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Ante Portas
Okay, last historical Hannibal-from-Carthago joke, I promise. Following everyone's recommendation, I did watch the episodes thus far. My reaction can be roughly summed up as "hm".
I mean, I absolutely agree that Bryan Fuller does his thing again where the visuals of a show created by him are stunning and unique. Also, as promised, this has good ensembleness. (I think my favourite from the FBI team is Beverly Katz.) And lots of dark puns, not all made by Dr. Lecter. (In the last episode, a key guest character is Georgia Mädchen, unless I misheard. Mädchen is German for girl, or, to use the Scottish word, Lass. Georgia Lass being the heroine of Dead Like Me, Fuller's earlier show, a Reaper by profession, whose job it is to separate people's souls from their bodies.)
However. I have two main problems, not exactly those I feared I might have in advance. They're sort of related. While Hugh Dancy as Will Graham is indeed selling the empath-crumbling-under-horror-of-his-gift like none one's business and is immensely pitiable, it disturbs me that as much as the audience is encouraged to pity Will for undergoing the horror of his work in order to catch serial kllers (and for being manipulated by Lecter and Crawford), there is no sense of pity for the actual victims. You know, the dead people forming the material for the various gruesome scenarios of the week. The human body serves as raw material for various mostly Breughel and Hieronymus Bosch-esque sculptures, and the narrative wants you to feel the horror of Will having to look at this stuff week by week and getting into the mindset of the people who created it, but it doesn't want you to wonder about the raw material. The bodies. Who they were. What they suffered.
(The way Thomas Harris got around this in Silence of the Lambs, though not in Hannibal or the SiL film, was by making Catherine, "Buffalo Bill"'s latest victim whom he keeps alive for a few days, a view point character throughout the novel. A supporting one, but we still get enough of Catherine's own pov so she's not just the damsel Clarice has to save (or not) for her own peace of mind but someone you care about in her own right.)
If not for the fact that most of the victims are white (which I wouldn't have noticed as odd if I hadn't watched The Wire recently, which makes the Baltimore setting different for me than it was when I read Harris' books and watched the films many years ago), one would be tempted to say: white man's tears.
There is, of course, a notable exception in Abigail who starts out as the victim who survives and is saved and is then turned into something more complicated when it turns out she was complicit in her father's crimes, making her victim and culprit at the same time. We're definitely encouraged to care and wonder about Abigail. But not her father's other victims. Still, she is haunted by them. So, depending on how that storyline goes, I will gladly eat my words.
Otherwise, it's a bit like the show taking on Lecter's pov re: humans as interesting material, not individuals (save for a select few who make better mind games than cooking material). And I don't think this is because of necessities of the format (i.e. a new case every week for Will to solve, plus the ongoing case of the Chesapeake Ripper which we know he can't solve as long as Lecter is still at large). Dexter, at its best (i.e in the early years) did manage to individualize at least some of the victims and their families, while working with the same "a different case every week plus one long term killer" limitation. And that makes me deeply uncomfortable with the black humour and aesthetics - I'm all for both, as long as the humanity is also there.
And while we're talking emotions: no, I don't ship it, it being Hannibal/Will, and actually not because Hannibal the novel showed what a dreadful mistake it can be if you go from subtext to main text with your detective/psycho mentor pairing, or the awareness of how it all must end from Red Dragon, no, based on this show alone. Because while I've shipped some pretty dark pairings in my time, and a lot of screwed up ones, and also doomed ones with completely different principles and goals, one thing that is guaranteed to turn me off is power imbalance and exploitation. I can take villain/hero - sometimes I love it. But I can't stand one party exploited and gaslighted. In Elementary, one of the earliest examples of how this particular version of Sherlock Holmes cares about more than puzzle solving comes in the first or second case when he realises that the killer was himself a victim, deliberately given wrong medication and fed suggestions by his therapist. It's the abuse of the trust and confidence, the power a doctor has over a patient once the patient gives that to the doctor, that so outrages Elementary's Holmes, and it's this which makes both the relationship Lecter has with Will Graham and with Abigail abhorrent to me. Not in a way that means bad storytelling, I hasten to add. It's definitely preferable to serial-killer-with-a-heart-of-gold-doing-all-for-his-best-bud fluffiness (though why do I suspect this is how part of fandom will write it?). But it means that as opposed to not wanting the Hannibal and Will "friendship" to end, I can't wait for the day where Will realises the truth and in the meantime keep mentally yelling "get out of there" at him. Considering this moment of revelation is nowhwere imminent, this would be my other main problem with the show.
