Я очень извиняюсь перед всеми, кто подписался на этот дневник ради .. ну, уж точно не этого))) У меня не самое лучшее время в жизни так что это простительно?
VULTURE
Hannibal Redefined How We Tell Stories on Television
The show is a palace of dreams, and we are strolling through it.And so, in the end, Hannibal was a love story all along, and a doomed love story at that.
The third season ended like prior seasons, with a wrap-up that could double as a series ender if it came to that; and since, apparently, it has come to that — with NBC deciding not to carry a hypothetical fourth season of this international co-production, and thus effectively ending it — we should marvel at this climax’s majestic, well, finality. Hannibal Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen) and Will Graham (Hugh Dancy) join forces to defeat the fearsome disciple/rival serial killer Red Dragon (Richard Armitage) in a super-slow-motion mano a mano: silent, gorgeously protracted, scored to an original Siouxsie Sioux and Steven Severin song titled “Love Crime” (what else!). As Hannibal’s showrunner Bryan Fuller put it in a Vulture interview — in metaphoric language, which, like so many Fuller observations, renders additional critical commentary superfluous — Will and Hannibal were “like two jackals bringing down a rhinoceros.”
The recent craze for CGI-rendered blood has been a problematic new development for some horror purists, but pixel crimson has never looked as extravagantly sensuous, or felt as aesthetically right, as it has on Hannibal, a series that takes place entirely in dream space. It has a truly painterly texture, a brazen unreality that tickles the senses even as it completes the show’s vision, which is as romantic as it is horrific. Blades enter flesh, skin and tendons are severed, and the blood doesn’t just spill, it jets, sprays, arcs, like acrylic slung at a canvas. The finale’s director, Michael Rymer (director of some of the most aggressively visual episodes of TV drama, especially on Battlestar Galactica), stages it as a death dance, a loving showcase for bodies in motion that never forgets its immediate narrative goal of neutralizing the Red Dragon even as it pushes its true purpose — expressing the twisted, yet perversely pure love between Will and Hannibal — into the foreground. Their bond is brotherly but also romantic and (somehow, powerfully) sexual. This battle is its long-delayed consummation: the sex scene between Will and Hannibal that has been repeatedly imagined in so much fan art, or, to quote Fuller again, a coded “three-way” — one of many imagined by this censorship-flouting network series — wherein “you eliminate the third [participant] and get to business with the two who matter.” Will’s necessary and also eager participation in a killing (he’d only been a passive accessory before) is the sex act Hannibal has been urging him toward, as seen in the dream image (Will’s or Hannibal’s? We don’t know) of the two in a church, Hannibal dressed in a seersucker jacket with a Windsor-knotted tie. “I was rooting for you, Will,” Hannibal says. “It’s a shame: You came all this way and you didn’t get to kill anybody.” He’s not a virgin anymore. He gave it up for Hannibal.
Will and Hannibal’s final moment is a mutual recognition of the loving death-grip they’ve been locked in since season one. It takes place on the edge of a cliff (the right spot for a cliffhanger), backed by a glassed-in home significant to Hannibal’s own history, but also redolent of so many great thriller climaxes, including North by Northwest and, of course, Michael Mann’s Manhunter, a very different take on the same material. They embrace: Will rests his head on Hannibal’s chest, Hannibal puts his chin atop Will’s head, and then they go over the edge. The camera moves in, after a respectful moment, to look down. The final shot (not counting, of course, the post-credits stinger with Gillian Anderson’s Dr. Bedelia Du Maurier serving a Hannibal-styled feast) is a vertigo-inducing overhead shot of the surf crashing into a suggestively V-shaped cove. It is one of the great final shots in TV history. To quote the good doctor himself: “I believe this is what is known as a ‘mic drop.’”
This is as good a place as any to repeat that I’m as surprised as anyone by how much I grew to love this show. I’m on record stating that I never had much interest in serial-killer stories. Except for the occasional outlier (such as Manhunter and parts of The Silence of the Lambs and a few of the images in The Cell) I found most of them either ostentatiously stupid or morally reprehensible: a tactical evasion of real-world evil rather than a useful way of reimagining it in terms of a fable. It wasn’t until Bryan Fuller’s adaptation, which presented itself as a dark fairy tale from minute one, that I willingly immersed myself in Thomas Harris’s fiction. It is about the capacity for evil, and how evil is a stultifying word that closes off understanding, and how empathy really is the flip side of sadism and connected to it, and also about the fragility of order — how it can be tipped very easily into chaos by people like Dolarhyde, or Hannibal, who recognize the fragility, see the thin skeins of twine holding “order” aloft, and play them like guitar strings. They are out there. They may not be as physically imposing as Dolarhyde or as cultivated and smug as Hannibal, but they are out there. As my colleague Greg Cwik points out in his brilliant recap of the finale, via a Herman Melville quote:
“Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure. Consider also the devilish brilliance and beauty of many of its most remorseless tribes, as the dainty embellished shape of many species of sharks. Consider, once more, the universal cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each other, carrying on eternal war since the world began.”
The sophisticated aesthetic developed by Fuller (and his many collaborators, whose ranks include a number of visually oriented directors and a few veteran cinematographers, such as Guillermo S. Navarro, who shot numerous Guillermo del Toro films and directed the 11th and 12th episodes of season three). The aesthetic is the reason why, despite being the most gruesome drama ever aired on network TV, Hannibal never felt unacceptably brutal to me. It is, no question about it, ultraviolent, but not in the manner of a cheap slasher film. It is ultraviolent in the manner of Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd, Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill and The Fury, and Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket and A Clockwork Orange (which Hannibal quotes by scoring Jack's beating of the doctor to Gioachino Rossini's "The Thieving Magpie") and touchstones of religious painting, such as Tintoretto’s 1565 painting of Christ’s crucifixion. It is “studied” in the best way, i.e., thoughtful, considered. It is concerned mainly with exploring what violent actions mean (to us, and to the story) rather than simply attempting to replicate the physical experience of suffering (although it does that, too; every wounding and death on the show is viscerally jolting and also often carries an emotional charge).
And it pays equal attention, sometimes greater attention, to emotional violence, showing how characters (usually Hannibal, but not always) coolly scrutinize their targets, then push certain buttons to ensure a particular outcome that’s often destructive for all involved. The physical violence represents a continuation of emotional violence. This is made clear in many subplots throughout the series, but especially in the reimagining of Red Dragon/the Tooth Fairy in the back half of season three, with Hannibal and Will (individually, but also in tacit collaboration) contriving to slag Francis Dolarhyde as a disfigured, sexually inadequate freak in order to draw him into the open, knowing full well that it’s a cruel and inaccurate description, and beneath them as psychologists and human beings. (In Michael Mann’s 1986 version of the story, and in the novel, they insinuated that Francis was homosexual. Fuller realized this was unwelcome and unnecessary as well as ugly-retro, just as they realized that Dolarhyde’s necrophiliac rape of his female victims was no longer necessary to get across the idea behind his murders, violating the image of a “perfect” nuclear family.) You can see the same care exercised in the way that Hannibal manipulates Bedelia (and how she allows herself to be manipulated) in Italy, and in the many ways that Will’s FBI boss, Jack Crawford (Laurence Fishburne), insinuates that Will is himself behind actions that were originally envisioned, or at least suggested, by Lecter. The word psychodrama is thrown around indiscriminately in criticism (I’ve been guilty!), but here, more so than in a lot of dramas, it fits. Hannibal’s understanding of human psychology, while admittedly expressed in a knowingly stylized and grotesque way, is as sound as that of Mad Men’s or In Treatment’s.
