Hannibal.

Losing Lecter’s Lunch

Horrified brain expert dissects America’s favorite cannibal

Writer David Templeton takes interesting people to interesting movies in his ongoing quest for the ultimate post-film conversation. This is not a review; rather, it’s a freewheeling, tangential discussion of art, alternative ideas, and popular culture.

ATTENTION, class. Please take notes. Three things Dr. John J. Ratey and Dr. Hannibal Lecter have in common:

1. They are both brilliant doctors with a keen understanding of the human psyche.

2. They are both eloquent speakers, able to take complex scientific issues and restate them in elegant, understandable English.

3. They both have a thing for brains.

Unlike the fictional Dr. Lecter, however, Dr. Ratey’s interest in that spongy, three-pound organ is not the least bit culinary–a fact his patients will undoubtedly be relieved to hear.

Until he was invited by me to sit through Hannibal–the hit sequel to 1990’s Oscar-winning Silence of the Lambs–Ratey had never even considered using the human brain as a side dish, with or without onions.

“I loved Silence of the Lambs,” gasps the Massachussetts-based Ratey. “I loved it! But this one was . . . oh my god! It was horrible! It was just horrible! It ran from dull to grotesque and right back to dull. I mean . . . Oh . . . my . . . god!”

Exactly.

But everything is a matter of taste. With a box-office take of 100 million and counting, audiences are clearly eating Hannibal up, taking special delight in the much-discussed scene (one that gives new meaning to the word headwaiter) in which Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) dresses up in his Sunday best to serve up the frontal lobes of one unfortunate fellow’s brain, sliced off and sautéed with shallots and a dash of white wine, while the poor, anesthetized slob sits there babbling and slurring.

“The one good thing about that scene,” says Ratey, “is that people are leaving the theater asking serious questions about the human brain. Which part does what? How much of the brain do we need? Very good questions.”

An associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, Ratey is the author of several books on psychology and human behavior, the most recent of which is the appealingly titled A User’s Guide to the Brain .

The book is an exciting read that makes brain science seem like an action adventure, and Ratey is just as accessible and entertaining in person. He’s the kind of person who, discussing a film like Hannibal, will toss off such comfortably down-to-earth remarks as, “It’s kind of stupid to take someone’s brain apart like that” or “The brain is full of cross-fibers going all over the goddamn place.”

THREE FACTS the brain-eating scene got right, according to Dr. Ratey:

1. The brain has no nerve cells, so carving it up like turkey would technically not hurt.

“Assuming the person didn’t go into shock,” Ratey allows. “I suppose it’s possible to scoop out a few spoonfuls of brain while the guy makes wisecracks, and maybe he wouldn’t go into shock because you don’t lose that much blood when you do that sort of thing–but, oh my god!”

2. The removal of some prefrontal lobe tissue would cause some slurred speech, but the subject would maintain his basic language skills.

“Hannibal was going into the guy’s right frontal area,” the doctor explains. “And for men especially, that part of the brain does not contain much language function. They have language function in their left hemisphere only. For women, who tend to be more bilateral–having language function in both hemispheres of the brain–it would have been worse.”

3. While brain damage can cause changes in people’s personalities, since the guy in question was kind of a sleazebag, the procedure would probably make him no worse a person.

“What Lecter tells him is very true,” Ratey affirms. “He says, ‘You don’t really need this part of your brain,’ then something about ‘social graces’ and his being fairly rude to begin with. That’s accurate, because the part of the brain that Lecter was cutting has a major role in controlling our social interactions, our level of politeness, our empathy and sympathy to other people’s feelings. That guy was a sleazebag, so he wasn’t using much of that anyway.”

Just how much of our brains can we do without?

“Well, there are people who have hemispherectomies,” Ratey says, “in which one entire half of their brain–a whole hemisphere–is surgically removed. There are problems with motor skills on the opposite side, obviously–you’d be severely impaired–but most of their language function can be gradually picked up by the other half of the brain. So, can you live with half of your brain missing? Yes. Will you still function? Not very well.”

