I’ve seen the first four episodes of Hannibal [G-rated assessment]

Finally. Below is an assessment that I hope to have formulated in ways that avoid specific triggers for violence or gore. I know there are readers here who are concerned about those things and I intend to do the best I can to keep this blog safe for them.

I think we can take Richard Armitage off the hook for the charge that he said he would never do horror. This series is not horror, at least as I understand horror to be, or then it’s at least not conventional or traditional horror. One doesn’t spend all of every episode coiled up, worrying about what horrible, frightening thing will happen next. It’s nothing like The Silence of the Lambs (thank heavens). It definitely cops to the charge of aestheticizing violence, but we knew that already. It does so in what seems to be such a warped way that at times it seems to be offering a satirical comment on horror films (I would give examples, but see my promise to stay away from triggering comments) and maybe if I watched horror films, I’d see some clearer parallels.

This television show is way more intriguing than I would have guessed, and it was immediately apparent to me that there could be artistic (non-practical) considerations for wanting to be cast in it. The whole question of identity is front and center, with a protagonist, Will Graham (Hugh Dancy) who feels such extraordinary empathy with other humans that he can solve a crime from the inside by taking on the viewpoint of the killer. Graham is an actual real character with an inside in this adaptation, not the cardboard cutout from Harris’ novel. The questions about identity get repeated in every single episode — the person vs their family being another central theme, as well as the question of how exactly one responds to a life-changing trauma. There also are interesting questions raised about creativity that get addressed via the repeated questions Graham asks himself (and is asked by others) about what it is that he spends most of his time doing, whether he enjoys it, and why he does it. There’s a piece of me that cheers for Graham’s self-defense of himself; he feels free to tell people when they are uncomfortably in his space — and I’m jealous he could do this as a professor. And I’ve always found myself intrigued by the “I see myself in the thing I despise” discussion in art. How do you protect yourself from your own imagination? Do you need to?

Up till now, however, my identification has been with Graham, not with any of the villains. It seems the killers get much less interesting opportunities — they don’t have real story arcs. I can see Armitage’s physical skill playing really well into this series, with his penchant for creating impressions in seconds via postures and walks and gestures and so on leading to an unforgettable Dolarhyde, but so far the criminals are not getting much screen time or really any interesting lines. From the advance publicity it sounds like they are spending more time on Dolarhyde than they have on (so far Garrett Hobbs); I hope that is true. I also wonder, with a female Freddie Lounds — is Armitage’s Dolarhyde going to have to kill her? I can see him sinking his teeth into that possibility.

I never would have watched this show but for Richard Armitage. It never would have occurred to me. I admit that I am worried about how episode 4 ended, with the apparent “blame the woman” motif as an aspect of serial killing threatening rather large. The fact that each episode is only forty-two minutes long — I hate US TV — means that the plotting is often either flat or not credible from a rhetorical (or forensic) standpoint. A lot of “science and computers as deux ex machina” controlled developments in the episodes I saw — the same kind of thing we used to say about Spooks. And there are some big things that I am just not sold on, one of which (unfortunately, given how much screen time he gets) is Mads Mikkelsen. A lot of the ideas are better conceptually than they end up being in execution (I’m already getting tired of Will Graham’s apparently mystical connection to killers — this piece could have been achieved better with better scripts, or even five minutes more per episode.) However, I am intrigued enough (and able to tolerate the violence and gore by looking away from the screen when it gets to be too much, which is at least once or twice an episode) that I plan to watch all of the rest of them and have ordered the second season DVDs. I’ve usually been able to separate my analytical reactions from my emotional reactions to things, and although I’ve tried to cut down on that tendency in the last five years, it seems like it could be worth it again in this case.

The blood is also definitely better than whatever they were using on Spooks.

I hope we can still be friends.

~ by Servetus on March 8, 2015.