Hannibal: Season One: We Become Who Eats Us

This month, all three seasons of Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal re-appeared on Netflix, roughly five years after the show’s cancellation. To say it’s been one of the few uplifting moments for me thus far in 2020 probably says a lot about what sort of person I am, but then again, I’ve lived with Thomas Harris’s creations for longer than I’ve lived without them. 1968, I’m born, with a taste for villains, antiheroes, and blood opera bred into my bones; 1981, Harris’s novel Red Dragon is published, introducing us to all the show’s characters, particularly empath-on-the-edge profiler Will Graham, hard-edged FBI boss Jack Crawford and psychopath psychiatrist Hannibal “The Cannibal” Lecter. 1986, I leave a late show of Michael Mann’s Manhunter, Red Dragon‘s first adaptation, thinking “Oh yeah, I could be a journalist…not one who gets tied to a chair and set on fire after having his lips bitten off like Freddy Lounds, hopefully, but otherwise, sure,” and apply to Ryerson University’s Journalism program; 1990, I graduate and use a review of The Silence of the Lambs, Jonathan Demme’s Oscar-winning adaptation of Harris’s second Lecter book, as part of my application for a film critic job at Toronto’s Eye Weekly. And so on, through Harris’s problematic third and fourth installment in the series (Hannibal, Hannibal Rising) plus Ridley Scott, Brett Ratner and Peter Webber’s movie versions, until Fuller’s new rejiggering finally airs on April 4, 2013, which just happens to be…wait for it…my birthday. I am a Hannibal fan, a Hannibal fan, and proud of it.

By the time Fuller decided to make what essentially amounts to a long-form episodic narrative reboot of the entire franchise, the name of Dr. Hannibal Lecter had long since become a cultural touchstone whose resonance reached far outside the horror, or even thriller, genre(s). Not only could most people recognize his basic characteristics even if they hadn’t read any of the books or seen any of the films, they probably knew what they knew about him best from Silence, in which an imprisoned Lecter develops an oddly intimate relationship with Clarice Starling, the trainee agent Jack Crawford sends to pick his brain about the Bureau’s current target, Jame “Buffalo Bill” Gumb (thus called because he supposedly “skins his humps”). Spoilers, albeit for a movie my film history students used to say was “too old” for any of them to have seen: Lecter immediately knows who Gumb is, not least because he once murdered one of Lecter’s patients, but doles out bits of that information to Starling on a “quid pro quo” basis, demanding she share her personal traumas while he simultaneously fine-tunes her investigative methodology and maneuvers himself into an escape attempt. Clarice gets her collar and the fame that comes with it, while Lecter sidles away into the distance, murmuring that he’s “thinking of having an old friend [the doctor who once lorded it over him at the asylum] for dinner.”

But herein lies the problem, no doubt familiar to X-Men and Spider-Man fans alike: Although Hannibal producer Martha de Laurentiis owns the right to everything else from Harris’s creative output, Clarice Starling belongs to CBS, who is developing a spin-off series centering on the character’s return to the field in 1993, post-involvement with Lecter (whom they can’t use anyhow, because while de Laurentiis’s husband Dino lent the character to Orion Films for free after Manhunter didn’t make much money, he soon reclaimed the bad doctor and locked him down legally after Silence won the Best Film, Best Actor, and Best Actress trifecta). Which is why Fuller was “forced” to go back to the beginning, and start over.

What he and his team ended up putting together was crazily ambitious and beautifully grotesque, a show almost constantly perched on the brink of cancellation…baroque, blood-soaked, blackly hilarious, and queer as all hell, in every sense of the word. It’s quite possibly a masterpiece. And I would re-watch it basically anytime for no particularly good reason, so being asked to do a full overview on Hannibal Season One was, to be frank, so much gravy.

So let’s begin—with the pilot episode, “Apéritif.”

The first person we see is Will Graham (Hugh Dancy), standing at a crime scene that Word of God implies may actually belong to the serial killer who will eventually Become the Great Red Dragon; he closes his eyes and uses a self-hypnotic visual device that will punctuate the rest of the series — a sort of pendulum made from light, swinging back and forth inside “the bone arena of [his] skull” — as a way to pare back the noise and mess around him, to re-play the events the evidence says must have happened, to imagine himself inside the sort of person for whom this carnage is not just evil and inexplicable but logical and somehow…necessary. “This is my design,” Will says, finally, at the end of a present-tense monologue in which he speaks in the unknown subject’s voice (I do this, I do that, I do this, I do that), a capper at the end of this self-excoriating survey, perhaps settled upon as a ritual way to allow his own personality to resurface. Then we pull back, and realize Will is, in fact, in mid-lecture to a group of trainee FBI agents at Quantico, Virginia. “Tell me why [these victims deserved what happened to them,]” he concludes. “Tell me your design.”