Not surprisingly, Ratey is much more interested in what went wrong with Hannibal Lecter’s brain than in how Lecter would go about making a meal of someone else’s. Especially interesting to Ratey is the common-sense method Hannibal uses to try and escape justice at the climax of the film.

“Hannibal would try that,” Ratey reveals, “because–and this is kind of interesting–people like Hannibal don’t feel very much. Their brains are such that normal levels of sensation can’t register a spark. They have to press for the bizarre, the weird, the extreme. There’s a whole list of things they often don’t feel any other way.”

Five things that people like Lecter don’t easily feel:

1. A sense of thrill. 2. Pleasure. 3. Fear. 4. A sense of threat. 5. Pain.

According to Ratey, it’s like this: Though fairly rare, such individuals are hard-wired, so to speak, to be impervious to normal levels of stimulus. In scary or life-threatening situations that would give the rest of us a coronary these medical marvels maintain completely normal levels of blood pressure and pulse.

“In psychobabble language,” he says, “these people are not connected to their own lives; they’re sort of ‘not into it’ as much as the normal people. This is how we get people like Jeffrey Dahmer, people devoid of human feelings of pain, sadness, and attachment.

“It so happens,” Ratey concludes, “that all the Lecter types are missing that.”

From the February 22-28, 2001 issue of the Northern California Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Rebels with a Cause.

Rebel Hearts

Helen Garvy offers forgotten stories of the ’60s

HELEN GARVY was a young rebel the last time she stood in this part of downtown Oakland. That was 31 years ago. She’s a bit older now, and perhaps a bit wiser, but Garvy is still a rebel. And sometimes–today, for instance, back in Oakland to revisit a painful, powerful memory–she still gets angry.

Dressed for warmth against the February wind, the filmmaker stands near the corner of Clay and 16th, attempting to summon a vision of these streets as they looked on Friday, Oct. 20, 1969.

That was the day a band of antiwar activists, Garvy among them, temporarily shut down the Oakland Army Induction Center with a loud protest against America’s seemingly unstoppable Vietnam War machine. Only a few days before, in the very same spot, a baton-wielding squad of sheriffs and police officers had attacked protesters during an antiwar peace march, beating demonstrators until they scattered.

“I was furious,” recalls Garvy, 58, her voice dropping to a whisper. “We were all so angry by what happened in Oakland. We’d seen police violence at protests in the South, but this was the first time we’d ever seen that kind of violence here.”

All these events are captured in Rebels with a Cause, Garvy’s documentary film about Students for a Democratic Society (screening Feb. 23 and 24 at the Sonoma Film Institute).

Back then, however, Garvy was working as a schoolteacher in San Francisco. She was also an activist and an early member of SDS, which organized the Oakland protest. That Friday, Garvy joined a second, even larger protest march, and this time the marchers were prepared, protected by motorcycle helmets and hard hats. The police attacked anyway, but anticipating the police tactics, the protesters used cars and flower planters to barricade the intersections. This time they succeeded, taking the streets of Oakland and shutting down the U.S. Army–for one day.

But what a day.

THIS MORNING, Garvy can find few signs that any of it happened. “Nothing is recognizable,” she murmurs, gazing up and down the street. “I don’t remember exactly where anything was. Of course, in a situation like that, you don’t really pay attention to landmarks.”

Now standing in the spot where Garvy guesses the Induction Center was–“The building was nothing much to look at, that’s all I remember,” she says–is the Elihu M. Harris State Building, an attractive, glass, stone, and steel structure that was opened about three years ago.

Ironically, just inside the building’s main lobby is a conspicuous sign directing police officers upstairs for “Use of Force Training.”

Back on the street, Garvy points to a nearby street light, allowing that it might be one she climbed up to get a better view of the area and to scout the scene for the presence of police. “There were so many people, you didn’t know what was happening even half a block ahead,” she recalls. “And if you were like me, you were terrified.”

Our history books offer few references to such significant events of the 1960s. In order to preserve those stories, Garvy, who lives in Santa Cruz, has spent the last five years making Rebels with a Cause, a remarkable oral-history documentary that chronicles the actions of SDS.

