is, there was like, yeah, this guy goes and he wears a mask.

And I think, And I think I've pretty much understood the entire film. Yeah.

I'm.

Yeah. There's also this George H.W. Bush commencement address at the FBI Academy in Quantico. Where he goes, on my way in, I may have spotted Hannibal the Cannibal in the audience. Oh, Lord. And people, like, laugh. And then he goes, for those parents and others, that's an inside joke that I'm not sure I even understand myself. He's such a fucking dork. I hate that guy so much.

It's not an inside joke. It's a pop cultural reference. And he's like, I don't get it. Jokes I don't get, but I'm told they're very funny. Yeah. Yeah.

I have no idea.

It's a little bit of CIA humor for everybody. Let's take another quick break. We'll come back. We will talk about his real life inspiration, which is a fucking creepy story. And we'll close out. We'll be right back. And we're back. We're back. So when he's first introduced in Red Dragon, we immediately learn he's cultured. He's reading Dumas and has a nose like a bloodhound. And he observes that FBI profiler Will Graham, who had caught Lecter, is wearing the same cologne as in court. Which, like, that's... they like take that and step it up into superhero level with color, like being able to smell Clarice's body soap and knowing which brand it is. It's like, that seems a little far. Like, How the fuck do you know that? How do you

stand up on all the latest trends in perfume for men in here? Allow me to explain.

Every Friday evening, I go to Rite Aid, and I peruse the lotion aisle, and I smell them all.

I mean, it's a step below Scent of a Woman, which came out around the same time, and had Al Pacino being able to tell what a woman's name was based on the perfume she wore.

So we were just really into like, men's olfactory capabilities in the 80s.

Okay.

If it was like that, you'd think he'd be better at pairing wine and beans.

That is such a good point.

Although we don't know the taste of a human liver, it could be very different than beef or chicken.

Maybe it is different.

They say it's very pungent and irony. A human liver? Yeah, the human liver. That's what they say. Oh, wow. I went deep on my research for this one, Miles. Yeah. All right, dude.

Who says that?

Yeah.

Don't worry about it.

I do currently have an iron deficiency. So, like, this is medically interesting to me.

Do you ever eat liver? Well, I haven't.

Maybe that's the problem.

I mean, just for fun, you know, since it might help you, you know, with your iron deficiency, try it with some fava beans and.

A nice Chianti.

I mean, yeah. The problem is, is I'm a vegetarian. I don't eat animals. So it would have to be a human problem.

Liver which i don't know you.

Don't eat animals but you would eat the right human exactly yeah yeah not.

All humans i'm not i'm not crazy just not a monster yeah i'm not a not a crazy monster.

Um so one of his inspirations for lector uh he says can be traced back uh this is harris you know the novelist uh So he was a journalist working on a magazine article for Argosy in 1959 about a murder case in Mexico. And before interviewing the accused killer, he met a prison doctor who he later referred to as Dr. Salazar. And this is a weird description. He said he had the eyes of a fierce turtle. Okay, Senator Mitch McConnell. But he was a small, lithe man and seemed very, very smart. And Dr. Salazar, as he's about to go in, recommends that Harris not wear sunglasses when speaking with a prisoner, as the murderer may have been motivated by self-loathing caused by scars on his face.

And the reflection in the glasses could trigger that trauma.

And so we could see his fierce turtle eyes.

Yes, exactly. Right?

Yeah.

Here's turtle he's like thanks for the advice goes is able to interview the serial killer and then is later speaking with a warden and he's like that dr salazar is great and uh the warden's like oh that's not a real doctor that's an inmate what no he's not an employee he's a former he's a former surgeon who had committed murder shut doesn't that feel like they should have had a brighter line between like prison doctor and murderer who likes to pretend to be a prison doctor.

That is the best thing i've ever heard in my life and i love.

It so much classic like comedy bit of like a doctor in an office like okay and do this and the real doctor.

Comes like hey hey, what'd I tell you? Get out of here. Like, whoa. Who was that? That guy was a murderer.