Enter Jack Crawford (Laurence Fishburne), updated to be the head of the Behavioral Science Unit, who’s already convinced that no one else in the room will ever be able to do what Will does. He knows Will isn’t “real FBI,” just a consultant — Will’s various social difficulties made it impossible for him to pass the routine psych evaluation necessary, even after a successful career as a Homicide cop. This is where we graze neatly past what some people now refer to the “semi-autistic detective” trope, as mocked on a particular episode of Community, in which a neuroatypical character is automatically expected to be able to solve crimes by virtue of the way his brain works. As the neuroatypical mother of an autistic son, I’ll point out that while Crawford asks Will where he falls on the spectrum after seeing exactly how uncomfortable he is with both eye contact and any invasion of his personal space, Will’s reply that he’s closer “to Asperger’s and autistics than to narcissists and psychopaths” doesn’t mean he’s either received or accepted a diagnosis. He simply knows he’s odd, literally abnormal, born with a skill for shifting his own perspective that allows him to inhabit the mindset of people he finds terrifying to identify with. He runs on “immense amounts of fear,” as his colleague Dr. Alana Bloom (Caroline Dhavernas, first of a series of characters cisswapped from their original versions to increase female participation in a narrative that could all-too-easily be mainly about creepily sexualized female trauma) confirms, which is why he lives alone in a cabin outside of Wolf Trap, Virginia with a pack of rescue dogs, using whiskey and fly-fishing to chase away the nightmares.

But Jack wants Will’s help to find a new serial killer (Garret Jacob Hobbs, nicknamed “the Minnesota Shrike”), and Will can’t refuse, even if Alana wants him to. It’s not in his nature. “Tell me you won’t let him get too close,” she demands, and Jack seems to, but he knows he’s lying, and so do we; he’s completely practical, the sort of man who says things like “We have a difference of opinion, so I am going to choose the opinion that best serves my agenda.” Will, however, is at base a person, not a tool…and therein lies — will consistently lie, the longer Jack feels he needs to use him — the difficulty.

It will be half an hour yet before the man whose name provides the series’s title appears onscreen at last, coming into delicate focus behind a beautifully-framed dish of pomegranates (the fruit some believe Satan might have tempted Eve with in the Garden of Eden, rather than an oh-so-mundane apple). This goes to Fuller’s stated (re)vision of Hannibal as not so much a man who thinks “if one does what God does enough times, one will become as God is” as an actual devil, Lucifer, an Adversary who sets himself to test everyone around him, hoping to find them worthy but eating them and shitting them back out if he doesn’t. Here he’s played by Mads Mikkelsen, a Danish dancer turned actor whose most previously-recognizable role was as terrorism financier Le Chiffre in the James Bond series reboot Casino Royale, who’s given the unenviable task of cleansing Sir Anthony Hopkins’s Oscar-winning turn as Lecter from every watcher’s mental palate. Thankfully, he’s more than up to the challenge — his soft European accent pares Lecter (born in Lithuania, according to Harris, as the final scion of a dead aristocratic family) back to the books’ original ideal: intellectual, sadist, gourmet, connoisseur, artist. His head comes stuffed with music, perfume, and baroque imagery; his mental “memory palace” is capacious, built like a Renaissance cathedral, full of the epicene wit and malign philosophy that produces aphorisms like “Human emotions are a gift from our animal ancestors; cruelty is a gift humanity has given itself.”

Much like me on that long-ago birthday evening, Fuller assumes most of his audience are entering Hannibal’s first hour with all sorts of useful information that none of the already-introduced characters are aware of yet — we know that Hannibal Lecter, M.D. and Ph.D-Psych., lives a quietly flamboyant life in Baltimore, disguised in what his own psychiatrist calls his “person-suit.” He does what most people think is his job while taking his pleasures where he may as a highly intelligent, successful, and oddly emotionally available psychopath, serial killer (Jack Crawford’s very own white whale, the legendarily uncatchable “Chesapeake Ripper”), and cannibal. This is the guy, meanwhile, who Alana Bloom (once Lecter’s student) ends up recommending to Jack as someone qualified to keep Will Graham psychologically stable enough to do his work, because she feels too emotionally engaged with Will to do it herself. It’s a horrible mistake, and it kicks off a three-season tragedy which plays like a combination of blood opera and queer bad romance, as Will inevitably takes over the role once played by Clarice Starling, that of Hannibal’s intimate mirror-image — his prospective plaything, victim, antithesis, partner. It’s not Alana’s fault, though…just something either as grand as fate or as simple as chance, the devil drifting slowly but inevitably towards his match, blown by sheer fascination: “I wanted to see what would happen.” Or, as in Silence: “Nothing ‘happened’ to me, Agent Starling. I happened.”

