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Dr Lecter's Taste for ‘Goldberg’, or: The Horror of Bach in the Hannibal Franchise

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Carlo Cenciarelli
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Abstract

The repeated use of the ‘Goldberg’ Variations in the Hannibal Lecter saga offers a route into the complexities of cinema's appropriation of Western art music. To an extent, the affiliation of Bach with a cannibalistic serial killer rehearses the notion of ‘classical music’ as socially and culturally other. Yet at the same time, from its first appearance in a memorable scene in The Silence of the Lambs (1991), the music is tied to the workings of a mass-media phenomenon. This becomes evident in the sequel, Hannibal (2001), where the ‘Goldberg’ Aria, used as title song, crossing in and out of the diegesis and mixed with sound effects, becomes part of the development of the character into a media franchise, of the romanticizing of his masculinity and the spectacularization of his violence. Thus, in the process of capitalizing on Lecter's success, the saga at once insists on classical music's otherness and blurs its difference from film music.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Royal Musical Association , Volume 137 , Issue 1 , 2012 , pp. 107 - 134
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Musical Association

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References

1 I am using the term mass culture as descriptive of the global strategies of cultural production epitomized by Hollywood ‘event’ movies, that is, cultural products that are pitched at the widest possible audience (as opposed to niche markets and specialized-taste communities) through the help of technologies of mass production and distribution, forms of pervasive advertising and statistical analysis. A famous discussion of Hollywood as a paradigm of mass culture is found in Andreas Huyssen, Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington, IN, 1986). In keeping with Huyssen's influential work, my intention here is not to essentialize the Great Divide, but rather to discuss in detail how the use of Western art music in a Hollywood production can both exploit and blur the dichotomy between high art and mass entertainment. Elsewhere, I have discussed the relationship between the Western art canon and the cultural divide with a focus on ‘cannibalistic’ musical borrowings. See my ‘The Case Against Nyman Revisited: “Affirmative” and “Critical” Evidence in Michael Nyman's Appropriation of Mozart’, Radical Musicology, 1 (2006), 84 pars (11–32), <http://www.radical-musicology.org.uk> (accessed 23 March 2010).

2 Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (New York, 2008), 560. I would like to thank Justin Williams for drawing my attention to this passage.

3 For a discussion of this trope and particularly of cinema's tendency to distinguish the villain on the grounds of a weak masculinity, see Harriet Hawkins, Classics and Trash: Traditions and Taboos in High Literature and Popular Modern Genres (Toronto, 1990), 13ff., and Philippa Gates, Detecting Men: Masculinity and the Hollywood Detective Story (Albany, NY, 2006), 253–81. For a discussion of the specific affiliation of villainy with intellectualism and its relation to notions of American national identity, see both Gates, Detecting Men, 254ff., and Linnie Blake, ‘Whoever Fights Monsters: Serial Killers, the FBI, and America's Last Frontier’, The Devil Himself: Villainy in Detective Fiction and Film, ed. Stacy Gillis and Philippa Gates (Westport, CT, 2002), 197–210.

4 For a discussion of Lecter's relationship with figures of doubling, see Peter Messent, ‘American Gothic: Liminality and the Gothic in Thomas Harris's Hannibal Lecter Novels’, Dissecting Hannibal Lecter, ed. Benjamin Szumskyj (Jefferson, NC, 2008), 13–36.

5 Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs (London, 2002), 231.

6 To date, Harris has published four novels featuring the character of Hannibal Lecter: Red Dragon (1981), The Silence of the Lambs (1988), Hannibal (1999) and Hannibal Rising (2007). These have provided the material for five films: Michael Mann's Manhunter (1986), a first adaptation of Harris's Red Dragon; Jonathan Demme's The Silence of the Lambs (1991); Ridley Scott's Hannibal (2001); Brett Ratner's Red Dragon (2002), a second adaptation of Harris's first novel; and Peter Webber's Hannibal Rising (2007). Since Demme's The Silence of the Lambs, all the films use Bach's music even where, as in the case of Harris's Red Dragon and Hannibal Rising, the music does not feature in the book.