If you read this piece with no experience of the series (and really, why would anyone do that?) you might assume that Hannibal is entirely grim, a parade of perversity, suffering, and gore. It is that. But it’s also quite funny, and somehow in a way that never trivializes the momentousness of the psychological and physical violence. No series, Twin Peaks included, has quite managed to be as deadly serious but also as winkingly ludicrous, so that you can’t easily separate one mode of presentation from the other. The show is an outrageous joke that’s not funny at all, and a horror show that’s very funny, at the same time, without contradiction. (Dreams are funny/not funny that way.) As Hannibal, Mads Mikkelsen gives the sort of performance that would be called “delicious” if a 1940s ham character actor gave it, but there are many moments (particularly reaction shots of Hannibal listening to patients, or to Will) when he seems to be truly feeling the pain of others, even as he thinks about how to increase or top it, as well as moments of serene acceptance or sly amusement. The bromance between him and Will is a joke but not a joke; it’s powerful, just as the relationship between Will and Jack, and Hannibal and Bedelia, Mason Verger (Joe Anderson) and Margot Verger (Katharine Isabelle), and Alana (Caroline Dhavernas) and Margot, who leave the story as co-parents of their Verger baby, which Alana carried. In every scene, there is always humor to relieve the excruciating tension. Some of it veers toward outright camp — particularly the season-three scenes involving Verger, who sounds (as Anderson plays him) like Richard Nixon eating peanut butter, refers to the risen Jesus as “the Riz,” and fantasizes his mortal enemy Hannibal laid out on a banquet table, naked and honey-glazed, and crows, “Transubstantiation!”
There is an elated, intoxicated quality to every frame of this amazing show. So much of Hannibal’s look and feel is what critics who prize linear, foursquare iterations of plot and character would term “excessive” or “pretentious” or, God forbid, “arty.” And there are ways in which such complaints are hard to refute. No reputable psychiatrist would hold sessions in an almost-dark room, as Hannibal Lecter and Bedelia Du Maurier tend to do. There is not now, nor has there ever been, a plague of serial killers who all seem to be auditioning for a spot in a hip art gallery, arranging corpses and pieces of corpses into sculptures and murals and mixed-media installations. Nothing on this series is “realistic” in any sense that means anything. In fact, there are moments when it seems to be channeling German expressionist dream films like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Nosferatu and The Hands of Orlac or The Last Laugh, or Surrealist features such as Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast and Orpheus and Luis Bunuel’s L’Age D’Or and The Exterminating Angel, and the dream sequence that Salvador Dalí created for Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound, and the animated psychotic break that Saul Bass cooked up for Hitchcock in Vertigo.
Everything is exaggerated, distorted, reframed so that it feels at once figurative and real. Hannibal’s childhood chateau looms against a purplish sky at night like Dr. Frankenstein’s castle from a 1930s Universal horror film (there are numerous Frankenstein allusions throughout the series equating Hannibal to Frankenstein and the other serial killers under his sway as creatures that he “created” to some degree). When Will is thrown from the back of a moving train by Chiyoh (Tak Okamoto) and the camera dollies back and back, the caboose is clearly a set filmed against a green screen, and the pop-up-book quality accentuates the eerie certitude of her act. The whole Italian arc is production-designed and photographed to emphasize artificiality: Italy and Europe not as the actual places, but as fantasies of Italy and Europe, rather like the Europe presented by Lars von Trier in The Element of Crime and Zentropa, both of which are framed as dreams occurring, respectively, in a drug haze and under hypnosis. The show is a palace of dreams, and we are strolling through it.
This Surrealist-Expressionist film lineage continued on TV, but to a severely limited degree, given the medium’s “don’t scare the advertisers” edicts. You can see it on such series as Miami Vice (the first season of which has a similar feel, especially in its silent-with-music montages; check this out) as well as Twin Peaks and The X-Files and moments from The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, and Mad Men. But Hannibal pushes it further. The whole series occurs in this mode. There are no breaks, no relief. Many TV programs have staged excellent, convincing dream sequences, but they were carefully set apart from the main story by signifiers that told us “this part is broken off from reality, you needn’t take it literally.” Hannibal doesn’t do that. What it does do is closer to this description of Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou, by Jonathan Jones: “To tell a story on screen, you create a physical world that serves your purpose. But in ‘Un Chien Andalou,’ the physical world is thicker, more resistant, more alive (and more dead). Instead of smoothly setting off the characters' desires and fears, it becomes an opaque field of desire and terror in itself. The events that can happen in such a world are full of passion, comedy, horror; it's just that they never get resolved and tidied up by narrative explanations. There are people in the film, but it is not 'about' them — it is about us, our reactions, our disgust and perversity.” (Francis’s filmed images of murder have a 1930s experimental-movie quality, which, given the creative team’s cultural literacy, has to be deliberate.)
But while it is accurate to sum up Hannibal as a 39-episode dream, that description doesn’t go far enough. Because it’s not just staging dreamlike or “weird” situations, it’s routinely adopting the points of view of certain characters — not in a particular episode, or in a self-contained sequence, but in a scene, or in part of a scene.
When Francis Dolarhyde imagines himself as the Red Dragon, there are individual shots that show him completely transformed into something like the creature he worships in William Blake’s painting The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in the Sun. Very late in the series, after the incarcerated Hannibal has tried to psychologically manipulate Will into thinking himself a potential serial killer on par with Francis (something Hannibal has been attempting to do, to varying degrees, since season one), an episode starts with similar images that we assume are from Francis’s point of view, but these are ultimately revealed to be Will’s, in a session with Bedelia. The Florence church scenes from the early part of season three recur throughout the final leg of the story. They’re presented as fantasies of Hannibal’s while he’s in lockup, shorn by Alana (Caroline Dhavernas) of signifiers of dignity, including his books and a proper toilet. It is also subtly indicative of Hannibal’s simultaneous wish to mock God and become a god himself by manipulating mere mortals. [Начинаю подозревать, что в этой истории нельзя Ганнибала считать только Дьяволом, а бога искать в Джеке или ком-то еще. Бог есть Дьявол, а Дьявол есть Бог в данном случае. Наверное. Кто-нибудь читает эти посты? Мне лень переводить это всё.] The church scenes also recur as fantasies (shared, perhaps?) by Hannibal and Will, who are far from Florence by that point. There, the church is a place of mental peace and fulfillment. It seems paradisiacal or heavenly or utopian, and there is no hand-holding explanation for the function that it serves: The show just assumes we’ll figure it out and not be confused, and it’s correct in assuming that we can.
