“Hannibal,” a television series that initially repelled with its graphic depictions of violence, ultimately evolved into a critically acclaimed exploration of human nature and artistry. This transformation, from shocking spectacle to profound meditation, reveals a complex narrative that, in its own unsettling way, can be interpreted as To Serve Mankind by forcing us to confront the darker aspects of ourselves and the power of art to both disturb and enlighten.
My initial encounters with “Hannibal” were marked by revulsion. The show’s penchant for transforming the human body into grotesque art installations – a corpse repurposed as a cello, entrails arranged like linguini, acupuncture needles piercing eyeballs – felt gratuitous and nihilistic. The glamorization of a serial killer like Hannibal Lecter, presented as a refined artist and intellectual, seemed ethically questionable. Each episode pushed the boundaries of acceptable television violence, prompting repeated urges to abandon the series as a descent into gratuitous darkness.
However, despite these visceral reactions, a persistent curiosity lingered. Like peeking through fingers at a horror film, I found myself drawn back to “Hannibal,” initially in small doses, then in immersive binges. Gradually, the initial shock gave way to a reluctant fascination. By the second season, the show transcended its blood-soaked surface, revealing a macabre beauty and audacious artistic vision. Echoes of cinematic masters like David Cronenberg, Michael Mann, David Lynch, and Stanley Kubrick resonated within its frames. “Hannibal” possessed a rare formal ambition for television, subverting the ordinary and the alien, the familiar and the grotesque. Corpses were stacked into nightmarish totem poles, bees swarmed from empty eye sockets, and songbirds were consumed whole. Beneath the visceral horror, patterns emerged: an unsettling exploration of intimacy, the fragility of the human form, and the potent, sometimes disturbing, allure of art. It challenged viewers to confront their own morbid curiosity, to question the line between repulsion and attraction, and to consider how art can make us crave what we initially deem disgusting.
This unsettling appeal might stem from the show’s provocative commentary on contemporary culture, particularly food culture. For those unfamiliar with “The Silence of the Lambs” or Thomas Harris’s novels, the premise revolves around Hannibal Lecter, portrayed with chilling composure by Mads Mikkelsen. Lecter is a brilliant psychiatrist who is also a cannibalistic serial killer. He collects “trophies” from his victims – organs and body parts – which he then meticulously prepares and serves to unsuspecting guests. These culinary sequences, often presented in stylized montages, are both alluring and deeply disturbing, creating a sense of guilt-ridden hunger in the viewer. Lecter justifies his actions by claiming to “eat the rude,” echoing a sentiment of culinary elitism, albeit taken to an extreme. He is presented as a sophisticated and cultured figure, playing the harpsichord and theremin, impeccably dressed, and well-versed in Dante. By day, he acts as a libertarian life coach, manipulating other, less refined serial killers to obscure his own crimes. In the world of “Hannibal,” serial killers are disturbingly commonplace.
Hannibal’s counterpart, and arguably his romantic interest, is Will Graham, played with poignant vulnerability by Hugh Dancy. Will is an FBI criminal profiler whose extreme empathy is both his greatest asset and his crippling weakness. When investigating a murder scene, Will enters a dissociative state, embodying the killer and reliving the crime, murmuring the show’s defining phrase: “This is my design.” The relationship between Hannibal and Will is a complex dance of seduction and antagonism, friendship and rivalry, therapist and patient. They are homoerotic nemeses, constantly probing each other’s minds, sometimes in disturbingly literal ways. The second season culminated in Hannibal seemingly disemboweling Will with a kitchen knife after a tender caress – a moment of symbolic penetration that captivated the show’s devoted fanbase, the “Fannibals.” In the third season, Hannibal’s twisted Valentine to Will, who survived the attack, was a corpse pulverized and sculpted into a human heart, displayed in a church like a sacred relic.
“Hannibal” deliberately eschews realism, yet it avoids descending into mere camp. Bryan Fuller, the show’s creator, known for his whimsical series “Wonderfalls” and “Pushing Daisies,” described “Hannibal” as a show that “regards spectacle with a sort of worship.” Initially structured like network procedural dramas, “Hannibal” quickly shed this conventional framework, much like Hannibal discards his “person suit,” the facade of normalcy he presents to the world. Fuller, in an interview, has stated that he instructs directors to approach each episode as a “pretentious art film,” not simply television. This willingness to embrace the outré and avant-garde, particularly on a mainstream network like NBC, aligns “Hannibal” with a broader trend in television, evident in series like “American Horror Story,” “True Detective,” and “The Leftovers.” These shows, while varying in quality, are united by their exploration of the Freudian concept of “the uncanny.” Within this landscape, “Hannibal” distinguishes itself by its audacious embrace of absurdity and self-seriousness, achieving a level of operatic and poetic strangeness. The heart sculpture, for example, unfolds to reveal ventricles and then transforms into a demonic elk, walking towards Will on nightmarish legs.