7 Harris, The Silence of the Lambs, 269.

8 Richard Dyer, ‘Three Questions about Serial Killing’, The Matter of Images (London, 2002), 110–17 (p. 112).

9 These meanings cluster around the dominant image of Bach as a master of counterpoint. For a historical account of the rich cultural meanings of Bach's counterpoint, and a critique of the twentieth-century tendency to reduce such meanings to matters of abstraction, rigour and speculation, see David Yearsley, Bach and the Meanings of Counterpoint (Cambridge, 2002).

10 Dyer, ‘Three Questions about Serial Killing’, 112. Thomas Fahy goes further in linking the variations to Lecter's violence, suggesting that ‘like the highly repetitive nature of the Variations and the reprise of the Aria, which both suggest an endless loop, this film presents violence as an ongoing cycle in modern society’. Thomas Fahy, ‘Killer Culture: Classical Music and the Art of Killing in Silence of the Lambs and Se7en’, Journal of Popular Culture, 37 (2003), 28–42 (p. 33).

11 Fahy makes the point that ‘the highly structured form of the piece parallel[s] Hannibal Lecter's cold meticulous nature’. Dyer, ‘Three Questions about Serial Killing’, 112. Thomas Fahy goes further in linking the variations to Lecter's violence, suggesting that ‘like the highly repetitive nature of the Variations and the reprise of the Aria, which both suggest an endless loop, this film presents violence as an ongoing cycle in modern society’. Thomas Fahy, ‘Killer Culture: Classical Music and the Art of Killing in Silence of the Lambs and Se7en’, Journal of Popular Culture, 37 (2003)., 32.

12 Kevin Bazzana, Glenn Gould: The Performer in the Work (Oxford, 1997), 226.

13 John Butt, ‘Bach Recordings Since 1980: A Mirror of Historical Performance’, Bach Perspectives 4: The Music of J. S. Bach: Analysis and Interpretation, ed. David Schulenberg (Lincoln, NE, and London, 1999), 181–95 (p. 185).

14 John Butt, ‘Bach Recordings Since 1980: A Mirror of Historical Performance’, Bach Perspectives 4: The Music of J. S. Bach: Analysis and Interpretation, ed. David Schulenberg (Lincoln, NE, and London, 1999)., 192.

15 For an in-depth analysis of how Gould was labelled a genius from the beginning of his public career and of how visual media insisted on drawing attention to his mannerisms and contributed to turning Gould into a ‘mass-mediated figure in the public domain’, see Graham Carr, ‘Visualising “The Sound of Genius”: Glenn Gould and the Culture of Celebrity in the 1950s’, Journal of Canadian Studies, 40/3 (2006), 5–42.

16 For an in-depth analysis of how Gould was labelled a genius from the beginning of his public career and of how visual media insisted on drawing attention to his mannerisms and contributed to turning Gould into a ‘mass-mediated figure in the public domain’, see Graham Carr, ‘Visualising “The Sound of Genius”: Glenn Gould and the Culture of Celebrity in the 1950s’, Journal of Canadian Studies, 40/3 (2006)., 19–26. For a selected sample of Gould's iconography, see also Glenn Gould: A Life in Pictures, ed. Malcom Lester (Toronto, 2007).

17 See Kevin Bazzana, Wondrous Strange: The Life and Art of Glenn Gould (Oxford, 2004), 10–11, and Carr, ‘Visualising “The Sound of Genius”’, 19. Various commentators have noted Gould's fusion of these qualities. See for example Joseph Roddy, ‘Apollonian’, Glenn Gould by Himself and his Friends, ed. John McGreevy (Toronto, 1983), 95–123 (p. 96).

18 Harris, The Silence of the Lambs, 269.

19 About the issue of Glenn Gould's cultural hybridity, see Carr, ‘Visualising “The Sound of Genius”’.

20 For a discussion of the way in which Gould's 1955 recording ‘predicated and helped usher in [a] new era of appreciation for Bach in the popular listening sphere’, see Laurette Goldberg, The Goldberg Variations Reader: A Performer's Guide and Anthology of Critical Appreciation (Berkeley, CA, 2002), iii.

