Review: Hannibal -The Show

Despite an initial distaste (zing!) for the show, I've come around to being a fan of Hannibal. I've been a Thomas Harris fan since I was a pretty young child. I think I read Silence of the Lambs when I was in the 4th grade or so (an indication of my parents' general antipathy to content regulation). Actually, I'm sure my English teacher dad would have been more offended by my reading something of poor quality than by my reading a well-written story where a man skins women and sews their skin into a lady-suit. I've since read all the books and have seen all the movies. I realize it's a pretty screwed up collection of stories to be interested in, but clearly I'm not the only one who likes them.

It took me a while to realize and accept that the show is a different entity than the previous stories, but once I settled into that reality, I came to enjoy it quite a bit. I was taken aback at first by how different all the characters are in the show from their counterparts in the books and movies and by the show's hyper-surrealist atmosphere compared to the books' and movies' more realistic tone. But as I watched more of the show, I began to realize that these deviations from the tone and content of the "Lecter Canon" were intentional and were done with respect.

I began to piece this together when I noticed the show taking dialogue and even narrative elements from the Canon and rearranging them to fit new characters and new places in the story arc. In the show, (very very slight spoiler alert that's not particularly important) a young FBI recruit stumbles onto Lecter in the course of investigating a murder and realizes that Lecter is the murderer when she sees a book depicting a famous medical illustration called "Wound Man," whose injuries match several of the murder victims'. This scene is a pastiche of various elements in the Canon. The character is clearly an homage to Clarice Starling, but the scene itself in the book features Will Graham. In the Canon storyline, it's when Graham catches Lecter and, in the process, is nearly killed by him. The show even has Lecter sneaking up in his socks, a detail Graham emphasizes in the books and the movies.

When I watched this scene, the light bulb went off that "oooooooh....I get it. This show is a new thing altogether." They are changing the back stories and the narrative. Both Will Graham's character and Lecter's character are very different in the different mediums. In the book, Graham is a sort of average guy who just happens to be good at getting into the heads of serial killers. In the show, they amplify Graham's strangeness and turn him into almost a high-functioning autistic. In the show, Lecter loses a lot of the snark that we see in the Canon Lecter. He seems much more serious and thoughtful and not nearly as humorously disdainful of the world. On the other hand, this Lecter is not the anti-hero Lecter that emerges in the book version of Hannibal. Lecter here is once again depicted as a consummately arrogant psychopath who is so disdainful of average people that he treats them like live stock. The anti-hero Lecter became more like Dexter...somebody who only kills bad people, people who deserve it. But in the show, Lecter murders a lot of regular people who don't appear to deserve it, including a teenage girl. I miss some of the snark, but I prefer personification-of-evil Lecter to anti-hero Lecter.

Now that I'm older, I realize that the books and the movies weren't exactly realistic, but Thomas Harris's background as a crime reporter lent some verisimilitude to the stories, at least in Red Dragon and Silence of the Lambs. The depictions of the procedural realities of the bureaucracies, like the FBI and the criminal mental hospital, at least had the veneer of realism. The victims seemed like real people from real places whose deaths inspired real trauma. The show does not attempt to capture this realism. In fact, it's so unrealistic that I have to believe it's intentional. To me, it feels like the producers of the show have decided to take the basic thematic and tonal elements of the Lecter Canon and turn it into an abstract art piece. In other wods, the surrealism is a feature, not a bug. The murder victims are killed in ludicrously elaborate ways, something we see a tad bit of in the Lecter Canon but which the show producers took and turned up to 11. The show doesn't even bother with a pretense of verisimilitude on the inner-workings of the FBI as a real government bureaucracy. The dialogue in the books was always a tad bit stylized, especially when Lecter himself was involved, but again, the show turns this up to 11.

Once I accepted that the lack of verisimilitude was simply part of the this show's particular stylistic choice, it became much more enjoyable. At this point, I don't care that the dialogue and the narrative are utterly ludicrous. They're entertaining as hell! The show is very well acted, and the narrative and dialogue, while obviously ludicrous, are also interesting and suspenseful. The show is a character study about two hyper-intelligent frenemnies who are both obsessed with questions of violence, life, death, and even art. It might not be philosophy, but for a broadcast tv show, it's pretty well done. And the show just looks fantastic. Again, they don't bother with the gritty realism we see in the production design of Silence of the Lambs. Nothing here is particularly realistic, but that's ok...the beautiful surrealistic images fit the atmosphere of the show. The "violence as art" motif is ludicrous (most serial killers just pick up prostitutes and murder them with knives or guns and dump them with no attention to the "art" of their act), but it is definitely a theme in the Lecter Canon, and the show's decision to ramp it up to 11 works well in the context of the world the show creates.

Watching this show has been a good lesson. Don't condemn something for not being a thing if it's not trying to be that thing. That doesn't make a lot of sense. Figure out what something is trying to be and judge it by its own standards. I hope the makers of the Fargo show are taking notes.