They do it in 30 Rock with Chris Parnell's Dr.

Spichemin. Yeah. So Salazar was sentenced to death in 1961. He had, I think, chopped up his partner's and like i don't know taking him in a taxi to like distribute the body parts uh but his sentence was he really rushed over that he was really uh like people loved him in jail he was full of good advice and was his sentence was commuted after 20 years at which point he returned to his old neighborhood in monterey to treat the sick and the poor for free listen Listen. Okay, Dr. Salazar.

We're all multi-dimensional characters.

You know? I mean, this guy sounds great. Yeah. He just mutilated a body. We don't know what that partner did. Yeah.

What did he do to deserve it, you know?

That's what I'm saying. He's got a lot of Sherlock in him, as we mentioned. So he's that guy crossed with fictional characters like Sherlock Holmes.

Um i'm doing a deep dive on this doctor what is it dr salazar salazar yeah i'm diving in.

It's such a wild story it feels like it can't be true and yet like yeah she's on the record and then people like went and looked into it and like found the guy and we're like whoa not dr salad czar brian Brian said salad, C-Z-A-R. That's not who.

Also, what is that prison like where anybody's pulling up with the charisma of a doctor and you're like, yes, doctor.

Yeah. Aren't these people murderers? Hey, my man, my man, my man, let me holler at you real quick. Hey, my man, my man, my man. Yeah, right here, right here, right here. You good? You good? Hey, how you doing, man? Dr. Zalazar, good to meet you.

He's lucky to have survived that situation.

He's like, step into my office real quick why is your office a prison cell don't worry man we're just remodeling man the budget cuts dude.

This is really great i i just i'm very excited about this new knowledge yeah that i have.

Every little thing i'm learning i because i the movie is just i i love seeing anthony hopkins in it but just knowing all these other details like the His method, that it's based on some other literal murder who was pretending to be a doctor but had amazing charisma.

Amazing charisma.

Yeah.

And good theories. Like, even though that might not have been true about the, like, sunglasses, like, it's still... Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the... It's, like, perfect CSI logic.

Yeah.

You know? Like, it's just a good... I don't know. Perfect, like, Joe Rogan guest, too. Yeah. Critically, they're like, dude, you see the Dr. Salazar on Joe Rogan? Oh, my God. She was saying it makes so much sense about him. Oh, my God. The character is such a hit that a psychologist at the time reported that nearly a third of her male patients wanted to talk about Lecter after losing sleep over the movie. But that people were like kind of rooting for him. And that like if you rewatch the movie again, he's a cannibalistic serial killer, but the movie is very carefully set up so that you're always kind of rooting for him. You're like, well, he's not going to do anything to Clarice and Clarice is a

good guy and everybody else is a bad guy around him. So like, I wouldn't mind if he actually killed those people. Yeah. Chilton sucks. Yeah. He also has actual superpowers. He has the Sherlock Holmes, like superpowers of deduction. He also has like the ability to control people through, like he makes a guy swallow his tongue.

That's right.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The powers of whispers. Yeah, just using his whispers. So he's like essentially an X-Men. Yeah, sure. And then, yeah, I think it's that. And I think it's like creating a serial killer character that we can root for is, I think that's the sweet spot. I think that's what they did here. That is, in addition to all the other ways that they got amazingly lucky with you know, get casting and the genius of Anthony Hopkins, finally, like finding a way to break through to the mainstream.

People are, fascinated with these fuckers, serial killers, like it's just they can't get enough. And they nailed exactly what we want in our serial killers. Like he is the platonic ideal of a serial killer. We want them to be smart. We want them to be gruesome, but artistic. We want a method for their madness. We want the world.

and their crimes to be little puzzles that they built for us, you know?

Yeah.

Cause people are so obsessed with like their mind, like, like the show mind.

Yeah.

Right.

Oh, interesting. You want to figure out like, why is this happening?

Yeah.

Versus like what was probably the portrayal. I assume before this, mostly where it's just like, they're crazy.

Right.