21 This influence has taken many shapes. Gould has acted as sound adviser (for George Roy Hill's Slaughterhouse Five (1971), which features his piano recordings of the Harpsichord Concertos in F minor and D major, as well as a selection of movements from the ‘Goldberg’ Variations), has served as inspiration for actors (in Harvey Keitel's performance of a troubled young pianist in Fingers (1978)), and has been the performer chosen for a number of American films ranging from Mike Hodges's The Terminal Man (1974) to Nights in Rodanthe (2008). During the last two decades, in keeping with his rising posthumous fame, Gould's cinematic incidence has increased. His Bach recordings feature in Unbreakable (2000), Int. Trailer. Night (2002), Solaris (2003) and When Will I Be Loved? (2004). Outside American cinema, he has been the primary subject of cinematic focus in François Girard's Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould (1993) and has appeared as a cartoon character playing Bach in The Triplets of Belleville (2003). About the posthumous, 1990s rise in Gould's popularity, see Bazzana, Wondrous Strange, 2–14. About Keitel's modelling of a ‘“Gouldian” approach to the piano’, see James Toback's audio commentary to the Warner Home Video DVD of Fingers (1979), T6299. For a discussion of the relationship between Gould and visual media, with a particular focus on questions of gender, see Julie Brown, ‘Channeling Gould: Masculinities from Television to New Hollywood’, Music in Television, ed. James Deaville (London, 2011), 183–97.

22 The Aria's marginal relationship to the dominant discourse of Bach's music is powerfully encapsulated in the musicological controversy about its authenticity. Doubts about the Aria's authorship were famously raised by Bach scholar Frederick Neumann; see his ‘Bach: Progressive or Conservative and the Authorship of the Goldberg Aria’, Musical Quarterly, 71 (1985), 281–94. For Neumann, ‘The Aria is a galant piece, but it is quite certainly not by Bach.’ Neumann's argument was part of his rebuttal of an influential article by Robert Marshall which used the ‘Goldberg’ Variations, and in particular the Aria, as part of a reassessment of Bach's relationship to the pre-classical or galant style. Of course what concerns us here is not the issue of authorship per se, but the fact that the Aria, as a galant piece, has been constructed against the trope of Bach's ‘brain music’ and ‘pure theoretical speculation’. Various authors have remarked on the piece's unusual nature and its kinship to the empfindsamer Stil of C. P. E. Bach. See for example David Schulenberg, The Keyboard Music of J. S. Bach (New York and London, 2006), 377, and Richard Jones, ‘The Keyboard Works: Bach as Teacher and Virtuoso’, The Cambridge Companion to Bach, ed. John Butt (Cambridge, 1997), 136–53 (p. 148).

23 Jones, ‘The Keyboard Works’, 148.

24 See Schulenberg, The Keyboard Music of J. S. Bach, 385. For a discussion of the F minor Prelude's relationship to the galant sonata style of Bach's eldest sons, see also Jones, ‘The Keyboard Works’, 148, and David Ledbetter, Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier: The 48 Preludes and Fugues (New Haven, CT, and London, 2002), 288.

25 Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror or Paradoxes of the Heart (New York and London, 1990), 31–2. Carroll's definition explicitly draws on Mary Douglas's classic anthropological study of taboo and pollution behaviour. See Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (London, 1966).

26 In Carroll's terms, this would make Lecter a ‘figure of fusion’, a figure that compounds ‘disjointed or conflicting categories in an integral, spatio-temporally unified individual’. Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror, 44. Along these theoretical lines, Lecter's monstrosity has been discussed in terms of ‘liminality’ and ‘boundary-breaking’, ‘oxymoronic implosion of definitions’ and ‘pollution of the moral environment’. See respectively Messent, ‘American Gothic’, 13–14; Barry Taylor, ‘The Violence of the Event: Hannibal Lecter in the Lyotardian Sublime’, Postmodern Surroundings, ed. Steven Earnshaw (Amsterdam, 1994), 215–30 (p. 219); and Philip L. Simpson, Psycho-Paths: Tracking the Serial Killer through Contemporary American Film and Fiction (Carbondale, IL, 2000), 10.

