What I Read & Watched: Confessions of a Fannibal

I can’t remember now why or how I decided to start watching Hannibal. I do know I mentioned my plan to my bestie, who endorsed it enthusiastically. Our tastes in entertainment don’t always line up (Exhibit A: she has seen IT four times, and I intend to see it precisely zero times), so it’s a nice bonus when we can talk about our current obsessions. I also don’t know why I didn’t watch Hannibal before. I think it aired after I stopped watching prime time TV. (That is not a value judgment, by the way, as much as a mom-life confession. GoT is my only weekly standing appointment, and luckily, it’s got a short run every year.) But it’s all good, because I was able to binge-watch all 3 seasons at double warp speed.

Needless to say, I loved it … but there is a lot to unpack in that verdict.

First of all, and this requires no caveats, the performances are – one and all – top notch. I mean, this is a show where Laurence Fishburne and Gillian Anderson both play what are, technically, secondary characters. I have been a Mads Mikkelsen fan girl for a long time, and yes, this is one instance where I’m gonna pull the “I saw him first” card. Because I saw him in movies like Pusher and After the Wedding back in the days when Edmonton cinephiles still got DVDs from the Movie Studio off Whyte. He is a phenomenal Hannibal Lecter … though, to be fair, he is never not phenomenal, and that includes the ultimate cheesefest that is King Arthur. More on that later. Now, if we go back far enough in time, I also used to have a Hugh Dancy problem at one time. He’s a cute, dark-haired Brit: it’s kind of a given. I have not thought about Hugh Dancy in years, but I was very impressed by his Will Graham, arguably the second banana/straight man on the show, which is never an easy role to pull off, I imagine. I may, ahem, possibly have a Hugh Dancy problem again.

Second, and maybe this does require a caveat … this is an intellectually challenging show. Yes, it is a lot of other things as well – Grand Guignol gets thrown around a lot by critics – but it is, fundamentally, a show about people talking to each other about things that are happening inside their own heads. It is not a “monster of the week” series in the vein of Criminal Minds (which I used to watch and love), especially not after the first few episodes. Initially, I thought that’s what I was getting, and it took some adjustment on my part to accept that the show was marching to the beat of its own, incredibly peculiar, drum. I have never seen a show like this one, ever, and I think it defies easy categorization.

I can confirm what all the reviews have typically said about it. It’s gory, but the violence is highly stylized, which lends itself to a certain amount of detachment on the part of the viewer; it is a world removed from, say, Game of Thrones. (On that note, there is also a distinct lack of sexual violence/brutality on the show.) The plot lines become more and more outlandish as the show goes on; the show frequently doesn’t have a firm grip on linear narrative – or, looking at it another way, is largely free from it. As someone who is a very linear thinker, I found this frustrating at times, until I gave up on trying to impose my expectations on the show, and just … well, accepted it as a sort of fever dream. A beautiful fever dream meditation on things like the self, self-perception and deceit, love, good and evil, the list goes on.

For me, this worked – and I loved it. It got me thinking and self-analyzing, often by what I call “tangential inspiration”; a bit of dialogue or scene would get me thinking about one thing, and from there my mind would hopscotch to a bunch of other things. It was, oddly enough, therapeutic in a way.

I have a lot of thoughts on the Will-Hannibal relationship, which is the heart (or blood?) of the series, but I will spare you the longer dissertation. Trust that it’s another reason to watch the show. Mads and Hugh have mad (zing!) chemistry together, and I was kinda embarrassed to realize really late in the game that Hannibal was not their first project together. I say embarrassed because King Arthur was my TOTAL CHEESEFEST MOVIE JAM BACK IN THE DAY AND I CAN’T BELIEVE I FORGOT ABOUT IT. Ahem, sorry about the shouting, I just got excited there for a moment reliving my memories. I have watched it way more times than any adult probably should, and having recently re-watched it a few more times still, I can confirm that it is way cheesier than I remembered it. It also features a metric tonne of attractive people, which is a very important metric in my books.

That includes Mads and his preternatural cheekbones …

… and Hugh, who apparently shares the Paul Rudd Aging Gene:

On that note, which is probably the high one of this post, let’s move on to a couple of quick articles. A new study says that people can guess whether someone is rich or poor from the way they look. I am skeptical, but okay.

I was a huge fan of Alain de Botton’s Essays in Love back in my early 20s, and was delighted to discover (somewhat belatedly) his more recent writings on marriage. This article, titled “Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person”, along with this podcast transcript on similar topics, are both fantastic reads.

Happy Friday!