Bonsoir, Hannibal

*In the interest of pushing more content to this blog given the glacial rate at which I am developing some longer, more formalized pieces, I am going to go ahead and offer some reflection on each week’s episode of Bryan Fuller's beautiful Hannibal TV series on NBC.

"Hannibal Title Card." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 1 Mar. 2014.

“Antipasto” (aired 6/4/2015)

It feels like so long since I have had Hannibal in my life. It has been so long, in fact, that I could no longer exactly remember what happened to Eddie Izzard’s Abel Gideon character last season. I remembered his capture by Hannibal, but I could not recall if the scenes I was seeing with him early in “Antipasto” were flashbacks or not. Of course, I soon realized that they were new material rather than just old footage given the amount of time spent on them—more than would be strictly necessary just to reintroduce the events of the previous year.

“Antipasto” is a delightfully modernist episode of Hannibal, though I use the term loosely. I simply mean that the show asks something of the viewer in watching it. My father fell asleep during the episode, which is not the most accurate way to take the temperature of a program, but it does offer a general indication of his interest. Increasingly, Hannibal eschews the straight up slasher antics of series like The Following in favor of a more cerebral experience that involves experimentation with sound, color, and composition. “Antipasto” is a slow burn of an episode, content to let its story unfold at a leisurely pace even though this is the first we are seeing of Hannibal after a year-long hiatus—a year-long hiatus following a massive bloodbath in the good doctor’s kitchen that left the fates of many principle characters uncertain. The episode toys with chronology, signaling flashbacks with grayscale and sometimes letterboxing while the present occupies the full screen, asking viewers to assemble a chain of events leading to Hannibal and Bedelia’s (Mads Mikkelsen and Gillian Anderson) mostly idyllic new living situation in Italy by way of Paris, France and a well-timed murder.

I had to put my brain to use during this episode, and I enjoyed it. I wonder what the composition of Hannibal’s fanbase looks like now and if there are any traditional fans of thrillers still waiting in the wings for people to stop talking and start slashing. I don’t mean to suggest that fans of thrillers will not enjoy Hannibal, but it has become increasingly obvious that Fuller and the show’s creators want it to be something different from the usual procedural.

Last season, the case of the week structure often felt neglected in favor of the main plot, and while the show has always been dreamy, casting its violence in lush, nightmarish ways rather than going for the shock of simply seeing and hearing knives going into bodies, the season three premiere is notable for its dreamlike qualities. Its structure is very much like a dream.

“Antipasto” starts off more than one scene with a mystery—usually an extreme close-up of an object with powerful depth of field blurring to the background—and asks you to solve it. The uncertainty this technique creates, along with the skips through time and the aforementioned surrealism of scenes like the one where Bedelia submerges herself in the bath and seems to be sinking instead into a vast, dark ocean helps create the psychological thrills of uncertainty about the character’s safety as well as the truth of what we are seeing and hearing. In this episode we are getting a look behind the curtain at Hannibal’s machinations—“seeing him” as he tells Bedelia, though only the bit he allows us to see—but we follow much of the action from the point of view of his former psychiatrist, who seems much less self-assured about the whole business of being abroad with the suave cannibal than I think most of us expected after seeing them together on a plane at the end of season two, suggesting that perhaps they were more in cahoots than previously expected.

In “Antipasto” we also finally get a look at the incident with a patient of Bedelia’s that the show has been alluding to for some time now. We get the sense from this scene especially that Hannibal’s psychic hold on his partner is at least partially a result of his helping her cover up whatever happened between her and the man whose mouth she is shown reaching into (or pulling her arm from). I do like that we see some uncertainty in Bedelia here, as she was previously one of my least favorite characters in the series—a stoic who somehow managed to out-stoic the other emotionally flat people around her. Although I can appreciate Hannibal’s deadpan, understated, often dry but philosophically-rich conversations with their many puns and allusions to the novels themselves—a style of dialogue and character interaction that has also become increasingly like a stage play as it dominates the focus of each episode—I still find the lack of emotional range in the characters bothersome. It makes sense for Hannibal, a sociopath, to be constantly straight-faced and untouched, but I started to feel with season two that this stoicism was showing up in far too many of the other characters. At least in Bedelia’s case in this episode, we get the sense that the calm is truly only a façade. The scene where she goes to a shop for the usual for herself and her pretend hubby is especially powerful since she has just learned that what Hannibal has her eating is designed to sweeten the taste of flesh.

The teaser for the rest of the season following the premiere showed us Will Graham (Hugh Dancy) and friends alive and well and on the case next week, so although it may be a relief after this slow start to (possibly) pick up the pace of the manhunt for Hannibal a bit, I do wish we could have had perhaps one more episode like this one—that capitalizes strongly on the show’s dreamlike atmosphere, basks in its rich colors and sounds, and offers a slightly more nontraditional viewing experience for the audience. After watching so many procedurals and so many hours of TV in general over the years, the old song and dance of establishing shots of buildings or streets, followed by close-ups of faces as people talk to each other and advance the plot has become boring. Hannibal still follows this formula to a degree, but its deviations into the unknown or unexpected are what make this cultured, mindful take on the source material so much more engrossing than it could have potentially been. Like Hannibal himself, the show seems a well-dressed, educated presence with which we are alone, waiting for the slips, to see what is underneath the “person suit” or the procedural suit and to feel the tension of uncertainty.