Ditto the crime-scene imaginings of Will Graham. In Manhunter, Will (played by future CSI front man William Petersen) stands amid the mayhem after the fact, speaking his speculations into a tape recorder. The dramatization of atrocity occurs mainly in his face and voice, and via the droning synthesized score, and in our imaginations. But on Fuller’s show, Will is an imaginative (visually active) participant, actually performing the deeds he’s attempting to visualize, including pulling a small child out from under a bed and killing him (off-camera) with a pistol shot. We are implicated in a way that other horror films rarely attempt — for good reason, because few horror stories are capable of achieving the precise tone that Hannibal nails in episode after episode, making situations psychological and viscerally real (Will is suffering, visibly suffering, in these sequences) but also stylizing them in order to provide enough distance for the images not to seem trashy and exploitive. They are real and not real: imaginative projections of Will’s empathy for both killer and victims.
Season three could easily have been broken into two mini-seasons or mini-series (Italy and the Red Dragon arc), and there are points where the second feels very much like a follow-up to the first, but Fuller and his collaborators have planted many lines of dialogue and images in the early section that recur in the second, so that on rewatch, they feel like pieces of an intricately conceived whole. The architecture of images is ingenious. Sometimes the Italy arc seems to be foretelling events that happen later. Some of the most dazzling moments in the Red Dragon arc bring back images from an earlier episode in a different context, so that they have different meanings or associations. My favorite example of this is the series of flash cuts that occur after Will and Hannibal kill Francis: We see flashbacks to Francis’s burning scrapbook (the frame itself seeming to burn and curl as the character’s soul is released and his torments ended) and, most strikingly, a shot of Francis, seen from the back, standing before a burning mass of celluloid film strips arrayed in a starburst pattern. This is a visual callback not just to Francis’s film fetishism (which included a moment where he seemed to swallow a projector beam and “become” the record of his atrocities) but also to the sequence of Will visiting the Jacoby home, where FBI forensics officers had mapped the spray of blood jets with suspended strings.
These daring structural flourishes bring Hannibal closer than any commercial series to embodying the phrase “a novel for television.” A novel is not merely a novel because it is long. It is a novel because of the freedom it takes, or can take, in telling its story. It can adopt different points of view and slip back and forth between past and present, not just from chapter to chapter, but within the context of a page, a paragraph, even a sentence. Hannibal makes almost every other TV series seem aesthetically impoverished in comparison because it takes these freedoms and actually plays with them, to make the story and its telling more surprising, confounding, and multilayered. (One of the best examples are the sex scenes, which are shockingly explicit, in that you always know exactly what the characters are doing with each other physically, but also figurative, smearing and doubling body parts into prismatic tangles of limbs and whirling graphic patterns.)
Anyone who makes scripted television should look at this series and think about ways to apply Hannibal’s experiments in tone, point of view, image, and sound to non-horror material, because what it’s doing is not innate to the horror movie, but to the most sophisticated third-person omniscient novels. It is literary and cinematic at the same time, in such a way as to suggest that one mode can be the continuation of the other, without falsifying or oversimplifying the uniqueness of either form. It represents a major step forward in scripted TV’s artistic evolution.
Hannibal is dead. Hannibal is the future.
TVoverMIND
Hannibal Season 3 Episode 13 Review: “The Wrath of the Lamb”
читать дальше
When Season 3 of Hannibal began, the good doctor Lecter invited us to consider his story in a surprising context: “Let it be a fairy tale, then. Once upon a time…” Twelve weeks later, even though we commonly think of the series as a crime procedural (or else some variation on that that centers on killing), the fairy tale structure holds up. “The Wrath of the Lamb,” quite possibly the final episode of Bryan Fuller’s adaptation of Thomas Harris, populates itself with fairy tale allusions: Hannibal telling Alana that he spun her gold being the most obvious line of dialog and the heroes coming together to kill a dragon being the most obvious image. But where I see the fairy tale format work best in “The Wrath of the Lamb,” which has received some wonderfully delicious mixed responses, is in its treatment of the concept of true love. Rather than say true love protects the finale from certain criticisms, I would prefer to do what I’ve always done with these reviews: explore an idea and how it relates to what we’re being presented in a given episode of Hannibal. You can read about whether I liked or disliked it all in the “Bite-Sized Thoughts” section below, but Hannibal is at its best when it is looked at not for its quality as a TV series, but for its ability to help us see things about ourselves.
The discussion hinges on the idea that true love exists in the world of Hannibal, which is easier to accept given the fairy tale idea. In our own separate worlds, we may or may not agree with true love as a concept, but Fuller clearly intended it to be a part of the story of Will Graham and Hannibal Lecter. In Hannibal’s version of true love, the lovers are inherently, intrinsically, inexorably, inescapably and inextricably tied to one another. They are, in other words, doomed. Bedelia posits it as a “Can’t live with him, can’t live without him” situation, which is also an accurate way of looking at it, but however you do, it’s important to note that the unfortunate by-product of true love for the lovers is that there is no way to break away from the other person. Hannibal did its best to show that to us. Not only is there a three-year gap between Will breaking up with Hannibal and finally coming back to him, but Will was given the perfect replacement under the circumstances. Molly makes Will laugh and feel as though he no longer has to be the one to pick up strays; someone can care for him in the ways he cares for other people. In the end, though, it isn’t enough. What Will and Molly share is a deep, heartfelt love, but it is not true love, which is exclusive to Will and Hannibal.
Granted, this notion could have possibly been communicated better, whether by having another scene in last week’s episode in which it is clear Molly has been tainted for Will because of Dolarhyde and Hannibal, but seeing her in the position of former Dragon victims works towards that. In any case, Molly’s absence in “The Wrath of the Lamb” is crucial to understanding why the love shared between Will and Molly is less than the love shared between Will and Hannibal, regardless of how much Will tries to deny that to himself. By limiting Molly’s presence in this finale to only a single mention, we see a rare instance of Hannibal going into a character’s perspective, because not having a scene with or even an image of Molly speaks to how Will is actively pushing her out of his mind. In that way, much of “The Wrath of the Lamb,” which technically has Will in the title role if we follow through on the biblical comparison from last week, is seen through Will’s point of view. By sidelining Molly, Will is able to follow through with his decisions without feeling the guilt of abandoning her. I actually don’t think it would have made a difference in the end—that, even if Molly had had a presence in this episode, Will would have done anything differently—but subconsciously or even actively blocking out Molly helps us understand what’s going on inside Will’s head. At the risk of diminishing the initial power of the Will-Molly relationship that I felt at the beginning of the Red Dragon arc, I don’t think there’s much of a difference between Molly and Abigail as far as the philosophical and even emotional nature of Will’s relationships with them. Much of these episodes (and even much of Season 2) has shown a reluctant Will who is pretending to be something that he’s not. Dialog in which he is trying to convince either a character or the audience of something has felt quite unconvincing and, already beginning to look back on this season, what we have is a Will struggling to come to terms with the person he has become. Again, subscribing to this idea means admitting that Molly is essentially a wonderful distraction for Will, but a distraction nonetheless. Yet, given her absence in this episode, that position is probably easier to come to than instincts would suggest.
Regardless, “The Wrath of the Lamb” finally lets Will realize that there’s no denying Hannibal—not permanently, anyway. They are true lovers, and their fates are tied to one another. They go through the motions with each other in the sense of fighting that connection—Will, in another unconvincing line of dialog, tells Hannibal that he (Will) is going to sit back and watch the Dragon change Hannibal, and Hannibal tells Will that his compassion for Will is inconvenient, as if that compassion is the only thing keeping Hannibal from killing Will himself—but it’s all affect. It’s all pretense. It’s all an act, like stage performers. The end we get in “The Wrath of the Lamb” is the ending that was destined from the beginning of Hannibal, and yet it’s one that’s still hard to come to terms with.
