HANNIBAL Ep. 34: "The Great Red Dragon"

In which it’s dark on the other side, and madness is waiting.

“One small event, which occurs in everyone, told the seed in his skull it was Time: Standing by the north window, examining some film, he noticed aging in his hands.  It was if thought his hands, holding the film, had suddenly appeared before him and he saw in the good north light that the skin had slackened over the bones and tendons and his hands were creased in diamonds as small as lizard scales…..Now in his forties, he was seized by a fantasy life with a brilliance and freshness and immediacy of childhood.  It took him a step beyond Alone.”

(Red Dragon/Thomas Harris)

It’s such a simple occurrence, this genesis of the Red Dragon into the life of Francis Dolarhyde (Richard Armitage).  The two previously filmed version of the Tooth Fairy’s reign of terror have their disturbing charms, but they’ve both downplayed the power of this brief moment out of time.  The manner in which DP James Hawkinson opens “The Great Red Dragon”, with a tight close-up of Francis’s hands, their mildly aging crevices, like those aforementioned Harris-ian lizardly diamonds, bathed in stark Cobalt blue, offers a precise study of the utter banality from whence such monstrous impulses can spring.  So trained have we become to expect logical progression of trauma as motivator for psychosis (especially in the serial killer mythos of literature and film), that it’s easy to forget what a potent trigger something as innocuous as a magazine article can be.  Of course, we know from his previous incarnations that Francis Dolarhyde comes packed with decades of trauma and repression which act as the tinder for his fiery transformation.  But in the moment, in that moment, Harris (and now Bryan Fuller) paints a portrait of the twin universal impulses that are the recognition of age and the fantasy of regeneration.

Or maybe revelation would be the more operative word here, laden as it is with the Biblical overtones that first drove William Blake to commit his apocalyptic visions of that legendary Satanic beast to the canvas.  Like the mad prophets and shamans before him, Francis is merely a common man opening himself up as a vessel for the divine message that seemingly has been waiting for him his entire life.  Of course, Travis Bickle also opened himself up for a message.  But that sense of purpose, that drive to transcend a pedestrian life, is not merely the provenance of the deranged.  It’s at the heart of the American Dream, the ability to reinvent oneself at any time and from any strata.  The Dream that (as Frederick Chilton notes later on…more on him in a bit) Francis will commit himself so assiduously to shattering with his ritual annihilation of the family unit.

Reinvention and rebirth are key to much of what “The Great Red Dragon” offers up on its menu.  Having sacrificed himself at the altar of his twisted relationship with Will, Hannibal now resides, some three years later, in a designer cell inside Chilton’s Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane.  It’s a wry rethinking of Lecter’s iconic dungeon cell from the Silence of the Lambs cycle (after all, we’ve already covered that ground with Eddie Izzard’s Anthony Hopkins-channeling Abel Gideon) which recasts Hannibal as almost a zoo animal on display, today’s refined cannibal in his natural habitat.  On his Twitter account, Fuller notes that the inspiration for the cell is the sterile hotel room/apartment at the conclusion of 2001’s stargate sequence, another venue which symbolizes a profound sense of rebirth.  And after all, isn’t there just a bit of Stanley Kubrick in Hannibal Lecter’s extravagant, yet clinical worldview?

Not that such a worldview ensures lasting notoriety, at least in this version of the Lecterverse.  One of the great self-reflexive moments of this episode arrives during Hannibal and Chilton’s blood and chocolate suare, when the latter remarks on his new patient’s growing obsolescence:

“Like overused punctuation, the novelty of Hannibal Lecter has waned…The Tooth Fairy.  I find folks are a bit more interested in him.  He is the debutante.  Although he lacks your love of presentation…It is not as snappy as Hannibal the Cannibal, but he does have a much wider demographic than you do.  You, with your fancy allusions and your fussy aesthetics, you will always have niche appeal, but this fellow, there is something so universal about what he does.  Kills whole families—and in their homes.  Strikes at the very core of the American dream.  You might say he’s a four quadrant killer”

In a four quadrant-obsessed entertainment market, Hannibal was always going to be a challenging proposition, especially in the major network setting.  Creating a Hannibal Lecter (and a Will Graham) whose motivations and predilections are so diffuse and hazy offered little support for the prospects of mass acceptance.  But it’s the richness of that character complexity that lends such weight and power to a Red Dragon tale that is drawn so faithfully from its source material.  Indeed, it can be surprising for a longtime Lecterphile watching this episode to realize just how much of it they’ve seen before, so expertly has Bryan Fuller crafted the cinematic universe that forms the foundation for the narrative.

