In
which the dead…the dead at least have the luxury of being done with what they
lost.
“Not
all our choices are consciously calculated.” (Will)
Four episodes into Hannibal’s third season, it’s become
readily obvious that there’s no escaping the events of Season 2’s final salvo, “Mizumono”,
no healing from the Lecter House Massacre aside from the various layers of psychological
scar tissue that each victim has formed (the physical manifestation of which
Cordell so delights in describing to Mason.)
In total, those first two seasons formed a closed circle of trauma and
violence, the apocalypse at Garret Jacob Hobbs’s residence looping back on
itself in the final confrontation between Will and Hannibal. And with that circle closed, its main actor
abandoned the hermetically sealed murderworld that he created, leaving his
victims trapped within, gazing out toward him while choking on the fetid air on
which they were left to subsist.
Or maybe that closed circle
actually formed around the glass ceiling of sanity under which Will, Jack,
Alana, etc. precipitously hovered, its pressure finally shattering that barrier
into a million pieces and sending the players crashing back down to the
bottom. Shattered glass, shatterings of
all sorts are a prominent motif in “Mizumono”, and they’ve continued to recur
in Season 3, especially in “Apertivo”, which beckons the plot back in time to
fill in the blanks between the events of last season and Will’s search for
Hannibal in Italy. The opening flashback
to Frederick Chilton’s near assassination by Miriam Lass features not only the
shattering of the interrogation room window by her bullet, but the grotesque
rupturing of the back of his head, the blood spatter from which drenches the
screen before subsiding to reveal the reconstructed, yet still fundamentally
broken, Chilton of today. The flashback
to Hannibal’s gutting of Will (which is becoming the central and defining trauma
of his life, replacing that of his murder of Garret Hobbs) includes an interior
close up(!) of the rupturing of his stomach.
Of course, Alana’s iconic plunge in “Mizumono”, seen here again, sent
her crashing through the second story window of Casa de Lecter, her prone and
broken body left to absorb a cascade of glass and rain. Jack’s flirtation with death comes courtesy
of a shard of glass embedded in his neck and Mason Verger’s fate is sealed by
his drug-induced rupturing of his face and Hannibal’s shattering of his spine.
It’s a great indicator of the
chaotic, deformed world of this season that the returning Chilton serves as the
guide who attempts to bring these characters back from their state of spiritual
disembodiment. But, well….Humpty Dumpty
and all. There’s no real returning to
the land of the living for these members of the walking dead. As Chilton tells Will “The optimist believes
we live in the best of all possible worlds; the pessimist fears this is
true. This is your best possible world,
Will. Not getting a better one.” Like Hannibal’s other victims, his
motivations are driven by revenge most personal, an inversion of Lecter’s methodology
of elevating his victims into transcendence via his murder tableaus. Chilton’s desire is to drag Hannibal back
down into his torture dungeon, to exert command over him once and for all. Alana, with bone marrow in her blood,
transforms herself from the show’s beacon on optimistic goodness into a femme
fatale, her dark sexuality seemingly a weapon at the service of punishing
Hannibal for his sexual manipulation of her, a means, as she notes to Mason, to
“get him to the stage” of the Verger-designed theatre of his death. Jack’s drive to abandon the pain of his FBI
life following Bella’s death is derailed by Hannibal’s conciliatory note, which
draws him to once again serve as protector to Will, to see their original
mission completed this time.
“Oh
wrangling schools, that search what fire
Shall
burn this world, had none the wit
Unto
this knowledge to aspire,
That
this her fever might be it ?”
