Hannibal doesn’t do rape stories? Bitch, please.

[Tree, don’t read this. Spoilers for all three seasons of Hannibal.]

This issue has been bugging me for a long time, probably since someone forwarded me a story about how Hannibal‘s audience was mostly women and that was because it was a feminist show. Then I read Bryan Fuller say several times in interviews this summer that he doesn’t want to do rape stories because they are too complicated and need more attention than they can be given in that format. Last month I watched a video of a woman at the #Fannibal, practically in tears, telling Bryan Fuller how grateful she was that Hannibal doesn’t do rape stories.

Everyone then praises Fuller — for what exactly? Gentility? Feminist politics?

Restraint?

If Hannibal is an index of Fuller’s restraint, the mind pails at what a representation of his license would look like. I do not want to know what evil images lurk in the mind of Bryan Fuller if these are the “safe” ones. But let’s not forget — it’s a team of people who write this show and while many of the ideas are originally Fuller’s, several women inhabit that writers’ room as well. There’s a whole group of people engaged in pushing this stuff out in the name of feeding our desire for entertainment.

So all of those things I just cited were intra-fandom and it’s not a fandom I want to join or have really been prepared to criticize, because I have never achieved a balanced view of the show. I do not understand what makes people love it, and without that knowledge, it’s difficult to write meaningful criticism because I can’t take on the view of the series creators sympathetically for very long.

But now this same claim — “We Heart Hannibal‘s stance on Sexual Assault,” shows up in Ms. Magazine — a publication I used to read with interest and enlightenment when I was in my twenties, a medium important to the development of my political consciousness. It’s not just a fandom or two anymore — broader cultural and political claims are being advanced on the show’s behalf.

So I think it’s time for me to say, without rancor, something that I have been thinking for months. The claim that Hannibal doesn’t do rape stories is obvious and rather extreme form of shtuss.

Hannibal is no feminist show, if by that we mean a medium that seeks to define and pursue equal rights for women. The show would have practically no storyline if it were not for ineffectual women. It includes no truly independent female character except possibly Bedelia du Maurier, whose power is always subordinated to that of Hannibal, the psychopath she follows while apparently unable to separate herself from or report him to the authorities. Dr. Alana Bloom has no distinctive personality and is written as continually unable to set her professional concerns through with her superiors, who consistently ignore them and her. Dr. Bloom stupidly falls under Hannibal’s spell as well and then in series 3 turns into the stereotype of all anti-feminist stereotypes, the “surprise” bisexual. At the middle of season 3 (I did not watch the first seven episodes), she seems poised to take her revenge out on Hannibal, demonstrably evil but also clearly mentally ill, and now her charge. (That this power arrangement is not credible dramatically does not mitigate its severe disequilibrium.) Freddie Lounds (Lara Jean Chorostecki), who does move a few plot lines, does so as the epitome of the stereotypically unfulfilled tabloid reporter and also has to subordinate herself in the men in the story (including pretending to be dead, thus literally erasing herself from the screen, a plot line that Fuller’s team resorts to again and again when it comes to women) to accomplish her ends. Kade Prurnell (Cynthia Nixon), a powerful woman with an important role to play, is written as a bitch queen bureaucrat who just wants to keep Jack from doing his job. Jack’s wife, Bella (Gina Torres), is dying, and ultimately unable to get her husband to stop his crime hunting or ignore his fixation on the Hannibal / Will Graham binary to stay with her in her suffering. Myriam Lass (Anna Chlumsky) tries to take the initiative in a crime investigation and apparently spends years in imprisonment for it before she’s mutilated and returned to society to torture Jack. Abigail Hobbs (Kacey Rohls) falls under her father’s spell, and then Hannibal’s. The most independent female character in the entire program, Beverly Katz (Hettienne Park), is saddled with juvenile male sidekicks in her lab and when she does suspect that Will’s story about being framed is true, her curiosity (or Will’s desire for vengeance — depending on how we read it — both stories are clearly anti-feminist) get her killed and sliced up. And then then there are all the various mentally ill females on the show, both victims and killers. The best we can do for someone like Georgia Madchen (Ellen Muth) is pity her.

When a woman is powerful in this segment of the Fullerverse, then apparently primarily because she’s demonstrably mentally ill, manifestly ignorant of reality, incipiently homicidal, and/or so bitchy that any real person who’s worked in a bureaucracy knows she’d never have gotten that far with such behavior, and thus not inherently believable. If it’s too hasty step for me to infer that the writers of this show hate women, still it’s impossible for me to conclude that any of them have much respect for female autonomy, power, intellect, or capacity to act effectively. It is hard for me to see how that stance could be read as feminist.

If Hannibal is not feminist, neither is it rape-free.

