MAD MEN Ep. 90: "Lost Horizon"

In which it may not have sunk in, but your status has changed.

“When I want something, I get it.  And I wanted you for ten years. You’re my white whale, Don.”  -Jim Hobart

And so, all that glitters…well, you know how it goes.  It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the Valhalla of McCann-Erickson that Jim Hobart promises the five SC&P partners at the conclusion of “Time and Date” turns out to be as soulless as they expected (well, at least for some of them.)  Indeed, “Lost Horizon”, with its psychological landscape of white whales, Shangri-La’s and open roads, posits that the existential longing for that mythical goal in any life might always be consumed by futility.  It’s Don and Rachel’s conversation about utopia from Season 1 all over again: the good place and the place that cannot be.  And yet, this episode also suggests that sometimes that inherent futility is the whole point, and a source of fulfillment in and of itself.

The title of this episode refers, of course, to the famed book and films of the same name, in which one prosperous man, on the verge of even further greatness, finds himself detoured into that mythical valley of eternal youth that is Shangri-La.  The question that much of the plot poses is where is the Shangri-La for each of these characters?  And how do they deal with the very real possibility that their dreams are forever disappeared over that horizon?  The result is one of the truly great episodes of the show’s run, an elegy for all that they (and we) have known for these past six plus seasons.

Mad Men has always been a master class in production design, the meticulous detail of its sets, props, the whole invented world of the past a character unto itself.  Such attention to minutiae has always given the locations a completely immersive feel.  So it should come as no surprise that the harsh reality of the McCann-Erickson transition lies in the contrasting sets that open this episode.  The old SC&P digs may be a shambles of leftover boxes and empty spaces, but its bright color palette and the glow of natural light from its copious bay windows still make it a warm and welcoming environment.  In stark contrast, the definitely ‘70s décor of the McCann offices, all brown and grey enclosed hallways and box offices, is like a casket…or a mausoleum.  It’s the death of ‘60s pop optimism at the hands of a grimmer new decade.

And it’s exactly the sausage factory that Don though it would be so long ago, back when Jim Hobart’s siren call first reached his ears.  There’s a hint of optimism in one of his first meetings with Jim and Ferg Donnelly, as he’s once again presented the world at his feet and lauded as the great catch of McCann’s dreams.  The camera even plays along with this seemingly fresh start, dollying in on Don when he finally utters those magic words “I’m Don Draper, from McCann-Erickson.” 

“I realized these were all the snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder, thinking their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered lives and got up in the morning to walk proudly on the sidewalks of life, never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, our actual night, the hell of it, the senseless emptiness.”

But it only takes his first big meeting with the Miller diet beer account for reality to slap him upside the head.  In the leadup to the SC&P dissolution, Don was able to play sage realist to Pete and Joan’s disappointment, coolly suggesting the inherent rough changes of the business.  Once he’s in the Miller meeting, that manufactured sand froid finally collapses, as he sees how this new setup is just as crushing as he thought it would be.

Following the trend of these final episodes, the Miller meeting is once again a callback to the show’s past and the characters’ past glories.  In this case, we’re all the way back to “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes”, the pilot episode.  Instead of being the focus of attention, Don is just one of many creative directors at the meeting, all attentively absorbing the words of Bill Phillips from Conley Research.  Phillips’s analysis, a pitch focused on the average Midwest husband demographic, makes explicit reference to convincing said man to abandon loyalty to “his brand of beer.”  It’s a direct line back to the first scene of Mad Men, in which Sam the bartender tells Don that he smokes Old Gold cigarettes out of loyalty and habit.  Don was the one researching those motivations then, and he was able to laugh off Greta Guttman’s intimations of the Freudian death wish’s role in smoking’s appeal.  But that was ten years ago, when creativity drove the business.  In the end, the Duck Phillipses and Jim Cutlers of the world were right: advertising has become a data-driven game.  And now it’s Don in a subservient role to the alpha male status of numbers king Bill Phillips (the POV shot of Don’s befuddled gaze at the uniform note-taking of the other meeting attendees really hammers things home.)