Among the most influential student groups of the 20th century, SDS at the height of its strength had more than 100,000 members on campuses from coast to coast, organizing to fight for civil rights, free speech, women’s rights, and the anti-apartheid movement, and to call for an end to the war in Vietnam.

The film features dozens of interviews with the group’s members, ranging from Tom Hayden to the late Carolyn Craven. Mingled with archival footage, newspaper clippings, and startling FBI documents that target SDS leaders, Rebels masterfully blends its individual storytellers, cutting from person to person–often in mid-sentence–in a way that suggests a group of people so closely connected they can finish one another’s thoughts.

“We would do that, back in the ’60s,” says Garvy, smiling. “We would finish each other’s sentences. In a lot of ways, the movement was one big long dialogue.”

In part, Garvy made the film to counter the widely held opinion that the ’60s were mainly about sex, drugs, and rock and roll, and that the idealistic social movements of the era were a failure. That’s a view, says Garvy, that breaks her heart–and can’t be supported by the facts.

“We did make a difference,” she says. “Yes, we had setback after setback, and frustration after frustration. It took years to end the war–and it was the Vietnamese who did that–and every little victory along the way took incredible effort.

“But look around,” she continues. “The world is a better place because of the people who put their lives on the line in the ’60s.”

Garvy’s film has already changed a few minds. After one screening, a young black woman approached Garvy and thanked her. “She thanked us for making things better for her,” Garvy says. “She said she’d always taken it for granted that people made sacrifices so she can be a little better off than she would have been.”

Garvy hopes the film also touches those who were a part of the movement.

“There are people who lost their hope back then,” she says, “people who’ve been hurt and disappointed and embarrassed to talk about what they did in the ’60s because everyone keeps saying we failed.

“I hope they see this film and finally get to say to themselves, ‘Oh my god. It wasn’t all for nothing,’ ” she says. “We really did make a difference. We really did help change the world.”

‘Rebels with a Cause’ screens at 7 p.m. Friday and Saturday, Feb. 23 and 24, at Sonoma State University’s Darwin Hall, 1801 E. Cotati Ave., Rohnert Park. Filmmaker Helen Garvy is tentatively scheduled to appear Friday night. Tickets are $4. 707/664-2606.

From the February 22-28, 2001 issue of the Northern California Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Reel Deal

Novelists Russell Banks and Michael Ondaatje pair up to discuss fiction and film

By

FROM THE BURNING desert of The English Patient to the snow country in The Sweet Hereafter, the geographies in the books of Russell Banks and Michael Ondaatje are as diverse as their prose. Still, these two prolific literary lions are both most quickly identified by mentioning the movies that came from their words. Ondaatje is the author of The English Patient. Banks wrote the books that were the sources for the films Affliction and The Sweet Hereafter.

Such writers reading publicly always face the same questions–whether they were handled gently or roughly by Hollywood, what was included or left out, how it felt to see the omissions and additions. Yielding to these popular questions, the two authors have made the subject of novels transformed into movies the main part of their Feb. 28 appearance at the Marin Center Literary Arts Series.

If you ask me, Banks has had the better luck with his adapters. Paul Schrader’s solid film of Banks’ semi-autobiographical novel Affliction had a justly Oscar-winning turn by James Coburn as the lumbering, drunken father, and Nick Nolte was tragic and feral as the beaten, grievously damaged son. (Echoing other battered kids who were saved by art, Banks has said that if he hadn’t become a novelist, he probably would have become a murderer.)

Atom Egoyan’s film of Banks’ The Sweet Hereafter was maybe the best movie of the 1990s. In his novel, Banks spoke of the unspoken terror of North American families as they try to protect themselves against chance: the random act of violence, the bad influence, the loose piece of machinery that snaps and kills a child.

Meanwhile–and this is the bitterest irony in The Sweet Hereafter–these families are blind to the interior forces that scatter them. By never preaching Togetherness or Responsibility, Egoyan captured Banks’ great themes. How love and admiration is expressed in the worst possible way, as incest. How a father is placed, by a medical emergency, into the position of Abraham, with Isaac shivering in his arms.

