Fannibalism : Introduction

Earlier this year, my wife introduced me to the TV show Hannibal. Cass has been a Fannibal for a long while now – long before the TV series was created. We’ve both read Red Dragon and Silence of the Lambs. We’ve both watched Anthony Hopkins perform as the infamous Hannibal Lector in the movies of the same name, and have seen Brian Cox inaugurate the role on screen in Manhunter.

We’ve both watched the aesthetically dubious Hannibal Rising about how the Sexy Murder Baby Hannibal became the Sexy Murder Man Hannibal in a Sexy Murder Bildungsroman.

Cass even read the Hannibal Rising and Hannibal books. Only a couple of weeks ago we finally watched the hilariously absurd Hannibal movie. (Why did Gary Oldman decide to use his Jimmy Stewart voice impression for the role of the deformed child molester Mason Verger?)

The new TV show stars Mads Mikkelsen in the title role, and he does an amazing job with the character. He adds a certain quiet subtlety to the role that allows something as outrageous as a cannibalistic serial murder machine carry through a TV series with some gravitas.

In an interview Mads Mikkelsen states that he is basing his interpretation of Hannibal on Satan, and you can definitely detect touches of Mephistopheles in his characterization.

I think in some ways it is the best performance of the character seen thus far. Hopkins’ performance of the character was perfect for Hannibal’s limited exposure in Silence of the Lambs, but in a TV format it would become unsustainable and silly. Mikkelsen’s lower-key performance has a believability about it. You despise Mikkelsen’s Hannibal, but you do not feel entirely alienated from him. There’s a sense that you could almost understand him – until he eats someone’s organs.

Despite Hannibal more closely resembling a human being, the show is not without its absurdities. The show exists in an alternate universe where the FBI deals with an outrageously ostentatious serial killer on a regular basis. Human corpses are played with by the show’s special effects team like they were Lego blocks to create morbid fine art sculptures almost every week. A human totem pole  or corpse marionette theater are so mundane they barely warrant attention as anything more than background noise for the real story of Hannibal’s Mephistopheles interacting with Will Graham’s Faust.  

I’ll get more into the details with the Faust analogies later.

There’s a great deal that I loved about the show’s first season. I identify strongly with Will Graham on several superficial levels:

• I do have a tendency to end up with the local stray becoming part of my household.

• I have a very strong sense of empathy. 69/80 on the somewhat dubious Baron-Cohen test. It doesn’t help me solve crimes unfortunately. I think you need at least a 75 and some manner of X-gene to get to that point.

• I hate looking people in the face. Maybe not to the extreme Will Graham exhibits, but looking anyone I am not very familiar with in the face is uncomfortable on visceral level.

• I clean up nice, but there are times that I just devolve into a scruffy looking bum looking nervously around at my dogs and not at your terrifying face.

• I have had seizures where I have lost time. This is due to diabetes, not encephalitis, and it has never led to me being force fed a human ear… that I know of. But still! When this became an important factor in the show, I started to wonder how much more they were planning to draw on my experience for this show.

Yup! So much of this show was just great in the first season for me. I had a character I could watch that was essentially me, even the secondary characters were really interesting and believable in their own right, all the characters – including the primary hero and villain had flaws and made mistakes. All of this made for a very believable show about a largely fantastical world filled with artful horrors.

The second season has started strong on some points, but some of the show’s strengths have started to fray. The second season starts off very quietly looking at Hannibal’s loneliness. This is contrasted beautifully with Will receiving much greater variety of company in his struggles to find himself even though Will is imprisoned.

Unfortunately, the 3^rd-5^th episodes of the season have gotten increasingly clichéd. That’s not to say that the show doesn’t still have magnificent moments, but  there has been a flood recently of tired “women invading male space” tropes that leave me… well… tired.

More on that in a future post! Stay tuned!