The only person hit harder by this transition to the McCann afterlife has been Joan.  The old Sterling Cooper days might’ve featured rampant sexism and misogyny, but there was always a sense of frat house frivolity about the proceedings.  And she was the queen bee of manipulating those male hijinks to her advantage.  The way that McCann execs of all stripes treat Joan is much more crass and darkly manipulative.  Ferg Donnelly seems to provide her a respite from Dennis’s dismissive sexism, but even he only wants to sleep with her in the end. 

Christina Hendricks’s run as Joan has always been one laced with intrigue and sadness.  Already in her early 30’s at the show’s genesis point, she’s never been young enough to take full advantage of the freedoms that the encroaching women’s rights movement begins to provide.  The limited power that she originally possesses over the secretary’s pool turns out to be a self-perpetuating trap when she strives to transcend mere eye candy status.  Her partner status at SC&P, the grand achievement of her professional life, only comes when she agrees to sleep with Jaguar’s Herb Rennet.  Now, at the dawn of a new decade, stripped of her partner status, she’s back to just being the house sex bomb.  When she confronts Jim Hobart about the rampant sexual harassment she’s faced, invoking Betty Freidan and the ACLU, it seems like the moment of sweet retaliation against male oppression for which she’s always been yearning.  But she ultimately heeds Roger’s advice to take the fifty cents on the dollar that Hobart offers her as severance, while also ignoring beau Richard’s offer to send “a guy” to talk to the McCann boys.  Whether this is Joan abandoning any hope of reaching her own personal Shangri-La, or merely choosing the relative comfort of Richard’s benevolence over never-ending career conflict is still a matter of conjecture.

“What is that feeling when you're driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? - it's the too-huge world vaulting us, and it's good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.”

And speaking of Roger Sterling, the clown prince of the SC&P empire, the man who saved it all by selling its soul, the guy who, in Peggy’s words, was supposed to protect them all.  One of the saddest parts of the Mad Men’s demise is the impending absence of John Slattery’s brilliant portrayal of this magnificently flawed, epically hilarious, totally charming character.  Crass and opportunistic as he may be, there’s always been a passionate (albeit damaged) heart beating within Roger.  Look back to his pained, almost helpless love for Joan in Season 1 high mark “Babylon”.  Or to the sudden call to maturity that saves Don’s existence and prolongs the company’s life in the first half of this season.  Roger may be an accounts man out of time, lost in the generational shuffle, but his artist’s soul has always made him more human than a Jim Cutler or a Jim Hobart.

Which makes his extended scenes with Peggy in “Lost Horizon” so touching, and funny, and beautiful.  They’re two characters who’ve never shared that much screen time together, and it’s easy to remember her as the timid secretary of Don’s whom Roger condescended to back in 1960.  But now they’re both the last survivors of the SC&P crew, manning a ghost ship of an office while she waits for her new McCann spot and he clears out the final detritus of his vanquished existence.  Their semi-drunken conversation (fuelled by Vermouth, the last resort for the election night party in Season 1’s “Nixon vs. Kennedy”!) is a pure bit of Mad Men character development.  She correctly accuses him of selling out the company, yet doesn’t entirely resent him for being who he is.  He acknowledges the real loss he’s finally feeling, now that the house his father built with Bert Cooper is no more, and yet his pragmatism about the cold realities of the business won’t allow him to despair.  Many shows, especially this late in the run, might try to turn this into a grand emotional climax.  But that’s nothing that Matt Weiner has ever been interested in pursuing, and it’s that commitment to the fuzziness of human behavior that makes a scene like this so satisfying.  (Although there is one obvious result of it: Peggy’s entrance into the McCann offices the next day, sunglasses on, smoking a cigarette, lugging Bert Cooper’s old painting of a woman being violated by an octopus, heeding Roger’s subtle advice that she need not just be non-threatening to men to succeed.)