This was like, And that's why we need really good cops to find them.

You see? Sure.

Because these guys are normal humans. That's why we need a bunch of super cops to be out there to keep us safe, too.

Yeah. And they're not pretty... Based on the amount that they're killing without being discovered, it sounds like the cops fucking suck. Really? That's odd. Yeah. I mean, the truth... First of all, the truth about serial killers. Yes, that's a very good point about... because we have like this entire world of copaganda, right. Of, you know, cops being smart and using their wit. You know, it makes sense that it goes from Sherlock Holmes being like the super cop who has insane, you know, powers of deduction to, And now it's like, and we also want a serial killer who has insane powers of deduction. The truth about serial killers is much dumber. There are like, but one of the most prominent theories about like where serial killers

came from, because there is like in 1940, there were 55 serial killers. In 1950, there were 72. In 1960, there were 217. 1970, there were 605. By 1980, there were 768. And then by like 2020, there were 117 again. So it was like this massive wave that happened in the 60s and 70s. And one of the theories on where that came from is that there's this Pulitzer Prize winning author, Caroline Fraser, who wrote a book that her speculation is just like that it was lead poisoning, essentially.

What?

And like that you can see there were all of the crime rates and stuff. Yeah. Yeah. All of these like major, like I, think it's, uh, what's, what's the, like the Rockefellers or, you know, these like major industrial families had these giant smelting plants and like, you can see, uh, The preponderance of serial killers who like lived by these smelting plants where there was like really high lead levels.

I've never heard this before.

That's me either. From her book, it's August of 1961. There are three males who live in what you might call the neighborhood. She also grew up there. within a circle whose center is Tacoma, Washington. Their names are Charles Manson, Ted Bundy, and Gary Ridgeway. Jesus Christ.

So it's been the billionaires all along.

It's been the billionaires all along, yes. And then didn't even, like, Cause like also leaded gas too. It's like gasoline was like more, but like really intense lead poisoning in Washington.

I know you can't in Oregon. So I wonder too, if like you're, you're the one pumping the gas too. And that also you're like getting exposed to leaded gasoline.

And there's other, like people think it also had to do with like being crimes of opportunity, like because cars were a thing and interstate highways were a thing and people were hitchhiking a lot. And so that also was something that had, kind of popped up around that time. And so there were fewer, fewer and fewer opportunities. But I do think one of the main things that is woven throughout all of this is that the police were and continue to be fucking idiots. Right. Exactly. She, in this book where she's talking about like this rise of, uh, serial killers, instead of being like, you know, talking about, uh, in this New Yorker article, they say like she, she declines to indulge the allure of Bundy's lector, like cunning,

emphasizing instead the raft of mistakes made by law enforcement officers in their ham handed pursuit. And like, that is the story. It's like, when you test serial killers' intelligence, it is exactly at average, and yet they're outwitting the police. So what does that tell you about the police? Oh, there was just an open window.

I don't know what I was supposed to do.

Yeah.

So wait a minute.

You were camped out forever, weren't you?

Is all of this propaganda to have, like, really smart, puzzler, Riddler, serial killers, like from the cops being like, no, they're just like so smart.

You guys like, it's not us.

We're just like, so they're so smart.

I think it's what we want to believe. I think that like the FBI is involved in, in the same way that the air force is involved in the making of top gun. The FBI is involved in the making of silence of the land. Yeah. They're like, yeah, you can have access to like all this stuff, but we need you. And by the way, their notes were fucking terrible.

And yeah, not taken in the vast majority of the FBI. It should be Steve Martin. The FBI literally said this should be rated PG. And they were like, and also we would never send an inexperienced person to talk to Hannibal Lecter. So like the main thing that is like the plot and what's cool about it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

they wouldn't send this dizzy broad. Um, but yeah, like we were talking about Dahmer, like Dahmer is a serial killer because his parole officer had too many cases to check on and didn't do home visits. Like she was supposed to be doing home visits at a time when he was killing his first victims. And instead, you know, the city was just, they probably had like three instead of 300, you know, caseworkers, uh, And so she wasn't able to do that. And, like, all the murders happened after that. Like, it's, we have serial killers because we don't prioritize not having them. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Also, like, the victims that they would choose, you know, like, especially, like, it was like, you know, my daughter is missing. And it's like, she probably ran away. Or, like, you know, my daughter is missing. Well, she was a sex worker. Like, it was, a lot of times, like, it stopped at the, victim of like this doesn't require investigation and it's like well we we probably could have caught the serial killer sooner if we had like treated these victims as human beings.

