Red Dragon / Manhunter: The Radicality of Good
What the story most famous for introducing one of popular culture’s most nefarious bogeymen has to say about human decency
Like most people, I was introduced to author Thomas Harris’ creation, Dr. Hannibal Lecter, and the world of twisted serial killers and haunted FBI agents he inhabits, through Jonathan Demme’s masterful film adaptation of The Silence of the Lambs. Lambs came out the year I was born, and by the time I sought it out, its reputation as a work of cinema, the very thing that drew my attention in the first place, had grown to almost mythic proportions.
Bravura performances from Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins, and Demme’s masterful command of the camera, using it to lock in on his cast members’ faces as they deliver dialogue, imbuing the proceedings with an almost claustrophobic tension, ensured the film didn’t disappoint. It bought enough intrigue and goodwill for me to delve into the sequels made with Hopkins in the role of the famous cannibal. The less said about Ridley Scott’s 2001 misfire, Hannibal, the better (to be fair to the legendary director, the source material, written under duress in the wake of the phenomenal success of Demme’s film, may not have exactly set him up for success). But surprisingly, despite director Brett Ratner’s more pedestrian, if competent, direction, it was Red Dragon, adapted from Harris’ very first novel in the milieu, that has most lingered in my imagination.
A study in contrasts
Partly, this was because it’s in Red Dragon where the actual mechanics of Harris’ investigation plotline are most compelling. It follows former FBI profiler Will Graham as he comes out of retirement to track down and apprehend the serial killer known as “the Tooth Fairy” — in reality home video processing technician Francis Dolarhyde, labelled such due to the bite marks he leaves on his victims’ bodies. Following Graham as he zeroes in on Dolarhyde through a combination of classic deductive reasoning, codebreaking, his inborn gift for intuiting the motivations and thought processes of psychopaths, and skillful deceptions delivered through public media makes for a roller coaster ride that’s as gripping and clever as these things get. As a cat-and-mouse thriller, Red Dragon is about as perfect a specimen as they come.
Possibly even more fascinating though is the emotional narrative arc Graham goes through over the course of the investigation. Graham had retired following his apprehension of Lecter years before the outset of the story, having been grievously injured at the doctor’s hands during the arrest, and more pointedly, brought to the edge of his psychological limits by the very thing that serves as his ace-in-the-hole as a profiler: his ability to empathize with and think like the serial killers he chases. But when his old superior, Jack Crawford, approaches him to lend the FBI his unusual gifts after the Tooth Fairy leaves them stumped, Graham is compelled to put his anxieties aside and leave the semblance of peace he’d built for himself. The tension between his drive to bring the killer to justice and the great personal cost it comes at endows Red Dragon’s procedural with a unique undercurrent of intimacy and human interest.
I was thus pleased to find that Michael Mann’s 1986 film Manhunter, the first to adapt Harris’ Red Dragon novel to the silver screen, is even more keyed into Graham’s internal journey than the later Ratner film. In a way, the change in title, ceded begrudgingly to producer Dino de Laurentiis’ anxieties that it’d be mistaken for a kung fu flick, is apt. Mann’s film fixes the spotlight not on either of the killers, but on the detective dedicated to hunting them down. To this end, Mann drops some of the deeper explorations of Dolarhyde’s backstory and psychoses and instead focuses on the investigatory process and the critical role Graham’s special ability plays in it, whilst using scenes depicting Graham’s family to emphasize the psychological toll it takes on him.
Graham is able to extract insights into Dolarhyde’s background and true identity that other FBI investigators can’t because he can infer the significance of specific choices and the rationale behind methods employed by the insane. Thus, he’s able to connect the dots between evidence, methodology, and motive to paint a broader, more complete picture of their psychological profiles; to see the forest of their inner thoughts out of the trees of individual clues. That he’s able to do so only fuels his fear that he’s cut from the same cloth, forever on the verge of becoming just like them. In a conversation with his son, he reveals that he had himself detained following Lecter’s arrest, even after his wounds had healed, because getting into the doctor’s mindset left him in a state full of “the ugliest thoughts in the world”, and potentially a threat to his own family. Lecter, for his part, is only too happy to seize on Graham’s insecurities, claiming “the reason you caught me is we’re just alike”.
Yet for all that both characters believe that to varying extents, it’s clear that Will Graham is fundamentally different from the monsters he opposes. He loathes his own power and what it does to him, yet he surrenders himself to it time and again in service of those without power. Dolarhyde’s entire purpose, on the other hand, is to ascend to a higher state of being, to become the “Great Red Dragon”, by preying on them. As Lecter puts it, “if one does what God does enough times,” — namely, to take life — “one will become as God is.”
Lecter himself, meanwhile, is already so intrinsically convinced of his own superiority over the rest of mankind that killing hardly appears to carry any import to him at all. When Graham challenges him to prove he’s smarter than the Tooth Fairy by helping to catch him, Lecter merely responds by smugly asking Graham if he believed successfully apprehending Lecter was itself proof of his own intellectual advantage. He speaks of killing like a hobby, attesting that others, like Dolarhyde and Graham himself — who was forced to shoot the first serial killer he tracked down — must take pleasure from acting like God “because God has power.”
