What’s Worth Watching: A tasteful ‘Hannibal’ with Lecter, Will Graham
Drawing characters and plot points from Thomas Harris novels like “Red Dragon,” director Bryan Fuller’s “Hannibal” falls somewhere between a crime procedural and a horror-fantasy drama, starting as the former and ending nearer the latter. It begins awkwardly, but those willing to stick with it for an episode or two (#fannibals) are rarely able to stop there.
The series follows Will Graham (Hugh Dancy), a criminology professor with an empathy disorder that allows him to assume the perspective and motive of any criminal just by visiting a crime scene. His condition, “pure empathy,” allows him to understand other people’s motivations so keenly that he can assume their thought processes.
He uses this unusual skill throughout the series to reconstruct crimes and build criminal profiles. In the language of the show, he looks at a crime scene and, with a little concentration, reveals the killer’s whole “design.” In the first episode, Jack Crawford (Laurence Fishburne), head of Behavioral Sciences at the FBI, recruits Will to consult on a particularly bloody home invasion.
“Can I borrow your imagination?” Jack says. Will quickly solves the case and agrees to consult on another, but the side effects of his empathy disorder start showing themselves all too soon after. This unusual ability to empathize makes him unstable. But it also serves a second purpose in the story in that the premise of super-empathy, the ambiguity of when it affects him and what he can sense, forces you to suspend your disbelief much farther than you otherwise might.
Hoping to keep ahold of his own identity, Will begins seeing an eminent surgeon-turned-psychologist, Dr. Hannibal Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen). Lecter seems all propriety and politeness, but – spoiler alert – beneath all the tailored suits and pocket squares lies something darker than even Will could have imagined. He’s a well-spoken, polite, immaculately dressed and fancy cannibal.
He kills, cooks and eats people while also psychologically pushing his patients to manifest their own repressed murderous instincts. But thanks to our already extended disbelief and the charisma of Mikkelsen, Hannibal is the most interesting character in the show. “Whenever feasible, one should always try to eat the rude,” Hannibal says at one point, explaining a tenet of his philosophy.
These people he kills? They die bad, sadistic, brutal deaths. And yet, you, as a viewer, will be rooting for him the whole time because the murders that we see him commit seem almost justifiable: a psychopathic violin maker, a color-obsessed serial killer, a man sent to abduct and kill him, etc. All the others we only hear about after the fact.
We don’t see Hannibal coldly dissecting his victims. We see the gentlemanly “life of the party,” a master chef in a tastefully (ha) decorated kitchen, an artist, a man who cries at the opera and practices the Goldberg variations on a harpsichord. You, like Will, can’t help but empathize with him.
Over the course of season 2, Hannibal essentially tortures Will seemingly, at first, for the sake of curiosity. But, we slowly realize, in his own twisted way, Hannibal loves Will. He’s trying to break down Will so that he can rebuild the ideal companion he sees in him from the pieces left behind.
About halfway into the first season, I started catching myself hoping that the FBI wouldn’t find him. And every time Hannibal comes to any harm, which he does more frequently as the series progresses, I have to look away. You know as a viewer that he both deserves and does not fear death, but it doesn’t make it any easier to see him hurt.
Judging from his general “the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away” attitude, it seems Hannibal would be perfectly comfortable with death. But if, for example, he was suddenly forced to live without all his fineries, talents and authority, that would be a different story. “I know what you’re afraid of. It’s not pain or solitude. It’s indignity you can’t stand, Hannibal,” Alana Bloom (Caroline Dhavernas), a fellow psychiatrist, says.
Hannibal is drawn to beauty in every area of life, most notably, in the macabre. This seems a pretty foreign idea until you realize that strange affection you’re likely to develop for Hannibal the character typifies what we should find most ugly in him.
All in all, this show is genuinely unsettling . But with Halloween upon us, ‘tis the season.” “Hannibal” is available on Amazon Prime.