This week marks the mid-point of the second season of NBC’s Hannibal,
Bryan Fuller’s devilishly delightful translation of source material
from the novelist Thomas Harris. I think this is the best drama on
television (HBO’s Game of Thrones and FX’s The Americans are jockeying hard for the second spot, Justified has badly faded after an electric fourth season, and while Mad Men is impressive it is not, nor has it ever been, the best drama on television).
Some shows plod, others sprint, some seem to dance. Hannibal slithers. The images it conjures up are the stuff of nightmares, and like the best nightmares their beauty is as striking as their terror. Watching the disintegration of Will Graham’s (played by Hugh Dancy) psyche, and the gradual opening of the doorway into the mind of Hannibal Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen), is like being trapped inside of Goya’s El sueño de la razón produce monstruos (1797).
The first season of the show develops the relationship between Graham, the elite profiler, and Lecter, a serial killer with the training of a forensic psychiatrist. Throughout the first season the driving question of the plot was whether or not Graham would realize that his friend/therapist/partner was the killer he was hunting. Viewers could be forgiven for thinking that Hannibal, like the Coen brothers’ masterpiece No Country for Old Men, is interested only in asking us to consider the inscrutability of its central character. While the Coen brothers are content to give their audience a kōan to meditate on (A Serious Man for instance, poses the question of suffering in such a way that it can only be apprehended and never truly comprehended), Fuller’s scope is both wider and deeper. He isn’t merely pointing out to us that that evil is inscrutable, he’s interested in the way that its inscrutability allows it to infiltrate and color all aspects of the world around it. It is not an intrinsic attribute of evil, it’s a tool.
Fuller’s Hannibal Lecter is not an intelligent psychopath. He is a religious adherent, an iconographer whose creations are “altogether alien to any emotionality” [1]. In last week’s episode, “Futamono,” for instance, the sight of one of Hannibal’s victims grown into a tree, his organs replaced with bouquets of brightly colored flowers (that popped like fireworks against the dull metallic hues the show generally prefers) was impossible to look away from. So thoroughly was the corpse fused into the image that it was impossible to imagine it as a living, breathing, moving human being. The body had been transubstantiated, fashioned into a portal through the dark power incarnated in Hannibal Lecter has entered into the world. Whatever Hannibal is, he is not human. He is like David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth, an alien presence pretending to be a man (and is Mads Mikkelsen nailing that aspect of the performance? You’d better believe it!). Ultimately, Hannibal is part of the great American tradition focused on the way evil wears, as Gillian Anderson’s Dr. Du Maurier so deftly puts it, “a person-suit” [2].
At its core Hannibal is a study of how the existence of a creature like Hannibal, who is building, one elaborately staged murder at a time, a connection to a reality beyond our own, imperils the whole of the world. This may sound hyperbolic, or even a touch mystical, but remember that Hannibal is part of the “Fullerverse,” and is bound by character crossovers to the worlds of Wonderfalls, Dead Like Me, and Pushing Daisies [3]. The gun-metal hues of Hannibal exist in the same world as the bright and bucolic world of Coeur d’Coeurs. The difference is that one part of that world is infused with the genial presence of Ned, the pie-maker who can turn back death, while the other part is being pulled, one episode at a time, into the realm where evil things wait to don their person-suits. God help us when the worlds collide.
For any who are interested I will be writing about Hannibal again at the end of its second season as part of a larger piece on the history of Hannibal Lecter in film and television.
Series Rating: Dave’s Best on TV
[1] I have taken this language directly from Metropolitan Hilarion’s lecture “Theology of Icon in the Orthodox Church,” delivered at St. Vladimir’s Seminary in 2011.
[2] In the 36th chapter of Moby Dick Melville expressed the same idea when he has Ahab remark that “all visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event — in the living act, the undoubted deed — there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask.”
[3] Is this really Fuller’s fourth show that meditates on death and the beyond in a distinct way? That’s kind of awesome.
This article appeared originally at Pop, Shop, and Troll
Some shows plod, others sprint, some seem to dance. Hannibal slithers. The images it conjures up are the stuff of nightmares, and like the best nightmares their beauty is as striking as their terror. Watching the disintegration of Will Graham’s (played by Hugh Dancy) psyche, and the gradual opening of the doorway into the mind of Hannibal Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen), is like being trapped inside of Goya’s El sueño de la razón produce monstruos (1797).
The first season of the show develops the relationship between Graham, the elite profiler, and Lecter, a serial killer with the training of a forensic psychiatrist. Throughout the first season the driving question of the plot was whether or not Graham would realize that his friend/therapist/partner was the killer he was hunting. Viewers could be forgiven for thinking that Hannibal, like the Coen brothers’ masterpiece No Country for Old Men, is interested only in asking us to consider the inscrutability of its central character. While the Coen brothers are content to give their audience a kōan to meditate on (A Serious Man for instance, poses the question of suffering in such a way that it can only be apprehended and never truly comprehended), Fuller’s scope is both wider and deeper. He isn’t merely pointing out to us that that evil is inscrutable, he’s interested in the way that its inscrutability allows it to infiltrate and color all aspects of the world around it. It is not an intrinsic attribute of evil, it’s a tool.
Fuller’s Hannibal Lecter is not an intelligent psychopath. He is a religious adherent, an iconographer whose creations are “altogether alien to any emotionality” [1]. In last week’s episode, “Futamono,” for instance, the sight of one of Hannibal’s victims grown into a tree, his organs replaced with bouquets of brightly colored flowers (that popped like fireworks against the dull metallic hues the show generally prefers) was impossible to look away from. So thoroughly was the corpse fused into the image that it was impossible to imagine it as a living, breathing, moving human being. The body had been transubstantiated, fashioned into a portal through the dark power incarnated in Hannibal Lecter has entered into the world. Whatever Hannibal is, he is not human. He is like David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth, an alien presence pretending to be a man (and is Mads Mikkelsen nailing that aspect of the performance? You’d better believe it!). Ultimately, Hannibal is part of the great American tradition focused on the way evil wears, as Gillian Anderson’s Dr. Du Maurier so deftly puts it, “a person-suit” [2].
At its core Hannibal is a study of how the existence of a creature like Hannibal, who is building, one elaborately staged murder at a time, a connection to a reality beyond our own, imperils the whole of the world. This may sound hyperbolic, or even a touch mystical, but remember that Hannibal is part of the “Fullerverse,” and is bound by character crossovers to the worlds of Wonderfalls, Dead Like Me, and Pushing Daisies [3]. The gun-metal hues of Hannibal exist in the same world as the bright and bucolic world of Coeur d’Coeurs. The difference is that one part of that world is infused with the genial presence of Ned, the pie-maker who can turn back death, while the other part is being pulled, one episode at a time, into the realm where evil things wait to don their person-suits. God help us when the worlds collide.
For any who are interested I will be writing about Hannibal again at the end of its second season as part of a larger piece on the history of Hannibal Lecter in film and television.
Series Rating: Dave’s Best on TV
[1] I have taken this language directly from Metropolitan Hilarion’s lecture “Theology of Icon in the Orthodox Church,” delivered at St. Vladimir’s Seminary in 2011.
[2] In the 36th chapter of Moby Dick Melville expressed the same idea when he has Ahab remark that “all visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event — in the living act, the undoubted deed — there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask.”
[3] Is this really Fuller’s fourth show that meditates on death and the beyond in a distinct way? That’s kind of awesome.
This article appeared originally at Pop, Shop, and Troll
No comments:
Post a Comment