The final scene of Roger and Peggy’s time in the SC&P office is brief, but it’s a gorgeous, haunting moment, easily one of my all-time favorites in the show’s history.  Playing the organ that was left over from “Time and Date’s” child actor auditions, Roger tickles the ivories to the tune of “Hi Lilli Hi Lo” (the elegiac standard about lost love) while Peggy rollerskates in a circle around him.  There are so many beautiful things contained in this image.  The soft, evening-bound lighting that renders it as almost a faded memory.  The goofy, yet touching incongruity of the whole thing.  The way it encapsulates the shaggy playfulness that could happen at Sterling Cooper, a sense of camaraderie completely absent from the frigid McCann machine.  There’s even a hint of “The Phantom of the Opera” about the whole thing, with Roger as the slightly mournful spirit haunting the room (Peggy first realizes he’s still there when she hears the distant, ghostly organ tones.)    

“A pain stabbed my heart, as it did every time I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world.”

This timeless dream moment crossfades into Don in his Cadillac, chasing after another one of his many white whales in an endlessly repeating pursuit of Shangri-La.  Once it was called Betty, then Rachel, then Suzanne, then Megan…and now Diana.  But they’ve all been in service to his ceaseless sense of wanderlust, which is once again stoked during the Miller meeting when he looks off to see a plane ascending in the distance.  Which is not to completely discount the genuine nature of his feelings.  There’s a nice moment he shares with Betty in this episode, where she gently rebuffs his well-practiced shoulder massage/stab at connection (while studying Freud!), and it reminds the viewer that the long-gone Draper marriage was based on more than just opportunism and money.  Don’s line as he leaves the house (“Knock ‘em dead Birdie”) is genuinely moving, as he reaches a moment where he can come to terms with what they once had, and what they can still be to each other. 

The quantifiable reality of some of Don’s journey is still up for debate; after all, his vision of Bert Cooper in his car (and in the final scene of “Waterloo”) shows that Don isn’t above projecting his inner turmoil.  Classic narrative structure would dictate that his realization of the true emptiness of the McCann experience should lead him finally dropping the straightjacket of his corporate life and pursuing his dream.  But we’ve seen this before in his nomadic visits to California, and the resulting minor changes in his life.  And at every turn, Diana has proven to be more elusive and unreachable than before; her ex-husband refers to her as “a tornado”, someone that only Jesus can save, and she herself is last seen pushing Don out of her life.

Maybe this is why Don’s pursuit has taken on such a deeper meaning for him.  Maybe he’s finally broken his pattern and is chasing a woman who seems to be just as a damaged as him, and who has left a similar wake of destruction.  Or maybe Don Draper is just someone for whom the goal will never truly be known, for whom the quest is all that’s there.  It’s notable that, in conversation with his vision of Bert, he compares his travels to On the Road, that totemic icon of the rewards and perils of the flight toward meaning.  The myth of Jack Kerouac’s vision is that it was only a call to life, while in reality, he was never afraid to offer up pointed critique when appropriate.  Nowhere is this more evident than in his portrayal of Dean Moriarty (Neal Cassidy in real world parlance) who is both the ideal of masculinity and deeply flawed drifter.  There’s a whole lot of Dean in Don, his nagging desire to just go a perfect complement to the suave charisma he can’t help but generate.  In the end of On the Road, Dean is last seen as a somewhat battered shell of his former self, still chasing his indefinable dream toward who knows what.  As he picks up a hitchhiker at the conclusion of “Lost Horizon” (David Bowie’s “Space Oddity”, that classic ballad of exploration both interior and exterior playing on his car radio), Don is still adrift on the road, far away from the life he’s built for himself, in pursuit of a person, a ghost, an ideal, a………………………       

“What difference does it make after all?--anonymity in the world of men is better than fame in heaven, for what’s heaven? what’s earth? All in the mind.”

HANNIBAL Ep. 6: "Entree"

(S           P           O           I           L           E           R           S)

In which here we are: a bunch of psychopaths helping each other out.

For all of the ways in which Bryan Fuller successfully reinvents the Lecterverse in Hannibal, the long shadow of Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs inevitably hangs heavy over this world.  Which is completely understandable.  Few films of the modern era have so resolutely embedded themselves in the pop consciousness like that Oscar-sweeping behemoth.  Think about it objectively for a second, how unlikely its success was, especially by 1991’s standards.  Here was a mid-budget drama featuring an Oscar-winning former child actress playing an FBI agent advised by a cannibal (portrayed by a Welsh actor with minimal stateside renown) in her pursuit of a psychopath assembling a skin suit.  Oh, and it features some of the more brutally violent scenes in then-mainstream cinema, including a climactic orgy of annihilation in which the cannibal doctor beats a guard to death with his baton and then, in one of my personal favorite reveals, is shown to have used his sliced-off face as a mask for his escape.

