Natalie Feng

Clarice recounts her childhood trauma: after her father died, she was sent to live with relatives. One night, she heard the cries of lambs waiting to be slaughtered. Wanting to save those pitiful creatures, she picked up a little lamb and ran as hard as she could, trying to escape the farm. In the end, she failed. Not only did she fail to rescue the lamb, she herself was driven away.

Whether Clarice’s story is true, we do not know. The only thing we know is that Hannibal believed it—and he was moved.

Rather than asking why Hannibal would be touched by such a story, a better question is why Clarice chose to tell it. She understood that Hannibal was an extraordinarily powerful man—and also profoundly monstrous, because he eats people. A monster like this must carry immense inner trauma. He despises humanity because he knows too well the evil within it. And those who loathe evil inevitably long for goodness.

As a psychiatrist, Hannibal had repeated the same game with previous patients: hollowing out their stories and then killing them. This time, he kept probing Clarice’s narrative. But when she told the story of the lambs, his expression changed. He realized he had found someone like himself. Their shared understanding—the metaphor beneath this fable—suggests that true tragedy must be something more universal, independent of appearances, rooted in the trembling origin of life itself. Clarice’s compassion, already detached from personal catharsis and elevated into a form of universal concern, mirrors Hannibal’s own pursuit. From this, a deeper bond emerges between them.

People often ask whether Hannibal loves Clarice. I find the question meaningless. Love or pity—whatever the label—the underlying logic is that they are the same kind of person.

Hannibal, a man freed from base desires, would never fall in love merely after a few encounters—moved by superficial humanity or fleeting emotion. To interpret their relationship simply as male-female love is, in effect, to deny the resonance of their shared understanding of human nature.

The story of the lambs supplements Clarice’s characterization, while Hannibal’s response—his expression, tears, touch, and words—constructs his own image. To understand why Hannibal reacts this way is to grasp the strong philosophical aura surrounding him. This leads to a deeper question: if Hannibal empathizes with Clarice because of their similarity, what kind of personality does he ultimately symbolize?

In Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucault writes meaningfully at the end:

“The world seeks to measure madness through psychology and to justify it,
but in the end it must first justify itself before madness—
for a world filled with struggle and suffering is the very conclusion drawn.”

Foucault suggests that madness is not a natural phenomenon but a product of civilization. Nor is it simply an illness; it is a sense of otherness that shifts over time. In primitive states, madness does not exist. It appears only in modern society, produced by mechanisms that exclude in order to preserve dominant culture—an effect created jointly by the observer and the observed.

This resembles what Camus called the absurd, born from humanity’s sense of estrangement. It is perhaps the perfect annotation for Hannibal’s elegant madness. After all, Hannibal does not consider himself insane. With supreme intelligence, he challenges society’s moral limits while remaining as calm as if doing something entirely ordinary. He is playing—first with Clarice, then with the asylum director, then with the senator—mocking and teasing every established order and norm.

Between society and Hannibal, one must be mad. It depends on where you stand.

Why does Foucault separate the mad from the realm of normal reason? Because they cannot be categorized. They follow neither the path of the good nor the evil. Like geniuses, the mad insist on walking their own unprecedented road. Some pose no danger, constructing only an inner spiritual world. Others are dangerous—like Hannibal—because they attempt to force reality to match their imagined world.

Foucault cites many great artistic geniuses, arguing that art provides madness with a channel for release. From this perspective, Hannibal is essentially an artist. Indeed, the film portrays his mastery of art, his outward elegance, and inward frenzy—indistinguishable from that of an artist.

In the scene where Hannibal kills two guards, he remains calm and even plays Bach’s Goldberg Variations. The music’s progression—from graceful theme to abrupt stylistic transformation—foreshadows the film’s violence. When the music finally drowns out the guards’ dying struggles, the piece has reached the seventh variation, and Hannibal pauses to appreciate it before quietly departing.

Another subtle detail lies here: the recording used in the film is Glenn Gould’s performance. This brilliant musician is remembered as much for his eccentric, almost shocking behavior as for his genius. Across distance and time, Hannibal and Gould converse—obscure rational thought meeting rich emotional understanding within the variations. After all, the rational always come in groups; the mad exist only one by one.

Buffalo Bill is also mad, self-exiled to society’s margins. Hannibal, however, exists outside social rules altogether, drifting among them. Clarice searches for her own position. As the film unfolds, we see which side she gradually leans toward—and the original novel provides an even clearer answer.

The film’s profound interpretation of madness implicitly questions modern civilization itself, offering us a mirror for self-reflection. Catherine, imprisoned by Buffalo Bill, is undoubtedly another lamb. Though she ultimately gains physical freedom, whether she—and others like her—will escape silence remains unknown.

“Aphasia”—the loss of speech—feels closer to the lambs’ final fate. Under the discipline of rational modernity, people move from confronting silent inner terror to gradually losing the ability to speak at all. Just as Hannibal discovers Buffalo Bill, it is not “civilization” that defeats madness, but another form of madness. This narrative design itself carries powerful irony and absurdity.