"Astronomers Glimpse God!": Dollarhyde as Alien

With his menacing gait, his otherworldly residence, his second set of teeth and his face-hugger-like hands, Tom Noonan’s Francis  Dollarhyde is less like the killer from the Red Dragon source material and more like an amalgam of alien creatures which have stalked movie screens since the 1950s. In adapting Thomas Harris's novel for the big screen, director Michael Mann eliminated Dollarhyde’s Gothic backstory and completely changed the ending. The rejection of Harris’s psychological realism in the portrayal of Dollarhyde allows Mann to make of him something utterly Other and alien, which is why the tropes and imagery Mann employed when making these alterations would seem to have their origins in science fiction films dealing with alien beings and the worlds they inhabit.  

The “lunar cycle” motif is lifted straight from Red Dragon. Mann expands on this interstellar concept in sometimes subtle, sometimes bombastic ways. Apart from the terra-forming (terror-forming?) subtext of invading homes and making of them “elements undergoing change” to create the dream-world Dollarhyde can truly inhabit, there are these references to outer space in relation to the killer:

The teeth-imprints left on Dollarhyde’s toilet-paper letter to Lecktor resemble a lunar surface:

The hand, like a face-hugger and the second set of teeth, both components of the Alien creature designed by H.R. Giger for the Ridley Scott film of the same name. It is important to note that, with the absence of the novel’s explanation of the origin and role of these dentures, they are set adrift to become cinematic entities, caught in the gravitational warp of perhaps unintended references.

The climax of the film practically takes place on the moon, a composite lunar landscape. Dollarhyde’s walls are plastered with huge photos of planetary surfaces, against which he sulks like an alien straight out of a 50s sci-fi movie, complete with a classic damsel-in-distress: Reba. During this climax Reba, who is blind, cannot locate Dollarhyde on this new moon because he is playing Iron Butterfly’s “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” at deafening level on his stereo. Her ears can’t breathe, the song having replaced Earth’s atmosphere and gravitational force. Reba is saved from the Alien when astronaut Will Graham—who has been decoding the creature’s transmissions and orbiting his planet--crash-lands onto the surface.