And the other thing too is like you know uh we had we had a guest on aliamia learn who had like a video essay about like how you know the our obsession with serial killers is just like this you know, continuation of propaganda more in the sense that if we create these characters who are not human in these serial killers, then we don't have to acknowledge the human context in which they arise from. Therefore, we don't have to actually correct the human context in which these people arise from, because it's just a, some people are just fucking wacky, man.

And we, that's why we need.

Cops rather than like, I don't know, man, maybe we can clean up the environment. Maybe these people need support. Maybe these other things like they, they, they don't just happen in a vacuum, but to flatten it to like, monster good guy then no real thought has to be given to them and it's not that you're trying to create sympathy but understanding about what this is and like.

Speaking of Baltimore actually I mean one of the things that they're doing in Baltimore that the mayor of Baltimore is doing is like when a murder happens instead of you know what they've been doing for decades and decades and decades the cops the social workers and everyone they go and talk to the victims friends and they're like hey you we know that this is like really traumatic for you and you could be like looking for revenge, whatever, but like, we want to get you the help that you need. We want to get you resources.

We want to.

And all of a sudden, like the murder rate dropped, like down to the basement in Baltimore.

You know, and it's providing cops with more money to, to antagonize everybody in the community.

It's like, what if we just gave them mental health, health and support?

Yeah. Like they're humans. Right. I mean, it's crazy.

It's crazy to be considering them humans.

But we're constantly like just societally in this thing of like trying to get people to acknowledge people's humanity, whether that's go down the list, you know what I mean? Especially right now, like we're just, we're, we're people are, are. struggling with the just very bare minimum concept of humanity yeah and we have so many things that flatten this idea of what is it but who a person is a hundred that has people.

Being like i don't know maybe it's burn maybe i don't know do i need.

To care about it it's yeah right it's and i think a lot of that we realize we're consuming like things passively that kind of just trying to perpetuate our inability to kind of be like we're all people we're all humans yeah Except for Hannibal Lecter.

He's sick, dude. He's sick with it. But yeah, I mean, Silence of the Lambs is a terrifying movie, but I do think it's partially popular because of witch fulfillment. Because it gives us the serial killer we want, and it gives us the cop that we want. You know, the idea of a police force that I think people wish was out there. Benevolent and strong. Yeah. Yeah. Not constantly tripping over their own pants and ending up with a bucket on their head and like a dead bystander next to them that they accidentally shot. Yeah.

Chris Isaac leading a SWAT team.

Oh yeah. Chris Isaac is in there. Chris Isaac's face is, uh, like he has such a small role. Shut up right now. Oh my God.

That's him.

Yeah. So when he cut, when they noticed the blood dripping down from the elevator, that's the guy goes, he's in the elevator shaft. He's talking to Chris Isaac. No way. It's like right after Wicked Games came.

Out, too.

Wicked Games.

Oh, my gosh.

That's wild.

Yeah. No way. Speaking of cannibalism. Keep going. No, no, no. You can't stop. Speaking of cannibalism, that video, they are eating each other's faces. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. And then cannibalism, I think, is just like a... I don't know. It is just like such a natural obsession in Western culture, like from the Greeks on, because they kind of other it and make it scary. But. I don't know, like, when you think about the New Testament, like, Christianity, and, like, the central metaphor is just, like, no, that's actually his body, dude.

That's his body. You're eating his body right now, and that's.

You're drinking his blood like Dracula.