Egoyan’s remoteness is as clean as the mountain snows and as eerie as the dirge “Courage” by the Tragically Hip, floating in the freezing air.

A DIFFERENT KIND of remoteness flickers through the work of Michael Ondaatje, whose prose style is elemental and mysterious, where Banks’ writing is clear and calm. Born in Sri Lanka, Ondaatje relocated to the antipodes of the world in Toronto. Still, the heat and spice remain into his novel writing, which seems an extension of his poetry.

The French title for The English Patient is L’Homme Flambé, “the burned man.” Ondaatje’s best-known book contains the epigram “the heart is an organ of fire.” He mentions “the antlered helmet of fire” the burning pilot wears when he is rescued. A burning heart also turns up as an image in a page of Ondaatje’s poetry in the collection Handwriting.

Rereading The English Patient, all alight with fire symbolism, is so much easier than rewatching the movie. The film seemed to lose its way, touching all the corners of a novel that’s simultaneously expansive and compact. It lost me with its emphasis on the romance of the stiff English–Kristin Scott Thomas and her double, Ralph Fiennes, thin already at his precooked weight.

Gorgeous as the movie could be, I had to cheer Seinfeld’s Elaine (Julie-Louise Dreyfus) when she broke up a screening of The English Patient by yelling “Wouldja hurry up and die, already?”

Statelessness is kind of a religion to Ondaatje, who writes about Hungarians in the Sahara and Sikhs prowling the Suffolk downs. When Ondaatje decided to write about America, he chose legendary figures of whom the historical facts are scant: the elusive jazz trumpeter Buddy Bolden (in his fictionalization of Bolden’s life, Coming through Slaughter) and Billy the Kid, in his 1970 The Collected Works of Billy the Kid. The book about William Bonney is woven out of scraps of poetry, news accounts, interviews: scraps gathered, as if they were pulled out of a fire.

Banks, by contrast, chose not a common outlaw for his American epic novel, but a titanic one. Banks’ novel Cloudsplitter is titled from the Iroquois name for an Adirondack mountain that overlooked John Brown’s farm in upstate New York. The honorific also applies to the towering figure of abolitionist John Brown, American history’s most celebrated terrorist, whose murder of pro-slavers and seizure of the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry precipitated the Civil War.

There are at least two ways of looking at Brown. Thomas Hart Benton’s mad-heroic portrait of Brown in the Kansas statehouse illustrates the passionate view. In the mural, Brown stands twice the height of an ordinary man, holding an open Bible with Alpha and Omega written large on its pages. Maybe Banks was thinking of this painting when he described Brown’s visage as “the face of a man who had been gazing on fires, who had routed the attendants of fires . . . the man who dared to swing open the iron doors and peer inside.”

Contrast that strength with Edmund Wilson’s more cool summing up of Brown, in his brilliant book of essays on Civil War literature, Patriotic Gore. “This madman,” Wilson calls John Brown, reminding the reader of the insanity that ran in Brown’s family, root and branch. Wilson credits Brown’s cult to “the capacity of self-delusion of the Bible-drugged New England idealist.”

Either way, it’s hard to think of a more vivid contrast to the coolly remote personalities who inhabit The English Patient.

Something slithered away from Ondaatje’s pages when the novel was about to be captured for screening purposes. Or perhaps symbolism just looks screamingly literal in a movie. (Maybe Michael Powell, a British director who took English rectitude and ripened it into lush reveries, could have made The English Patient in his customary fiery stained-glass-window brightness–instead of the nostalgic cream and bone colors used by the admirable cinematographer John Seale.)

When Ondaatje writes about different levels of pain–burning alive, Nazi torture, the minor injuries a furious woman inflicts on her stubborn lover–he always describes the scars instead of the wounds. The pain is always elsewhere.