One of the things that jumps out most clearly during a re-watch of Hannibal is that the rhythm of the series as a whole is based around the constant back and forth of classic Freudian analysis, “talk therapy”: the patient makes a statement and the psychiatrist repeats it, reflecting it back, forcing the patient to think about and elaborate on it. I’m familiar with this dynamic, for predictable reasons — but to be frank, for me, it also echoes the way that I (like many other neuroatypical people) once tried to teach myself to seem recognizably “human” by mimicking the behavior, speech, and body language of the “normal” people around me. Sometimes they figured it out and thought I was mocking them, but it was a valid and useful way to develop protective coloration, which in turn allowed me to relax enough to begin genuinely enjoying social interaction without fear of doing something “wrong” and inviting social exclusion. Interestingly, according to Jack, Hannibal’s written a monograph about that very subject. In Will, Hannibal recognizes a lifelong outsider whose lack of courtesy is less about rudeness than about being scared, weary, and trying to concentrate only on the most important things, the ones which will help him save — or avenge — the people who can’t save themselves.

From their first official meeting, Will and Hannibal speak almost entirely in metaphors, constantly elaborating on and unpacking an endless string of images that flicker past like verbal Rorschach blots; Hannibal treats it as flirtation and Will doesn’t, at least initially, but rises to it anyhow. Hannibal diagnoses Will immediately as having “pure empathy,” an overload of “mirror neurons” which makes it increasingly hard to separate his own self-image, his original personality, from those of the killers he’s required to understand. From the start, Hannibal probably sees Will as yet another patient he could potentially groom into a fellow serial killer, then mimic and frame — one of his hobbies, as we later discover — but he’s also fascinated by Will’s uniqueness, by the prospect of interacting with someone who thinks so differently from everyone else he’s met that he almost thinks like Lecter himself, except for still being snared in an inconvenient morality arising from that same uncontrollable empathy. Always the ironic professional, Hannibal also provides Will with the tools to deal with his problems, at least in the short term…and by the end of “Apéritif,” Will Graham and Hannibal Lecter are bonded as a team, having caught Garret Jacob Hobbs together. The fact that Hobbs’s discovery and death come about as a joint result of Will’s insights and Hannibal’s manipulations almost doesn’t matter. What matters is that Hannibal finds Will interesting, and is determined to make Will find him interesting in return.

In essence, the subtext of Hannibal Season One is about friendship that’s toxic at the core, about one person breaking down the other and using him as a scapegoat for his own crimes. Like most narcissists, however, Hannibal’s true power is that he likes (and better yet, accepts) himself, so the key part of his temptation is showing Will how to like the parts of himself he finds useful but ugly, “like a chair made of antlers.” He gifts Will with a new self-image as “the mongoose I want under the house when the snakes slither by,” something strong instead of something fragile or broken, neglecting to mention that he himself is exactly that sort of snake. Gradually, Hannibal strengthens Will’s belief in those “peculiar leaps” he makes, the ones evidence can explain only in retrospect, while also poisoning Will’s relationships with everyone but him. “Don’t doubt yourself,” he tells Will, building a false found family they can share with Alana Bloom — the woman with whom they both, to some degree, desire intimacy — by “adopting” Abigail Hobbs (Kacey Rohl), the Shrike’s daughter and victim-model. Again, though, it’s Hannibal who benefits most from this arrangement, in the long run.

And then there’s Will’s illness, the viral encephalitis already inflaming his brain, which no one but Hannibal could diagnose with a mere extremely sexy sniff — present from the very beginning, producing night sweats, hypnagogic states, and lost time, which Will just puts down to his usual cocktail of anxieties and interior horror. Hannibal uses the growing threat of his sickness to gaslight Will, slowly cutting him off from all the other members of Jack’s investigative team and maneuvering him exactly where he wants him, but the true evil is that aside from that, Lecter’s “therapy” prepares Will not to avoid falling from grace but to deliberately trigger and survive the process, plummeting from wild and uncontrollable innocence into a state where he can “see” Hannibal clearly enough to first hate him, then want vengeance on him, and then…well, who knows?

Every successive episode of Hannibal in general is jam-packed with incident and resonance, reflecting and bending and calling back to Harris’s original prose, along with every other iteration of the franchise. Episode two, “Amuse-bouche,” introduces us to tabloid/Internet journalist Fredricka “Freddie” Lounds of Tattlecrime.com (Lara Jean Chorostecki), smarter than her hapless male template but also snarkier and more vicious, a living monument to chutzpah. (“I can take back what I said,” she tells Will, coolly, after outing him as someone who can “think like the insane because he is himself insane.” “I can also make it a lot worse.”) By episode six, meanwhile — “Entrée” — we’re introduced to both Dr Frederick Chilton (Raùl Esparza), head psychiatrist for the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, and a new character, Dr. Abel Gideon (Eddie Izzard), whom Fuller uses to introduce both the circumstances we expect to be Lecter’s eventual fate and the concept of “psychic driving,” morally ambiguous therapy performed while the patient is under the influence of hypnosis-inducing drugs and lights, something which will play a huge part in the season’s climactic arcs.

