The thing about 'Insomnia', the song, by Faithless, right, is that the late (and I mean genuinely late, not whatever Trump means when he calls Hannibal Lecter 'late') Maxi Jazz was a middle-aged man when he wrote it. Because that song is about what it's like to experience insomnia, the condition, in your forties. The Corrs were right about what it's like at the other end of the age spectrum: 'it really doesn't matter...'cause when tomorrow comes, we can do it all again.' Well, bully for you, kids, but it isn't like that when you're my age.
When you're my age insomnia is a horrible limbo condition, an eternally recurring purgatory of hopelessness, a merry-go-round of lying down, closing your eyes, trying to sleep and failing because of course you can't try to go to sleep, you either sleep or you don't, there is no 'try', it isn't something you can will yourself to do because the act of willing yourself to do something precludes relaxation, so the carousel goes round again and you get off the fibreglass horse and you sit up and read, or draw, or watch YouTube or play video games to break state, to distract yourself, and if you're lucky an hour later your eyelids will start feeling a little bit heavy and you can lie down, let them close and slip past the nightwatchman but more likely no, psych, you feel the anxiety rising and realise you're trying again after all and the fibreglass horses are laughing at you behind their painted-on eyes and you may as well rise and try another trick and see if that gets you past go, or else you wind up like me, now, heavy-lidded but restless, eyes like pissholes in the snow, too tired to face the day but too wired to wave it bye-bye. Insomnia sucks.
I should have known this would happen. I was overdue. Anxiety drives my insomnia and this week I've been making some proper moves to try and sort my life out for the first time in ages, applying for things, polishing my resume, arranging meetings to discuss new things I'm working on (of which more in due time, dear reader, I promise) and so with tedious fucking inevitability of course the first night this week I had to relax because I had stuff on the calendar today would be the first night that I couldn't, the first night I wouldn't be asleep by ten and up the next day with the lark. I mean I'm up now, yes, but I already was when Vaughan-Williams' chum came on the scene, not that there's much chance of hearing him ascend above the sound of drunks and sirens in my part of town. But even they can't drown the laughter of the gods who glimpsed my diary. Hypnos, Morpheus, those lords of sleep, those well-known bastards.
Why does Donald Trump keep going on about 'the late, great, Hannibal Lecter'?
None of the Hannibal Lecter novels feature his death. Neither do any of the film adaptations. Even the Hannibal TV show leaves his end somewhat ambiguous. Of the actors who have played Lecter, only one, Gaspard Ulliel, has died - and given that he played the role in the now largely (and rightly) forgotten Hannibal Rising it seems unlikely that he can be the person Trump is thinking of.
(We can't discount it entirely, however: he did play Yves Saint Laurent in a biopic of the fashion designer, which, Wikipedia reports, 'turned him into a gay icon', so there's at least a non-zero chance that America's Fruitiest President might have seen him in that and checked out his other work.)
For some reason I keep thinking Anthony Hopkins has retired from acting, and for a while I thought this was what Trump was referring to, but then I saw him in the ads for that new Amazon gladiator show and realised that, no, it can't be that either. And Lecter's creator, Thomas Harris, is still with us.
So why the Hell does he not just keep referring to Hannibal Lecter, but specifically keeps describing him as someone who's dead?
Maybe He's Just a Fucking Idiot
You're unlikely to ever go wrong starting from this assumption in any assessment of Trump and his behaviour, and there are a number of vectors along which his idiocy could be manifesting here. He's the oldest candidate to ever run for President, and only his most ardent Stans wouldn't admit that when you compare him on the stump now to the man he was even four years ago, you can see that a step has been lost. Maybe he just can't remember the plots of movies that well anymore, especially given his habit of fast-forwarding through the boring bits. He might be under the impression that we definitely, unambiguously see Hannibal die in one of the adaptations. Or he might think Anthony Hopkins is dead. Or maybe Brian Cox? He played Hannibal in Manhunter (the thinking person's Lecter movie), and he also played the Rupert Murdoch analogue in Succession, who died towards the end of that show's final season. You can see why Trump might feel drawn to watching a show about a foul-mouthed tycoon with a family full of horrifically awful and self-centred children, but honestly it's hard to see him persevering with the show all the way. And besides, in one of his bizarre rambles Trump says 'Lecter' - whoever he's thinking of when he says that - was very complimentary about him, while Cox has made no secret about his lack of good feeling toward Donnie Dumbo.