Despite the pervasive gore, “Hannibal” possesses a disarming fairytale quality. Notably, the murders, with few exceptions, lack the misogynistic undertones often found in real-life serial killings and even in Harris’s novels. Rape is absent from “Hannibal’s” world, even in its darkest fantasies. Instead, victims are repurposed in bizarrely creative ways, such as becoming mushroom farms. When female characters are harmed, the violence is generally devoid of gendered sadism. While graphic sexual violence can sometimes serve realism, “Hannibal’s” omission of it acts as an unexpected, almost idealistic promise to viewers: while anything can happen, this particular horror is off-limits.
Murder, however, is treated with a brazen lack of respect, becoming a mere medium for artistic expression. Corpses are fungible art supplies, akin to clay or paint. Bodies are stitched into macabre frescoes, twisted into grotesque displays, skin stretched into wings, and belladonna planted in heart cavities. While such imagery could be cynically interpreted as mere shock tactics, designed to provoke rather than to explore deeper themes, in “Hannibal,” these visuals coalesce into metaphors for mortality and loss. A broken teacup reassembles itself, mirroring a shattered skull and a grieving man’s yearning for time reversal. Tears are stirred into Martinis. A woman’s corpse is sewn into a horse’s womb, and a live blackbird emerges from her torso. Symbols intertwine, blurring sensory boundaries, as in synesthesia: a heartbeat becomes a clock tick, then a drumbeat. The show’s arch dialogue operates on multiple layers, imbuing ordinary idioms with sinister undertones, from “the one that got away” to “the devil you know.” “You smoked me in thyme,” a victim remarks as he is served a dish of himself, with typically layered meaning.
One of the series’ most striking scenes involves a black male corpse discovered in a river, encased in resin. The man had escaped from an art project by a serial killer previously unknown to Hannibal: a mural composed of dozens of corpses of varying skin tones – racial diversity reduced to pigment, people transformed into brushstrokes. When Hannibal ascends a corn silo and looks down, he perceives a pattern: the contorted bodies form a giant eye, gazing upwards, perhaps representing God observing creation, or creation returning God’s gaze through the silo’s open roof. Hannibal calls down to the killer, “I love your work.”
This outlandish scene, while darkly humorous, underscores the show’s self-awareness regarding the act of viewership. It acknowledges our voyeurism, our capacity to indulge in the grotesque and the forbidden. “Hannibal,” in this sense, holds a mirror to our own appetites, forcing us to confront our fascination with darkness. Hannibal Lecter, in many ways, embodies the contemporary television antihero – a middle-aged male genius obsessed with control, akin to Don Draper or Walter White. He represents the ultimate uncompromising auteur, dedicated solely to realizing his artistic vision, regardless of the cost. “This is his design.”
As “Hannibal” progressed into its third season, it embraced an even more heightened theatricality, emphasizing its artificiality. In a flashback, Hannibal intones “Once upon a time,” and a red velvet curtain descends across the screen. A fugitive in Europe, Hannibal engages in a macabre Grand Tour, riding motorcycles, drinking champagne, and murdering to assume new identities. He poses as man and wife with his former therapist, Bedelia Du Maurier, played with icy elegance by Gillian Anderson. Their scenes are often hushed and ambiguous, questioning Bedelia’s role as either hostage or accomplice. “Observe or participate?” Hannibal asks after bludgeoning a man before her. “Are you at this very moment observing or participating?” “Observing,” she whispers, a tear on her face. This exchange challenges the viewer’s own position, suggesting that passive observation is itself a form of participation. Like Bedelia, and indeed like anyone captivated by “Hannibal,” we are drawn to the darkness, willingly tasting what we know might be corrupting, finding a disturbing allure in the macabre masterpiece. In this way, “Hannibal,” through its unflinching exploration of the grotesque and the artistic, ultimately serves mankind by prompting us to examine our own shadowed desires and the complex relationship between art, violence, and the human condition.