Witness Frederick Chilton himself, who in past versions of this tale claimed his spot as officious prick extraordinaire…and not much else, save for a future item on Hannibal’s plate.  Fuller’s expansion of the character (greatly aided by the arch smugness and dry wit that Raul Esparza brings to the role) gives him room to breathe, to stretch out and become a fully realized human being who the audience actually sympathizes with when he’s framed as the Chesapeake Ripper.  So when he gloats over his ownership of Hannibal during their meal, we laugh with more than condescension.  He’s already gone through his own physical transformation at the hands of the vengeful Miriam Lass (which requires himself to transform himself every morning for presentation to the straight world), so to see him metamorphosize in the context of the story into the redeemed author of the best-selling Hannibal Lecter tome, returned to the throne of his house of horrors….well, it’s a delight.  And he now works alongside Alana Bloom, whose gone through her own complex transformation process from quite possibly the show’s purest advocate for ethics and justice to a much more hardened observer of the human condition (Fuller also notes on Twitter how she’s gradually absorbed Hannibal’s penchant for designer suits.)

But metamorphosis and transformation come most prominently to Will, the character who’s dealt in such matters for most of the series’ run.  As Jack visits his home to bring him back into the fold to investigate the Tooth Fairy killings, he’s firmly ensconced in a world of bucolic domesticity that seems entirely in line with the dream visions of fly fishing into which he retreated during his extended stay at Baltimore State in Season 2.  But just beyond that sense of peace (what does Will do for money, anyway?), the dark world from which he’s retreated still exists.  As he tells his wife Molly after Jack calls the tune, “If I go, I’ll be different when I get back.”  She reassures him that she won’t, but in a way she’s ignoring the most glaring fact of the matter: Will may run from the darkness of his old life, but so much of that darkness resides within him.  He just needs someone, or something, to draw it out.

And in Francis Dolarhyde he finds it, unwittingly or not.  Both men fear the dark avatars of transformation/possession that stalk them (a dragon, a nightmare stag), yet both are also inherently drawn toward the possibility of embracing their primal instincts.  We see Will’s happiness with his married life, but we’ve also seen two and a half seasons before this in which he’s found such sustenance and meaning in the embrace of his twin outcast Hannibal.  The classic story of Will Graham: Tortured Profiler hunting the Tooth Fairy is compelling in its own right, but having witnessed Will’s fantasies of becoming the nightmare stag adds an entirely different and deeper heft to the proceedings.  And in a brilliant sequence in this episode, Francis gains another thread of connection with his profiler, as he’s portrayed being consumed by the 16mm film he watches before eventually merging with the projector itself.  What is Will, after all, but a similar projector of dead images from the past, who also projects himself into them.  Their shared sense of vision (remember Garret Jacob Hobbs’s “See? See?” that plagued Will) places them both outside of society.  Francis’s placement of mirrors in his victims’ orifices embeds him in their view.  And what does Will see when he gazes deep within the reflective abyss?  Himself.  James Hawkinson’s beautiful, haunting framing of him against the blood splatter analyst’s crimson threads (the image that opens this essay) cements him as brother in pain to the lowly film developer, the Red Dragon’s wings fitting him as well as his disturbed counterpart.

If Hannibal is indeed doomed to oblivion following this season, then the Red Dragon story serves as a fitting epitaph for much of the show’s obsessions.  For two and a half seasons, Hannibal and Will have debated the nature of God, his vengeful tendencies, his divine view from on high (one which Hannibal figuratively assumes, and once literally does), his theodicical existence.  Leave it to the Revelations via Blake-inspired Francis Dolarhyde to bring this debate to a nihilistic conclusion.  It’s interesting to note that after so many philosophical conversations between Will and Hannibal, it’s the virtually mute Francis (Armitage utters only a tortured yawp in this episode, no lines) who arrives to serve as the show’s possible final leveler of worlds, a silence that ushers in a void to match the darkest depths of Hannibal’s abyss.         

