Hinson 1 Hayley Hinson Professor Webb PSY-231-100 22 September 2013 Profiling of Red Dragon Frances Dolarhyde, also known

as the Tooth Fairy and Red Dragon was highly abused by his grandmother as a child. He lived with her in the Dolarhyde Nursing and continued to live there even after her death. The first scene to help understand Frances Dolarhyde is the scene that flashes back to his childhood. The scene begins with Frances apologizing for wetting his pants. His grandmother pays no attention to his apologies and continues to call him filthy, dirty, and puts him down in multiple ways. She even says that she should have put him in an orphanage instead of taking him in. She threatens to cut off his penis if he wets himself again. Then the movie cuts to Frances lifting weights as an adult and saying No grandma, please. Ill be a good boy. The fact that he is saying this when he is an adult when his grandmother is dead shows that his grandmothers bad parenting left an imprint in his mind. Francess grandmother displays an enmeshed style of parenting. Enmeshed parents punish children for every little mistake they make. This type of parenting teaches a child to handle their social problems with violence, making them very unfit to socialize into the real world. Enmeshed parents also let some major behaviors go unpunished. Both of the families that Frances killed had pets and he killed the pets before he killed the families. An early sign of antisocial behavior is if a child kills and tortures animals. If Frances Dolarhyde was killing animals as a child and his grandmother let him continue this behavior, it could have encouraged him to continue developing an antisocial behavior. Another thing I found interesting was the false teeth. After he puts the weights up, Frances goes over to a shelf that has two sets of false teeth on it. He then puts on the nastier looking pair. In the opening credits of the movie, there is a picture of a woman and a small child that says grandmother on it. The teeth of the woman in the picture look exactly like

Hinson 2 the teeth Frances put on after exercising that he uses to leave the bite marks on his victims and his letter to Hannibal. There are two possible reasons for Frances wearing his grandmothers teeth. One reason could be that Frances is smart and knows that cops can identify a person by their teeth. If he uses his grandmothers dentures, the forensics will not lead directly to him. Another reason could be that he takes on his grandmothers personality when he becomes the Red Dragon. Since his grandmother was the one that drove him to this madness he could be imitating her to take his childhood pain out on others. The second scene I chose is the one when Frances is at Rebas house after he takes her home from work. Before this scene there is a moment at Chromolux when another man offers Reba a ride home and she refuses, saying the only thing worse than pity is fake pity. Frances then says that he has no pity. Frances is not referring to Reba when he says this; he means that he does not have pity for anything. He lacks empathy. According to the book, people who lack empathy are more likely to abuse animals and eventually start abusing humans. In the movie Frances killed the animals before he killed the families. While at Rebas house, she mentions that she heard that Frances had something wrong with his soft palate that could have affected his speech. Judging by the scar Im guessing it was a cleft lip or palate. A cleft palate can affect speech and speech difficulty is a risk factor. If Frances had problems speaking at a young age then it would have increased his frustration and built upon his antisocial behavior. Reba also says that she knows what its like to have people always thinking that you are different. This suggests that Frances was also rejected by his peers at an early age. Peer rejection is a serious risk factor for antisocial behavior, especially if it started at a young age and continued throughout all of a childs adolescent years. If Frances was rejected by his peers then that combined with the abuse from his grandmother would put him at an extremely high risk for antisocial behavior. The third scene I chose is the one where Frances goes into the room with the Red Dragon picture. Before he goes to the room, he stops to look at his grandmothers picture and says no, as if the picture told him something. When he is in the room with the Red Dragon picture, he looks at the picture and says that he wont give Reba to it. He continues to argue with himself about how he wont give Reba to the

Hinson 3 Red Dragon inside of him. He tries to shoot the picture of the Red Dragon but he cant. He later goes to the museum where the original Red Dragon painting is and eats the painting. This shows that he wants to get rid of the Red Dragon and wants to do good but that his mind is so far gone that he cant. He has developed a multiple personality disorder and it had gotten so bad that his made up personality is taking over his real personality. This is especially dangerous because his other personality is violent. If the Red Dragon completely takes over then there will be no good left in Frances. The fourth scene I chose is the last scene of the movie where Frances is at Wills house and has his son. To get his son back, Will insults his son just like Francess grandmother used to insult him. This brought back Frances memories of his grandmother. Instead of trying to hurt Wills son, Frances goes for Will. This scene proves that Francess grandmother was largely to blame for his violence. The abuse that she inflicted on him as a child deeply scarred him and caused him to transform into the Red Dragon. Parental involvement and parenting styles are a huge risk factor. Frances did not have a healthy parental involvement and his grandmothers parenting style was too harsh to do any good. One technique that Will Graham used to apprehend the Red Dragon was by talking to Hannibal Lecter several times. Hannibal had committed crimes similar to that of the Red Dragon, so if he would help and offer up some advice then they would be closer to catching the Red Dragon. The only problem with using Hannibal was that he was often puzzling. His answers would be in riddles or he would give hints but never point directly to the answer even if he knew it. Hannibal was also extremely smart and could have tricked him, so Will also had to take that into account when taking his advice. Hannibal was taking both sides in this crime. He was helping Will apprehend the Red Dragon but he was also helping the Red Dragon avoid the police and find his next victim. Hannibal had even told Frances where Will lived so that he could take revenge on Will for locking him up, but then Hannibal led Will to find the Red Dragon after that. While Hannibal was an important source for information, he was also a very unreliable and confusing source.

Hinson 4 Another technique that Will used was by publishing a news story in the Tattler. Hannibal and the Red Dragon used the Tattler to communicate so the FBI printed a story to try and get his attention. The story was insulting to the Red Dragon, calling him the Tooth Fairy, disgusting, sick, and perverted all of which greatly angered him. In the article they published a picture of Will that showed the apartment he was staying at while conducting the investigation. The police hoped that the story would anger the Red Dragon enough to lure him to the apartment so they could arrest him while he tried to attack Will. The story did anger the Red Dragon, but not in the way that was intended. He ended up being angry at the man who wrote the story and went after him instead of Will. The Red Dragon glued the reporter to a chair, showed him everything he had done to the people he killed, then set the wheelchair on fire and rolled it down a hill as a warning to the police and Will. One tactic that surprised me was the video tapes. Both of the families that were killed had a video tape made from a certain company that was a compilation of home videos. I would have never made the connections with both of the families having home movies. Home movies are so popular that I would have probably overlooked it. At first, Will was just looking over the movies to see the families and see if there was anything that connected the two. Then he realized that the killer knew how they acted and knew the layout of the house. Thats almost impossible to know, especially since the two families were in completely different states. The videotapes allowed the Red Dragon to learn the layout of the houses without ever going into the house. Since the manufacturer of the videos was the same, Will had concluded that killer had to work for the company that made the videos and also had access to all of the videos made by the company. The most important technique in apprehending the Red Dragon was bringing back his childhood memories at the end of the movie. When Will insulted his son, it brought back the memories of Francess grandmother, making the Red Dragon emotionally vulnerable. It was obvious by the look on his face that he was still dealing with the abuse from his grandmother and that it was a large influence on his lifestyle. An important detail that I almost didnt notice was that Will was insulting his son and not the Red

Hinson 5 Dragon. Even though the Red Dragon was not being insulted directly it was still hurting him to hear those insults. That made me think that the Red Dragon still had a little bit of Frances left in him and that maybe he actually could feel pity. While the insults brought back memories and made Frances relive the terrible abuse of his grandmother, there was also a look on his face that showed he felt sorry for the kid. This caused the Red Dragon to let go of the kid and focus on Will and eventually lead to the death of the Red Dragon.