Titanic, this ain’t kids.

But with twenty years hindsight, it’s easy to see how Silence of the Lambs arrived at the perfect time in which to capture the zeitgeist.  The political conservatism of the Reagan ‘80s was about to give way to the more progressive bent of the Clinton ‘90s, and the film’s explorations of deviant subcultures dovetails with the emergence of much of the underground into mainstream culture (to use the title of the famous Nirvana/Sonic Youth documentary of the time, it was 1991: The Year Punk Broke…in all the permutations of that word.)  Jason Voorhees and Freddy Krueger might have been the nightmare lords of ‘80s horror cinema, but by the end of the decade they were more amusing ghouls than agents of fright.  The Hannibal Lecter of Silence is a truly transgressive figure, the end product of ten years of corporate power run wild: a suave, urbane man in a three piece suit who also happens to eat people.  And a medical figure, someone in whom you place your full psychological trust, who will betray and manipulate that confidence in ways far beyond your wildest dreams.  Add the second wave feminism that was bubbling up in the cultural conversation, and how aptly Jodie Foster’s Clarice Starling embodies a new wave of strong women heroes, and the portrait of the film’s crossover success becomes complete.

Fuller has always been upfront with his debt to the classic Lecterverse, and part of the enjoyment to be derived from watching this show is in spotting the often sly references he makes to it.  In the essay for “Coquilles”, I mentioned the allusions to Francis Dolarhyde and his eventual Red Dragon persona (in his audio commentary for the series pilot, Fuller notes that the opening Marlow murder scene is intended to be Dolarhyde’s first.)  “Entrée” is easily the most-Silence festooned episode yet, with the introduction of the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, its infamous maximum security wing/dungeon, and smarmy general administrator Frederick Chilton (Raul Esparza).  At his dinner with Chilton and Alana Bloom, Hannibal even drops in the oft-quoted final Lecter line from Silence (“It’s nice to have an old friend for dinner.”)

But Hannibal’s references to its progenitors aren’t merely winking namechecks.  As “Entrée” shows, it often uses that rich mythology as an echo chamber in which its characters journey, while also subverting its audience’s expectations.  And some callbacks fundamentally alter the Lecterverse in often fascinating ways.

So ingrained in the cultural consciousness is Anthony Hopkins’s performance as Hannibal Lecter, that Mads Mikkelsen’s task in reinterpreting the good doctor seemed daunting, to say the least.  Hopkins brings a theatrical flair and an aesthete’s decadent leanings to Hannibal’s persona.  By the time Clarice Starling meets him, he’s become acclimated to life in the confines of the State Hospital, and to playing the role of the monster hidden in the depths of the castle.  Once he’s escaped to Italy in the sequel, he’s free to indulge the outer limits of his psyche; if the film version of Silence is formally tailored toward the hard, incisive perspective of Starling, the filmed Hannibal is a stylistic outgrowth of the operatic sensibilities of its title cannibal.

Which makes Mikkelsen’s performance as the pre-committal Hannibal so compelling.  His unconventional good looks, almost reptilian in their nature, give him the appearance of a perpetually inquisitive predator, yet a predator whose seductive presence reels in most of those in his orbit.  He’s not afraid to underplay many aspects of Hannibal’s persona, turning him into a blank slate upon which the other characters project themselves.  This can be an alienating concept for some viewers; it’s easy to root for Hopkins as the larger than life anti-hero, but the Machiavellian calculations that Mikkelsen’s Hannibal displays throughout the first two seasons make him both fascinating and deeply frustrating (he’s always that far ahead of everyone else.)  It’s a testament to his underplaying that when he reads Freddie Lounds’s FBI-approved article on Gideon’s supposed Ripper status, the annoyed clicking of his fingers feels like an explosion of rage.

