Tonight the Stanford Theater screened The Spiral Staircase (1947).  The bars of this staircase blasted with off-stage flood lights cast lines and lines of shadows across the face and bodies of everyone climbing up and down our wealthy homestead mansion.  Do some people indulge in self-inflicted captivity?  We watch a woman being watched walking into her house.  When this woman walks into the kitchen she scares the cook to death.  Its my favorite part.  A second ago we were frightened for her and now, look, she is the one doing the scaring.  Sharing the same point of view as the killer, does the horror genre aim to make us feel guilty for the pleasure we audience members take in watching?

Everyone’s (mine, yours, the whole entire cast’s) concern is Helen:  She suffers aphasia and the previous three women murdered in town also had ‘disabilities’ or ‘imperfections’ as our killer will later confess.  But it isn’t just that.  The film teaches us to suspect the womanizer of the film all along, even his mother thought he was the killer, but it turns out to be his step-brother, who is a much worse enemy of the people: he’s a college professor!  His unworthy profession has proven inadequately masculine to make his late father, an accomplished hunter and presumable taxidermist, proud.  The year is 1947 and against the back-drop of World War II perhaps Hollywood can’t help but depict intellectuals as either eugenicists or psychopaths.  
    
Meanwhile down the street, another coming-of-age film is being screened:  Hannibal Rising.  This time we learn exactly what triggered our generation’s most cinematic serial killer:

The story begins in Eastern Europe at the desperate end of World War II. For many it was no longer a conflict of nations but one of individual survival – at any cost. A young Hannibal watches from only steps away as his parents violently die…

I like the way our attention must be pointed to that personal, private battle of our young protagonist.  The subtitle of the film, Behind the Mask, now places captivity in the form of that private mask he must wear for our protection, rather than those more social bars of the mansion’s spiral staircase which instigated the need for protection. 

Showing a cunning aptitude for science he is accepted into medical school, which serves to hone his skills and provide the tools to exact justice on the war criminals that haunt him day and night. This quest will ignite an insatiable lust within a serial killer who was not born, but made.

You have to admire the way History whips into its opposite.  Today, school miraculously provides the means of enacting power.  The intellectual is not a sign of weakness, but the instrument of strength itself.  It’s exactly what enables us to settle all bets with our past, to become masculine and powerful once more.  The young, precocious Hannibal catches the entrepreneurial spirit of the age and turns himself into a killer, but certainly not yesterday’s stab and jab circus show, no, rather a surgical talent with a wall of medical degrees to prove it.  Our intellectual today, still a psychopath, but now one who is at the very least his own boss.

Hannibal Rising may have something to teach us about the role of nihilism in today’s academy.  Find out more about this by attending Entrepreneurial Week USA on Stanford campus this Saturday afternoon:

Kids can’t start too young to be in charge of their own education, and in charge of their own economic life. Our entrepreneurial economy presents almost unlimited opportunities for kids. . . . With Entrepreneurship Week USA about to begin, and with new technologies seeming to create opportunities for new businesses every day, now is the time to focus on giving our youth the tools for economic success.