For my final paper I am writing about fatherhood in Dracula and Frankenstein so first let me apologize for the fact that my head is entangled in those two books.  That said, I was introduced to the film Silence of the Lambs (1991) for the first time a few weeks ago and something has been bothering me:  Hannibal Lecter and Jame “Buffalo Bill” Gumb are fascinating recreations of Dracula and Frankenstein’s Wretch.  Maybe this course and my paper have me seeing them everywhere, but I really think there is a case to be made.  Further, how these two “monsters” relate to women.

Towards the end of the film, one of the cops asks Clarice Starling, “Is it true what they’re sayin’ [about Hannibal Lecter], he’s some kinda vampire?”  She denies it and states that there is not “a name for what he is,” however, I disagree.  I think vampire is a very good name for what he is.  To begin with, vampires and Dracula (particularly in the screen adaptations) stand somewhere between male and female elements: they attract their victims with their elegant appearance and yet hypnotize with a powerful male gaze.  Likewise, Hannibal Lecter, even in his prison clothes, is well groomed and dapper; his cell is more refined and elegant than those of the others and no cell-bars block him from view.  He is meant to be viewed—especially when in the isolation cage in the center of the room towards the end of the film.  In any other setting he would be appealingly put together; he looks at home in the refined suit at on the tropic island at the end of the film.  However, within a prison, knowing the threat he poses, and under his dominating gaze that follows the camera, he is distinctly unsettling.  Hannibal seems all the more dangerous because his danger is not overt.

Hannibal the vampire would seem to be dominant—his male gaze forcing Clarice to submit to him—yet, he never is interested in her submission.  What Hannibal wants from Clarice is equality.  For every piece of information he gives her he wishes stories of her life in exchange.  Nor is he interested in consuming her—literally or metaphorically.  When Hannibal escapes, he could easily target her but he makes the decision not to do so.  Like Dracula with Mina, he seeks an exchange—not of blood, but of data.  Interestingly, this suggests that so long as women are allied with the monster, they are safe—even humanized.  Until Hannibal, none of the men in the film look at Clarice as an equal.  She is an object.

Dr. Chilton says as much, “Crawford [Clarice’s superior] is very clever, isn’t he, using you? [….] A pretty young woman to turn him [Hannibal] on. I don’t believe Lecter’s even seen a woman in eight years. And oh, are you ever his taste. So to speak.”  Further, the only thing Chilton seems interested in is not her ability to do her job or her life, but only her appearance: “You know, we get a lot of detectives here, but I must say I can’t ever remember one as attractive.”  Even those she solicits for help, such as the students who study insects, help her mainly out of the hope that she might agree to go on a date with them as they find her physically, rather than mentally, appealing.  Similar to Clarice, others see Hannibal only as an object.  Dr. Chilton, whose care Hannibal is under, says of him, “Lecter is our most prized asset.”  He is an “asset” and described as an animal and a monster, not a person.

Interestingly, Clarice is not endangered by the vampire of Hannibal Lecter, but by the objectification by Gumb and other men.  Hannibal asks Clarice, “What is the first and principal thing he [Gumb] does? What needs does he serve by killing?”  She replies, “Anger, um, social acceptance, and, huh, sexual frustrations, sir…”  However, the answer Hannibal is looking for is “He covets.”  He might just as well have been describing the motivations of Frankenstein’s Wretch.  The Creature becomes a serial killer angry at his creator, finding no means of gaining social acceptance, and because Frankenstein denies him a mate.  Granted, there is one major difference: the Wretch’s appearance is a visible example of his fractured self and his inability to fit in, while Gumb struggles to create an appearance that matches his fractured interior.  Hannibal claims about Gumb, “Look for severe childhood disturbances associated with violence. Our [Buffalo] Billy wasn’t born a criminal, Clarice. He was made one through years of systematic abuse. Billy hates his own identity, you see.”  Once again, the quote could just as easily be applied to the Creature whose birth is marred by his violent abandonment at the hands of his “father,” is made a criminal by years of abuse and loneliness, and who hates himself as much as he does his creator.  Those things are what make him “savage and more terrifying” than Hannibal.