HANNIBAL Ep. 33: "Digestivo"

In which when it comes to you and me, there can be no decisive victory.

And so it ends.  Or begins.  Maybe this is the end of the beginning, the climax of the prequel to the life of Hannibal Lecter: Incarcerated Mastermind.  King of Chilton’s House of Horrors.  Maybe it’s the beginning of the end (literally in this case, considering NBC’s cancellation of Hannibal.)  Of course, Bryan Fuller’s view of time, chronology, and all things orbiting such states of measurement has always been as vastly fungible as his takes on identity and sexuality.  This series began drifting away from such concrete notions of linear judgment as soon as Will Graham investigated the murder scene at the Marlow house back in the pilot episode.  Even as the real life clock continues to tick away toward potential obsolescence for this incarnation of the Lecterverse, Hannibal itself refuses to yield to standard definitions of

Witness “Digestivo”’s much-discussed climactic scene, in which Will effectively severs his wildly complex relationship with Hannibal.  As Fuller noted on Twitter during the episode’s airing, the equations that we briefly see in Hannibal’s notebook represent his attempts to reverse time, a natural continuation of he and Will’s ongoing conversation about the shattering of a teacup and the realities/dreams of reconstructing it (a metaphor that has been extensively applied to the fractured psyche of everyone’s favorite FBI profiler.)  Will might be putting a button on this thing of theirs, but even his attempt at finality echoes his previous stabs at such.  Just as his near-death in the Lecter House Massacre of “Mizumono” painfully brought his story full circle, back to the initial trauma at Hobbs House, so too does he still seem trapped in this relationship cycle.

Hannibal’s ultimate decision to turn himself in to Jack Crawford and the FBI ensures this.  We know from the established Thomas Harris universe that the rise of Francis Dolarhyde and the Red Dragon will necessitate the deployment of Lecter’s deductive skills.  But all the previous versions of that story gave Lecter a clear, unambiguous motivator for his existence: rage.  The Will Graham of Manhunter and Red Dragon (and the source novel) was wily and insightful enough to finally capture Hannibal the Cannibal, but only by surviving his nemesis’s attempted murder gambit.  Held captive in his cell, the classic version of Lecter brooded and plotted away, trying to destroy the man who took his freedom. 

The version of this endgame that Fuller presents in “Digestivo” is a different beast indeed…and entirely in keeping with the tone of the show, and of the Will/Hannibal relationship.  Gone is the life-changing standoff between these two men; that happened at the end of last season, a lovers’ separation bathed in blood, yet lacking in the finality of Hannibal’s imprisonment.  With Will left to wander the underworld in search of his oppressor/obsession, the path to revenge seemed to be fairly clear.  But even that was obscured in the events of “Dolce”, when hesitation and negotiation took over their museum confrontation.  The two men who strode out into the courtyard were more deeply bonded soulmates obligated once again to play pre-assigned roles than bitter adversaries.  Not that that stopped Hannibal from attempting to eat Will’s brain after he nursed him back to life from Chiyoh’s assassin’s bullet.  After all, in the empathy-stunted ethical landscape of his mind, the calculus of survival rules all.  And even his soulmate stood in the way of his freedom.

Which, when Hannibal surrenders to Jack, makes his real endgame all the more powerful. And devious.  And touching.  (You wouldn’t expect anything less complex in this show, now would you?)  His final words as a free man (“I want you to know exactly where I am, and where you can always find me.”) are a clear refutation of Will’s stated desire to never see him again, the spurned friend/lover/confidante striking back in a nod to the classic literary Lecter’s vengeance.  But he’s also realized that his only real fulfillment comes with Will’s participation in his life.  And in a purely Machiavellian way, chess master Hannibal also has to realize that this lateral move temporarily grants him more power in captivity.  Brian Cox and Anthony Hopkins played the caged Hannibal as a sly and powerful man deprived of any meaning in his life.  Mads Mikkelsen has spent two and a half seasons establishing his version of the character as always being several steps ahead of everyone else, always deftly playing the long game, always testing the dialectical results of his sociological experiments.  Confinement for this Hannibal can’t be the crushing blow that it was for his predecessors, right?