“Entrée” seems to be keenly aware of the Hopkins legacy, as it serves up Eddie Izzard in the role of Dr. Abel Gideon, a most Hopkins-like villain.  When Alana makes her initial descent into the max security wing, it recalls Clarice Starling’s first visit with Hannibal, and Gideon’s demeanor is very much in keeping with the slightly arch and taunting tone that Hopkins takes in his portrayal.  Izzard’s casting is intriguing on several levels, with his combination of comedic and dramatic chops allowing him to project menace mingled with mirth.  His long history of helping to mainstream cross-dressing and his frankness about his own transgenderism also plays into the complex and mutable sexuality of the Lecterverse on a meta-level.

And the introduction of Miriam Lass (Anna Chlumsky) as the albatross around the guilt-ridden Jack Crawford’s neck certainly pays tribute to his future recruitment of the similarly green Clarice Starling.  Lass has the same plucky determination and slight naivety that defines the Starling of Silence.  She also trumps her more veteran superiors by having the wits and wherewithal to ferret out the Chesapeake Ripper (much like Starling’s insight helps her nab Buffalo Bill, as she literally shows up at the house that no one else figured out.)  But Hannibal Lecter is no Jame Gumb, and his advanced level of awareness spells doom for the young FBI trainee.

In the first five episodes of Season 1, Jack often comes across as an angry, stern figure.  Even as he’s humanized with the introduction of Bella’s cancer diagnosis, he’s simultaneously compared to an absentee god who’s abandoned his creation in Will.  This episode’s inclusion of the Miriam Lass storyline gives much greater weight to the motivation factor for much of his stern nature (well, that and the nature of the job, the emotional toll of which he lectures Lass on.)  It also forges a strong connection between Will and him, as we now see that both men are haunted by a crushing guilt for the human cost of their work.

On a meta-level, the inclusion of these references to the classic Lecterverse also creates a world which suggests that Will’s philosophy of futility is more correct than he knows.  Establishing Miriam as the Clarice precursor gives the narrative arc a sense of doomed repetition, and Gideon’s foreshadowing of the future Hannibal’s demeanor (albeit filtered through Hopkins’s role) can make the audience feel as if this role of the charismatic uber-maniac is one which must be filled by one person or another.  Will’s greatest fear is that the paralysis of his vision will allow events to repeat themselves, and that with each one he’ll lose more of himself.  The expansion of this version of the Lecterverse is often seen through his eyes, so it would only make sense (especially as his mental state deteriorates) that he would see those fears growing more powerful all around him. 

Time for the leftovers:

*We’ve seen several of Hannibal’s ritualistic murders (even though at this point of the season, they haven’t been explicitly attributed to him), their Bosch-like tableau nature creating works of art out of the victims.  The Chesapeake Ripper murders on display in “Entrée” (one by Lecter, one by copycat Gideon) are chaotic counterpoints to the aforementioned crime scenes, almost cubist works of violence in their perversion of sleek medicinal metal into human skewers.

*”Not to snap bubblegum and crack wise, but what’s my angle?” (Freddie, to the FBI trio.)

*Speaking of Ms. Lounds, Lara Jean Chorostecki and Raul Esparza (as Chilton) really get to chew the scenery in this episode.  I’ll always have a soft spot for Anthony Heald’s Chilton in the earlier Lecter films, but Esparza brings an arch contempt for everyone around him to his entertaining take on the role.

*Note that the Chesapeake Ripper copycat murder (and, by implication, the previous ones as well) involves the removal of his victim’s eyes, a visual echo of Garret Jacob Hobbs’s final words to Will (“See?  “See?”)

HANNIBAL Ep. 5: "Coquilles"

(S           P           O           I           L           E           R           S)

In which I can give you the majesty of your becoming.

But listen carefully to the sound

Of your loneliness

Like a heartbeat.. drives you mad

In the stillness of remembering what you had

And what you lost...

(“Dreams”/Fleetwood Mac)

It is the driving force, the dark, pulsating heart of Hannibal this claustrophobic tension between the clinical world of quantifiable psychiatry and the lurking, illogical pandemonium of the dream world.  The Silence of the Lambs derived great power from Hannibal Lecter’s acumen with hyper-logical mind games, and the its sequel indulged his more operatic, decadent sensibilities.  But Bryan Fuller’s aim is to plumb the depths of the mind without a certifiable expectation for any easy diagnosis.  To touch madness.  To experience every corner of the inky 3am world where fantasy and reality engage in a dance of erotic phantasmagoria, a Jungian melding of the indefinable twin impulses of our lives.