I find that absolutely fascinating, because I also experienced immense resistance to a lot of Will’s development over the last two seasons. But the conclusion I’ve eventually come to is that many of the reasons for having that resistance come from a place of expectance. I expect characters to act a certain way. I expect heroes to be heroes at the end of the day and villains to be villains. What I don’t expect is to get to the final episode of Hannibal and see that traditional notions of hero no longer apply to characters like Jack Crawford and Alana. So, all the times when Will is acting differently than how we expect him to act are actually times when Will is acting differently from how we want him to act. And that’s okay. I want Will to be the empathetic, kind-hearted profiler of Season 1, but that’s simply no longer on the cards. Hannibal Lecter, as he has done with so many people, changed Will Graham and took that from the audience in the same way he took Abigail from Will—violently and permanently. He put Will into a situation in which Will’s only happiness was tied to a life with Hannibal. The cruel flipside of Will’s pure empathy is that Will can’t have a truly loving relationship with Molly, because part of him will always be living that life for Molly, not with Molly. Someone with pure empathy has a monumentally difficult time being selfish, and selfishness is a necessary component to any relationship. It’s why people have to make compromises, because relationships can’t be one-sided. Hannibal is the only person in Will’s life with whom he can have a selfish, loving relationship, because the two characters share similar understandings of the world.
This is the realization that both terrifies and comforts Will. After having three years of distance, the notion is terrifying, because people want to believe they have full control over their lives. The notion is comforting, though, because Will is relinquishing control to someone who is doing the same with him. In the end, even though Will would have never been alone with Molly, he would have been lonely. Hannibal appeases the loneliness and allows Will to be himself when he relinquishes that control. It gives the fight with the Dragon so much more poignancy, because Will and Hannibal finally killing together is the most powerful expression of their love imaginable. How appropriate, then, to give what could have just as easily been titled The Tragical History of Will Graham and Hannibal Lecter that moment before needing to end how tragedies traditionally end? There is beauty in death, which is something Hannibal has supported several times, most notably in a session with Bella Crawford. The death of Will and Hannibal in the series’ most beautiful triumph in that regard. The ending also mixes the qualities of the fairy tale and the tragedy to show that life isn’t as black-and-white as those frameworks would have us believe. Even if lovers are doomed, it doesn’t make the power of fairy tale true love any less wonderful to think about and feel. And even if it’s easy to try to live in one’s own head, imagining an idyllic life (like how Hannibal uses his memory palace), there are realities that we must all come to terms with.
That, too, is terribly fitting, since it has been hard to come to terms with the reality of Hannibal’s end. Of course, different viewers can, have and will read “The Wrath of the Lamb” in different ways, with various ideas of how the story might continue. But as someone who thought he wanted a different Will Graham than what was being presented, I think I’ve finally acknowledged that this should be it for Hannibal. Going down this true love route makes this the perfect ending for the series that has been able to pull off impossible things within the episodic, broadcast network format. Lovers like Will and Hannibal will always exist, but there will never be another pairing quite like it. Similarly, the networks will continue to produce shows, but we’ll never see another Hannibal ever again. For that, we don’t owe ourselves fear of trying to find its replacement. We ourselves awe for having it as long as we did.
Bite-Sized Thoughts: Buon appetito!
– So, I liked this episode quite a bit. Is it a perfect episode? Nope. But because I think it’s a perfect ending to the series, it’s getting a score of 10. I’ve read and listened to many of thoughts that come from people less enthused with the finale than I am, and they all have really interesting opinions, so definitely seek them out. We talk at length on our podcast, This is Our Design, the final episode of which should be available in the next couple days.
– Before getting into some of the real bite-sized thoughts for the episode, I just wanted to say thank you to TVOvermind and the readers who have shared these reviews online and got in touch with me on Twitter. I’ve absolutely loved going in-depth with some of the ideas in Hannibal, and even though I would write these things with no readers whatsoever, the fact that people are going through them and leaving really sharp feedback of their own makes the whole process infinitely more rewarding. Hannibal is going to leave a huge hole in my life, but I’m grateful to have shared it with all of you.
– Okay. Details. Where to begin? The performances from Armitage and Wesley are excellent in the opening scene. Anyone familiar with the source material knew that Dolarhyde was faking his death, but the style of it works beautifully, from the Debussy to the burning stag head. I also like how Reba turns to sit down by instinct, knowing exactly where the bed is, before Francis says anything about sitting down.
– “When life becomes maddeningly polite, think about me. Think about me, Will. Don’t worry about me.” I actually think Mikkelsen says “maddenly” instead of the correct “maddeningly,” but it’s hard to tell.
– Arnold Lang was also the decoy body in the source material.
– Bedelia’s face is so wonderful when she’s mulling over what Will tells her. It’s the very definition of “NOT IMPRESSED.”
– “You’ve just found religion. Nothing more dangerous than that.” One final instance of Fuller and Lightfoot omitting subjects in their sentences.
– The Alana-Chilton scene is much more affecting than I thought it would be. I was surprised that the show didn’t pull the trigger on killing Alana, but if it meant giving her a scene in which Chilton tells her to her face that she’s basically turned into Hannibal, that’s worth it.
– On that note, Esparza as Chilton wins the series award for Supporting MVP. In a perfect world, he would win all the awards for that category. It simply can’t be overstated how integral he has been to the success of Hannibal, and I hope Esparza knows that the Fannibaldom appreciates everything he’s put into the role.
– Chilton in this episode brought back memories of a recovering Georgia from Season 1.
– Perhaps my favorite line in any episode of the series: “You dropped the mic, Will. But here you are having to come back and pick it up again.” It’s partly because of how ridiculous Hannibal taking about mic-dropping is, but it’s also because it recalls one of my favorite images in the series: the teacup shattering. Bravo.
– If the post-credits scene and fairy tale allusions weren’t enough to recall Abel Gideon, then the car chase/breakout did, since Hannibal was in a similar position to how Gideon was when he was being transported. I appreciate that we got that sense even though Izzard wasn’t in the episode.
– But, hey! Katharine Isabelle was in it! Yeah!
– Speaking of the post-credits scene, first of all: wow. Wow, wow, wow to that outfit Bedelia is wearing. Wow. Also, I read this as Bedelia cut off and cooked her own leg in preparation for a Hannibal who never came. It was her way of getting out ahead of the situation and offering herself up, because there was no escape. Her disappointment is really interesting, since there’s also a tinge of wanting to be eaten by Hannibal in her.
– The eroding bluff is such an obvious-but-awesome entendre.
– And the final fight sequence is among the most gorgeous pieces of filmmaking I’ve seen on TV, accentuated by the perfect use of the Dragon imagery. There have been moments of that imagery this season that haven’t been very good, like the first time we see the tail. But the wings were flawlessly used in this episode.
[Отдельно соглашусь насчет Рауля Эспарзы. Очень непросто сделать любимца публики из того, кто, во-первых, долгое время невероятно бесил, во-вторых, просто из .. мелкого человека. Не Героя и не Злодея или Хитреца или еще кого-то, чей архетип сам по себе ярок и привлекателен, а из бездаря-проныры.]
