Illustration by Martin Ansin
I initially recoiled from “Hannibal.” During its first season, the grotesque imagery proved too much. A corpse transformed into a cello, vocal cords as strings, then played. Dr. Frederick Chilton’s horrifying disembowelment. An acupuncture needle piercing an eyeball. A man forced to eat his own roasted leg. Each instance prompted a self-righteous withdrawal. Enough nihilism, enough torture, I thought. Enough glorification of serial killers as artists.
Yet, this moral high ground was fleeting. I found myself drawn back, peeking through my fingers—a glimpse here, a binge there. Perhaps I was desensitizing myself, or perhaps, properly sensitizing myself to its unique vision. Gradually, my eyes adjusted to the darkness. By the second season’s midpoint, “Hannibal” transcended mere gore; it became a macabre masterpiece, a study in pure, audacious pleasure. Echoes of Cronenberg and Mann, Lynch and Kubrick resonated within its frames. It possesses a formal ambition rarely seen on television, reflexively shifting the ordinary into the alien and back again. Totem poles of corpses, bees erupting from eye sockets, men swallowing songbirds—these are not just shocks, but meticulously crafted provocations. Over time, patterns emerge, revealing an unsettling exploration of intimacy, the fragility of the human form, and the potent, seductive power of art – its capacity To Serve A Man’s darkest cravings, to make us desire what we initially deemed repulsive.
Could my fascination stem from the show validating my cynicism about food culture? For the uninitiated, “Hannibal” (inspired by “The Silence of the Lambs” and Thomas Harris’s novels) centers on Hannibal Lecter, portrayed with chilling hauteur by Mads Mikkelsen. He is a brilliant psychiatrist who is also a monstrous murderer. He collects “trophies” – a liver, a heart – and transforms them into culinary creations for unsuspecting guests. (The show’s cooking montages are infamous, inducing hunger before a wave of guilt washes over viewers.) Hannibal justifies his actions by claiming to “eat the rude,” a darkly humorous, albeit ethically warped, rationale. He is, in many ways, the perfect catch: a harpsichord and theremin player, impeccably dressed, and a connoisseur of Dante. By day, he acts as a libertarian life coach, delving into his patients’ Jungian shadows, often manipulating other serial killers to obscure his own gruesome path. In this universe, much like “Dexter,” serial killers seem as commonplace as daisies.
Hannibal’s counterpart, his twisted love interest, is Will Graham, the intensely empathetic FBI criminal profiler, played with poignant vulnerability by Hugh Dancy. Will’s pathological empathy is far more debilitating than Hannibal’s chilling lack thereof. At murder scenes, Will enters a fugue state, becoming the killer, reenacting the crime while uttering the series’ haunting mantra: “This is my design.” The two men circle each other, a seductive dance of best friends and homoerotic adversaries, therapist and patient, each infiltrating the other’s psyche, sometimes in disturbingly literal ways. The previous season concluded with Hannibal plunging a kitchen knife into Will after tenderly stroking his cheek—a symbolic penetration that sent devoted fans, the self-proclaimed “Fannibals,” into ecstatic fervor. In the current season, the third, Hannibal’s valentine to the surviving Will is a pulverized and sculpted human corpse, shaped into a heart and displayed in a church, a perverse holy relic.
“Hannibal” eschews realism, yet it avoids outright camp. Creator Bryan Fuller (“Wonderfalls,” “Pushing Daisies”) describes it as a show that “regards spectacle with a sort of worship.” Initially structured like a network procedural, “Hannibal” has long since shed that skin, much like Hannibal discards his “person suit,” the facade of normalcy. Fuller, in an interview with RogerEbert.com, instructs his directors: “This is not an episode of television. This is a pretentious art film.” This willingness to embrace the outré and avant-garde (on NBC, remarkably) reflects a broader trend in television, seen in series from “American Horror Story” to “True Detective,” “The Leftovers,” “The Returned,” “The Strain,” and “The Knick.” Quality varies, but all are defined by a devotion to Freud’s concept of “the uncanny.” Within this landscape, “Hannibal” distinguishes itself by daring to be absurd and self-serious, yielding something gloriously bizarre and profound, akin to opera and poetry. When Will examines the heart sculpture, it unfolds, ventricles collapsing, then rises on twisted, black, nightmare legs, transforming into a demonic elk.
Despite the pervasive gore, a disarming fairy-tale quality permeates “Hannibal.” The murders, largely, lack the misogynistic undercurrents of real-life serial killings or even the sharper kink of Harris’s novels. Rape is absent, even in fantasy; victims are repurposed as mushroom farms. When female characters are harmed—shot, pushed, or sliced—gendered sadism is minimal. While graphic sexual violence can serve realism, “Hannibal’s” omission acts as an idealistic promise: anything can happen, except that.
Murder, however, is freely explored, treated with shocking irreverence. Corpses become fungible art supplies, like clay or paint, in sequences where bodies are sewn into frescoes or contorted into grotesque displays. Skin becomes wings, corpses transform into apiaries, belladonna is planted in heart cavities. Cynicism could interpret this as mere shock value. Nietzsche may be sophisticated, but shock is quicker. It certainly makes recommending the show difficult. Yet, these images coalesce into metaphors for mortality and loss. A broken teacup reassembles, mirroring a shattered skull, reflecting grief’s yearning for time to reverse. Tears are stirred into Martinis. A woman’s corpse is sewn into a horse’s womb; a live blackbird emerges. Symbols eerily intertwine: heartbeat, clock tick, drumbeat. The arch dialogue mirrors this multiplicity, ordinary idioms taking on sinister weight, from “the one that got away” to “the devil you know.” “You smoked me in thyme,” a victim remarks, served a dish of himself, with typically dark double entendre.
A standout scene from last season features a black male corpse in a river, encased in resin. He escaped a serial killer’s “art project”—a mural of dozens of corpses, diverse in skin tone, racial diversity reduced to pigment, people to brushstrokes. Hannibal, atop a corn silo, sees the pattern: from above, the bodies form an eye. The image evokes grandiose ideas: eye gazing at eye, God at creation, creation at God, through the silo’s open roof. Hannibal calls to the killer, “I love your work.”
This outlandish scene provoked laughter, but also highlighted the show’s self-awareness about voyeurism, our enjoyment of the macabre, like indulging in foie gras or veal. (One might suspect PETA sponsorship at times.) Hannibal, to the modern TV viewer, is familiar: another middle-aged male genius obsessed with absolute control, like Don Draper, Walter White, Dr. House, Francis Underwood. Astrologically, he’s Sherlock with Lucifer rising. Primarily, Hannibal embodies the fantasy of the uncompromising TV auteur: the perfectionist demanding every detail of his vision, regardless of the cost. “This is his design.”
Season 3 embraces feverish theatricality, layering artifice. In a flashback, Hannibal intones “Once upon a time,” and a red velvet curtain descends. A fugitive in Europe, Hannibal rides motorcycles, sips champagne, murders for curatorial positions, and poses as husband to his former therapist, Bedelia Du Maurier (Gillian Anderson, chillingly delicious, scenes like whispered contests). Bedelia’s status—hostage or co-conspirator—remains ambiguous. “Observe or participate?” Hannibal asks, after bludgeoning a man with an Aristotle bust before her. “Are you at this very moment observing or participating?” “Observing,” she whispers, a tear tracing her face. Such exchanges challenge the viewer’s role, suggesting we deceive ourselves. Bedelia, unable to look away, exemplifies those captivated by Hannibal. She, like us, deems what he offers too compelling to serve him only with observation, but with full sensory engagement.