And at the center of it all, sweating through his pillow night after night, gripped by the mania that so many of us have felt in the middle of the night, when rational solutions seem wholly inadequate, lies Will Graham.  The latest in a long line of heroic loners, possessed by a vision quest not of his choosing.  God’s Lonely Man, as Thomas Wolfe might say.  A seer schooled in the cold logic of murderous intent and damaged psyches, but also one who’s had the curtain of reality drawn ever so slightly back for him.  Who’s been given a glimpse of the anarchic glories that lie behind it, wild flights of fancy that occasionally kiss the quotidian through a barrier more gossamer than most realize.

A man whose profound isolation and loneliness often leave him only with the sound of his heart, and of the guilt that consumes it, to drive him mad.  And to taunt him with the question: “Why?”  And maybe more importantly: “How much more?”  In “Coquilles”, the standout fifth episode of Hannibal’s maiden voyage, that taunting grows deafening.       

I found an island in your arms

Country in your eyes

Arms that chain

Eyes that lie

Break on through to the other side

(“Break on Through”/The Doors)

Beverly Katz may be a supporting player in the Hannibal universe whose purpose often seems to involve providing exposition alongside comic sidekicks Zeller and Price(although her eventual murder at Hannibal’s hands marks a turning point in the show’s narrative arc), but she’s given one of the key lines in “Coquilles”, one which illuminates many of this episode’s messianic aims.  As she and the forensics team perform the autopsy on one of the Angel Maker’s victims, she notes that “Death makes angels of us all, and gives us wings where we had shoulders, smooth as raven’s claws.”  Zeller guesses Robert Frost as the quote’s source, but Will correctly credits Jim Morrison.  “Even a drunk with a flair for the dramatic can convince himself that he’s God” she quips. “Or the lizard king.”

Pop culture consensus has made it acceptable to venerate Frost as a transcendent poet, while relegating Morrison to the status of drunken buffoon spouting fourth grade poetry.  But Frost could produce material that was resolutely traditional, and Morrison’s rock star status and confrontational persona often obscured his Rimbaud and Blake-influenced visions of profound existential questing.  The hazy line between these two celebrity poets of the 20^th Century is part and parcel of our definition of genius and insight.  It’s also a split diopter of the sacred and the profane through which to view much of what occurs in this episode.

The most obvious allusion to Frost that Bryan Fuller provides the audience comes in the pre-credits sequence when Elliot Buddish (the Angel Maker) gazes upon two of his prospective victims at his hotel, seeing only their heads aflame (one of the series’ most striking images).  In a state of agitation, he averts his gaze into the bucket of ice he’s gone to collect.  It’s a direct reference to Frost’s “Fire and Ice”, his famous vision of the twin forces of apocalyptic destruction.  In a show filled with dichotomous tension, these forces stand comfortably alongside dreams and reality, logic and madness.     

In a greater sense, Frost’s poetry often explores the outer reaches of isolation, and the potential for inner destruction therein.  And it’s here that he finds kinship with Morrison, whose travels along the road of excess toward enlightenment was shared by many, but which was still at heart the voyage of a solitary man.  The transformative power of Morrison’s onstage persona, and the backbone of his continuing legacy, was his total commitment to performance as a means of transcendence, a nightly act of giving yourself over to the oft erratic impulses in the air.  It’s what made him a mesmerizing force of nature at his best, and a drunken buffoon at his worst.  But such is the sacrifice and the peril of commitment to capturing the essence of the shaman.