Read more at www.tvovermind.com/reviews/hannibal-season-3-ep...
VULTURE
Hannibal Redefined How We Tell Stories on Television
The show is a palace of dreams, and we are strolling through it.And so, in the end, Hannibal was a love story all along, and a doomed love story at that.
The third season ended like prior seasons, with a wrap-up that could double as a series ender if it came to that; and since, apparently, it has come to that — with NBC deciding not to carry a hypothetical fourth season of this international co-production, and thus effectively ending it — we should marvel at this climax’s majestic, well, finality. Hannibal Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen) and Will Graham (Hugh Dancy) join forces to defeat the fearsome disciple/rival serial killer Red Dragon (Richard Armitage) in a super-slow-motion mano a mano: silent, gorgeously protracted, scored to an original Siouxsie Sioux and Steven Severin song titled “Love Crime” (what else!). As Hannibal’s showrunner Bryan Fuller put it in a Vulture interview — in metaphoric language, which, like so many Fuller observations, renders additional critical commentary superfluous — Will and Hannibal were “like two jackals bringing down a rhinoceros.”
The recent craze for CGI-rendered blood has been a problematic new development for some horror purists, but pixel crimson has never looked as extravagantly sensuous, or felt as aesthetically right, as it has on Hannibal, a series that takes place entirely in dream space. It has a truly painterly texture, a brazen unreality that tickles the senses even as it completes the show’s vision, which is as romantic as it is horrific. Blades enter flesh, skin and tendons are severed, and the blood doesn’t just spill, it jets, sprays, arcs, like acrylic slung at a canvas. The finale’s director, Michael Rymer (director of some of the most aggressively visual episodes of TV drama, especially on Battlestar Galactica), stages it as a death dance, a loving showcase for bodies in motion that never forgets its immediate narrative goal of neutralizing the Red Dragon even as it pushes its true purpose — expressing the twisted, yet perversely pure love between Will and Hannibal — into the foreground. Their bond is brotherly but also romantic and (somehow, powerfully) sexual. This battle is its long-delayed consummation: the sex scene between Will and Hannibal that has been repeatedly imagined in so much fan art, or, to quote Fuller again, a coded “three-way” — one of many imagined by this censorship-flouting network series — wherein “you eliminate the third [participant] and get to business with the two who matter.” Will’s necessary and also eager participation in a killing (he’d only been a passive accessory before) is the sex act Hannibal has been urging him toward, as seen in the dream image (Will’s or Hannibal’s? We don’t know) of the two in a church, Hannibal dressed in a seersucker jacket with a Windsor-knotted tie. “I was rooting for you, Will,” Hannibal says. “It’s a shame: You came all this way and you didn’t get to kill anybody.” He’s not a virgin anymore. He gave it up for Hannibal.
Will and Hannibal’s final moment is a mutual recognition of the loving death-grip they’ve been locked in since season one. It takes place on the edge of a cliff (the right spot for a cliffhanger), backed by a glassed-in home significant to Hannibal’s own history, but also redolent of so many great thriller climaxes, including North by Northwest and, of course, Michael Mann’s Manhunter, a very different take on the same material. They embrace: Will rests his head on Hannibal’s chest, Hannibal puts his chin atop Will’s head, and then they go over the edge. The camera moves in, after a respectful moment, to look down. The final shot (not counting, of course, the post-credits stinger with Gillian Anderson’s Dr. Bedelia Du Maurier serving a Hannibal-styled feast) is a vertigo-inducing overhead shot of the surf crashing into a suggestively V-shaped cove. It is one of the great final shots in TV history. To quote the good doctor himself: “I believe this is what is known as a ‘mic drop.’”
This is as good a place as any to repeat that I’m as surprised as anyone by how much I grew to love this show. I’m on record stating that I never had much interest in serial-killer stories. Except for the occasional outlier (such as Manhunter and parts of The Silence of the Lambs and a few of the images in The Cell) I found most of them either ostentatiously stupid or morally reprehensible: a tactical evasion of real-world evil rather than a useful way of reimagining it in terms of a fable. It wasn’t until Bryan Fuller’s adaptation, which presented itself as a dark fairy tale from minute one, that I willingly immersed myself in Thomas Harris’s fiction. It is about the capacity for evil, and how evil is a stultifying word that closes off understanding, and how empathy really is the flip side of sadism and connected to it, and also about the fragility of order — how it can be tipped very easily into chaos by people like Dolarhyde, or Hannibal, who recognize the fragility, see the thin skeins of twine holding “order” aloft, and play them like guitar strings. They are out there. They may not be as physically imposing as Dolarhyde or as cultivated and smug as Hannibal, but they are out there. As my colleague Greg Cwik points out in his brilliant recap of the finale, via a Herman Melville quote:
“Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure. Consider also the devilish brilliance and beauty of many of its most remorseless tribes, as the dainty embellished shape of many species of sharks. Consider, once more, the universal cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each other, carrying on eternal war since the world began.”
The sophisticated aesthetic developed by Fuller (and his many collaborators, whose ranks include a number of visually oriented directors and a few veteran cinematographers, such as Guillermo S. Navarro, who shot numerous Guillermo del Toro films and directed the 11th and 12th episodes of season three). The aesthetic is the reason why, despite being the most gruesome drama ever aired on network TV, Hannibal never felt unacceptably brutal to me. It is, no question about it, ultraviolent, but not in the manner of a cheap slasher film. It is ultraviolent in the manner of Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd, Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill and The Fury, and Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket and A Clockwork Orange (which Hannibal quotes by scoring Jack's beating of the doctor to Gioachino Rossini's "The Thieving Magpie") and touchstones of religious painting, such as Tintoretto’s 1565 painting of Christ’s crucifixion. It is “studied” in the best way, i.e., thoughtful, considered. It is concerned mainly with exploring what violent actions mean (to us, and to the story) rather than simply attempting to replicate the physical experience of suffering (although it does that, too; every wounding and death on the show is viscerally jolting and also often carries an emotional charge).
And it pays equal attention, sometimes greater attention, to emotional violence, showing how characters (usually Hannibal, but not always) coolly scrutinize their targets, then push certain buttons to ensure a particular outcome that’s often destructive for all involved. The physical violence represents a continuation of emotional violence. This is made clear in many subplots throughout the series, but especially in the reimagining of Red Dragon/the Tooth Fairy in the back half of season three, with Hannibal and Will (individually, but also in tacit collaboration) contriving to slag Francis Dolarhyde as a disfigured, sexually inadequate freak in order to draw him into the open, knowing full well that it’s a cruel and inaccurate description, and beneath them as psychologists and human beings. (In Michael Mann’s 1986 version of the story, and in the novel, they insinuated that Francis was homosexual. Fuller realized this was unwelcome and unnecessary as well as ugly-retro, just as they realized that Dolarhyde’s necrophiliac rape of his female victims was no longer necessary to get across the idea behind his murders, violating the image of a “perfect” nuclear family.) You can see the same care exercised in the way that Hannibal manipulates Bedelia (and how she allows herself to be manipulated) in Italy, and in the many ways that Will’s FBI boss, Jack Crawford (Laurence Fishburne), insinuates that Will is himself behind actions that were originally envisioned, or at least suggested, by Lecter. The word psychodrama is thrown around indiscriminately in criticism (I’ve been guilty!), but here, more so than in a lot of dramas, it fits. Hannibal’s understanding of human psychology, while admittedly expressed in a knowingly stylized and grotesque way, is as sound as that of Mad Men’s or In Treatment’s.
