Films don't provide answers — just screams

There's really only one question about serial killers: Why?

Why do some men kill — again and again — without remorse, seemingly for the pleasure of self-expression?

Great writers have tried to answer it, but it's so naked and unsubtle an issue, it appeals more to cruder minds, and so it's more commonly studied by gifted hacks like the American thrillerist Thomas Harris. He's made a career out of one serial killer, Hannibal Lecter, the erudite intellectual and aesthete, gourmand and oenophile, Italianophile and opera lover, a plump charmer with eyes as deep as space beyond Pluto, who likes to eat people, occasionally with fava beans and a nice Chianti. Harris is offering his origins story of Hannibal the Cannibal in double format, as a book (released in December) and movie (out last month) sharing the title "Hannibal Rising."

By coincidence, two other movies that examine the origins of that particular manifestation of serial slaughter also occupy the marketplace. Guillermo del Toro's brilliant if bleak fairy-tale-cum-political-parable, "Pan's Labyrinth," is a serial-killer movie if only by powerful inference. Then there's the far more workaday examination of the squalor of an actual serial killer, the nut case calling himself "Zodiac," who haunted San Francisco in the late '60s and early '70s. He is thought to have killed at least five people and to have corresponded, à la Jack the Ripper, with the papers. That story is told in the docudrama "Zodiac," by the director David Fincher, who once rode the serial-killer gravy train in "Se7en."

What we end up with is an odd Orion's belt of serial killers in various modes expressing various meanings: Hannibal is the most romantic version, with his love of canto and concerto, his knowledge of cooking sherries and Renaissance architecture. In "Zodiac" we get a more proletarian and, since it's fact-based, more realistic serial joe. Zodiac actually tries to sound florid in his letters and via his affectations like including cryptograms, but that's a self-delusion: He's mean, squalid and ignorant and he kills without grace or wit, with gun or knife at close range, then runs away. He's about as elegant as the clap and unfortunately a lot more lethal. Finally, there's Capt. Vidal in "Pan's Labyrinth," who goes about his killing and torturing without a lot of self-consciousness. He's trying to accomplish a certain thing, and if human obstacles present themselves, they must be eliminated; but the application of death to life is no art form for him, it's simply a means to an end. Of the three, he's the most terrifying; more sadly, he's the most common.

Hannibal the cannibal

I find Hannibal fascinating: a genius killer so smart that he can deconstruct crimes at warp speed and pay out his findings to his law-enforcement tormentors in exchange for small gifts, and possibly, eventually, the leverage to escape. He has a Superman gestalt going; watching him is like watching Michael Jordan go one-on-one against a dwarf, and the pleasure isn't in his victory (which is assured) but in the utter grace and sweatless precision of his victory.

That said, he's a hoax.

His transformation into serial killer is somewhat dubious. Harris gave him an exotic background, Eastern European flavorings tinged with the most romantic view of the Orient, seasoned in the most violent spasm in history. This blend explains his erudition, his education, his courage, his will — but not his pathology. That is the contribution of World War II, where in the cauldron of the Eastern Front, trapped between German and Russian armies, he caught a bug of mass murder when, after being hideously orphaned by war, he watched his beloved sister slain and devoured by hungry human wolves.

Convincing? No. Hannibal's transformation is inappropriately insulting to the millions who went through experiences as fully depraved (read any concentration-camp survivor's memoirs) as young Hannibal, yet managed to rejoin society, put aside their trauma, and have decent, productive lives. The tragedy of World War II wasn't the death of Mischa Lecter and the construction of Hannibal Lecter; it was the death of tens of millions of innocents.

The Zodiac killer

With the Zodiac killer, we are on far more familiar ground. The serial killer that emerges from "Zodiac" is closest of all to the demented Buffalo Bill. "Zodiac" is based on the book of the same name by Robert Graysmith (played by Jake Gyllenhaal), who became so obsessed with the case, he quit his job as a political cartoonist at the San Francisco Chronicle and essentially dedicated his life to finding the guy the cops couldn't locate. For his troubles he was awarded a best-seller, a respected career as a true-crime writer (several other books followed) and now this movie.

Problem: His serial murderer isn't very interesting. Take away the illiterate braggadocio of the letters to the newspaper and the secret-code games, he wasn't much beyond a common street thug who robs and occasionally kills. He's a mundane figure, a dime a dozen in any big city. He depended as much on the clumsiness of the police as his own overrated "brilliance" to avoid capture.

Capt. Vidal ("Pan's Labyrinth")

Capt. Vidal (Sergi López) in the Oscar-nominated "Pan's Labyrinth" (it won for art direction, cinematography and makeup) is, as I say, the most terrifying. In his way, he stands for the greatest serial killer of modern times: the state. He might be called a duty killer. He seems to have no obsession with it, or no particular need for it. But his problem is vanity: He sees himself as the center of existence, as the towering ego of his times, as the one who knows and represents. He would never consider himself evil but rather an earnest servant of civilization. It troubles him not a whit to eliminate those who stand before him in opposition, mainly the ragtag motley of Republican guerrillas left over from the Spanish Civil War (which ended in 1939) whom he now hunts to the death in the bitter year of 1944.

The story is presented from a child's point of view, and 12-year-old Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) is the only one who realizes immediately that the handsome, commanding, masculine man, who has rescued her poor mother from the desolation of widowhood, is really far more evil than anything in her fairy-tale fantasies. But Capt. Vidal's predations — unlike Hannibal, who is theatrical, or Zodiac, who writes letters — are not charismatic. Though his body count is much the highest, his more typical kill is the execution of prisoners, without ritual or sadism or pleasure. It never occurs to him that such a thing is wrong.

He confuses self and state as one; everything else is malleable otherness, of no consequence. His identification with the Generalissimo's monolithic apparatus is so total that when he kneels, dispassionately puts his Luger muzzle to the temple of a wounded guerrilla and pulls the trigger, it seems not to register, much in the way that squashing a bug would not really register in the consciousness of most men. He doesn't hear the screaming. He may enjoy it, but he's not — this could be argued, I realize — really a sadist, in the sense that he is getting sexual gratification from inflicting pain. It's ego. It is how Vidal makes his mark upon the world, by making his mark upon the flesh.

Unlike Hannibal and Zodiac, he doesn't kill because he has to or wants to, but because it's an occupational necessity. It's part of doing business. What defines him isn't the death he delivers but the uniform he wears and the bravery he takes such pride in, his warrior lineage, which he pines to deliver intact to his unborn son.

So we have three films about boys who like to snuff from a good hack, a cutting-edge modern filmmaker and a great artist. (Of the three movies, "Pan's Labyrinth" is the most satisfying, and, by far, the best.) What, in the end, do they tell us about this most blasphemous of human behavior? They don't have many answers, but taken as a whole, it's a nihilistic message. The consensus is that such things will not fade away. You only have to look at the front page to see how depressingly accurate they are.