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Peter Clayborne's avatar

Oh this is brilliant! I have a post brewing about the way we treat real life villains as if they're movie villains, and this point about smart versus stupid is just it. Evil masterminds are ultimately not as interesting because they're not real. But regular human hubris is quite real and relatable — and gets us into far more trouble in the long run.

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DR Darke's avatar

:: Lecter horror is about how smart evil is—and how smart the director is for thinking up something this smart. I can admire the mechanism. But it’s too glib for me to quite trust it.::

This is the problem with people not Thomas Harris trying to write their own Hannibal Lecter, and it's a problem we've been seeing a LOT in movies! Lecter was never written to be the Master Supervillain, the Professor Moriarty/Dr. Mabuse/Fu Manchu/Lex Luthor/Ernst Stavro Blofeld who was out to destroy the hero. Kind of the opposite, in fact, because Hannibal Lecter, in his own Apex Predator way, is the hero's ally—not Moriarty, but STAR TREK's Q.

This reminded me of Voldemort in the Harry Potter books, whose motives are to 1) Destroy Harry, 2) Conquer the Wizarding World, 3) Destroy Harry, 4) Burn Down the Muggles' World Altogether, and 5) Destroy Harry. After he's accomplished all that, then what's he going to to do with his life—take up a piracy franchise?

While the hero might hunt Lecter, that's always alongside her's/his's main objective, which is usually to save somebody's life. I think you don't like Lecter because you're not seeing Lecter, you're seeing the cheapo store brand knockoffs written to ultimately destroy the hero because...reasons! You might like the character better if he (and I'm using "he" because as far as I can tell, this character is always a man) wasn't really destroying the hero's life, but...helping her/him in a way the hero never asked for.

Thomas Harris never wrote Lecter to be a realistic villain, he wrote him to be a fantasy helping the hero hunt far more realistic evil—all of whom are, as you said ,"petty and foolish, as likely to do harm through fucking up as through successfully concocting elaborate schemes." (I kind of liked how Sherlock Holmes in ELEMENTARY described serial killers as "onanists and mouth breathers", but that could be because of the withering contempt Jonny Lee Miller's Holmes gave it.) This Azrael is the writer taking a lazy shortcut because, well, "the movie has to happen"....

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