27 Maggie Kilgour, ‘The Function of Cannibalism at the Present Time’, Cannibalism and the Colonial World, ed. Francis Barker, Peter Hulme and Margaret Iversen (Cambridge, 1988), 238–59 (pp. 249–50). Kilgour here refers to Lecter himself as ‘the most famous of contemporary cannibals’. Part of this quotation is also used by Fahy, ‘Killer Culture’, 32.

28 Kilgour, ‘The Function of Cannibalism’, 247 (italics original).

29 For an influential treatment of this issue, see Robin Wood, ‘An Introduction to the American Horror Film’, The American Nightmare: Essays on the Horror Film, ed. Wood and Richard Lippe (Toronto, 1979), 7–28. For a critique of the political dimension of horror's ‘return of the repressed’, see Christopher Sharrett, ‘The Horror Film in Neoconservative Culture’, The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin, TX, 1996), 253–76.

30 Much has been written about the contested generic placement of The Silence of the Lambs. See for example Mark Jancovich, ‘Genre and the Audience: Genre Classifications and Cultural Distinctions in the Mediation of The Silence of the Lambs’, Horror: The Film Reader, ed. Jancovich (London and New York, 2002), 151–61.

31 See Carol J. Clover, Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton, NJ, 1992). See also Linda Williams's use of the term in relation to porn, horror and melodrama in ‘Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess’, Film Quarterly, 44 (1991), 2–13. For a critique of the use of the term, see Joan Hawkins, Cutting Edge: Art Horror and the Horrific Avant-Garde (Minneapolis, MN, and London, 2000), 3–8.

32 The Silence of the Lambs is one of the three films in cinema history to have won the so-called ‘Big Five’ Academy awards of Best Picture, Best Male Actor, Best Female Actress, Best Director and Best Screenplay (the others being It Happened One Night (1934) and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975)).

33 Cynthia Freeland, The Naked and the Undead: Evil and the Appeal of Horror (Boulder, CO, 2000), 256ff.

34 Neumann, ‘Bach: Progressive or Conservative’, 290.

35 A famous exposition of the mechanism of suspense along these lines is given by Alfred Hitchcock in François Truffaut, Hitchcock (New York, 1967), 52. For a similar characterization of suspense as based on the split between spectators and characters, see also Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror, 138.

36 In her discussion of this scene, Robynn Stilwell similarly highlights the coexistence of contrasting interpretative frameworks, focusing on the complex patterns of empathy and anempathy at play in the scene. Building on her considerations, I am arguing that these patterns are organized in a precise temporal trajectory, and that their unfolding is accompanied by a shift in paradigms of listening and conceptions of music. See Robynn Stilwell, ‘The Fantastical Gap between Diegetic and Nondiegetic’, Beyond the Soundtrack: Representing Music in Cinema, ed. Daniel Goldmark, Lawrence Kramer and Richard Leppert (Berkeley, CA, 2007), 184–202 (pp. 190–3).

37 About the relative gaps between music and image in multimedia, see Nicholas Cook, Analysing Musical Multimedia (Oxford, 1998), 141.

38 On the idea of suspense and suspension, see Truffaut, Hitchcock, 35–6.

39 Jonathan Demme, on his approach to screening violence and The Silence of the Lambs, in Michael Bliss and Christina Banks, What Goes Around Comes Around (Carbondale, IL, 1996), 142–3.

40 About the shock cut as a staple of the horror genre, see David Scott Diffrient, ‘A Film is Being Beaten’, Horror Film: Creating and Marketing Fear, ed. Steffen Hantke (Jackson, MS, 2004), 52–81.