If you read this piece with no experience of the series (and really, why would anyone do that?) you might assume that Hannibal is entirely grim, a parade of perversity, suffering, and gore. It is that. But it’s also quite funny, and somehow in a way that never trivializes the momentousness of the psychological and physical violence. No series, Twin Peaks included, has quite managed to be as deadly serious but also as winkingly ludicrous, so that you can’t easily separate one mode of presentation from the other. The show is an outrageous joke that’s not funny at all, and a horror show that’s very funny, at the same time, without contradiction. (Dreams are funny/not funny that way.) As Hannibal, Mads Mikkelsen gives the sort of performance that would be called “delicious” if a 1940s ham character actor gave it, but there are many moments (particularly reaction shots of Hannibal listening to patients, or to Will) when he seems to be truly feeling the pain of others, even as he thinks about how to increase or top it, as well as moments of serene acceptance or sly amusement. The bromance between him and Will is a joke but not a joke; it’s powerful, just as the relationship between Will and Jack, and Hannibal and Bedelia, Mason Verger (Joe Anderson) and Margot Verger (Katharine Isabelle), and Alana (Caroline Dhavernas) and Margot, who leave the story as co-parents of their Verger baby, which Alana carried. In every scene, there is always humor to relieve the excruciating tension. Some of it veers toward outright camp — particularly the season-three scenes involving Verger, who sounds (as Anderson plays him) like Richard Nixon eating peanut butter, refers to the risen Jesus as “the Riz,” and fantasizes his mortal enemy Hannibal laid out on a banquet table, naked and honey-glazed, and crows, “Transubstantiation!”
There is an elated, intoxicated quality to every frame of this amazing show. So much of Hannibal’s look and feel is what critics who prize linear, foursquare iterations of plot and character would term “excessive” or “pretentious” or, God forbid, “arty.” And there are ways in which such complaints are hard to refute. No reputable psychiatrist would hold sessions in an almost-dark room, as Hannibal Lecter and Bedelia Du Maurier tend to do. There is not now, nor has there ever been, a plague of serial killers who all seem to be auditioning for a spot in a hip art gallery, arranging corpses and pieces of corpses into sculptures and murals and mixed-media installations. Nothing on this series is “realistic” in any sense that means anything. In fact, there are moments when it seems to be channeling German expressionist dream films like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Nosferatu and The Hands of Orlac or The Last Laugh, or Surrealist features such as Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast and Orpheus and Luis Bunuel’s L’Age D’Or and The Exterminating Angel, and the dream sequence that Salvador Dalí created for Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound, and the animated psychotic break that Saul Bass cooked up for Hitchcock in Vertigo.
Everything is exaggerated, distorted, reframed so that it feels at once figurative and real. Hannibal’s childhood chateau looms against a purplish sky at night like Dr. Frankenstein’s castle from a 1930s Universal horror film (there are numerous Frankenstein allusions throughout the series equating Hannibal to Frankenstein and the other serial killers under his sway as creatures that he “created” to some degree). When Will is thrown from the back of a moving train by Chiyoh (Tak Okamoto) and the camera dollies back and back, the caboose is clearly a set filmed against a green screen, and the pop-up-book quality accentuates the eerie certitude of her act. The whole Italian arc is production-designed and photographed to emphasize artificiality: Italy and Europe not as the actual places, but as fantasies of Italy and Europe, rather like the Europe presented by Lars von Trier in The Element of Crime and Zentropa, both of which are framed as dreams occurring, respectively, in a drug haze and under hypnosis. The show is a palace of dreams, and we are strolling through it.
This Surrealist-Expressionist film lineage continued on TV, but to a severely limited degree, given the medium’s “don’t scare the advertisers” edicts. You can see it on such series as Miami Vice (the first season of which has a similar feel, especially in its silent-with-music montages; check this out) as well as Twin Peaks and The X-Files and moments from The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, and Mad Men. But Hannibal pushes it further. The whole series occurs in this mode. There are no breaks, no relief. Many TV programs have staged excellent, convincing dream sequences, but they were carefully set apart from the main story by signifiers that told us “this part is broken off from reality, you needn’t take it literally.” Hannibal doesn’t do that. What it does do is closer to this description of Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou, by Jonathan Jones: “To tell a story on screen, you create a physical world that serves your purpose. But in ‘Un Chien Andalou,’ the physical world is thicker, more resistant, more alive (and more dead). Instead of smoothly setting off the characters' desires and fears, it becomes an opaque field of desire and terror in itself. The events that can happen in such a world are full of passion, comedy, horror; it's just that they never get resolved and tidied up by narrative explanations. There are people in the film, but it is not 'about' them — it is about us, our reactions, our disgust and perversity.” (Francis’s filmed images of murder have a 1930s experimental-movie quality, which, given the creative team’s cultural literacy, has to be deliberate.)
But while it is accurate to sum up Hannibal as a 39-episode dream, that description doesn’t go far enough. Because it’s not just staging dreamlike or “weird” situations, it’s routinely adopting the points of view of certain characters — not in a particular episode, or in a self-contained sequence, but in a scene, or in part of a scene.
When Francis Dolarhyde imagines himself as the Red Dragon, there are individual shots that show him completely transformed into something like the creature he worships in William Blake’s painting The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in the Sun. Very late in the series, after the incarcerated Hannibal has tried to psychologically manipulate Will into thinking himself a potential serial killer on par with Francis (something Hannibal has been attempting to do, to varying degrees, since season one), an episode starts with similar images that we assume are from Francis’s point of view, but these are ultimately revealed to be Will’s, in a session with Bedelia. The Florence church scenes from the early part of season three recur throughout the final leg of the story. They’re presented as fantasies of Hannibal’s while he’s in lockup, shorn by Alana (Caroline Dhavernas) of signifiers of dignity, including his books and a proper toilet. It is also subtly indicative of Hannibal’s simultaneous wish to mock God and become a god himself by manipulating mere mortals. [Начинаю подозревать, что в этой истории нельзя Ганнибала считать только Дьяволом, а бога искать в Джеке или ком-то еще. Бог есть Дьявол, а Дьявол есть Бог в данном случае. Наверное. Кто-нибудь читает эти посты? Мне лень переводить это всё.] The church scenes also recur as fantasies (shared, perhaps?) by Hannibal and Will, who are far from Florence by that point. There, the church is a place of mental peace and fulfillment. It seems paradisiacal or heavenly or utopian, and there is no hand-holding explanation for the function that it serves: The show just assumes we’ll figure it out and not be confused, and it’s correct in assuming that we can.
Ditto the crime-scene imaginings of Will Graham. In Manhunter, Will (played by future CSI front man William Petersen) stands amid the mayhem after the fact, speaking his speculations into a tape recorder. The dramatization of atrocity occurs mainly in his face and voice, and via the droning synthesized score, and in our imaginations. But on Fuller’s show, Will is an imaginative (visually active) participant, actually performing the deeds he’s attempting to visualize, including pulling a small child out from under a bed and killing him (off-camera) with a pistol shot. We are implicated in a way that other horror films rarely attempt — for good reason, because few horror stories are capable of achieving the precise tone that Hannibal nails in episode after episode, making situations psychological and viscerally real (Will is suffering, visibly suffering, in these sequences) but also stylizing them in order to provide enough distance for the images not to seem trashy and exploitive. They are real and not real: imaginative projections of Will’s empathy for both killer and victims.
