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"You'd like to quantify me, Officer Starling. You're so ambitious, aren't you? Do you know what you look like to me, with your good bag and your cheap shoes? You look like a rube. You're a well-scrubbed, hustling rube with a little taste. Your eyes are like cheap birthstones - all surface shine when you stalk some little answer. And you're bright behind them, aren't you? Desperate not to be like your mother. Good nutrition has given you some length of bone, but you're not more than one generation out of the mines Officer Starling. Is it the West Virginia Starlings or the Okie Starlings, Officer? It was a toss-up between college and the opportunities in the Women's Army Corps, wasn't it? Let me tell you something specific about yourself, Student Starling. Back in your room, you have a string of gold add-a-beads and you feel an ugly little thump when you look at how tacky they are now, isn't that so? All those tedious thank-yous, permitting all that sincere fumbling, getting all sticky once for every bead. Tedious. Tedious. Bo-o-o-o-r-i-ing. Being smart spoils a lot of things, doesn't it? And taste isn't kind. When you think about this conversation, you'll remember the dumb animal hurt in his face when you got rid of him. If the add-a-beads got tacky, what else will as you go along? You wonder don't you, at night?"
Hannibal Lecter, The Silence Of The Lambs (book)

Prisoners don't like to talk, but interrogators have ways of making them. Police, psychiatrists, kidnappers, superheroes, shadowy government conspirators, and crazed vigilantes are all masters of Perp Sweating. Not only does the prisoner confess, they are often tricked or brainwashed into agreeing with their captor. Particularly successful Perp Sweating forces the captive to realize they have Feet Of Clay — they're not the terrifying Badass they thought they were, but a pathetic loser who is nothing compared to the one who holds them captive.

But only a fool tries Perp Sweating on a Serial Killer, a Psycho For Hire, an evil Warrior Therapist, or a Nietzsche Wannabe. These loonies know all the tricks, and will turn the tables until it's the interrogator who winds up agreeing with what the prisoner says. And the loonies always do this the same way, every time. They start out with a few seemingly-innocent questions about the captor's life or even appearance — "why did you go into law enforcement instead of medicine like you wanted?" or "why aren't you married?" Then, slowly, the prisoner asks more questions, which turn into comments, which turn into declarations, about how the captor has failed in different ways. Pretty soon, the prisoner is doing all the interrogating and all the answering, with the poor captor doing nothing but nodding their assent and crying.

In the climax, the prisoner's probing becomes a full-blown lecture — a Hannibal Lecture. The theme of the lecture is always the same: their captor is a sad, pathetic failure who is only holding the prisoner captive to give themselves delusions of adequacy. Frequently, the captor must admit they are Not So Different morally.

Due to Contractual Immortality or simple awesomeness, this doesn't work on long-established Action Heroes; the story will often imply, however, that the villain still has a damned good point. If the hero is suitably awesome, they may even be able to Hannibal Lecture the bad guy, or subvert an attempt by a bad guy to lecture them by turning it into a lecture right back; yeah, the villain might be sharp, but that doesn't mean that the hero can't point out a few things about how pathetic the bad guy is in return. In other cases, the hero would just beat up the guy whom he interrogates and tells him to start sweating.

In a Briar Patching inversion, some crooks push the interrogator in the other direction, allowing them to become overconfident and thus make a few lethal mistakes in the middle of questioning; the crook comes out ahead, often leaving with information he didn't have before, and the interrogator never even realizes the error.

Incidentally, professional interrogators for police and other investigative agencies are trained never to answer questions. Ever. The main protagonist of The Closer is one of the few interrogators on TV who is faithful to this basic precept. Movie Nazis tend to respond with "Ve are askink ze questions here!".

Named for Dr. Hannibal Lecter of the 1988 novel The Silence Of The Lambs, who set the standard for this trope when he was immortalized onscreen by Anthony Hopkins in the 1991 film adaptation. Almost every example since has been either an Homage or parody of his scenes. Offscreen, he also talks another inmate into suicide.

When taken to the extreme, becomes More Than Mind Control.

If the declarations come from simple clues, this is a form of Sherlock Scan.

The opposite effect is done by a World Of Cardboard Speech, when the hero tells about his own flaws and how they don't matter now.

See also: To The Pain, Talking Your Way Out, Just Between You And Me, Evil Gloating, Shut Up Hannibal and The Reason You Suck Speech. Compare And Then What?

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