Hannibal

When I first heard that they were going to be making a television show about Hannibal Lechter, I, like many others, was intensely skeptical. Not only did this seem like a cheap "recognizable name = profit" kind of thing, but we have been, I think, somewhat inundated with the "sociopaths catching killers" genre (as much as I like Sherlock, I do also think that some of its camp has begun to wear a little thin, and Dexter really never got as good as its first season, even though the fourth was pretty good.)

But then I discovered that Hannibal was cooked up by Bryan Fuller, he of Dead Like Me, Wonderfalls (which I have yet to see) and Pushing Daisies. Fuller makes good television, and after binge-watching the first nine episodes of Hannibal, this opinion has not changed.

Yet while Dead Like Me and Pushing Daisies took a surprisingly light (and in the latter case, even cheerful) tone despite being about death, Hannibal is a show that exists deep in the darkest pits of hell. That's not to say there isn't occasional levity (often brought about by the forensics team composed of Hettienne Park, Aaron Abrams, and none other than Buddy Cole himself, Scott Thompson,) but Hannibal is a hard R in terms of tone and graphic violence.

As an aside, it is actually shocking to me the level of gore they are able to show on a network television show. To stand on my soapbox for a second, why does NBC get fined if they let an errant "fuck" out now and then or show someone naked (which are both perfectly natural things that can and will occur in the average person's life) whereas showing a man whose throat has been cut open so that his vocal chords can be turned into the strings of a macabre cello is A-OK? I have never been able to wrap my head around why our culture finds violence so much more comfortable than sex and, even more absurdly, foul language. Anyway, coming down from the soapbox now.

Theoretically, Hannibal is a procedural, but it escapes the trap of many procedurals by focusing far, far more on the regular cast than drawing out the killer-of-the-week mystery. In fact, the weekly killer is rarely the focus of an episode.

While it branches out a bit as the series progresses, the center of the show is not, as one would imagine, the cultured cannibal who Anthony Hopkins won an Oscar performing (little known fact: he was not the first to play Lechter. That was Brian Cox in Manhunter in the 80s.) Rather, the protagonist is Will Graham, played by Hugh Dancy. Graham is primarily an academic psychological profiler who teaches FBI trainees at Quantico, but has a unique gift (which doubles as a curse) that allows him to get into the minds of killers.

In the face of a tricky (and of course, utterly horrific) series of killings, Jack Crawford (Laurence Fishburne) brings Graham in to help in figuring out the killer's motivation. However, Graham's colleague Alana Bloom (Caroline Dhavernas) objects, given the strain that such work puts on Graham's psyche. Crawford seeks out Bloom's old mentor, Hannibal Lechter, to work as a kind of therapist or anchor to help Graham deal with the mental stress.

And so, after a fairly long way into the pilot, we finally encounter the infamous Doctor Lechter. Lechter is played my Mads Mikkelsen, and he does so in a way that makes him at once utterly and completely dissimilar to Anthony Hopkin's Lechter, while still coming around to the same basic blueprint of the character. Mikkelsen's Lechter has almost none of the scenery-chewing grandiosity of Hopkins', but is instead perfectly cool, perfectly subtle. If one were not aware of the show's legacy, one could potentially be fooled into thinking that Lechter was, in fact, just a cool foreign intellectual... at least until we see him carving up human lungs for his next meal.

Thus, the dynamic of the show eventually becomes clear. Graham and the team pursue and confront demons week to week, while they remain unaware that one of their number is the devil himself. The friendship between Will and Hannibal is surprisingly genuine, but one must remember that the defining trait of Hannibal Lechter is that despite his appetites and his proclivities, he is ultimately seeking out people he can call friends (though he tends to butcher those who don't live up to his standards.)

The show is rendered cinematically, recalling Seven, and perhaps unsurprisingly Silence of the Lambs. Additionally, the role of dreams (usually nightmares) and imagination plays a prominent role, showing the dark side of Fuller's typical whimsy. One of the major visual signals of the show is the demonstration of Will Graham's "killer mind imagination." At the crime scenes, he wipes away his fellow investigators, and the accumulation of time, with a sort of windshield-wiper of yellow light. Honestly, this reminds me a bit of the UI of a video game, but in a good way, if that makes sense. Just as if you were going into "Eagle Vision" in an Assassin's Creed game, Will goes into his "killer vision," but the effect is particularly disturbing, as it forces him to cast himself as the killer.

The show is not flawless. While Dhavernas does a lot with what she gets, it seems that Alana Bloom does not have a clear role to play in the series just yet, other than as a complicated love interest for Will, and in a more disturbing way, for Hannibal (really only disturbing because of what we know of Hannibal.) Likewise, the sensationalist blogger Freddie Lounds (Lara Jean Chorosteki) is a little too winkingly selfish and self-serving.

The danger, I think, for Hannibal is that it could become too much of a superhero story. We already have Will's empathic superpower and Lechter is weighed down by so much time in the public consciousness that he could come to feel a bit too much of a cardboard cutout - a symbol of a character rather than a character. Mikkelsen and the writers have thankfully been working hard to avert that so far, but I think it's a danger they should look out for.

But so far, what I've seen of the show has been excellent, though I would emphatically encourage you not to eat while watching it.