Season three could easily have been broken into two mini-seasons or mini-series (Italy and the Red Dragon arc), and there are points where the second feels very much like a follow-up to the first, but Fuller and his collaborators have planted many lines of dialogue and images in the early section that recur in the second, so that on rewatch, they feel like pieces of an intricately conceived whole. The architecture of images is ingenious. Sometimes the Italy arc seems to be foretelling events that happen later. Some of the most dazzling moments in the Red Dragon arc bring back images from an earlier episode in a different context, so that they have different meanings or associations. My favorite example of this is the series of flash cuts that occur after Will and Hannibal kill Francis: We see flashbacks to Francis’s burning scrapbook (the frame itself seeming to burn and curl as the character’s soul is released and his torments ended) and, most strikingly, a shot of Francis, seen from the back, standing before a burning mass of celluloid film strips arrayed in a starburst pattern. This is a visual callback not just to Francis’s film fetishism (which included a moment where he seemed to swallow a projector beam and “become” the record of his atrocities) but also to the sequence of Will visiting the Jacoby home, where FBI forensics officers had mapped the spray of blood jets with suspended strings.
These daring structural flourishes bring Hannibal closer than any commercial series to embodying the phrase “a novel for television.” A novel is not merely a novel because it is long. It is a novel because of the freedom it takes, or can take, in telling its story. It can adopt different points of view and slip back and forth between past and present, not just from chapter to chapter, but within the context of a page, a paragraph, even a sentence. Hannibal makes almost every other TV series seem aesthetically impoverished in comparison because it takes these freedoms and actually plays with them, to make the story and its telling more surprising, confounding, and multilayered. (One of the best examples are the sex scenes, which are shockingly explicit, in that you always know exactly what the characters are doing with each other physically, but also figurative, smearing and doubling body parts into prismatic tangles of limbs and whirling graphic patterns.)
Anyone who makes scripted television should look at this series and think about ways to apply Hannibal’s experiments in tone, point of view, image, and sound to non-horror material, because what it’s doing is not innate to the horror movie, but to the most sophisticated third-person omniscient novels. It is literary and cinematic at the same time, in such a way as to suggest that one mode can be the continuation of the other, without falsifying or oversimplifying the uniqueness of either form. It represents a major step forward in scripted TV’s artistic evolution.
Hannibal is dead. Hannibal is the future.
TVoverMIND
Hannibal Season 3 Episode 13 Review: “The Wrath of the Lamb”
читать дальше
When Season 3 of Hannibal began, the good doctor Lecter invited us to consider his story in a surprising context: “Let it be a fairy tale, then. Once upon a time…” Twelve weeks later, even though we commonly think of the series as a crime procedural (or else some variation on that that centers on killing), the fairy tale structure holds up. “The Wrath of the Lamb,” quite possibly the final episode of Bryan Fuller’s adaptation of Thomas Harris, populates itself with fairy tale allusions: Hannibal telling Alana that he spun her gold being the most obvious line of dialog and the heroes coming together to kill a dragon being the most obvious image. But where I see the fairy tale format work best in “The Wrath of the Lamb,” which has received some wonderfully delicious mixed responses, is in its treatment of the concept of true love. Rather than say true love protects the finale from certain criticisms, I would prefer to do what I’ve always done with these reviews: explore an idea and how it relates to what we’re being presented in a given episode of Hannibal. You can read about whether I liked or disliked it all in the “Bite-Sized Thoughts” section below, but Hannibal is at its best when it is looked at not for its quality as a TV series, but for its ability to help us see things about ourselves.
The discussion hinges on the idea that true love exists in the world of Hannibal, which is easier to accept given the fairy tale idea. In our own separate worlds, we may or may not agree with true love as a concept, but Fuller clearly intended it to be a part of the story of Will Graham and Hannibal Lecter. In Hannibal’s version of true love, the lovers are inherently, intrinsically, inexorably, inescapably and inextricably tied to one another. They are, in other words, doomed. Bedelia posits it as a “Can’t live with him, can’t live without him” situation, which is also an accurate way of looking at it, but however you do, it’s important to note that the unfortunate by-product of true love for the lovers is that there is no way to break away from the other person. Hannibal did its best to show that to us. Not only is there a three-year gap between Will breaking up with Hannibal and finally coming back to him, but Will was given the perfect replacement under the circumstances. Molly makes Will laugh and feel as though he no longer has to be the one to pick up strays; someone can care for him in the ways he cares for other people. In the end, though, it isn’t enough. What Will and Molly share is a deep, heartfelt love, but it is not true love, which is exclusive to Will and Hannibal.
Granted, this notion could have possibly been communicated better, whether by having another scene in last week’s episode in which it is clear Molly has been tainted for Will because of Dolarhyde and Hannibal, but seeing her in the position of former Dragon victims works towards that. In any case, Molly’s absence in “The Wrath of the Lamb” is crucial to understanding why the love shared between Will and Molly is less than the love shared between Will and Hannibal, regardless of how much Will tries to deny that to himself. By limiting Molly’s presence in this finale to only a single mention, we see a rare instance of Hannibal going into a character’s perspective, because not having a scene with or even an image of Molly speaks to how Will is actively pushing her out of his mind. In that way, much of “The Wrath of the Lamb,” which technically has Will in the title role if we follow through on the biblical comparison from last week, is seen through Will’s point of view. By sidelining Molly, Will is able to follow through with his decisions without feeling the guilt of abandoning her. I actually don’t think it would have made a difference in the end—that, even if Molly had had a presence in this episode, Will would have done anything differently—but subconsciously or even actively blocking out Molly helps us understand what’s going on inside Will’s head. At the risk of diminishing the initial power of the Will-Molly relationship that I felt at the beginning of the Red Dragon arc, I don’t think there’s much of a difference between Molly and Abigail as far as the philosophical and even emotional nature of Will’s relationships with them. Much of these episodes (and even much of Season 2) has shown a reluctant Will who is pretending to be something that he’s not. Dialog in which he is trying to convince either a character or the audience of something has felt quite unconvincing and, already beginning to look back on this season, what we have is a Will struggling to come to terms with the person he has become. Again, subscribing to this idea means admitting that Molly is essentially a wonderful distraction for Will, but a distraction nonetheless. Yet, given her absence in this episode, that position is probably easier to come to than instincts would suggest.
Regardless, “The Wrath of the Lamb” finally lets Will realize that there’s no denying Hannibal—not permanently, anyway. They are true lovers, and their fates are tied to one another. They go through the motions with each other in the sense of fighting that connection—Will, in another unconvincing line of dialog, tells Hannibal that he (Will) is going to sit back and watch the Dragon change Hannibal, and Hannibal tells Will that his compassion for Will is inconvenient, as if that compassion is the only thing keeping Hannibal from killing Will himself—but it’s all affect. It’s all pretense. It’s all an act, like stage performers. The end we get in “The Wrath of the Lamb” is the ending that was destined from the beginning of Hannibal, and yet it’s one that’s still hard to come to terms with.
