In Bed With a Monster: Hannibal Lecter and Ariel Castro

So Ariel Castro, convicted of sexually preying on three young women held captive for a decade in the basement of his Cleveland home, complained at his sentencing hearing that “these people are trying to paint me as a monster and I'm not a monster.” He insisted,  "I'm not a violent person. I simply kept them there so they couldn't leave.” He explained that “I'm just sick. I have an addiction. Just like an alcoholic has an addiction.” Despite it all, said Castro, “I'm a happy person inside.”  

Years ago, when Roger Corman was newly back from filming his scenes as the FBI chief in Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs, he told me that Anthony Hopkins was sure to be Oscar-nominated for his portrayal of Hannibal Lecter. But Hopkins wouldn’t win, said Roger, because his character was so monstrous that no one would vote to reward him with Hollywood’s highest acting prize. Well, Roger was wrong on that one. At the 1992 Oscar ceremony, Silence of the Lambs picked up five statuettes, including best actor for Hopkins. (He beat out such notables as Warren Beatty for Bugsy and Robin Williams for The Fisher King. Also on the short list was Robert De Niro as another maniacal killer in Cape Fear.) My point is that increasingly, in today’s Hollywood, we tend to root for the bad guy. 

Of course years ago actors like James Cagney became famous for playing bad guys, in such gangster films as White Heat. But Cagney’s three Oscar nominations were not for his most monstrous roles, and his single win rewarded him for playing George M. Cohan in the oh-so-wholesome Yankee Doodle Dandy. How times have changed!

By all accounts, Denzel Washington is one of the good guys in private life. But his one Best Actor Oscar came when he played a down-and-dirty rogue cop in Training Day (2001). Though Daniel Day-Lewis won his third Oscar for portraying Abraham Lincoln, his second recognized his work as the terrifyingly ruthless oil magnate in There Will Be Blood (2007). That same year, Javier Bardem won the Best Supporting Actor statuette as a psychopathic killer in No Country for Old Men. One year later, the Oscar in this category went to an even more outrageous bad guy, Heath Ledger as the Joker in The Dark Knight. And in 2009, Academy voters showed Oscar love for Christoph Waltz, playing a smooth-talking but thoroughly evil Nazi in Inglourious Basterds.

Why do we like these bad guys, at least in their on-screen incarnations? They’re certainly not boring. They have energy; they have panache; they have chutzpah. Those of us who’ve worked on Roger Corman-style genre films know that success in the movie marketplace often hinges on having a truly great villain. In real life, alas, villains can be attractive too. Just look at how Adolf Hitler managed to sweep so many Europeans off their feet.

But a guy like Ariel Castro? It’s hard to imagine who would find him attractive. I can’t see him being portrayed on a movie screen as mad, bad, dangerous, and therefore exciting. Instead, he seems grotesquely pathetic. Much like, in some ways, the killer in Silence of the Lambs. Not the smart, savvy Hannibal Lecter, but rather Buffalo Bill, who brutally incarcerated female victims in order to indulge his sexual kinks. Hannah Arendt’s famous  phrase about Nazi Germany, “the banality of evil,” springs to mind. I don’t know precisely how you define a “monster,” but it seems to require some superhuman quality. Ariel Castro, though, is all too human: just a sick and scary man.

Three in the Basement: Is it GIRLS Who’ve Gone Wild?

Two weeks ago, America was shocked by horrific news from Cleveland, Ohio. It seems a school-bus driver named Ariel Castro had apparently been holding three young women in his basement for nearly a decade. They had endured sexual abuse, and one had borne a child while in captivity. The women had vanished separately from this tidy working-class neighborhood between 2002 and 2004. At the time of their abduction, they were 20, 16, and 14 years old. According to his lawyer, Castro plans to plead not guilty.

In Wednesday’s Hollywood Reporter, I read Stephen Galloway’s exclusive interview with Joe Francis, founder of Girls Gone Wild. Francis has just been convicted by a Los Angeles jury of assault and false imprisonment for his brutish behavior toward three young women he met in a local nightclub. He talked them into his limousine, whisked them to his Bel-Air home, and went wild when they wanted to leave. Now Francis, hotly proclaiming his innocence, insists that his jury was “mentally fucking retarded” and “should all be lined up and shot.”

I don’t know what’s going on with the number three, but naturally I’m appalled by the idea of men holding women against their will. I’m also peeved that these terrible news items have brought to mind one of the most annoying movies of all time. I’m talking about a so-called comedy called Three in the Attic.

Picture me in 1968. I was a UCLA grad student varying my academic routine by covering film for the school paper. Because Three in the Attic was meant to appeal to hip young Baby Boomers with an open attitude toward sex, AIP  invited me to the sneak preview. I couldn’t believe what awaited me.

The leading man, Paxton Quigley, is played by Christopher Jones. In an instant cult classic called Wild in the Streets (also AIP, also 1968), Jones portrayed a handsome twenty-two-year-old rock ‘n’ roller who got himself elected president of the United States. Three in the Attic casts him as a campus lothario who succeeds in romancing (and sleeping with) three different co-eds. The first is a sweet and beautiful blonde, Yvette Mimieux. The second is a sassy black art student, played by Judy Pace. (The idea of a white guy enjoying an on-screen fling with a black girl was regarded as the height of hip in the late Sixties.) The third is a hippie chick (Maggie Thrett) who has traded in her bagels-and-lox upbringing for flower power. They consume some magic brownies; she covers him with body paint; he claims he’s an abused homosexual, then gets her in the sack.

Soon Paxton, while pledging fidelity to each of his conquests, is screwing them all, until they discover his secret and vow revenge. Trapping him in the attic of a campus dormitory, they demand non-stop sex. Oh puh-lease! At base, this is another of those male fantasy flicks, in which women are so desperate for a man’s special touch that they’ll do anything -- anything, do you hear me? -- to avail themselves of his sexual powers. And, this being a Hollywood movie, it winds up with a happy ending. A female dean at the college (the usually estimable Nan Martin) shows her sympathy for the girls’ situation by letting them off scot-free. And then Jones belatedly discovers that Mimieux is his own true love, so we’re assured they’ll live happily ever after. 

Forced sex: one man being serviced by three women. AIP thought back in 1968 that this was a fresh and larky idea. In Cleveland, in 2013, it doesn’t seem so funny.