Such a shamanic imperative is at the heart of Will Graham’s vision quest, his dark romance of a duet with the other side.  It’s only by channeling the twisted psyches of his subjects, by almost completely giving himself over to them, that’s he’s able to fully comprehend their obscene motivations.  Elliot Buddish provides the most harrowing mirror image for him yet.  Though according to his wife he’s not a religious man, the onset of his brain tumor inspires thoughts most divine in his mind.  His quest to transform sinners into saints through a grotesque transfiguration of the flesh echoes the Old Testament philosophy of redemption through blood sacrifice.  It also gives Will a view of the dark side of revelation, a reality that only seems a half step away from his.  Transfiguration reigns over this episode, as Bella Crawford reveals her cancer diagnosis by intellectually dissecting the cold and emotionless calculus that the cancer employs in taking over her lungs.  And Buddish is clearly a precursor to the mythical chaos that will be wrought by Francis Dolarhyde, the Red Dragon himself (the quote that leads off this essay is from Will’s nightmare vision of Buddish, a direct reference to a famous Dolarhyde line.  It’s also a parallel to Hannibal’s Cassie Boyle murder tableau subconsciously mirroring Will’s previous visions of Theresa Marlow’s gored body, yet another example of the waking world freely intermingling with the dreamscape.  And don’t forget the psychosexual transformative desire of Jame Gumb/Buffalo Bill.)

In biblical terms, Will hews to the classic model of the prophet, endowed with an almost spiritual sense of insight that is both gift and curse.  He’s doomed to be rejected (although in this case, the rejection is mostly self-inflicted) and, as I mentioned in a previous essay, to endure a sort of reverse Cassandra complex, sentenced to a life recreating the events of the past, paralyzed to change them in any way.  But this paralysis also tears apart his psyche, transforming him into what he sees as the manifestation of his worst fears.  And the only person who seems to empathize with the wicked power of his visions is a vaccum of empathy who revels in playing both God and Devil.  

Lost in a Roman wilderness of pain

And all the children are insane

(“The End”/The Doors)

Though there are certainly religious overtones in parts of Hannibal, “Coquilles” is the first episode to address the topic of a divine presence in such explicit fashion.  And the question of an absentee God hangs heavy over the proceedings.  During their conversation about the Angel Maker, Hannibal tells Will that “Any idea of God comes from many different areas of the mind working together in unison.”  Later, Will says of the Angel Maker “His mind has turned against him, and there’s no one there to help.”  Once again, he clearly realizes his brotherhood with Elliot Buddish, their mutual cry for relief from a damaged psyche. 

But this exchange also begs the question: If our conception of God comes from the mind, does the revolt of the mind also equal the revolt/failure of God?  On a deeper level, does Will’s fear for his sanity mask a despair for a potentially godless universe, in which that curtain between dreams and reality is due to fall at any moment?  Granted, it’s a somewhat Lovecraftian notion, but seen from the perspective of this man on the edge (which is our viewpoint for much of the show), it’s worth considering.  It’s also deeply complicated by the eventual revelation of Will’s encephalitis and the effect it has on his perception of reality, although how many prophets of all ages (Elliot Buddish included) have walked that line between medical malady and divine insight? At the scenes of Buddish’s crimes, DP James Hawkinson employs a God’s eye POV of Will, the camera slowly descending towards him, Hugh Dancy looking for all the world like a penitent man in search of something beyond his world, staring straight into the face of God…but a God whose handiwork betrays his vengeful intent.

If God is absent, then Will is left with Jack and Hannibal to stand in for him, each man manipulating his abilities to their own effect.  It’s in “Coquilles” that Hannibal first firmly plants the seeds of dissent between Jack and Will, telling his patient that gods often abandon their creations, while also referring to his service to Jack as a deal with the Devil.  The irony is delicious, as it’s Hannibal whose calculated oscillation between God and Devil figure leaves Will as his ultimate creation, and his ultimate experiment.  His fascination with the fungible nature of spiritual enlightenment can be summed up in his comments to Will about Buddish:

“You want to feel such sweet and easy peace.  The Angel Maker wants that same peace.  He hopes to feel his way cautiously inside and then find it's endless, all around him… You accept the impossibility of such a feeling, whereas the angel maker is still chasing it.”

Part of Hannibal might rationalize the impossibility of this ocean of peace, but his curiosity about the mental impulse that drives anyone to search for it also drives him to prod Will into the deeper recesses of that journey.  Judeo-Christian beliefs often portray the grace of God as an all-encompassing embrace of love.  As a God figure in his life, Hannibal offers Will that same comforting embrace.  But it’s an embrace of enveloping darkness.