Like, what is happening? That's not even a metaphor. That's actually what's happening. Yeah. Like, it's, like, I don't know. I feel like I can't even talk about cannibalism because it's, like, I don't understand. There is just a deep, deep Obsession that is constantly bleeding through and people are just like the Hannibal TV show, which was like incredibly critically acclaimed.

They hired like one of the things they did was they hired a person who's like a an acclaimed food photographer. And like the whole thing is him making these beautiful dishes like culinary delights out of his victims and then feeding them to FBI agents like that. Yeah. It's like food porn.

But it's people.

It's people. And they're just like, yeah, hell yeah. People loved that shit. People literally ate it up.

I mean, the thing, too, with cannibalism, I think the reason, also, just to zoom out historically, right, is, like, the whole thing of cannibalism, that was, like, an accusation colonizers levied against indigenous people to dehumanize them.

And that word comes from fucking Christopher Columbus. Right. Oh, does it? Yeah.

Those first instances come of his depiction of the Caribs and turn into cannibalists, and that's where that whole term comes from. So, also, like, you think of colonization as a form of cannibalization where you're eating human beings, you're destroying their way of living to give you, to sustain you in some way.

I think it's just a, it just all kind of fits together.

I think that's probably why it's metaphorically about them.

Yeah.

There's that karmic, like so many of the fears of the Western world are just sort of these karmic fears that they have from their own histories.

So it's like, it's also, I think one of the reasons, and I know that I'm, probably like terrifying listeners but yeah like i don't like it's all meat we're all meat you know what i mean and even from like an indigenous perspective it's like we turn into the thing that other things eat you know what i mean like to me it's all just this obviously i don't think we should go around eating people but i also think that the obsession with it is very misplaced in a way that it's like, well, what are we actually, what are we actually upset about? Like, what are we actually talking about? You know, because there is the thing of like, if Kim and I are on a mountain and she's about to die and it'll sustain me, of course I'm going.

To eat her.

And I would be furious if she didn't eat me.

Is she still alive? Or you're going to not. It's like.

If she's still alive, we'd have a conversation about it.

Yeah. She's not going to make it.

I'd be like, so I think it's time for us to have the conversation. We're like, I'm looking a lot better than you are.

Sure.

You know, like.

And your leg kind of fell off back there.

And their leg already fell off.

And I know we're only on day two. Right. But I'm just.

I'm just a little.

Really fucking hungry.

Yeah.

Just.

Yeah.

I know the power just went out on. It's a small world. But. He's just saying, we don't know how long we'll be here. Yeah. Um, but yeah, I think that's a really good point, Miles, that it is the, like the Western world recognizing that in a deep karmic sense, all of our values are cannibalistic. And then on a superficial level, we have othered the act of cannibalism in a way to make it scary. And so, um, we just, this kind of fear and, uh, you know, recognition of what the fuck is actually wrong with us on some level that we understand just is going to keep churning back on us and coming up over and over and over again.

Especially you think about in this country too, we let our young die. We eat our young, you know, with our inaction.

So yeah, that's so true. It just exists. We don't protect people. Yeah. We it's, It's all predatory.

And so I think it's just a really just encapsulates a lot of the things that people sort of feel and maybe put their finger.

Yeah.

It's the whole thing about like pro-life with an asterisk. It's like I'm pro-life when it comes to abortion, but like nothing else.

And I'm like, yeah, it's the second they're born. I don't give a.

Yeah.

So, yeah. And you brought up such a good point about like the, that it is, there's always an underpinning of racism. You know, there's always an underpinning of hypocrisy in terms of religion.

Like it's, yeah.

So it's just like, if we want to have a talk about cannibalism, let's have an honest talk about cannibalism and just.

Go back to 1492. Yeah. Let's actually talk about it. When the phrase was invented. Yeah. And why? Well, Kim and Kat, This has been such a pleasure having you on to talk Hannibal, the cannibal lector.

Yeah, we love being here.

Where can people find you, follow you, hear you, all that good stuff?

Oh my gosh.