Who knows? Maybe he just doesn't actually know what 'late' means in this context.
So yeah, as always with Trump, stupidity is a distinct possibility.
Maybe He's Misremembering a Stephen Colbert Skit
This is really a special case of the above theory, but I mention it because I only became aware of the above video while searching for the Vic Berger supercut at the top of this post. The skit itself is a particularly cringeworthy example of the kind of humour libs resorted to to deal with their horror at Trump's election, and honestly you feel bad for Jodie Foster having to be involved in it, but it does feature an instance of someone playing the role of Dr Lecter saying something vaguely positive about Trump - specifically, that the two played golf together and enjoyed a longpig taco bowl 'and a nice diet coke' (I warned you it was cringe). While Colbert was critical throughout Trump's presidency, we do know that reign involved the White House television getting a heavier workout than it had under any other incumbent, and given that Trump was known to stay up until 4am tweeting invective against his haters, there's a good chance he had The Late Show on in the background for part of those sleepless, rage-filled nights (he just like me fr, fr).
Maybe It's Misdirection
This possibility is even less funny than the Colbert sketch, but given that we know from reporting in Haaretz that Israel ordered the use of its Hannibal Directive on October 7th, is it possible that someone in Trump's circle is encouraging him to go out and ramble on about the fictional killer to try and game Google searches in the hope that fewer people will find out about the Israeli military's very real slaughtering of their own personnel and even civilians? If so it doesn't seem to have been very successful, but it would fit with a trend in politics for at least attempting to throw out chaff to confuse the curious, such as Boris Johnson's bizarre 'confession' to painting cases of wine to look like Routemaster buses (which many people believe was an attempt to push Johnson's association with the infamously dishonest 'Brexit bus' down the search results), or the recent rash of pieces by apparently overexcited British newspaper columnists about how they'd love to have an affair with Keir Starmer, whose timing seems very suspicious to those aware of certain rumours.
Or Maybe It's Code?
The thing that keeps nagging at me, though, is the idea that Trump isn't really referring to Hannibal Lecter at all: that, in fact, for his own sick amusement, he's revelling in talking about someone else entirely. I don't know why this possibility keeps pinging away in the back of my head, but it does. Who, though? That's the question.
Let's consider the character of Hannibal Lecter: a figure wholly without conscience, who presents himself as a man of culture and a towering intellect, a well-connected patron of the arts who regards other people not as complex human beings but mere commodities to be consumed, who delights in corrupting others and sharing his predilections with his fellow avid fans.
Now, who would Trump know who fits that description?
Was said dignity in evidence when he allowed his body to be used as the flesh-vessel to consummate an unholy union between the corpse of Maggie Thatcher and the ghost of Jimmy Savile?
I don't have Netflix these days, partly due to the cozzie livs and partly due to the fact I have no desire to give some of what little money I do have to transphobic pricks like Ricky Gervais or Dave Chapelle, so I haven't actually seen Baby Reindeer. But I have seen the poster for it, and when I saw it it's fair to say I did a double-take because really, what the fuck? That looks like me, right? All the way down to the shade of lipstick, fat forearms, three-quarter-length sleeves and the cropping of the photo to hide a high forehead. There I am, walking to the supermarket of a Monday evening, confronted with what looks to all intents and purposes like a picture of me caught in the act of suffocating a Borrower. What is going on here? 'A captivating true story'? I've never even met this Richard Gadd bloke! Why would Netflix want to do me like this? Most of the stuff I've been most scathing about has been on Amazon Prime...
Obviously I Googled the show as soon as I got home. This was a little more reassuring, as while the Wikipedia entry informed me Gadd's show was semi-autobiographical, I didn't recognise anything of my own behaviour in that of his self-insert's antagonist, Martha: all my experience of stalking has been on the receiving end. But it didn't reassure me much, because I know the modern-day media environment too well to kid myself that the true-crime-brained gumshoes of the Internet weren't going to burn lean tissue long into the night trying to track down the 'real-life Martha', and all it would take to make my life even more of a living Hell than it already is would be one dickhead posting a pic of me side-by-side with the poster online. Sure, Gadd himself had pleaded with fans not to engage in digital vigilanteism, but when has pleading ever stopped the mob?