(Gaslighting is really one of the vilest things ever.)
(It's also my opposite emotional reaction to the recently marathoned Bates Motel where I want the dysfunctional Bates family to remain around with all parties alive instead of reaching the state of affairs from the film.)
Meanwhile, the show's Jack Crawford, played by Laurence Fishburne, is definitely the most interesting version of the character. Also a great example of the show taking a few book lines and running with them, for example, the fact that by Crawford has a sick wife and Lecter in Silence of the Lambs knows about, torments him about it via writing a condolence note from prison. He's a shades of grey chessmaster type here, and the flashback episode showing him with a very Clarice-like trainee puts an incredible dark spin on why Crawford will later pick Starling, of all the people, to try and get information out of Hannibal Lecter. How much, or little, Crawford allows himself to genuinenly care for the people he uses, knowing he may have to break them, is an ongoing question, and that fits with my penchant for manipulative bastards in a way Lecter does not. (Not least because Crawford manipulates with open cards, so to speak - Will knows what he's doing and Crawford knows Will knows - , and he doesn't get any personal kicks out of it but does it for life saving purposes.) Incidentally, while watching I was reminded again how weird it was to see Fishburne as a kid in the making-of-Apocalypse Now documentary (he played the youngest of the soldiers on Willard's boat) Hearts of Darkness shortly after I had seen him as Morpheus in The Matrix. And now he's completely different again.
Minor stuff: the show genderbends not just often refered psychiatrist Alan Bloom into Alana, but also one of Harris' Vile Tabloid Journalist stock characters into a woman as well, which I'm wait-and-see about. I do approve that she's shown smarter than her male counterpart so far - she knows when the FBI is using her.
This is the show of the brunettes, with the exception of Freddie Lyons the redhead. Abigail, Alana and Beverly are all dark haired.
And lasty, with the fifth season of The Wire fresh in mind, wherein McNulty and Lester fake a serial killer on the loose in Baltimore because as opposed to gang related killings, that's deemed fund-worthy, and not hear some of the biting lines from that show on the entire subject in my mind when watching Hannibal. Did anyone ever write a Wire/Hannibal crossover where Crawford's FBI team has to work with McNulty & Co.? The personality clashes, they would be epic.
I mean, I absolutely agree that Bryan Fuller does his thing again where the visuals of a show created by him are stunning and unique. Also, as promised, this has good ensembleness. (I think my favourite from the FBI team is Beverly Katz.) And lots of dark puns, not all made by Dr. Lecter. (In the last episode, a key guest character is Georgia Mädchen, unless I misheard. Mädchen is German for girl, or, to use the Scottish word, Lass. Georgia Lass being the heroine of Dead Like Me, Fuller's earlier show, a Reaper by profession, whose job it is to separate people's souls from their bodies.)
However. I have two main problems, not exactly those I feared I might have in advance. They're sort of related. While Hugh Dancy as Will Graham is indeed selling the empath-crumbling-under-horror-of-his-gift like none one's business and is immensely pitiable, it disturbs me that as much as the audience is encouraged to pity Will for undergoing the horror of his work in order to catch serial kllers (and for being manipulated by Lecter and Crawford), there is no sense of pity for the actual victims. You know, the dead people forming the material for the various gruesome scenarios of the week. The human body serves as raw material for various mostly Breughel and Hieronymus Bosch-esque sculptures, and the narrative wants you to feel the horror of Will having to look at this stuff week by week and getting into the mindset of the people who created it, but it doesn't want you to wonder about the raw material. The bodies. Who they were. What they suffered.
(The way Thomas Harris got around this in Silence of the Lambs, though not in Hannibal or the SiL film, was by making Catherine, "Buffalo Bill"'s latest victim whom he keeps alive for a few days, a view point character throughout the novel. A supporting one, but we still get enough of Catherine's own pov so she's not just the damsel Clarice has to save (or not) for her own peace of mind but someone you care about in her own right.)
If not for the fact that most of the victims are white (which I wouldn't have noticed as odd if I hadn't watched The Wire recently, which makes the Baltimore setting different for me than it was when I read Harris' books and watched the films many years ago), one would be tempted to say: white man's tears.
There is, of course, a notable exception in Abigail who starts out as the victim who survives and is saved and is then turned into something more complicated when it turns out she was complicit in her father's crimes, making her victim and culprit at the same time. We're definitely encouraged to care and wonder about Abigail. But not her father's other victims. Still, she is haunted by them. So, depending on how that storyline goes, I will gladly eat my words.