(“A
Fever”/John Donne)
This excerpt from Donne’s poem
about a long lost love serves as Hannibal’s elegy to Bella in his card. It also encapsulates so much of the tone of
this season, as characters are driven by a fever of madness and despair for the
death of their former lives. Nowhere is
this stronger than in Will’s vision quest toward…what? As he notes in the quotation that opens this
essay, logic and reason went out the window a long time ago. In a week in which Hannibal was felled by the low ratings-driven axe wielded by NBC
(alternate destinations for a prospective Season 4 remain), this quote also
encapsulates so much of what is inscrutably sticky and phenomenal about this
show. Its distortion of temporal solidity
and its willingness to wade into moral and ethical ambiguity (especially in
relation to its ostensible protagonist) take it to places that most televisual
works dare not tread. And its desire to
trace the outer limits of free associative psychology, both in its characters
and its formal style, presents often daunting challenge to the viewer. A network horror drama gains much of its
allure from the hero’s search for order amidst the chaos; when that hero slowly
begins to embrace the chaos, to enter a dark romance with it, where does that
leave the viewer? Bryan Fuller would
likely argue that this is the whole point, that falling into the chaos can be a
liberating experience for the audience.
But the discomfort that results from a viewership weaned on plot-driven
narratives probably prevents much of that from happening on a mass scale.
Will’s long-standing fear of
plunging into these liminal depths was what drove him to near-madness in the
first two seasons. But his passage
through Hannibal’s underworld, and his passionate embrace of death, has left
him without the restrictions of that thought process. He appears to be psychologically freestyling
through his days, moving inextricably towards a return cycle in Hannibal’s
orbit (as Chilton so succinctly puts it).
And it’s this sense of freedom, this exploration of the Freudian death
wish, that makes him just as much of an unwitting pawn as he was at his
Encephalitis-plagued nadir. The
revenge-driven quartet of Chilton, Alana, Mason, and Jack all seem to be
pushing Will back out into the stream of life, bait once again for the big
catch that is Hannibal Lecter. What they
might not fully realize is the extent to which they might follow him out into
that stream, and maybe how far they’ve already drifted away from the shore of
reality and sanity. After all, Hannibal was the one who left Will just whole
enough to live another day….
Leftovers aplenty this week:
*Will’s fantasy vision of he and
Hannibal garroting Jack at the dinner table is scored to Edward Grieg’s The Death of Ase, from his suite to
Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt. It’s stirring material, but there’s also a
bit of Peer Gynt’s vagabond ways about both Hannibal and Will. Act One of the play sets up Peer’s story, and
much like Hannibal’s second season,
Act Two features the main character descending into a fantasy world, before
becoming an outcast/outlaw in Act Three.
*Joe Anderson takes over for
Michael Pitt as Mason Verger…which is probably the best timed actor transition
in recent history, the latex skin-grafted face he now wears erasing most
obvious demarcations of such a change.
Mason’s quasi-religious conversion is fascinating stuff. His view of himself as being in league with
Christ, especially in the context of Hannibal as fallen angel (which Bryan
Fuller has remarked upon in the past), forms a world in which the Verger estate
becomes the Heaven to which this seraphim must be drawn back into. Talk about every cop is a criminal, and all
the sinners saints…
*Glenn Fleshler debuts here as
Cordell. In an amusing twist, he also
played George Remus across several seasons of Boardwalk Empire, including a stint in Season 2 in which he did
business with Jimmy Darmody…who was played by former Mason Michael Pitt.
*It’s great to see Raul Esparza
back as Chilton, his perpetual smarminess tamed here by an obsession with payback
for the deformation of his body and soul.
The moment of unmasking that he and Mason share (“You show me yours, I’ll
show you mine”) is, in keeping with the show’s twisted tone, both grotesque and
mildly kinky.
*Once again, DP James Hawkinson
creates a stunning visual landscape for this episode. He continues to use rack focus to separate
characters in the frame’s field of depth, but here he also utilizes several
crossfades between the profiles of several actors. The effect is once again to simultaneously
unite these visages in the frame, while showing how truly, figuratively distant
they are from each other.
*“The riot of lilacs in the wind
smells nothing at all like the stockyards and slaughterhouses one usually
associates with the Verger name.” (Margot, to Alana)
*”You see, I’m free Dr.
Bloom. I’m right with the Risen Jesus,
and it’s all okay now. And nobody beats
the Riz. He will rise me up and smite
mine enemies and I shall hear the lamentations of their women.” (Mason,
paraphrasing his lines to Clarice Starling from Thomas Harris’s Hannibal)
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