In this version the part of Richard Gadd is played by a Fire Ant figurine
So, to my shame, I have to admit that I was somewhat relieved when the real Martha, Fiona Harvey, announced herself to the world via the medium of an interview with Piers Morgan. Only somewhat relieved, though, because I knew the resulting spectacle would be far from edifying and, more than that, I consider it irresponsible journalism. The kind of stalking which Harvey claims Gadd is unjustly accusing her of engaging in (as opposed to the sort of stalking engaged in by the kind of reporters employed by the likes of Piers Morgan) tends to be the result of a form of romantic obsession called limerence, and it is, to say the least, not mentally healthy behaviour. Revealing Harvey to have been the inspiration for Martha in this manner, whether or not she volunteered her identity readily, is extremely reckless as we don't know what Harvey might try to do to Gadd, or to herself, never mind the fact that it presumably leaves her open to reprisals from members of the public looking to punish the villain from one of their stories. In the past, actors have been abused and attacked by members of the public just for playing villains in TV soap operas: it's all too easy to imagine the bloodlust that might be inspired in the kind of person who does that if they found themself face-to-face with a real life television villain.
Not that Martha is the only villain in Gadd's series: as well as experiencing stalking and sexual assault at the hands of Martha, his protagonist is also assaulted by a theatre producer, called Darrien in the show, whose identity, according to the presenter Richard Osman, is something of an open secret in the comedy industry. Tellingly, Osman doesn't say whether or not the real-life Darrien has faced any consequences, although Gadd's friend Sean Foley ironically wound up having to go to the police due to being misidentified as the culprit by the online investigators. If I had to guess, I'd imagine there have been no consequences for the real rapist: my own experiences in the poetry scene have taught me that most of the real dangers escape any reprisal beyond being outed on a need-to-know basis by the whisper networks. I'd like to think that's what Osman is referring to when he says everybody knows the identity of the real-life Darrien.
One reason for that, of course, is that rape is effectively legal in the UK. As the campaigning organisation Women Against Rape points out, only 6.5% of reported rape cases result in a conviction, 45% are no-crimed, and 90% of rape victims never even bother reporting their crimes to the police. And why would they, when doing so can leave them open to the charge of making a false accusation? The stigma of being labelled a false accuser is compounded by the fact that the police follow a policy of prosecuting victims who are unable to bring a successful prosecution against their rapists, and allows the same organisation that for years protected the likes of Wayne Couzens and David Carrick to bully women and girls into dropping the charges. Women Against Rape met with the then Director of Public Prosecutions and current Leader of the Opposition, Kier Starmer, asking him to end this damaging practice - but instead he rejected their advice, and doubled down on the existing policy of prosecuting victims. With a record like that, is it any surprise that Starmer provided such a cheery welcome to the Tory turncoat Natalie Elphicke, who allegedly interfered in the trial of her rapist ex-husband, and is on record as having said that his only crime was 'being attracted and attractive to women', and made disgusting comments about his victims? Between that and his work defending Silvio Berlusconi, anyone might think rapists are Kieth's kind of people. No wonder he's dogged by those rumours about Savile and Worboys...
So it's beyond ironic to see Starmer, or someone in his office, trying to present himself as a victim and steal a little valour from Gadd by briefing the press about his own harassing emails from Harvey - which I assume is what happened, because as undoubtedly unwell as Harvey may be I don't think it's likely she would willingly tell the Sun about how fun it was for her to call Kieth a 'stupid little boy' and 'a free loader on the public purse'. It's hard to say what's more sickening about this really - the blatant attempt to ride the coattails of a media sensation, however sordid, is of a piece with the cargo-cult Blairism of pretty much everyone buzzing about the LOTO office these days, and of course there's the fact that whoever leaked these emails on Kieth's behalf is more than happy to throw a mentally ill woman even further under the bus than Piers Morgan did, but for me it's definitely the simpering attempt to present this man who has done so much to make life worse for rape and sexual assault survivors as the real victim in all this, while Gadd, who has much stronger grounds to feel ill will towards Harvey, has shown an admirable degree of empathy and forbearance towards her.
It certainly makes me feel much less bad about writing that poem where I describe Starmer allowing his body to be used as the flesh-vessel for the spirit of Jimmy Savile to fuck the corpse of Maggie Thatcher, anyway. Maybe I should email it to him. At least The Sun won't be able to make sarcastic remarks about my 'punctuations' (yes, the spelling of 'Cercle' is deliberate; ask Nadhim what it means). You'd think at least one of their subs would have heard of Muphry's Law...