You can find our podcast. It's Kim and Kit Stay Alive. Maybe anywhere you listen to podcasts. And you can follow us on all the social medias at KKSAM Podcast.

Yeah we also have a patreon if you guys can't get enough of us um on on the apps you can uh also join our patreon we're currently watching widow's bay in our minisodes right now so we do a live review of widow's bay currently so yeah check us out i love.

Uh i love what i was back yeah yeah so good yeah my favorite show uh all right we're gonna take another quick break and we're gonna come back and i will do the notebook dump notebook dump All right. That was our episode. Thank you to Kim and Kat for staying alive to appear on that episode. Hate to spoil their show, which has a cliffhanger right there in the title. Kim and Kat stay alive. Ellipses maybe. But yeah, they were alive during that episode and a complete delight as always. This is the no, no, no, no book dump.

We did not have time to get into all of the terrible sequels and one great and beloved TV show that Hannibal Lecter has appeared in. The TV show I am not overly familiar with. I will say that it really leaned in on the cannibal front. They hired the art director and food stylist for Epicure magazine, as I think I mentioned in the episode, to just Really make sure that the cannibal dishes made people's mouths water. Janice Poon is the name of the food stylist. Another case of nominative determinism in that she has spoon. Jana Spoon.

Janice Spoon. Janice Poon, uh, right in the middle of her name, uh, on the, uh, movie sequels, I will say, uh, maybe the greatest testament to the iconography of the character of Hannibal Lecter is the sheer number of terrible sequels that he's, uh, withstood and remained our most iconic, uh, serial killer. you know, anyone can be popular after being the focus of a blockbuster that sweeps the big five at the Oscars. But it takes a truly iconic diva to star in the movie Hannibal, like to be the titular star, to star in a Brett Ratner movie, to get his own just bafflingly misguided Batman Begins called Hannibal Rising.

Just movie after movie that tirelessly and enthusiastically sucked shit year after year, decade after decade, the hottest of garbage. And he still gets voted top movie villain of all time over Darth Vader. A few words on the bad sequels. Hannibal ends with him cutting open Ray Liotta's skull and feeding his brain to him while he's still awake, also to Clarice. And yeah, I guess people were just like, still got it, man. In the book, Clarice likes eating the brains so much, they start traveling the world, having like an affair that nobody wants to imagine and eating people.

And people were just, people did not like that. But we still fuck with Hannibal Lecter. I was not fully aware of Hannibal Rising, but apparently Dino De Laurentiis essentially blackmailed Thomas Harris into writing Hannibal Rising or just like used a pretty underhanded negotiation strategy when he was just like, that's fine if you don't want to write it. I'll have somebody else write it and it'll be bad, which ended up being bad anyway. So jokes on him. Oh, also that negotiation strategy. He apparently did the same thing with Anthony Hopkins on one of the sequels. He said, um, no, it's fine. If you don't want to do it, we'll open in Brazil where Hannibal Lecter has just had plastic surgery. And, uh,

suddenly he just looks a whole lot like Kevin Spacey. Um, so he, he was just, I guess one of the ways he negotiated was like threatening to ruin the character and the franchise and people were like, fucking fine. I mean, he did end up paying, Anthony Hopkins, $ 20 million to do some of the sequels. So it's not exactly all that negotiation strategy. But Hannibal Rising is not just like similar to Batman Begins in that it's an origin story.

He trains to be a samurai for some reason. And there's also a moment when he tries on a samurai mask that looks like his famous, you know, don't eat the senator's face mask from Silence of the Lambs. They play this scene like he's Indiana Jones trying on his fedora, even though that just makes no sense. That wasn't his personal mask they were putting on him for his meeting with the senator. Love the suit. But yeah, they just desecrated the character repeatedly, and we're just like, can't put you down because the high of Silence of the Lambs is so high, and... I think because he is so load-bearing.