Maybe it’s because he dealt confinement of all sorts to others with such great aplomb.  Hence the end of Mason Verger, the paralyzed plutocrat trapped in the prison of his own body.  Mason has always been an acid commentary on the gaudy, perverse excesses of the social elite.  Looking back now, his repositioning in the pre-Red Dragon storyline (he’s post-Silence of the Lambs in the books) makes him the final extension of a long series of stabs at the wealthy and privileged.  After all, much is made in the first two seasons of how seamlessly Hannibal navigates the world of the rich.  Think back to the opera scene and subsequent dinner party in Season 1’s “Sorbet”, in which the privileged patrons and associates fawn over his charms, only to be fed harvested organs at the episode’s conclusion.  Hannibal’s rarified tastes might play well in the dens of the Baltimore brahmins, but his enduring connections come with the mostly middle-class (at least in demeanor, if not entirely income) characters surrounding the FBI.  With the upper class portrayed as self-absorbed and foolish (think also of the vainglorious Frederick Chilton), it seems only natural to have Mason serve as their ultimate avatar, a grotesque parody of the power of money.

So when, in a truly horrifying moment, Margot realizes that the child he’s promised her as payback for her loyalty has been stillborn inside the womb of a giant pig, it all makes sense in the twisted logic of a man who’s lived a life of unbridled power and privilege.  I’ve noted this before, but in his limited run on the show Mason has been one of the few characters to make Hannibal smile and laugh.  This surely is somewhat based in condescension, but there might also be a bit of knowing recognition in his reactions.  For if Hannibal is an empathy-bereft, childlike predator, then Mason’s total lack of moral and ethical grounding must serve as some sort of funhouse mirror reflection.  There, but for the grace of God, goes Hannibal?

From a purely entertainment-based perspective, it’s sad to see Mason meet his demise.  As portrayed by both Michael Pitt and Joe Anderson, he was one of the show’s great levelers, his riches allowing him to cut the Gordian knot in ways both decisive and terrifying.  And just as Hannibal’s personality infected the show in meta-stylistic fashion, so too did Mason’s perverse desires serve as a competing virus.  “Digestivo” must have set an unofficial record for most primetime references to dining on penises, and Mason’s death by drowning/asphyxiation via eel (Chekhov’s eel?) is a stomach churning moment and a metaphorical feminist deathblow enabled by two women who’ve been traumatized by men.  Now the real question is what happened to his harvested sperm, especially with the time constraints of this episode’s rapid plot movement?  But maybe that’s a question best left for later.  For now, the Red Dragon awaits.

HANNIBAL Ep. 32: "Dolce"

In which we’re conjoined.  I’m curious whether either of us can survive separation.

Allow me, dear reader, if you will, to indulge in a bit of editorializing before digging into “Dolce”, this week’s mind-warping episode of Hannibal.  Or perhaps the editorializing is part and parcel of the digging.  Lord knows a good deal of my thoughts have already been beaten into the ground before now, especially if you’ve been following the epic Hannibal essay project that I began several months ago (and if you haven’t, get cracking at the beginning.)  But I feel that they bear repeating nonetheless, even in the relatively limited arena of my readership.

So following the news of Hannibal’s cancellation two weeks ago, this week brought the news that both Netflix and Amazon have passed on picking up a prospective fourth season of the show.  Much of their decision seems to be motivated by the unfortunate timing of the cancellation, as the series’ cast has been released from their contracts (a common move in a situation like this) and Bryan Fuller has begun work on his televised adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods.  Despite the interest of most of the creative parties to continue the show, the wait for their availability might stretch into next year, thus delaying more Lecterverse exploits beyond the time that those streaming services are willing to wait.  The fate of the show, then, rests in another cable outlet, or a lesser web service.

