Dahmer Vs Hannibal: The Netflix Cannibal and The Icon Of Hopkins And Mikkelsen
Dahmer Vs Hannibal: Past nightmares, traumatic events and physical harassment, but also and above all psychological, do not take place at the exact moment in which they are perpetuated but reverberate obsessively in people’s minds to the point of diverting their behavior. Sometimes the defense mechanisms are subtle, almost invisible, like minimal compulsions or an ever-present faint state of anxiety, while on other occasions they explode with anger inside broken minds and guide the actions of real monsters.
The Milwaukee nightmare has returned to our screens twice in the last few days because in addition to the scary Dahmer (here is our review of Dahmer) on Netflix the docuseries dedicated to one of the most chilling serial killers of all time has just arrived – you can find it among the Netflix TV series of October 2022. The conversations with the murderer report the extreme discomfort of a fragile person, tormented by a lonely childhood and unable to freely express his being, who has chosen to cure pain by taking revenge against that inhospitable world. The disgusting treatment dedicated to his victims was an attempt to make up for a physical and psychological lack, through a solution very similar to that implemented by the character created by Thomas Harris.
Dahmer Vs Hannibal: The Heat Of The Meat
The screenplay of the TV series conceived by Ryan Murphy has the undoubted merit of not spectacular sizing any aspect of the killer’s life, managing not only to treat with sensitivity the mourning that still grips the families of the victims but also to avoid the easy justifications deriving from some untrue rumors. In fact, during the first reconstructions of Dahmer’s life, in an attempt to rationalize the tragic abuse of corpses, the rumor spread that the Monster of Milwaukee had spent a tragic childhood, even suffering the harassment of a neighbor. His early years weren’t that terrible, but it’s true – as shown on the Netflix show – that Jeffrey lived in a very complicated family., with an absent father and a hypochondriac mother, who kept the desire for suicide at bay the abuse of psychiatric drugs.
Nobody thought about the child during his formative years, so he grew up autonomously becoming shy and lonely, developing that strange fascination with carcasses that in a few years would become one of his worst obsessions. In the icy loneliness of childhood, we find the common thread that unites him – fortunately only in artistic fiction – to the famous psychiatrist outlined in the pen of Thomas Harris: Dr. Lecter rarely opens a glimpse of the events of his past, but when it happens it is impossible. do not find in them the horror that will dictate their actions. The son of a Lithuanian count, Hannibal becomes an orphan in childhood when a Nazi panzer destroys his parents’ villa. The child emerges from the war front as a ghost, pale and mute, with a chain around his neck to symbolize his missing childhood, replaced by the loneliness that he will never be able to erase due to the profound traumas that will haunt him throughout his life.
The Thirst For Control
An unhappy youth is not enough to create a monster but, at least in the case of Dahmer, already in the first years of life, there were those alarm bells that have only recently been classified as possible indications of a criminal compulsion. Abandoning himself to a world of animal carcasses, and frequently conducting unrefined experiments on bones and organs, was coupled in adolescence with a serious problem of alcoholism, fueled in all probability by the attempt to suppress his homosexual inclinations, publicly opposed. from the retrograde society in which he grew up.
The unhealthy relationship she had with his family figures was the spring that triggered his first murder, which took place a few days after the divorce of his parents. Dahmer took a hitchhiker home, and they spent the afternoon together chatting, drinking beer and listening to music, but the discomfort that controlled his mind led him first to kill, and then to vent sexually. The killer will demonstrate several times this profound inability to relate to others, certainly derived from a sad and friendless childhood, but also from a confused sentimental sphere to which he did not want to give in. The killer felt frustrated by his inability to control his own life and tried to extend his will to others in the only way he could, through power over those corpses he has always been fascinated by.
The parallel to Hannibal, in this case, is not evident only because the psychiatrist played by Hopkins first, and Mikkelsen later, did not need to vent his physical needs on lifeless bodies: the simple act of murder was enough for him to sublimate the own desire for superiority. Harris already indicated in the name of his character the extreme intelligence and the insatiable thirst for revenge that would give meaning to every action, because the Carthaginian general was one of the finest strategists in history, and the Romans tried to humiliate him by launching before his fortified camp the severed head of his brother.
A Wounded God
Hannibal Lecter kills because he can do it, he does not feel subject to the humble rules of the common man and laughs at his weaknesses, like a sadist Raskòl’nikov who has never reached the grandiose epiphany of pity. His obsession with power basks in the possibilities offered to him by an out-of-scale acumen, but it stems from the terrible trauma from which his lust for flesh also originates. In consuming his victims, Dr. Lecter recalls, and somehow attempts to exorcise, the memory of the runaway Nazis who devoured his little sister Mischa, an image that he cannot erase in any way from his memory.
The psychiatrist, however, justifies himself unconsciously, moving away from the barbarians with the swastika, giving honor and dignity to his meal, because he feeds himself only with the organs and ennobles them in a refined cuisine. It is therefore from a deep pain that the inhuman perversion of the fictional character is born, but also that of the real beast, because Dahmer satisfied an uncomfortable emotional lack with cannibalism, trying to fill himself with another when the sexual outlet was no longer sufficient. For his admission, it was the desire to feel close to someone that forced him to kill, a tendency to which he surrendered after fighting it for a few years, and it is in the light of this suffering that not only makes sense his meticulous preservation of the skeletons and organs of the slain, but also the horrible attempt at lobotomy carried out on some victims, in an attempt to create the living dead who would never leave him alone.