41 See Stilwell, ‘The Fantastical Gap’, 191.

42 Keith Uhlich, ‘Jonathan Demme’, Senses of Cinema, 32 (2004), <http://www.sensesofcinema.com> (accessed 4 December 2008). The notion of the director's ‘humanism’ is a recurring trope in the reception of Demme's work. See, for example, Bliss and Banks, What Goes Around Comes Around, 1–14.

43 For a theorization of cinema's use of the ‘dialectical opposition between the unconsummatedness of the musical symbol and the consummatedness of the cinematic object-events’, see Chapter 2 of Royal S. Brown, Overtones and Undertones (Berkeley, CA, 1994), 38–49 (p. 40).

44 Stilwell, ‘The Fantastical Gap’, 192.

45 The Lecter Variations and The Lecter Variation: The Story of Young Hannibal Lecter were working titles for the book and the film Hannibal Rising (both 2007), the latest episode in the series. See Ali S. Karim, ‘Hannibal Rising: Look Back in Anger’, Dissecting Hannibal Lecter, ed. Szumskyj, 147–59 (p. 147).

46 Michael, blogger, on samizdata.net, <http://www.samizdata.net/blog/archives/002348.html> (accessed 14 April 2009).

47 See Linda Mizejewski, ‘Stardom and Serial Fantasies’, Keyframes: Popular Cinema and Cultural Studies, ed. Matthew Tinkcom and Amy Villarejo (London and New York, 2001), 159–70 (p. 159).

48 Philip L. Simpson, ‘The Horror “Event” Movie: The Mummy, Hannibal, and Signs’, Horror Film, ed. Hantke, 85–98.

49 About high-concept advertising, see Justin Wyatt, High Concept: Movies and Marketing in Hollywood (Austin, TX, 1994).

50 Publicity taglines from the Internet Movie Database, <http://www.imdb.com> (accessed 9 February 2009).

51 For a survey of the critical discourse surrounding Hannibal's genre, see Ernest Mathijs, ‘The “Wonderfully Scary Monster” and the International Reception of Horror’, Kinoeye, 2/19 (2002), <http://www.kinoeye.org> (accessed 15 February 2009).

52 See for example Kenneth Turan, ‘A Cannibalized Tale’, Los Angeles Times, 9 February 2001; Joseph Grixti, ‘Consuming Cannibals: Psychopathic Killers as Archetypes and Cultural Icons’, Journal of American Culture, 18 (1995), 87–96; Mike Clark, ‘Tasteless “Hannibal” Lacks Old Bite’, USA Today, 14 March 2001, <http://www.usatoday.com> (accessed 5 February 2009); and Peter Rainer, ‘Brains Over Beauty’, New York Magazine, 12 February 2001.

53 Blake, ‘Whoever Fights Monsters’, 208. Blake writes about ‘the enormously popular Lecter trilogy’ as an extreme example of what she sees as a lingering ‘association in the popular media of violence and heroism, murder and an essential American self’ (pp. 198–205).

54 Within the context of action film, Robynn Stilwell has shown how even in movies such as Die Hard (1988), which seemingly reinforce the stereotypical polarization of ‘brute force and native cunning […] versus intellectual sophistication’, the music can open up alternative interpretative possibilities, potentially undercutting and subverting the protagonists’ roles, and allowing the viewer to read against the grain of the text's dominant voice. See Robynn Stilwell, ‘“I just put a drone under him …”: Collage and Subversion in the Score of “Die Hard”’, Music and Letters, 78 (1997), 551–80. What I am suggesting here is that in the Hannibal saga, with the conspicuous absence of a male hero and the elevation of the serial killer to media franchise, the possibility of cheering for Lecter becomes central to the films’ mechanism of distribution and consumption. In this sense, Hannibal can be seen to lead to extreme consequences an ambivalence always potentially present in cinema's long-standing flirtation with the figure of the murderer.

55 Gary Percesepe and Frederick Barthelme, ‘Digesting Hannibal’, Salon, 3 March 2001, <http://www.salon.com> (accessed 20 May 2009).