The only way I can respond to this (especially in the wake of viewing “Dolce”) is to drop my well-mannered veneer of loquacity and say “Wake up people!  This is a tragedy!”  There’s a whole tree falling in the woods argument to be made about Hannibal’s impact on the popular form, but the fact remains that what Bryan Fuller, James Hawkinson, Brian Reitzell, Hugh Dancy, Mads Mikkelsen, and so many others on the creative team have crafted in two and half seasons has forever expanded and altered what is possible for a televised narrative.  As I’ve mentioned before, I hesitate to even confine Hannibal to the field of television; it’s as cinematic as anything the medium has witnessed, an unholy marriage of Lynch and Bunuel.  Works of art like this show what is truly possible on the small screen, and in many ways they’re much more daring than the majority of major theatrically released films.  If indeed this season is the swan song for Fuller’s vision of the Lecterverse, then there will come a day in the near future when the word on Hannibal finally gets out to the audience that it so stridently demanded: that this was arguably the most subversive show in the history of television and one of the most subversive artworks of the modern cinematic medium.

It’s also been a show very much reflective of our time, sometimes in rather unexpected ways.  Witness the two scenes in “Dolce” that encapsulate the show’s complex explorations of sexuality.  Following Mason’s offer to harvest his sperm for a proper Verger heir, Margot and Alana engage in a bout of sensual coupling that transcends the meaning of the term “sex scene.”  It’s intriguing on a purely narrative level, as before now there’s been no hint that Alana has lesbian tendencies.  And Fuller doesn’t seem like one to indulge in the hoary male cliché of all women being constantly a half step away from getting it on with any member of the sisterhood.  Alana’s intentions in her alliance with the Vergers have always been murky, and yet following their tryst both women are fairly blunt about the desire to deliver both Hannibal and Mason to the authorities when the time is right.

So what remains is what appears to be a purely carnal experience for both women, depicted in a kaleidoscopic montage of intertwined body parts and merging identities.  It’s all in keeping with the show’s various plunges into the fungible, mutable nature of sexuality.  In this manner, it also mirrors our modern society’s ever-evolving definition of what defines one’s sexual identity in all its permutations.  Just as we’ve gradually moved away from the strict male-female gender dynamic, so too has Hannibal defied much of that tradition in the way it presents desire and attraction (even as it also conforms enough to said expectations to provide a gateway into its more subversive aspects.)  It’s very possible that the Alana-Margot affair involves two women who view sexuality as a nebulous concept to be indulged, no matter what reproductive organs the partners might possess.  It doesn’t hurt that they’ve both been the victims of sexual predation by two men who’ve shown no compunction about using sex as a weapon (Mason’s pedophilia from Thomas Harris’s book has been downplayed in this version of the story, but his incestual crimes still leave vivid scars.)  Or that they’ve both entertained dalliances with a man whose increasing obsession with one of those predators has removed him from their lives. 

That man, of course, is one Will Graham, and it’s his long awaited reunion with Hannibal at the Uffizzi Gallery that forms the other half of this episode’s dual examination of the ambiguities of sexuality.  At various times, Hugh Dancy and Mads Mikkelsen have lauded Bryan Fuller for the silences and pauses he’s allowed them in their conversations/confrontations, and this scene is no different in that respect, as so much of what each man wants to express is contained in lingering glances and deep gazes.  But then again, so much of what has come to define the Will/Hannibal relationship has been borne from this same sense of the sprawling, often indefinable undertones that lay just beneath the surface of their interactions.  The internet meme of the duo as suppressed gay lovers is amusing, and there’s definitely a spark of homosexual desire that drives their bond.  Credit Fuller, again, for having the guts to redirect Hannibal Lecter’s previously dandyish but very heterosexual impulses (his most enduring on-screen relationship so far the May-September one with Clarice Starling) into coded gay longing.  Maybe this is part of the reason why the show hasn’t reached a broader audiences; the arena of network television still like its relationships to be resolutely hetero or definably gay in a prancing or butch manner. 