The danger represented by Gumb is clearest.  He directs his attacks on women and openly attacks Clarice, as well.  Gumb, though he identifies with women, thinks he can become one by literally creating a patchwork girl—or at least a patchwork girl costume.  He thinks he can become a woman by putting on the skin of his female victims.  Therefore, it is through mimicking the appearance of womanhood and not the experience of womanhood that he seeks to become female.  Just as the other men, Gumb reduces women to appearance and not their identity.  He ignores his victims emotions, pasts, and memories—the things which one uses to construct an identity.  In fact, Gumb never refers to the women by name or even “she,” only as “it”: “It rubs the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again,” “yes, it will, Precious, won’t it? It will get the hose,” etc.  In spite of Gumb’s desire to become a woman, he fails to recognize them as more than objects.  He denies them status as people.

Her superiors don’t help matters.  They inturrupt her training to send her into the field.  They don’t listen to her arguments and consequently she walks into danger ill-prepared.  In fact, the only reason Hannibal is able to escape is because the police focus on his exterior rather than his interior—they look only at the face of the “victim” and fail to recognize it as merely a fleshy mask (the face of one of his guards which he removed for the purpose).  Thus, it’s clear that whether through Gumb or Clarice’s colleagues, objectification and exterior is what endangers women—and through the officer’s mistake, men, too—rather than the monstrosity of Hannibal.  Perhaps because Hannibal is positioned between the male gaze and the feminine object to be viewed, he is able to use his objectification in the eyes of men to his advantage.

Hannibal is different. As frightening as it is, he is fascinated by Clarice’s mind.  He explores her memories, fears, and background all in an attempt to know her.  Even in his method of killing he is interested in the interior of his victims for he consumes them entirely, with particular interest in their interior organs.  I wouldn’t go so far as to say Hannibal is a feminist hero—he does eat a nurse’s face, after all—but he is the lesser evil to Clarice and even proves a vital ally.  Further, Clarice is undoubtedly the hero of the film.  Though, even that is fascinating as it shows that to be a hero a woman must court a monster and be his equal, ally with him to combat the other, more dangerous monstrosity and one that cannot be courted because it refuses to recognize the heroines humanity.  If Red Dragon is anything to go by, for a man to be a hero, he must become the monster he hunts.  He must feel the monstrosity inside of himself.  Clarice, need on prove her humanity to the monster as objectified as she is to empower herself.  Through this, the two form a special bond.  Hannibal, if teasingly, suggests, “People will say we’re in love.”  Certainly the two share a common language, so to speak.  Clarice is the only one able to decipher his anagrams and interpret the clues in his turns of phrase.  As frightening as Hannibal is, he is the only one who understands her and sees Clarice as more than a tool to be used, an art object to be admired, or a vehicle for sexual pleasure.  It takes a monster to give woman her humanity and a woman to see the humanity in the monster.

The encoding project finished, let me first say: I greatly enjoyed the experience.  When we were first introduced to encoding in class during boot camp, the experience was rather intimidating.  I had prior experience with programming, but creating a program is different from describing through code.  However, it did at least give me an advantage of knowing that all tags once opened (like <line>) needs to be closed (with a </line>).  But, as with most things, what one already is familiar with may make things easier, nevertheless it is the differences one must learn makes a project exciting.

While intimidating, learning to describe the manuscript pages in code made them personal.  My chief source of delight was also my greatest challenge when it came to encoding:  Mary and Percy’s illustrations and flirtations in the manuscript.  I’ve discussed this in my submission to the group post so I don’t want to discuss the technical aspects of this, but rather the reason why it deserves to be encoding.  It humanizes them.  One has a tendency of thinking of great and famous writers as something unlike us—not monstrous, but at least a sort of other.  No matter how human we know them to be, how much they celebrate that themselves, they still feel distant.