He taps into these two crazy, powerful, underground veins of just, you know, serial killer obsession. Like, giving us a smart Sherlock Holmes serial killer is fucking irresistible. And then cannibalism, which, man, we fuck heavy with cannibalism. Which, yeah. So on the subject of our serial killer obsession, the fact that serial killing was kind of like a viral craze was something I think I discovered. This is probably old hat to true crime people, but those numbers blew my mind. Like how rare it was in the forties and then how huge it was, how like common it was in the seventies back to, again, those numbers, I think, yeah. So this is from that New Yorker article on Caroline Frazier's book, Murderland,

but It said 55 serial killers in 1940, 72 in 1950, 217 in 1960. By 1970, there are 605. 1942 and 1950, 217 in 1960. By 1970, there are 605. By 1980, 768. Throughout the 90s, 669. In the 2000s, down to 371. From 2010 to 2020, 117. So back down to like 1940s and 50s levels. But it followed lead exposure on a 20-year time lag. But basically... people were massively exposed to lead exactly 20 years before that massive rise, and then they made it illegal. The article goes on to say it's probably one of many factors, including DNA evidence, which I find somewhat compelling, you know, and the corresponding drop in hitchhiking and like people locking their windows. But DNA evidence seems kind of inevitably significant to me, like

for so long being a serial killer meant tangling with cops who, you know, we're not the bread who just like kept getting their heads stuck in buckets and accidentally shooting each other. And then suddenly they have a technology that at least in the media is treated like, you know, the precogs and minority report, just a magic. This guy did it ball that rolls down out of a black box. But, uh, Yeah, the New Yorker piece. It's by Gideon Lewis Krauss. Also, just a direct quote that gets at the thoroughness of Hannibal Lecter's, you know, pervasiveness in popular culture. That profile is complementing the Fraser book in terms of it's not focusing on how brilliant Ted Bundy was by saying, she declines to indulge the allure of Bundy's Lecter-like cunning, emphasizing

instead the innocent lives he cut short And the raft of mistakes made by law enforcement officers in their ham-handed pursuit. But yeah, Lecter gives us the serial killer we want, and then it gives us the police we want, or at least wanted, and I think still believed in for a long time. And I honestly think the current true crime moment... is at least partially to do with people waking up to the fact that we are kind of out here on our own with regards to police not being good at their job. Specifically, women are on their own.

After decades of 80s and 90s movies with cops who will ultimately save the day, people who pay attention to the reality of crime and the justice system finally you know, got people, more and more people to come to terms with the fact that, you know, they're not coming to help you. They're more likely to actually be the serial killer.

And we have to study other crimes and come up with rules like, you know, never go to a second location and stay out of the woods. And adults don't ask kids for help and lock your fucking windows. Shout out to my favorite murder for some of those. But yeah, and just more on the cops being bad. I mentioned the story about Dahmer's parole officer not having time to check on him his arrest was basically just just comparing this with Clarice the the cops who get Jeffrey Dahmer basically get him by complete accident and like against their will almost they're like forced to catch him so Dahmer was apprehended after Some cops noticed that one of his intended victims was running down the street in handcuffs after

they had managed to escape. And before that, a 14-year-old boy who ended up being one of his victims had managed to escape. And the police found him drugged and like half naked. And Dahmer just walked up and was like, oh, sorry, that's my boyfriend. And the police were like, all right, man. and just handed him over. Like, well, you know, a lot of people were like, what? What are you doing?

Two of the officers involved in that and, you know, previous incidents with Dahmer were fired after Dahmer was caught and all of that came to light. But then they were, quote, later reinstated on appeal and each received around $ 55, 000 in back pay. And then a decade after that, one of them was even elected president of Milwaukee's police union. So, That's just, again, it's not quite Clarice Starling out here.

And serial killers are not quite Hannibal Lecter. There's been studies, you know, people are fascinated. So they've done studies to be like, what is the actual intelligence of serial killers? Are they actually these hyper intelligent people? And, you know, they found it to be slightly above average or exactly at average, meaning it's exactly not that. It's not that they are. brilliant and they can be explained by their brilliance.