Beyond all of this, though, is the boldness he displays in forming a male-male coupling that is defined less by traditional modes of sexuality and more by the logical extension of male bonding that the culture has reduced to the status of bromance.  For here are two men who have found the ultimate definition of themselves in each other, even as that fulfillment comes loaded with self-destruction and the possibility of annihilation.  Will is able to clearly define the blurring of their personalities that has taken place, even as he also deals with the retroactive and future guilt that he now feels for all of Hannibal’s murders.  It’s the endgame for Will’s empathic abilities; he might have feared forever bonding with Garret Jacob Hobbs, but the connection he’s formed with Hannibal extends to an almost genetic level.  Such haziness lends this scene a queasy feeling, but it also makes it downright touching, a depiction of two people inextricably headed toward doom, yet also deeply enamored of each other.  It also blows away most other televisual and cinematic representations of the complexities of human relationships in the depth of maturity to which it strives. 

In the realm of complex pairings, we also have the curious case of Bedelia DuMaurier, who has been posing for so long as Lydia Fell that she now regularly self-administers a potent mixture of sedatives to keep her act going when Jack and Will arrive on the scene.  Again, in most narratives of this sort, Bedelia would be the victimized woman or the femme fatale, but Hannibal  won’t allow for such easy answers.  For the better part of two seasons, she’s simultaneously expressed a deep attraction and revulsion toward her patient/lover/captor.  But even now, after so many hints this season of her disgust with Hannibal’s murderous tendencies, she refuses to participate in simple dialectics when it comes to her feelings, packing up his bags as she prepares to part from him, telling him that he won’t be eating her, but still sharing a tender kiss and intimating that that act of cannibalism might still happen someday.  And her staunch defense of him in the face of multiple interrogations shows the depth her bond with him, mirroring so much of Will’s situation.  On a meta-level, these two relationships might be read as a metaphor for the plight of intellectuals and artists, who need their mutual company in a world that is so defined by strict measures of good taste, success, quality. 

To continue the angle of complex and dysfunctional relationships, there’s Mason Verger’s homicidal revenge lust.  His obsession with eating Hannibal is a neat bit of poetic justice, but it also seems to hold deeper implications.  Look at the scene in which he fantasizes about walking up to the table where a fully glazed and prepared cannibal has been served up, Cordell’s rapturous description of the cooking process still ringing in his ears.  There’s such peace in Mason’s gait and countenance.  When he awakens to the sound of his phone, the pained, wistful look on Joe Anderson’s mangled face almost makes you sympathize with this monster of a man, forever trapped in a physical prison borne from the cost of his own excessive ways.  Mason might be a horrible person, but he’s as much of a product of his upbringing as any of the show’s other characters.  This single act of revenge seems to represent, for him, a chance at redemption through assimilation (or as his newly found Bibilical viewpoint allows him, a “transfiguration.”)

The mechanics of that redemption form the basis for a scene (and an edit) that is as moving and hallucinatory as anything the show has produced this season.  Drawn once again back into Hannibal’s lair, Jack is forced to witness Will (who, earlier in the show, he admitted to possibly wanting to carry out Hannibal’s killing on his behalf, looping back around once again to his usage of Will as a pawn from the earlier seasons) serves as the main course of the recreation of the planned dinner from “Mizumono.”  As Hannibal notes “Jack was the first to suggest getting inside your head.  Now we both have the opportunity to chew quite literally…what we’ve only chewed figuratively.”  As he bores in on Will’s skull with a saw, seasoned Lecter fans will recognize the encroaching doom as the same one that FBI sleazebag Paul Krendler suffers at the climax of the Thomas Harris’s Hannibal.  And for a moment, Jack’s ultimate nightmare seems to be coming true, as blood flies from a drugged Will’s scalp.  But that blood slows down into an impressionistic splatter of crimson rain (an image that has been repeated many times in the show), climaxing in several splotches suspended against a heavenly field of clouds (reminiscent of the celestial ending of “Mizumono”) before cutting to Will and Hannibal hanging upside down alongside other cuts of meat, the newest arrivals to the Verger estate, Mason there to greet them with delight.  This transition seems to indicate that the bribed Florence police arrive to the scene before Will’s brain is served up as the main course, but it also creates enough temporal dissonance to call into question the nature of the reality of this final scene.  But in a season in which the characters have often moved as the dead navigating their way through the underworld, this should come as no surprise.