It just occurred to me . . .

. . . that Hannibal Lecter cut his hand off needlessly at the end of Hannibal.

Note that he cut his hand off to escape the handcuff that Clarice slapped on him in the scene right after Hannibal fed Ray Liotta's character part of his own brain.

But didn't Hannibal free himself from handcuffs in the Silence of the Lambs, in seconds, while the deputies were bringing him dinner? And he did so under spartan conditions, where he had to find or smuggle an improvised handcuff key.

So back to Clarice's kitchen. If Clarice had a frigging meat cleaver suitable for severing a man's hand at the wrist, she probably had many other items lying around, as in within three steps of the cleaver, that would have gerry-rigged a handcuff key as easily as the ballpoint pen tube that he used in Silence.

Clarice was heavily doped and not likely to put up much of a fight to this improvisation---the handcuffing was all she could pull off without passing out.

I must conclude that the cleaving of his hand was a dramatic flourish, not a true necessity for a fiend as clever as Hannibal Lecter. I haven't read the book, so I don't know whether that even happened in the book, and the book controls.

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