56 For a discussion of how high-concept movies integrate ‘visual and thematic style’ with ‘meta-cinematic marketing and merchandising campaigns’, see Simpson, ‘The Horror “Event” Movie’, 90. See also Wyatt, High Concept, on whom Simpson relies.

57 For a discussion of Lecter's post-The Silence of the Lambs celebrity status and the role of the mask in the 1992 Oscar awards ceremony, see Grixti, ‘Consuming Cannibals’.

58 In hindsight, Hannibal went beyond providing a sequel to The Silence of the Lambs, and marked the creation of a media franchise on Harris's literary saga. On the increasing synergy between Harris's novels and their cinematic adaptations, see Karim, ‘Hannibal Rising’, 148.

59 I am here using the terms symbolic and iconic in keeping with Charles Peirce's tripartite semiotics. For an application of Peirce's model to the study of multimedia, see Cook, Analysing Musical Multimedia.

60 Simpson, ‘The Horror “Event” Movie’, 85.

61 Simpson, ‘The Horror “Event” Movie’, 94.

62 The technical and creative aspects of this collaboration, and the intention to produce a soundtrack that ‘was to match the way Ridley shoots his movies’, are discussed by Per Hallberg in Mark Scott, ‘Final Cut: Hannibal, Sounds of the Flesh’, Audio Media US, 3 (2001), 46–7 (p. 46).

63 For a discussion of cinema's ideal of ‘great “dry” strength’ and the ‘very present and very neutral sound’ of THX cinema systems, see Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen (New York, 1994), 95–101.

64 Glenn Gould, ‘The Prospects on Recording’, High Fidelity Magazine, 16 (1966), 46–63 (p. 54).

65 Elvis Mitchell, ‘Whetting that Large Appetite for Second Helpings’, New York Times (9 February 2001).

66 The film's publicity, as Martin Barker has noted, put some emphasis on the presence of a ‘bizarre romance’. See Martin Barker, ‘News, Reviews, Clues, Interviews and Other Ancillary Materials: A Critique and Research Proposal’, 21st Century Film Studies: A Scope Reader, ed. James Burton, 42 (2007), <http://www.scope.nottingham.ac.uk> (accessed 23 March 2010).

67 Ridley Scott, liner notes to Hannibal (DVD, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures, 2001).

68 For an exploration of the use of pre-existing music as cinematic leitmotif, see Jeongwon Joe, ‘Reconsidering Amadeus: Mozart as Film Music’, Changing Tunes: The Use of Pre-existing Music in Film, ed. Phil Powrie and Robynn Stilwell (Aldershot, 2006), 56–73.

69 Heather Laing, The Gendered Score: Music in 1940s Melodrama and the Woman's Film (Aldershot, 2007).

70 For a discussion of the historical alignment between notions of female beauty and the galant aesthetic, see Matthew Head, ‘“If the Pretty Little Hand Won't Stretch”: Music for the Fair Sex in Eighteenth-Century Germany’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 52 (1999), 203–54.

71 See Laing, The Gendered Score, 67–75.

72 Victoria Alexander, ‘Hannibal: Review’, Films in Review, 12 February 2001, <http://www.filmsinreview.com> (accessed 5 February 2009).

73 Freeland, The Naked and the Undead, 267.

74 This is a term used by Seymour Chatman to express ‘the sense of narrative information flowing through the psychological and emotional channel provided by a character’. See Robert Stam, Robert Burgoyne and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, New Vocabulary of Film Semiotics (New York and London, 1992), 94.

75 The money shot, as Linda Williams puts it, is ‘a shot whose name derives from mainstream film industry slang for the film image that costs the most money to produce’. Williams famously discusses the shot and its seeking for ‘maximum visibility’ in her cultural analysis of the porn industry. See Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the ‘Frenzy of the Visible’ (Berkeley, CA, 1999), 95.

76 For a contrasting example of Bach's cinematic appropriation, in which the music's cultural and aesthetic difference is deliberately downplayed, see my ‘Bach and Cigarettes: Imagining the Everyday in Jarmusch's Int. Trailer. Night’, Twentieth-Century Music, 7 (2010), 219–43.