Graham meanwhile, is driven by impulses just as powerful as those fueling his nemeses, but they’re channeled towards the protection of innocents and the preservation of life. Even in retirement, Manhunter depicts him as having taken to building protective barriers around the sea turtle nests that dot the beach near his home in the Florida Keys. When Crawford shows him photos of the two families the Tooth Fairy had massacred, both men know the fate of his idyllic reprieve is sealed. His wife Molly perhaps knows it better than anyone else — when Will shares the news with her, ostensibly to ask for her blessing, she knows that in reality, there’s nothing she could say to stop him from charging back into the breach.
And charge he does. Crawford had initially only asked the retired Graham to assist the investigation team in an advisory capacity, hoping to take advantage of his unique abilities, and Graham himself is cautious, bordering on hesitant — afraid of what re-entering this world will awaken in him. But as opportunities to expedite the search for the murderer through his hands-on involvement present themselves, Graham embroils himself deeper and deeper into the case. He even elects to face Lecter, the man who’d left him both physically and psychologically scarred, once again in order to aid the investigation, whether through enlisting the incarcerated killer’s assistance or to help himself plunge deeper into a homicidal mindset. It isn’t long before it’s apparent that Graham is as invested in catching the Tooth Fairy as Crawford or anyone else, if not more so. He practically makes it his life’s mission.
The liberation of choice
Political theorist Hannah Arendt first coined the term “the banality of evil” through her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem. It recounts the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi SS officer widely known as “the architect of the Final Solution”, and explores both the socio-political context that enabled the Holocaust to happen as well as Eichmann’s personal beliefs and feelings about his role in it. Part of her intent was to draw attention to a more mundane but far more insidious form of evil than that depicted in Thomas Harris’ work. Eichmann, in her estimation, is far removed from the fanatical visionaries and megalomaniacs that often come to mind when thinking of such atrocities; he isn’t a Dolarhyde, Lecter, or even a Hitler.
Instead, the threat Eichmann poses stems from his willingness to submit to ideologies and codes of conduct that are codified independently and externally from himself. He sublimates his own decision-making in service to a broader organization or group, absolving him of the need to think for himself. Arendt’s term thus refers, with some measure of oversimplification, to the tendency of the most heinous acts in human history to stem not from radical notions, but from the seemingly innocuous phenomenon of human beings dedicating themselves to dogmatic ideologies without question. This is especially true when, as in Eichmann’s case, it’s coupled with a consummate professionalism that begets the belief that, forgoing any critical thought, one’s greatest responsibility is to fulfill one’s role as well and efficiently as possible — that doing so is in itself righteous.
Will Graham’s anxiety and deep-seated self-loathing stems from his fear of his power, his ability to think like a killer, and what he believes it says about his own nature. But in doing so, he forgets that other great power he possesses, the capacity for which he shares with all of humanity, regardless of how often it goes unused: choice. Graham may be made of the same stuff as his foes, capable of the same twisted reasoning and self-delusion, but at every juncture he makes the decision to dedicate himself to doing what he believes is right. Perhaps a dragon, not the Great Red Dragon of Dolarhyde’s fancies, but the golden Paarthurnax from The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, who battles his draconian nature to serve as an ally of mankind, put it best:
What is better — to be born good, or to overcome your evil nature through great effort?
For Graham, quite unlike Eichmann, making these choices can mean pushing against the grain of the infrastructure he’s otherwise chosen to align himself with, and he does so with a similar zeal and commitment to his cause. On the eve of the full moon, when the Tooth Fairy is expected to enact his next murder spree, Crawford is ready to throw in the towel. He believes they had not made enough headway in the investigation to prevent it at that point in time, and that their best bet would be to leverage the evidence left at the new crime scene. Graham, however, is resolute.
‘Anywhere he hits, we can be there in an hour and fifteen minutes. We get the call, we roll. The scene will be fresh. Fresher than we’ve ever had it.’
‘It’s not over yet.’
‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, it’s a foregone conclusion! It’s 11:30 P.M.; the full moon is happening tonight. Give it up. Forget this month. It’s too damn late.’
‘I gave it up! ‘Til you showed up with pictures of two dead families, knowing God damn well that I’d imagine families three, four, five and six. Right?’
‘You’re fucking right I did! And I’d do it again!’
‘Great! But don’t talk to me about late, pal! I’ll tell you when it’s too fucking late! Until then, we go as late as I wanna take it!’
For all his unwavering resolve, fate rewards Graham in kind with cruelty. Thanks in part to Lecter’s machinations, his address is leaked to Dolarhyde, placing his family right in his crosshairs, and despite Crawford’s assurances that he’d be far from the action, he again suffers terrible personal injury. He knows the choices he makes go against his own self-interest, but he makes them anyway, knowing his actions will have saved lives and enforced justice in the world.
In Will Graham, Harris created one of the most admirable and captivating characters in fiction, not because of his spectacular sleuthing abilities, but because he exemplifies what we all could, and should aspire to be. While Graham fears becoming a Lecter or a Dolarhyde, the reality is that complacency is much more likely to lead us to becoming like Eichmann. Righteousness is not a default state we have the luxury of falling back on; it’s achieved from consciously deciding at every juncture to act in the interest of the greater good, knowing full well that the choice to do so can exact a toll, and paying it anyway.
Graham did, and for his trouble, he finds himself on the same beach, carrying a couple more scars. But he saw to it that Dolarhyde never killed another family, and he had his own right by his side. Molly asks him about the sea turtles, and how many made it to the safety of the ocean.