In Ondaatje’s most recent novel, Anil’s Ghost, his heroine Anil is a forensic examiner who re-creates injuries through the marks left on skeletons. Ondaatje seems to be in the same line of work as Anil. In Ondaatje, violence is abstract, touching down and moving on, impossible to perceive except through its aftermath.

Banks, who experienced plenty of violence growing up, writes of it with the sense of injustice that is still awake and pain that’s still vivid. It’s the American in Banks that thinks there is truth and justice somewhere.

From the February 22-28, 2001 issue of the Northern California Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Ratcatcher.

No Kidding

Hell is for children in compelling ‘Ratcatcher’

By Nicole McEwan

“MY MUM says this place is a very-mental-health hazard,” says one child to another as he surveys the garbage-choked yard of the condemned housing project they call home. It’s ’70s-era Glasglow at the height of the famed garbage strike. In this sorry corner of the earth, the vermin outnumber the populace–and the rats probably eat better as well.

Ratcatcher, UK director Lynne Ramsay’s mesmerizing feature film debut, paints a devastating portrait of one boy’s impoverished life as it aimlessly drifts from bad to worse. Shot mainly in cool blues tones, the episodically structured film is saturated with a dank and bitter hopelessness that moves purposely toward a frank conclusion that would never see the light of day on a Hollywood film set.

Unlike the young hero of the highly overpraised, paint-by-numbers tearjerker Billy Elliot, 12-year-old James Gillespie (William Eadie) is leading a life that’s unlikely to take him much farther down the lane, let alone over the rainbow.

He lives one step above squalor in a tiny apartment with his drunk-and-on-the-dole dad, his long-suffering mum, and his two sisters. It’s a hand-to-mouth existence, but somehow there’s always enough money for liquor and cigarettes, even if that means hiding from the landlord and letting the children suffer in outgrown shoes.

School’s out for the summer, so James spends his days playing in and around the polluted, trash-strewn canal near his home. In these bleak surroundings, the mountains of rubbish and the murky water serve as both playground and swimming pool to a group of lice-ridden, grubby imps, and sadistic toughs so downtrodden that they might have sprung from Dickens’ inkwell.

One morning, some horseplay between James and his best friend, Ryan, ends in disaster, with the younger boy drowning. Terrified, James flees the scene. The secret weighs on him terribly, but his remote, erratic behavior goes unnoticed by a family consumed with simply surviving.

Distraction comes in the form of a masochistic and pitifully myopic neighborhood girl (Leanne Mullen), whose chief form of entertainment is to allow a group of neighborhood bullies to use her as sperm depository. Presumably it’s the only attention Margaret gets, as her parents are rarely at home. It’s a disturbing but utterly believable scenario made more poignant by the fact that the girl is quite pretty–only she doesn’t know it yet. In the same way that dogs smell fear, her tormentors sense her insecurity and recognize her loneliness and use those weaknesses against her.

James, a sexual innocent, finds solace and an almost maternal fascination in her naked form. Goaded by the others into laying atop her semi-clad body, he finds comfort, not arousal, in her Madonna-like embrace. Ramsey breaks up the desolation with several small magic moments like this.

Particularly memorable is one in which a pet mouse is carried skyward by a balloon. As James watches the slow ascent, his envy of the animal’s escape is palpable, despite his knowledge that the mouse will likely perish.

Eades’ angular face, alert eyes, and milk-pitcher ears serve him well in an often silent performance. Considering the dour tone of Ramsey’s film, it’s a good bet that the director cast him for his low cuteness quotient.

Ratcatcher is not without flaws. In her quest to avoid sentimentality, Ramsey has left a few too many questions unanswered. Of course, poverty is too complex a social ill to explain in 90 minutes, though Brit social realist filmmaker Ken Loach has made a career out of trying, with mostly strong results.

“What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” wrote Nietzsche. It’s a homily tailor-made for children like James–if only they all lived long enough to appreciate it.

‘Ratcatcher’ opens Friday, Feb. 16, at the Rafael Film Center, 1118 Fourth St., San Rafael. For details, see or call 415/454-1222.

From the February 15-21, 2001 issue of the Northern California Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.