Otherwise, it's a bit like the show taking on Lecter's pov re: humans as interesting material, not individuals (save for a select few who make better mind games than cooking material). And I don't think this is because of necessities of the format (i.e. a new case every week for Will to solve, plus the ongoing case of the Chesapeake Ripper which we know he can't solve as long as Lecter is still at large). Dexter, at its best (i.e in the early years) did manage to individualize at least some of the victims and their families, while working with the same "a different case every week plus one long term killer" limitation. And that makes me deeply uncomfortable with the black humour and aesthetics - I'm all for both, as long as the humanity is also there.
And while we're talking emotions: no, I don't ship it, it being Hannibal/Will, and actually not because Hannibal the novel showed what a dreadful mistake it can be if you go from subtext to main text with your detective/psycho mentor pairing, or the awareness of how it all must end from Red Dragon, no, based on this show alone. Because while I've shipped some pretty dark pairings in my time, and a lot of screwed up ones, and also doomed ones with completely different principles and goals, one thing that is guaranteed to turn me off is power imbalance and exploitation. I can take villain/hero - sometimes I love it. But I can't stand one party exploited and gaslighted. In Elementary, one of the earliest examples of how this particular version of Sherlock Holmes cares about more than puzzle solving comes in the first or second case when he realises that the killer was himself a victim, deliberately given wrong medication and fed suggestions by his therapist. It's the abuse of the trust and confidence, the power a doctor has over a patient once the patient gives that to the doctor, that so outrages Elementary's Holmes, and it's this which makes both the relationship Lecter has with Will Graham and with Abigail abhorrent to me. Not in a way that means bad storytelling, I hasten to add. It's definitely preferable to serial-killer-with-a-heart-of-gold-doing-all-for-his-best-bud fluffiness (though why do I suspect this is how part of fandom will write it?). But it means that as opposed to not wanting the Hannibal and Will "friendship" to end, I can't wait for the day where Will realises the truth and in the meantime keep mentally yelling "get out of there" at him. Considering this moment of revelation is nowhwere imminent, this would be my other main problem with the show.
(Gaslighting is really one of the vilest things ever.)
(It's also my opposite emotional reaction to the recently marathoned Bates Motel where I want the dysfunctional Bates family to remain around with all parties alive instead of reaching the state of affairs from the film.)
Meanwhile, the show's Jack Crawford, played by Laurence Fishburne, is definitely the most interesting version of the character. Also a great example of the show taking a few book lines and running with them, for example, the fact that by Crawford has a sick wife and Lecter in Silence of the Lambs knows about, torments him about it via writing a condolence note from prison. He's a shades of grey chessmaster type here, and the flashback episode showing him with a very Clarice-like trainee puts an incredible dark spin on why Crawford will later pick Starling, of all the people, to try and get information out of Hannibal Lecter. How much, or little, Crawford allows himself to genuinenly care for the people he uses, knowing he may have to break them, is an ongoing question, and that fits with my penchant for manipulative bastards in a way Lecter does not. (Not least because Crawford manipulates with open cards, so to speak - Will knows what he's doing and Crawford knows Will knows - , and he doesn't get any personal kicks out of it but does it for life saving purposes.) Incidentally, while watching I was reminded again how weird it was to see Fishburne as a kid in the making-of-Apocalypse Now documentary (he played the youngest of the soldiers on Willard's boat) Hearts of Darkness shortly after I had seen him as Morpheus in The Matrix. And now he's completely different again.
Minor stuff: the show genderbends not just often refered psychiatrist Alan Bloom into Alana, but also one of Harris' Vile Tabloid Journalist stock characters into a woman as well, which I'm wait-and-see about. I do approve that she's shown smarter than her male counterpart so far - she knows when the FBI is using her.
This is the show of the brunettes, with the exception of Freddie Lyons the redhead. Abigail, Alana and Beverly are all dark haired.
And lasty, with the fifth season of The Wire fresh in mind, wherein McNulty and Lester fake a serial killer on the loose in Baltimore because as opposed to gang related killings, that's deemed fund-worthy, and not hear some of the biting lines from that show on the entire subject in my mind when watching Hannibal. Did anyone ever write a Wire/Hannibal crossover where Crawford's FBI team has to work with McNulty & Co.? The personality clashes, they would be epic.
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