Matching Scars

*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.

“Aperitivo” (aired 6/25/15)

            In the wake of his wife’s death, Jack Crawford confides in Alana Bloom about his feelings concerning the normalcy of the world outside his window. After such an enormous loss, suggests Jack, one expects to look out and find everything changed. The reality, though, is that the world is underwhelmingly the same—disappointingly normal.

            Jack’s elegiac story, which is a principle focus of this week’s episode, feels strangely opportune given the news that broke earlier this week about NBC’s decision to cancel Hannibal after this season,[1] either because of the show’s dropping ratings or possibly a result of its creators’ failure to acquire the rights to the character Clarice Starling.[2] While I certainly believe that low viewer turnout for the show could lead to its cancellation, I have heard the rumor about the Clarice character’s role a couple places and still do not really buy it. Although some continue to refer to Hannibal as a “prequel series,” I would argue (and have argued) that it is more of a retelling or re-imagining. Even without Clarice, I am sure that Fuller and company could replace her in some clever way (see season two’s “Kade Prurnell” whose name is actually an anagram of “Paul Krendler,” one of the antagonists of Harris’s third novel) that ultimately deepens the show’s own mythos while further distancing it from its source material in positive ways.[3] If the show were to be picked up elsewhere—like, say, on Netflix[4]—they could also go another route and simply tell their own story. After all, the plot of Silence of the Lambs leans heavily on a negative portrayal of trans folks as insane serial killers, and I would hate to see Hannibal live to potentially make a mess of itself trying to adapt that material. I’d rather see it die on a high note and end up being a sort of prequel series after all than to have it live to be a retelling that I end up disliking.

            For the time being, however, I can safely continue to heap praise on the show. “Aperitivo” is yet another episode that is bound to please the devout Hannibal fanbase and frustrate other viewers. As if we needed an in-episode representation of the way that the show has officially shed its old “person suit” disguise as a somewhat typical procedural, this episode we find out that nobody is working to catch Hannibal in an official capacity anymore. At this point, it’s all purely personal. Alana, who finds herself “thinking differently” after the incident at Hannibal’s house, really makes the rounds in “Aperitivo,” visiting with both Will and Jack while also serving as Chilton’s liaison with the disfigured Mason Verger after the (clearly resilient) doctor himself bows out from treating his patient when he begins to suspect that Mason’s intended method for dealing with the trauma Hannibal caused him may be somewhat less than legal. While he leaves off treating Mason himself and clearly wants to make a fortune off Hannibal (“Hannibal the Cannibal^tm,” y’all), Chilton still urges Alana to goad Mason onward in his schemes. My guess is that the Chilton of the Hannibal universe is over attempting to study the man that got him shot and is ready to write his seminal work on the good doctor once he knows he is free of the possibility of reprisal. He doesn’t have to get his hands dirty, and by arranging Hannibal’s death from a distance he may feel that he is more successfully imitating the great manipulator himself.

            The structure of “Aperitivo” generally involves returning to the incident in the kitchen at the end of last season several times to catch us up with Will, Jack, and Alana. Although we saw some of Will’s story in “Primavera,” we weren’t really seeing anything but his fantasy of a world in which Abigail lived. This time we find out that his real visitor in the hospital was Chilton, and we also get a look inside Will’s head at what his intentions are regarding Hannibal. We see him fantasizing about a better world in which he worked together with Hannibal to kill Jack, and then we hear him openly admit that he wanted to run away with his friend when Jack approaches him at his home—where we also find him working on a boat engine at last in a nice nod to Red Dragon Will. 

            Throughout Will’s interaction with Jack and Jack’s interactions with Alana, Chilton, and Will, I was struck by how much more subdued this performance by Laurence Fishburne is compared with the old Jack we met in the season one premiere who bellowed at someone to use another bathroom while he and Will had a one-on-one chat. At the time, I thought that Jack was going to be an obnoxious character—loud, domineering, and perhaps excessively straight-laced—but “Aperitivo” shows him to be none of those things. He is quiet, contemplative (even docile), and may or may not have given his wife what amounts to euthanasia. 

            “I’ve let go of everything,” Jack tells Chilton—Will and Hannibal, obviously, but also his wife who was resuscitated against her will in season two because Hannibal knew that Jack did not want her to die. Jack still does not want Bella to be dead, but he has let go of her in a way that he never let go of Will and his determination to use him to catch the Minnesota Shrike and copycat killer. If Jack had been more willing to let go—if he had released Will from duty early in season one after he saw the strain the work took on him, for example—then there would have been no kitchen incident. Although Hannibal is heavily focused on Will’s relationship with Hannibal, much of what has occurred thus far with regard to the escalation of events has been a result of Jack continually pushing Will toward Hannibal. 

