(S P O I L E R S)
In
which I am who I’ve always been. The
scales have just fallen from my eyes. I
can see you now.
“Just
as every cop is a criminal
And
all the sinners saints
As
heads is tails
Just
call me Lucifer
‘Cause
I'm in need of some restraint
So
if you meet me
Have
some courtesy
Have
some sympathy, and some taste
Use
all your well-learned politesse
Or
I'll lay your soul to waste”
(“Sympathy
for the Devil”/The Rolling Stones)
In the essays for Mad Men that I’ve written for this blog,
I’ve dealt extensively with the narrative long game that Matt Weiner so deftly
employs in his storytelling, in which he and his writing team let character
tension both interior and exterior develop in such a measure way that the payoffs
never seem to be coming. So when they do
arrive, their impact is like a bomb going off (even if the actual mechanics of
the payoffs involve fairly quotidian matters.)
On the surface, Bryan Fuller’s narrative strategy with Hannibal seems to stand in stark
opposition to the one Weiner uses. The
first season revolves around an emotional cipher, but it’s also filled with
moments of grotesque and operatic violence and conflict. And most of the audience’s perspective is
focused through that of a man cursed with hyper-empathic tendencies, whose
mental and emotional breakdown becomes more pronounced as the season
progresses. If Mad Men is Michelangelo Antonioni, Hannibal is Pier Paolo Pasolini and Federico Fellini locked in a
passionate love affair (which would make their child…Dario Argento?)
Which makes the emotional impact
of “Savoureux”, the shattering finale of Hannibal’s
first season, such a surprising experience.
For despite the Grand Guignol nature of what’s come before, this episode
reveals the very authentic and long-building emotional connections that Fuller
has established with these characters.
There’s a natural audience empathy for Will throughout Season 1, but the
slow build of his collapse isn’t fully paid off until he’s finally arrested and
wrongly accused of the copycat killings that he’s been investigating. His interrogation scenes are wrenching
experiences, especially with Alana, who’s haunted by the guilt of her
complicity in his disintegration and by her conflicted romantic feelings for
him.
Part of the emotional heft that
this episode packs (at least for me) can be attributed to those long aforementioned
preexisting expectations. After all, we
know that Hannibal Lecter must eventually end up in the basement of the
Baltimore State Psychiatric Hospital, and that Will must go on to hunt the
Tooth Fairy. So to see the roles
reversed in “Savoureux”’s final moments is a real gut punch. But even the second time through this
episode, I was still very moved by Will’s plight. Credit Hugh Dancy with really selling the
hurt, anger, and confusion that course through Will’s veins as his world
dissolves around him. This role requires
him to chew quite a bit of scenery (especially to contrast it with Mads
Mikkelsen’s icy restraint), but he’s always tapped into the emotional honesty
of the character, especially when he’s going completely off the rails.
And once again, the formalist
aspects of the show place the viewer squarely in his damaged psyche. The opening scene of this episode is a
masterwork of technical excess, James Hawkinson’s off-kilter camerawork
capturing Will’s shattered perceptions, and Brian Reitzell’s ambient sound
design reaching new heights of chaotic overload. Significantly, that skittering soundscape
continues to pulsate in Will’s head after his opening dream, echoing throughout
the rest of the episode. It’s the
realization of one of his greatest fears: that the nightmare world of his
empathic visions will irretrievably leak into the real world. Will in the throes of an encephalitis attack
can be a frightening proposition, but even then the clarity he exhibits while
in this state (especially in this episode) is tragic in its futility. He’s God’s Lonely Man, the archetypical Cassandra
figure, the prophet ridiculed in his own time.
That clarity comes into its
fullest focus in “Savoureux”, when Will’s visions of the mutant stag finally
transform into what will become his psychological obsession from here on out:
the Wendigo. He’s only glimpsed in
snatches here, but even then it’s readily obvious that he (it?) is Hannibal, in
what seems to be his real form: a half-man, half-animal avatar of pure
darkness, the force of which spreads like an oil slick onto Will’s visions of
his copycat victims. As Will says to
Hannibal when they return to the Hobbs house:
“I stared at Hobbs, and the space
opposite me assumed the shape of a man filled with dark and swarming
flies. And then I scattered them.”
All this season, he’s been both
chasing and running from the ghost of Garret Jacob Hobbs, and yet in his
recollection of this vision he perfectly describes the man he’s really been
chasing. Or, rather, the darkness that
has assumed the shape of a man. As a
wounded Will admonished Jack to “See!
See!”, he finally fully assumes the role of Hobbs for a moment, his POV
filled with Hannibal as the Wendigo, the darkness now out in the open…but only
for him.
And so the twist ending of this
final episode, in which Hannibal enters the basement wing/torture dungeon of
Baltimore Psych, taking in a whiff of the air around him (as Anthony Hopkins
does when he first meets Jodie Foster in Silence
of the Lambs). And in which Will
Graham, the heroic seer/quester, is now the incarcerated psychopath. The cop is a criminal, and the sinner a
saint, all to the strains of “Vide Cor Meum”, an operatic selection based on
Dante’s “La Vita Nuova” (The New Life).
It’s fitting , for as Hannibal tells Jack in Will’s hospital room “No
one in this room will be the same.” As
these two men who have faced off in therapy so many times this season do so once
again (in Will’s own Dante-esque ninth circle of Hell), the dynamic between
them is now charged with an added frisson of tension. And as Season 2 will show, their battle of
wills/love affair will change everything for everyone else.
To the leftovers we go:
*I’ve cited her fine work before,
but Caroline Dhavernas really pulls out all the stops with her performance in “Savoureux”. The nature of her role requires her to be
somewhat of a conscience/protector figure for Will, preaching restraint to Jack
while looking aghast at the screw-ups along the way. But the real sense of hurt she projects after
Will’s arrest is very moving…which makes her romantic allegiance with Hannibal
in the season to come all the more infuriating.
*Another stellar moment for Mads
Mikkelsen, as for the first time he sheds tears during his initial session with
Bedelia. It’s a great, classic Hannibal story beat: he claims to be
mourning the loss of Abigail, but you’re never quite sure how much of this
reaction is authentic, how much is manufactured, or if it’s a combination of
both that makes utter sense in his moral blank slate of a mind.
*As a friend of mine pointed out,
the police work in this episode (and in large chunks of Season 1) is not
exactly what you’d call the most professionally competent. I still maintain that Bryan Fuller is
commenting on the misplaced trust we all place in corrupt or ineffective
authority figures. Or maybe it really is
just Hannibal’s world, and everyone’s just living in it.
No comments:
Post a Comment