In one moment, looking at the tiny sketch of flowers in the margin of the text, one suddenly relates to these long dead writers.  We form a connection because of the sheer humanness of these little marginalia.  Percy and Mary have become people who, perhaps in a moment of boredom or when searching for inspiration, begin to draw doodles of nature in the corners.  And Percy, who writes at the end of the page, “O you pretty Pecksie!”, we are reminded is a husband—one who flirts with his wife while editing her manuscript!

But why is this important?  Maybe it isn’t and maybe one just records it because it is there, yet I disagree.  I think it’s important because it stops us and reminds us to be moved by what we read.  It reminds us—here, I think of our discussion in class—that these distant authors are not others, but us.   WE can relate to them as much as we relate to their writing.  They too fully experienced and understood the human.  That I think is very important and that is why even those details, unimportant to the text, are still important.

We’ve been discussing in class what makes a something (or a ourselves, for that matter) monstrous.  However, recently I’ve started to wonder what happens when a “classic monster,” such as Frankenstein’s creation or Dracula, is faced with a “monster” of the modern age–digital or technological.  I’m curious, does Frankenstein’s creature appear as monstrous if he faced with a robot?  Or does he somehow seem less infused with alterity and more “human” by comparison?

I’ve always had a particular love for Dracula and the gentleman vampire.  While I was doing some research, I came across a mention of “psychic vampires.”  They are not entirely a new idea; in fact, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle of Sherlock Holmes fame wrote a tale about one in Dracula’s Brood.  His female vampire slowly preys on a young man, stripping him of all he holds dear: love, respectability, and livelihood.  She drains his life without ever touching his blood.  However, what interests me now is what they have come to represent: our fears of hackers.

There is little difference between a psychic vampire and a modern hacker intent on identity theft.  Psychic vampires don’t need any connection with their victim, they need not even know their victim’s name or face.  The psychic vampire impersonally drains them of life, just as a hacker might drain one’s bank account.  In the end, the psychic vampires has consumed the host’s life, just as identity theft can destroy all that one has worked to create: reputation, credit, stability, and one’s happiness.  Worst of all, the psychic vampire can undermine one’s  sense of self, slowly stripping away from one and altering all that was once “I.”  We become nothing and they become us.

Compared to these, the classic vampire and his descendants don’t look nearly as bad.  They must forge a personal relationship with their victims.  They conduct their business face to face.  And if they cannot survive without their host, at least the host is offered something in return (in the case of Dracula, Lucy the flirt and Mina the clever one are enhanced through their relationship with Dracula).  There is a very good reason why the hideous Dracula becomes the idealized lover and hero: he offers intimacy.  The traditional blood sucking vampire, like Byron, is “mad, bad, and dangerous to know,” but he exists through connections, as intimate as they are social.

Frank Langella as Dracula from the 1979 John Badham film. Langella's Dracula was the culmination of years of evolution for the gentleman vampire from villain to hero, champion of women. Sensual and Byronic, he cares for Lucy as a true companion rather than an object of beauty.

At least compared to the psychic vampire, I feel as though the traditional blood-sucking vampire doesn’t come out too badly.  If the psychic vampire represents our fears of technology, the threats it opens us up to, and the distancing effect technology has on people (replacing human interaction with digital alternatives); then the traditional vampire comes to represent a return to intimacy and human interaction.  Even if he’s a threat, the traditional vampire is at least one that must stand before us to attack rather than draining us from the shadows, unknown and unseen.

I wonder, if Frankenstein created two creatures–one his traditional creature made, ultimately, of flesh and blood and the other of wires and springs–which would we find more desirable?  Would it be easier for us to feel for the creature because his emotions are inherently human rather than the result of programming instilled in him like the memories of the Replicants?  Is it therefore easier to see the basic humanity of something when it is opposed to technology?  Do we still want to create a dichotomy between human and technological even though we are all “cyborgs?”  A sort of monstrous nostalgia?