            Jack’s words of resignation concerning the US’s interest in terrorists rather than psychopaths after his forced retirement feel like yet another convenient parallel with the show’s cancellation. Wouldn’t we all rather chase easily recognizable targets and enemies than parse the complexities of something more nuanced than alleged freedom-hating militants? Wouldn’t you rather watch a show that affirms the benevolence of God and the existence of good guys (good cops, good sexy doctors, good firefighters) rather than one that talks about forgiveness but continually reminds viewers that the Old Testament God existed and that he was as likely to bless you for ten generations as he was to curse you for forty or open a gaping hole beneath your feet? Perhaps Will genuinely does forgive Hannibal since he seems truly enamored, but we know for certain that Hannibal’s forgiveness of Will and Mason Verger’s forgiveness of Hannibal are highly conditional. Hannibal will forgive Will once he butchers and eats him. Mason will forgive Hannibal once he sees him devoured. Given that Alana tells Jack Will “knows what he needs to do,” his own forgiveness of Hannibal is likely to involve a deadly caveat or two. God forgives but only after he’s soundly punished you first. At least, that seems to be the implication.

            On that note, I am pleased that Fuller and co. are moving ahead with Mason’s plan for Hannibal’s demise at what seems like top speed. I am glad to see that they have been treating this season like a possible series ender even before the official call was made, which should mean that even if we don’t get a season four elsewhere, the ending of season three should at least bring us some sense of resolution. Interestingly, I had the thought while looking at the titles of future episodes on Wikipedia that the series tradition of giving episodes culinary titles ends this season with episode eight, which could be a subtle hint that by mid-season when we get into Red Dragon Hannibal will be in a situation similar to the one he exists in in the novel—that is to say, no longer free to pursue his taste for fine dining that has been a motif that has found additional resonance in the naming of each installment of the show up to this point.

            In a way, “Aperitivo” feels like the grim fulfillment of a joke from earlier in the show’s run when Freddie Lounds suggested that she and the rest of the principle cast were all psychopaths helping one another out. The old collaboration between the main, initially heroic, players in this drama has more or less dissolved, but if they weren’t all thoroughly damaged individuals before, they certainly are in the wake of Hannibal’s attack, leaving them all with matching scars of a sort. Mason, his sister Margot, Chilton, Alana, Jack, and Will have all been irrevocably damaged either because of their direct encounters with the doctor or as a result of his influence. Nonetheless, they occupy a world that refuses to acknowledge how fundamentally they have been changed. No one else at the FBI or that they had previously interacted with has changed like they have. The conventional world of the objective reality we used to glimpse in the establishing shots common in procedural series has given way to a nightmarish dreamscape—“Let it be a fairytale,” said Hannibal in “Antipasto,” apparently setting the tone for the entire season—and we now see them freely interact with hallucinations and fictions that no longer require justification because we are experiencing them from the subjective, changed perspectives of Will and company. If we saw the world around them without their influence it would be strikingly mundane and disaffected. 

            This reading of the show’s aesthetic and structural decisions is, of course, merely my own attempt to make symbolic meaning from the noticeable shift away from the more recognizable procedural that Hannibal used to be. Live or die, it’s been a network series like no other, and though it’s probably a bit much to suggest that it has indelibly marked those of us who have stuck with it from the beginning, it’s certainly not a series that will be easily forgotten.         

Notes:

[1] http://cultural-learnings.com/2015/06/23/handicapping-hannibals-future-netflix-amazon-hulu/ (I use the phrase “NBC’s decision” here almost as shorthand for what is admittedly a much more complicated issue. This piece by Myles McNutt for the A.V. Club walks through the details of Hannibal’s “cancellation” and also discusses the reasons why or why not streaming services might step in to save it. I won’t pretend to fully understand the particulars of the financial stuff.)

[2] http://tvline.com/2015/06/22/hannibal-cancelled-nbc-season-4/ (One of the first pieces I read covering Hannibal’s cancellation, including some quotes from Fuller and statistics regarding the viewership this season.)

[3] http://hannibal.wikia.com/wiki/Kade_Prurnell (Simply a Wiki page where someone pointed out the “Kade Prurnell”-“Paul Krendler” connection.)

[4] http://variety.com/2015/tv/news/hannibal-season-4-netflix-amazon-1201527355/ (A more recent piece that discusses what we currently know from Fuller about the potential for Hannibal to be picked up by a streaming service like Netflix or Amazon.)