Indelicacies: The Silence of the Lambs cultivates unusual tastes

THE FIRST AND MOST important thing we know about Hannibal Lecter is that he is a man-eater with taste. He does not eat his fellow man out of necessity, like the survivors of a shipwreck or plane crash might, but out of something like a hierarchy of manners: “Whenever feasible,” notes Mads Mikkelsen’s Lecter in the 2013 TV show Hannibal, “one should always try to eat the rude.” And he does so stylishly: In 1991’s The Silence of the Lambs, Anthony Hopkins’s Lecter famously describes eating a census taker’s liver with fava beans and “a nice Chianti.”

Unlike real-life serial killers like Ted Bundy or the Zodiac killer, who targeted victims based on a code or a physical type, Lecter’s rules are based on something more ineffable. If the dominant cultural image of the serial killer is of a nondescript chameleon, the stranger who is hard to catch precisely because he can melt into a crowd, then Lecter’s insistence on having his aesthetic judgments temper his cannibalistic crimes makes him rather odd among the murdering set. In doing so, Lecter forces us to confront an uncomfortable question: What does taste have to do with the taboo drives that would lead a person to kill, and eat, other people?