It seems silly, but I keep thinking of Godzilla.  He started out a monster, but with the introduction of new threats he became the hero. (Sure, a few cities are destroyed along the way, but accidents happen, right?)  At one point Godzilla is pitted Hedorah, the embodiment of pollution from factories.  In another film, he is faced with the threat of a mechanical version of himself: Mechagodzilla.

It may seem rather silly, but it shows how what once is monstrous can become a hero and even an ally in the face of technological changes.  Monsters are our ways of examining our fears, but a changing world means changing fears.  Our monsters can’t always be the same and rather than becoming more frightening, they become our champions against new monsters as we learn to accept them and ourselves.

After class the other night, I watched (okay, here I must admit to being rather a nerd) Battlestar Galactic with my boyfriend.  For those of you who haven’t seen the 2004 series (which differs somewhat from the original):  Mankind created the Cylons as slaves, but the Cylons developed sentience.  The Cylons, angry after years of servitude and fearful that their creators might destroy them now that they are sentient, decide to strike first and destroy the humans.  This summary is simplistic at best; the problems between the humans and the Cylons are compounded by religious differences (the Cylons are monotheistic, while the humans believe in a pantheon of gods), grievances from the long war, desires to prove themselves, and more.  Significantly, (and why the show reminded me so strikingly of our discussion in class) during the war, the Cylons evolve from their original form:

 To a model which looks virtually indistinguishable from humans:

However, unlike humans, the Cylons are limited by only a set number of human-like appearances, multiple copies of the same model being possible, both male and female.

What all this builds up to, in a round about way, is that not only do the Cylons illustrate the Uncanny Valley (some humans, overlooking the war and the differences, develop feelings for the humanistic Cylons, even fall in love and start families with them), but the Cylons bring into question what it means to be human.  More than just in appearance, the Cylons are almost indistinguishable from mankind.  Like humans, the Cylons have religious beliefs, emotions, a respect for life (even though they themselves can be reloaded into new bodies like a computer program might be moved from one computer to another), ability to suffer pain, desires to reproduce and have offspring, ability to dream, and more.  In fact, the Cylons are so similar to humans that they have even developed traits that, while we should like to call “inhuman,” the show more than clearly demonstrates are all too human.  Both the Cylons and the humans make use of torture, though one of the first instances of it in the series is the humans is the humans raping and beating a female Cylon.  Further, neither the humans nor their creations are opposed to suicide bombings, terrorism, and murder (even murdering their own people not simply as acts of war).  The humans, when speaking of these acts committed by the Cylons call them “inhuman,” yet when their own people do it, one must admit that it is all too human.  The humans simply argue that their use of such tactics are out of the necessity of war, yet the Cylons could as easily claim the same.  The Cylons are so indistinguishable from their creators that they possess both mankind’s best and worst characteristics.

In spite of this, the humans abhor the Cylons, calling them “monstrous” and “inhuman,” yet when it comes to putting one’s finger on just what makes them different from the humans it is hard.  Is simply declaring it is because they are not us–our creations–enough?  Perhaps it is because they make us all too aware of the inhuman aspects of humanity that we wish to distance ourselves from them.  As we have discussed in class, the line between us and technology (or us and them) is uncertain and shifting at best being so dependant on how one defines technology and it brings into question our identity as humans.

In one of the most recent episodes I’ve seen a doctor emerges from a medical tent, covered in blood.  A Cylon approaches him and, indicating the blood, asks if it is Cylon or human as “it all looks the same.” This is a perfect summation for my argument:  There is almost no difference between the Cylons and the humans, indistinguishable from each other even by members of the same race. Simply by existing, the Cylons bring into question how we differentiate between human and inhuman.  The same question that is approached through Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in discussion of monstrosity: Is it possible that humans can be less “human,” more “monstrous,” than their creations?  Both the Cylons and Frankenstein’s Wretch would readily answer  yes; humanity can be inhuman and the inhuman can be far more humane, at times.