Analyzing Crime in Literature and Film Essay

Crime in Literature and Film

"Red Dragon" by Thomas Harris and "Manhunter" by Michael Mann

The original version of the novel red dragon was written by Thomas Harris in 1981. In the words of Vest, only few authors have risen to the level of relevance and success as Thomas Harris, who authored just five novels, beginning from 1975. The Red Dragon, with other fictional works in the same series, is a famous fictional book built around a crime thriller. The book was later adapted in the 1986 Michael Mann movie, Manhunter. Some key actors that played key roles in these movie series are Brain Cox, the first ever actor to play the role of Dr. Hannibal Lecter, the manhunter antagonist, who became the Red Dragon's protagonist. However, some other actors like Anthony Hopkins in the movie, the Silence of the Lamb and Red Dragon, Hannibal's Mads Mikkelsen and Hannibal Rising's Gaspard Ulliel, all reprised Dr. Hannibal Lecter's role in the movies that followed. The NBC-National Broadcasting Network adapted the movie to a series called Hannibal in 2012, the TV adaptation of Red Dragon with Bryan Fuller doubling as the writer and the producer and Mads Mikkelsen featuring as Hannibal Lecter.

According to Murphy, these movies are true to their sources and at the same time, bear their directors' unmistakable signatures; they are different in both appearance and movement. The enthralling fictions of Thomas Harris keep unsettling company with strange breed of clandestine sharers and serial killers who run after bizarre transubstantiation of the flesh and blood of their victims, and the twisted souls that track them.

Summary of the Red Dragon and Manhunter

Will Graham is a specialist forensic who is recuperating from a past case when the F.B.I approached him to help them fish out a deadly murderer who murdered two families. The killings took place one month apart and kindled the fear of imminent attacks within the next month. The killings are mostly gruesome and involve every member of the family. Francis Dolarhyde, an employee of a movie-processing company (Vlastelica), is the serial killer here.

Graham is one troubled man with a very rough past who eventually finds some peace by taking his family to the Florida Keys to live a story book kind of life. But, he is quite aware of the killings and knows no one else can apprehend the killer before he kills more people, except him. All through the story, it became quite clear that the method used by Graham isn't like any of the methods the F.B.I could come up with-he first identifies with the victim before identifying with the killer, had a very troubled childhood and had a cleft palate problem as a child. This was responsible for his emulation of Dr. Hannibal Lecter and found a way to communicate with him (Vlastelica).

Graham seeks advice from Dr. Lecter, a forensic psychiatrist, a cannibalistic serial murderer and a sociopath, who he risked his own life to put away. Since his insanity made the Jury declare him not guilty, he is being held at the Chesapeake State Hospital for the Criminally insane. Somehow, Lecter succeeds in conveying Graham's address to Dolarhyde. The killer sets out to have Graham's family murdered, but got killed in the process. However, he succeeded in sticking a knife into Graham (Lanchester).

Review of the Novel and the Film

According to Vlastelica, one can see from both the novel and the movie Dr. Hannibal Lecter's gravitational pull. The character in the Red Dragon is in just two scenes, featuring on approximately 400 pages, though he gets referenced in the other scenes, thickening the plot matching with the titular maniac. In Manhunter, Lecktor/Lecter has about nine minutes of total screen time and three scenes. This further shows how his relevance in the movie was improved from the book with the aim of communicating the main plot or theme of the book.

The movie starts with first acts in close tracks with the novel. It concentrates on Will Graham, a physically and spiritually wounded FBI refugee, famous for his ingenuity in detecting crimes from the criminal's point-of-view and ability to access their psyches. The novel gives an explanation of this as a type of extreme empathy, which explicitly positions Graham as Lecter's antithesis, but in the movie, the ability of Graham is more of acute perceptiveness and less of new age. After the Lecter case where Graham was attacked by Lecter, Graham left the agency. A dramatizing performance opens this scene. However, Graham returns as an FBI consultant and uses Lecter to enable him develop killers' psychological profiles (Vlastelica).

Manhunter and the Red Dragon commence following the attack, with Jack Crawford, Graham's former Boss, coming to pay Graham a visit in the case where two families got killed by obviously the same killer. From what we learnt, the killings were carried out by a Francis Dolarhyde, also referred to as the Tooth Fairy, due to the deep bite he inflicts on his victims. He is also known as the Great Red Dragon. Initially, Graham is to abandon his quiet life where he is assured of safety, but pictures of the victims have a peculiar effect on him, and he soon starts traipsing all over crime scenes (Vlastelica).

The book and the movie both make reference to the back story with Lecter, but quite briefly. As a matter of fact, the history of Lector became so tangential in Manhunter that Mann's movie never makes any mention of cannibalism. In spite of that, both go the extra mile to mention that Graham has issues of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD); the novel makes allusion of stresses that relate to drinking problems while his personality zones him out most times, zombified, and snaps into moments of anger and violence when something is triggered by the case.

Adding to the attack and betrayal by Lecktor, investigating several brutal crimes haunts Graham, most especially, the episode where he shot Garret Jacob Hobbs, the killer he wrestled down before he went after Lecter.

The inability of Graham to make any investigative headway takes him back to Lecter. In the movie, the material is heavily stylized in a clinical way, with several scenes filled with synch music and pastel colors. Two remarkable imageries were those of the serial killer Francis Dolarhyde's spooky face and the shocked investigator, Will Graham, just like the movie's color palette (Vest).

The movie is, however, pared down to the level where most of the scenes happen in vacant white rooms that would have been more suitable in the sci-fi dramas of the 70s. The emptiness in the rooms is quite deliberate; a mirror of the cloudiness of Graham, but it provides more distraction that is as effective as an artistic choice, mostly as Dolarhyde's scenes have much of red and green colors, fine-tuning the point on the yin-yang existing between the criminal and the cop. There is equally a display of the Dolarhyde's washed out looks as used by Mann is the movie (Vlastelica).

The novel is totally saturated with both despair and sin, down to the two-sentence character that gestures to a woman who just left a funeral in an obscene way, which prompted his girlfriend to hit him. Additionally, warped sex and violence were common sights all through the novel and the antiseptic approach of Mann fails to capture any of it. In the first appearance Lector made here, the set's brightness countered the character's darkness in a very ironical way, but Hannibal's scary nature gets more pronounced in shadows. While Manhunter wielded a great influence on the shadows of the CSI, Mann's stylistic remove wasn't emulated by any of those programs. However, the film underlines that Hannibal is not what you can refer to as your average murderer. And Harris conveys this through prose, giving him a present tense description while everyone else gets described in the past: Dr. Lecter has maroon eyes, which reflect the light in tiny red points. Graham had the sensation of each hair standing up on his nape. By having Lecter positioned outside the scope of time, Harris encourages the notion that Lecter cannot be defeated, even in jail, because he has an eternal nature (Vlastelica).

The movie keeps tracking the novel quite closely with regards to Graham. Manhunter dedicates more of his time highlighting the existential burden investigation involves, always getting Graham framed to make sure he is filled with emptiness. Manhunter's concentration on Graham results to the adaptation of one of the novel scenes where he lets his son understand how much he has suffered under Lector, not only by the attack, but also by getting his mindset approximated. The boy turns out to be the stepson of Graham in the novel, while he is Graham's biological son in the movie (Vlastelica).

The high points in both the novel and the movie differ substantially with regards to the different ways they treated Dolarhyde. In the novel, the murderer is a substantial character, which gave…