I find that absolutely fascinating, because I also experienced immense resistance to a lot of Will’s development over the last two seasons. But the conclusion I’ve eventually come to is that many of the reasons for having that resistance come from a place of expectance. I expect characters to act a certain way. I expect heroes to be heroes at the end of the day and villains to be villains. What I don’t expect is to get to the final episode of Hannibal and see that traditional notions of hero no longer apply to characters like Jack Crawford and Alana. So, all the times when Will is acting differently than how we expect him to act are actually times when Will is acting differently from how we want him to act. And that’s okay. I want Will to be the empathetic, kind-hearted profiler of Season 1, but that’s simply no longer on the cards. Hannibal Lecter, as he has done with so many people, changed Will Graham and took that from the audience in the same way he took Abigail from Will—violently and permanently. He put Will into a situation in which Will’s only happiness was tied to a life with Hannibal. The cruel flipside of Will’s pure empathy is that Will can’t have a truly loving relationship with Molly, because part of him will always be living that life for Molly, not with Molly. Someone with pure empathy has a monumentally difficult time being selfish, and selfishness is a necessary component to any relationship. It’s why people have to make compromises, because relationships can’t be one-sided. Hannibal is the only person in Will’s life with whom he can have a selfish, loving relationship, because the two characters share similar understandings of the world.
This is the realization that both terrifies and comforts Will. After having three years of distance, the notion is terrifying, because people want to believe they have full control over their lives. The notion is comforting, though, because Will is relinquishing control to someone who is doing the same with him. In the end, even though Will would have never been alone with Molly, he would have been lonely. Hannibal appeases the loneliness and allows Will to be himself when he relinquishes that control. It gives the fight with the Dragon so much more poignancy, because Will and Hannibal finally killing together is the most powerful expression of their love imaginable. How appropriate, then, to give what could have just as easily been titled The Tragical History of Will Graham and Hannibal Lecter that moment before needing to end how tragedies traditionally end? There is beauty in death, which is something Hannibal has supported several times, most notably in a session with Bella Crawford. The death of Will and Hannibal in the series’ most beautiful triumph in that regard. The ending also mixes the qualities of the fairy tale and the tragedy to show that life isn’t as black-and-white as those frameworks would have us believe. Even if lovers are doomed, it doesn’t make the power of fairy tale true love any less wonderful to think about and feel. And even if it’s easy to try to live in one’s own head, imagining an idyllic life (like how Hannibal uses his memory palace), there are realities that we must all come to terms with.
That, too, is terribly fitting, since it has been hard to come to terms with the reality of Hannibal’s end. Of course, different viewers can, have and will read “The Wrath of the Lamb” in different ways, with various ideas of how the story might continue. But as someone who thought he wanted a different Will Graham than what was being presented, I think I’ve finally acknowledged that this should be it for Hannibal. Going down this true love route makes this the perfect ending for the series that has been able to pull off impossible things within the episodic, broadcast network format. Lovers like Will and Hannibal will always exist, but there will never be another pairing quite like it. Similarly, the networks will continue to produce shows, but we’ll never see another Hannibal ever again. For that, we don’t owe ourselves fear of trying to find its replacement. We ourselves awe for having it as long as we did.
Bite-Sized Thoughts: Buon appetito!
– So, I liked this episode quite a bit. Is it a perfect episode? Nope. But because I think it’s a perfect ending to the series, it’s getting a score of 10. I’ve read and listened to many of thoughts that come from people less enthused with the finale than I am, and they all have really interesting opinions, so definitely seek them out. We talk at length on our podcast, This is Our Design, the final episode of which should be available in the next couple days.
– Before getting into some of the real bite-sized thoughts for the episode, I just wanted to say thank you to TVOvermind and the readers who have shared these reviews online and got in touch with me on Twitter. I’ve absolutely loved going in-depth with some of the ideas in Hannibal, and even though I would write these things with no readers whatsoever, the fact that people are going through them and leaving really sharp feedback of their own makes the whole process infinitely more rewarding. Hannibal is going to leave a huge hole in my life, but I’m grateful to have shared it with all of you.
– Okay. Details. Where to begin? The performances from Armitage and Wesley are excellent in the opening scene. Anyone familiar with the source material knew that Dolarhyde was faking his death, but the style of it works beautifully, from the Debussy to the burning stag head. I also like how Reba turns to sit down by instinct, knowing exactly where the bed is, before Francis says anything about sitting down.
– “When life becomes maddeningly polite, think about me. Think about me, Will. Don’t worry about me.” I actually think Mikkelsen says “maddenly” instead of the correct “maddeningly,” but it’s hard to tell.
– Arnold Lang was also the decoy body in the source material.
– Bedelia’s face is so wonderful when she’s mulling over what Will tells her. It’s the very definition of “NOT IMPRESSED.”
– “You’ve just found religion. Nothing more dangerous than that.” One final instance of Fuller and Lightfoot omitting subjects in their sentences.
– The Alana-Chilton scene is much more affecting than I thought it would be. I was surprised that the show didn’t pull the trigger on killing Alana, but if it meant giving her a scene in which Chilton tells her to her face that she’s basically turned into Hannibal, that’s worth it.
– On that note, Esparza as Chilton wins the series award for Supporting MVP. In a perfect world, he would win all the awards for that category. It simply can’t be overstated how integral he has been to the success of Hannibal, and I hope Esparza knows that the Fannibaldom appreciates everything he’s put into the role.
– Chilton in this episode brought back memories of a recovering Georgia from Season 1.
– Perhaps my favorite line in any episode of the series: “You dropped the mic, Will. But here you are having to come back and pick it up again.” It’s partly because of how ridiculous Hannibal taking about mic-dropping is, but it’s also because it recalls one of my favorite images in the series: the teacup shattering. Bravo.
– If the post-credits scene and fairy tale allusions weren’t enough to recall Abel Gideon, then the car chase/breakout did, since Hannibal was in a similar position to how Gideon was when he was being transported. I appreciate that we got that sense even though Izzard wasn’t in the episode.
– But, hey! Katharine Isabelle was in it! Yeah!
– Speaking of the post-credits scene, first of all: wow. Wow, wow, wow to that outfit Bedelia is wearing. Wow. Also, I read this as Bedelia cut off and cooked her own leg in preparation for a Hannibal who never came. It was her way of getting out ahead of the situation and offering herself up, because there was no escape. Her disappointment is really interesting, since there’s also a tinge of wanting to be eaten by Hannibal in her.
– The eroding bluff is such an obvious-but-awesome entendre.
– And the final fight sequence is among the most gorgeous pieces of filmmaking I’ve seen on TV, accentuated by the perfect use of the Dragon imagery. There have been moments of that imagery this season that haven’t been very good, like the first time we see the tail. But the wings were flawlessly used in this episode.
[Отдельно соглашусь насчет Рауля Эспарзы. Очень непросто сделать любимца публики из того, кто, во-первых, долгое время невероятно бесил, во-вторых, просто из .. мелкого человека. Не Героя и не Злодея или Хитреца или еще кого-то, чей архетип сам по себе ярок и привлекателен, а из бездаря-проныры.]
Read more at www.tvovermind.com/reviews/hannibal-season-3-ep...