Pedagogical publicity, or: Why I’m reading less Hannibal advance press rather than more

Richard Armitage becoming the Red Dragon, from the preview trailer for season 3 of Hannibal. Source: Fangoria

It’s funny, because usually I am extremely eager to pick up every trace of Richard Armitage’s work and media presence, and having read the book, it’s not like there are really any meaningful spoilers I could run across. But I finally realized tonight what’s been bugging me — reading one of these Bryan Fuller interviews that broke today — the one in TV Insider was where the lightbulb went on:

“We’re not going to make it easy on you,” Fuller warns. “This man who falls for a blind woman and wants to take her to the zoo to enjoy the animals, who has arranged for her to actually touch them because she can’t see them—that is one of the most beautiful gestures I’ve seen in a romantic story. Yet it happens to be buried in the horror of a terrible, terrible killer of families. You see that this man is a contradiction; he is capable of beautiful and terrible things. And you can root against the monster, but you also need to root for the man, and hope he defeats the monster.” Fuller is careful, though, to point out that the fictional nature of the story makes this cognitive dissonance a little easier to handle. [my emphasis]

Actually, as a long-time fan of Armitage, I think it would be interesting to see a role in which my favorite actor didn’t try to make a bad guy seem more human, or try to get me to identify or sympathize with him. That would be a real departure for him, seen artistically.

It’s the pedagogical approach to watching that Fuller’s pushing in these interviews, I guess. Is he really that worried we won’t get the point? Maybe Armitage’s performance of Dolarhyde is more repellent, and less sympathetic, than we’ve been led to believe, if Fuller has to sell it this hard. He’s been saying similar versions of these things in the interviews I’ve read, for example, in Tattle-Crime.com:

There were times that we were sitting in the editing room going over a scene and both the editor and I had to wipe a tear out of the corner of our eyes because you’re rooting for this man to find some peace because he is so tortured, and yes, he is a terrible killer of families but Richard imbues him with great power and also tremendous vulnerability and it’s incredibly appealing.

Maybe Fuller has a different sense of the meaning of the word “appealing” than I do, but it’s hard for me to imagine anything less appealing than “a terrible killer of families.” Compelling, maybe. Moving, perhaps — or simply affecting, in the sense that conflicted narratives can often affect us deeply on numerous levels, not all of them positive. In one sense, sure, it’s good that people who are editing something they’ve shot are so much in love with it that they can edit out the moral level of their reactions and focus on their love for their characters. I don’t expect anything less of a good novelist (for instance). On the other hand, it’s truly disturbing that that would become the main message that the creator would want to spread about the creation. A vulnerable character can be appealing, it’s true — but isn’t one of the axes this show is supposed to draw its power from is the fact that the gore and violence and the horrible harm that they wreak mean we can never sympathize fully with these killers? Of course, to the extent that Fuller et al. love precisely the gory, violent pieces of the show, perhaps they’ve abandoned that stance; gore, violence and mayhem are not barriers for them. There’s a kind of glee in Fuller’s remarks about the show generally that is reflected in the filming style that generally turns me off.

Maybe, too, it’s that after seeing episodes 10-12 of season 2 of Hannibal, I’ve begun to suspect that I wouldn’t much like Fuller if I met him. Someone who can be involved in the writing of this show generally and a plot line like that one in particular might well consider refraining from telling people how to think morally. Or maybe it’s that I’m a day or two older, raised with moralistic narratives, and exhausted at being told what to think about television by television writers. Whatever the reason for it, I find myself asking, Really, Mr. Fuller? Do I have to root for the man? Why do I have to take your point of view on at all? Isn’t it up to the show to convince me to assume its point of view? Do I really need you to give me additional lessons in the exercise of moral imagination?

It’s weird, because I know after five years of doing this fan thing that one point of pre-event publicity is for the artists to sell you on their vision of what they’ve done. In Armitage’s case, it’s often the opportunity for him to reveal bits of his own personal backstory for his character that probably didn’t make it into the script or onto the screen — perhaps in hopes that you will factor that stuff in when you’re watching and it will enhance your perception of his performance. In any case, I liked what I read today of Armitage’s remarks a lot better — they acknowledged the problems that one is up against when observing his character — and importantly, they accept that there may not be any resolution: “I look at the potential of the child that was taken down this path. I always felt that there was a kind of possibility of redemption through his love for Reba. But then that’s the point where I have to step outside the character and really see him as a figure of menace and discord, and let him be that. I fluctuated between loving him and condemning him.”

In their substance, I think, Fuller’s and Armitage’s viewpoints are the same — that Dolarhyde is an ambivalent figure about whom one’s feelings are divided. Armitage’s remarks here, however, rely implicitly to what he said about how to build a character — you have to know what other people (might) say of him. Intelligently, in today’s interview Armitage doesn’t tell me any way I need to feel about what he’s doing as Dolarhyde and he admits that his own feelings were torn. It’s another piece of “show don’t tell” that is worth remembering.

~ by Servetus on May 28, 2015.