Similarly, Jack Crawford has to deal with mounting guilt over the unknown fate of Miriam Lass (Anna Chlumsky), a trainee very obviously based on Clarice Starling, who he once mentored — he unleashed her on the Chesapeake Ripper, only to have her disappear out in the field. Even as he can’t quite keep himself from steering Will into the Ripper’s path, Hannibal makes sure that Jack becomes more and more aware of his complicity not only in whatever happened to Miriam, but in whatever might happen to Will. Or, in the end, whatever already was happening to Will, which Jack was too caught up in his own investigative zeal and pride to notice. (A sub-plot involving Jack’s wife Bella and her battle with stage four lung cancer, meanwhile, provides both Fishburne and his then-wife Gina Torres with the opportunity for master-class acting together, deepening Jack’s vulnerability in ways no previous adaptation of Harris’s work ever thought to.)

To briefly return to my own personal issues, what rings most absolutely true for me about Will Graham’s initial response to Lecter’s “grooming” is its resemblance to the incredible happiness and gratitude felt when you finally meet someone who appears to appreciate and understand you… feelings so intoxicating that you don’t — can’t — see until too late that they may have ulterior motives. Will’s wariness and utter vulnerability remind me of my younger self, bonding hard and fast and way too intimately with anyone who wanted to talk about the stuff I found interesting and important. And I almost wonder if the reason that Will’s remark “I’m on the part of the spectrum closer to autism than to narcissism” seems to annoy people is that it makes him ring closer to an undiagnosed adult female than an undiagnosed adult male. Will has very obviously suffered for being emotionally “open” — like a wound, not a door — in a culture where men are supposed to be anything but.

Will is raw, and he doesn’t scar — even though by the series’ end, he is literally covered in them. He doesn’t want to ever like himself so much that he can’t be reached with a sense of his own inadequacy. Will needs both his pain and other people’s pain to function, but not the way that Hannibal needs it — to feel it, not to enjoy it. Hannibal, on the other hand, enjoys life intensely in the moment, moving from choice to choice, all to serve nothing but his own literal appetites — he consumes, he savors, he disdains, he rejects. He has no morals, just aesthetics; what moves him to act is a sense of curiosity, or a perception of what would be most beautiful to happen next. His ability to perceive beauty, as well as to create it — from harpsichord music to “field kabuki” — is something we want to think is part of what makes us human. Yet if someone like Dr. Lecter shares it, how comforting can such an ability really be? Maybe we’d be better off sticking with Will’s crappy aftershave (the one with the ship on the bottle that he keeps getting for Christmas), his lumberjack fashion sense and incredibly limited wistful dreams of retiring to fix boat motors in Florida.

For me, the key to understanding Hannibal’s first season may be an idea introduced in episode four, “Ouef” (infamously never shown during the series’ initial network run due to its supposed resemblance to a recent episode of gun violence): its killer-of-the-week, played by Molly Shannon, is a woman who’s assembled a pack of “Lost Boys” which mimics Will’s rescue pack, but who demands each boy return home and kill his original family. “Capture bonding,” Will says, of her methods; “It’s a psychological response to a new master, an essential tool of survival for a million years. You bond with your captor, you survive. You don’t…you’re breakfast.” By the time we’re introduced to Hannibal’s patient Franklyn (Dan Fogler)’s psychopath “friend” Tobias Budge (Demore Barnes), however, in episode eight (“Fromage”), Hannibal is willing to confide in his own psychiatrist — the coolly beautiful Bedelia Du Maurier (Gillian Anderson) — that he may be ready to consider Will Graham a friend. This implies that the very process that Hannibal has been unwittingly practicing on Will has, in some indefinable way, bonded him to Will as well.

But perhaps the true lure and enduring appeal of Hannibal all goes back to to a clever inversion of that wonderful line from Silence, when Clarice Starling observes, “It’s hard to accept that someone can understand you without wishing you well”…ie, that it’s Hannibal’s very interest in Will which eventually leads to the two of them becoming inescapable for each other. The many shots of Hannibal eating show him doing so with restraint as well as gusto, refined, finicky, precise; he’s all about taste, ritual, quality over quantity. On that level of appreciation, Fuller’s version of Will Graham — like Clarice before him — is definitely quality, a taste not found before. And the question of whether or not he is friend or food, whether or not Hannibal will end up cutting the Gordian knot of their relationship by making a literal meal of him, persists right up to the entire series’s bitter, tasty end.