And then on the subject of cannibalism, look, I think I get why it's interesting to people. It's one of the like foundational cultural taboos that make human civilization possible along with the incest taboo, which according to the Pornhub year end search trends, Also very interesting to people. So makes sense. There are these taboos that we're told should not be looked at, which makes people just want to look and think about those things more. But yeah, I think I mentioned in the episode, the cannibalism metaphor in Catholicism, the idea of like, eating, consuming the body and blood of Jesus, which I'm always surprised by how important that is, uh, to a lot of people, like how seriously they take it.

They're like, no, that's actually his body. We're not being symbolic. Uh, we are cannibals. Um, but I, I'm not going to just pick on Catholicism. Like it's, it's lots of different religions and cult, like Greek mythology has some major cannibalism stories. Like, Zeus's dad swallowed five of his kids right after they were born. There's always people just like feeding humans to each other in Greek mythology and lots of foundational mythologies.

And then I think there's some of the stuff that Miles was talking about, about our culture and why cannibalism would specifically appeal to us metaphorically. But yeah, it is the foundational idea of a bunch. of the most important myths in the history of human culture. And the people who make popular culture are onto this in 2022. I remember this being a big story that there was like suddenly like, uh, Timothy Chalamet is big movie after, uh, you know, he became a star. Bones and All was a cannibalism movie. The Menu, the Dahmer monster Netflix series, Yellow Jackets on Showtime, like all of these were hitting within a few years. Anyways, all of which I think makes the concept of Dahmer being a cannibal serial killer

too good for, you know, the culture at the time and The police and Dahmer himself to resist, as I mentioned, I think in the episode, the Milwaukee police chief initially told the press that the evidence is not consistent with cannibalism, which tells you two things. One, that there obviously wasn't evidence.

He didn't have a person's head with a piece cut out of it. Like, is it cake episode under a cake bell? And also that the media was asking about the cannibalism thing before the evidence was suggesting that that's what was going on here. It was like a media inward pressure process, not a information outward process. And the details have just always suggested to me that he was keeping their dead bodies around for sexual purposes. He has said that like he couldn't get aroused while they were awake.

So he started by drugging them and then His explanation, which is truly horrifying, but he was like, I kept the truly beautiful ones so I could keep their bodies, essentially. But that is gross, and there's not an entire weird sociological and religious obsession with people having sex with dead bodies. So, you know, my assumption is they gave the people what they wanted. Like, the police started asking more questions about that, and he could tell that they wanted a certain answer and that this was going to be the less embarrassing, more sensationalistic direction to take things. Uh, he being Dahmer and, um, you know, they delivered people magazine, the headline they wanted, which people magazine at the time literally described his crime

as a real life silence of the lambs. Um, I don't know why I'm so adamant about this point. It doesn't change how horrifying any of the Dahmer stuff is. Uh, but I, I, I just think it's I guess it's interesting either way. Right. It's interesting to me because it's an example of a thing going from pop culture to our perception of reality, like the movie writing itself into reality.

But I guess the other option would be that the movie like there was a cannibal serial killer operating silently in Milwaukee and the movies predicted it like Silence of the Lambs. was made and came out six months before there was any evidence that that was happening. Um, either way, interesting for zeitgeist purposes. I just happen to believe it's the first option, but that's enough for our, uh, Dahmer notebook dump. Thanks again to Kim and Kat and, uh, to miles as always to Brian, the editor for putting it all together. Uh, and to, uh, JM McNabb, who I feel like really knocked it out of the park with the research on this episode. Next week, we have a deep dive into the spooky character people are most

likely to believe in. It's our annual I Want to Believe in Spooky Shit episode with Jack Wagner and one of our great spooky icons, Until then, back with more Zeitgeist. We'll be back this afternoon to tell you what's trending. And we will talk to you then.

Bye. The Daily Zeitgeist is executive produced by Catherine Law.

Co-produced by Victor Wright. Co-written by J.M. McNabb. And edited and engineered by Brian Jeffries.

Fright-con #41 - Hannibal Lecter: America's Favorite Cannibal

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