But, its defenders will say, the plot that drove the entire first season (Garrett Jacob Hobbs’ murders and eviscerations of a series of young Minnesota women) didn’t involve rape. A Freudian would have a field day with that claim, considering the number of violent penetrations of young, nubile female bodies with antlers that the viewer is subjected to on screen. The general level of symbolic violence against women in Hannibal is incredibly high, from female ears to entire arms to their reproductive organs (of this more in a moment). Ah, you say, but it’s equal opportunity violence, as men are also killed and killers. That’s true, but it’s a poor claim for any kind of feminism, in my considered opinion, that its cultural vehicles apply sexual violence equally to all the sexes. I know of no feminism that sponsors gratuitous violence as a normative ideal.

But whether or not we see forcible penis-vagina penetration in the show, in the Red Dragon story arc, Francis Dolarhyde still rapes women. Richard Armitage doesn’t do it on screen. He has been quoted several times now as saying it would have been a dealbreaker, but I find it an equivocation. If he has to imagine his character’s life to the point of writing diaries and emails in character and sharing them with people (like trophies?), he must have thought in detail about how Dolarhyde would have committed those rapes, and made Dolarhyde’s compulsion to commit them and resulting gratification he obtained from doing so a part of his inner emotional life, at least while he was playing the role. But even if Armitage isn’t playing those events, Will Graham (Hugh Dancy) has to relive it all, and while we may not see a rape in flagrante, it’s clear what’s happened. “Not showing the rape of a character on screen” is not the same as claiming that “no character was raped in the execution of this drama.” Off-stage rapes as a dramatic technique that go back to the Greeks. Aeschylus didn’t show Cassandra raped on stage either, though everyone in the audience of Agamemnon knew that she had been punished by Apollo for refusing to comply with his desires, then raped as Troy fell and, in turn, taken by Agamemnon as his concubine. In that sense, whether the violence is shown or only hinted at, we all know what happens, and so Hannibal remains the absolute opposite of Take Back the Night. Implicitly, then, Hannibal is a classic rape story — we just don’t usually see the rapes.

Symbolic and off-screen rapes aside, however, the key piece of evidence against the point of view that Hannibal doesn’t do rape stories is the twisting arc around Margot Verger and Will Graham, culminating in the horrid, lurid scene in a medical setting near the end of Hannibal 2.11, which stopped me watching the show for some time. Richard Armitage has said a few times recently that there are scenes from films he’s seen that he wished he could erase from his mind, and this one would be on my list. I assume everyone remembers the story line — Margot Verger (Katharine Isabelle) — is afraid of her brother, Mason (Michael Pitt), so in attempt to produce a child who can inherit the family fortune according to the sexist terms of her father’s will, she sleeps with Will to get herself pregnant. Hannibal, who put that notion in her mind, in turn informs her brother that she’s pregnant. Her brother then arranges for her to be in a car accident, transports her to a private facility, and has someone in his pay terminate her pregnancy by removing her reproductive organs.

No penis entering a vagina forcibly there, of course, but to me that entire story line reads exactly like a rape. The idea that just because no man is forcing a woman to have sex on screen or in the script means that there’s no rape or that the show does not do rape stories perpetuates a weird notion common among Americans, with our current neo-Victorian fixation on the inviolacy of a woman’s sexual “purity,” that the worst kind of violence that can happen to a woman is to be forced to engage in sexual contact with a man against her will. In a technical sense, perhaps, there’s no rape on Hannibal, but on the real level of sexual violence, Hannibal involves one rape story after another after another. Watching Margot’s eyes as she hears what her brother plans to do to her exposed me to a level of man-on-woman violence just as chilling as watching a forcible penetration. The fact that apparently Margot and Dr. Bloom (now unmasked as bisexual) end up with an heir and on top of things by the middle of season 3 (in episodes I have admittedly no desire to watch) emphatically does not make this part of season 2 not a rape story. It simply adds insult to injury by topping the rape off with a side of vengeance.

Still — is there really no forcible penetration in this show? Is nobody having sex against their consent? I would disagree with that conclusion as well.

I haven’t seen any reference to this point in the fan commentary I’ve been reading, but one key insight of feminism in my lifetime, anyway, has been that men as well as women can be raped. It’s hard to see how Will actually gave real consent to having sex with Margot, even though he wanted to have sex at the time, since he misunderstood the circumstances under which he was doing so. This fact of the narrative not only comes out explicitly in the script, with Will charging bitterly in Hannibal’s therapy room that Margot had said she was protected and Margot admitting that she lied to him to get what she wanted. It is even visualized, in all the not very sexy detail that U.S. broadcast television is allowed to provide. We see as much as possible of what happens when Margot seduces Will to steal his reproductive material for her own benefit. Even if I don’t find it all that sexy to watch Hugh Dancy miming on-screen intercourse, the actors clearly try to sexualize it and the camera — Fuller’s vision — wants us to view that way.

What happens to Will is exactly the same thing that Lot’s daughters did to him. If I remember correctly, alcohol was involved in both cases. It’s still someone having sex with at best dubious consent. When it happens to a man, we just call it “succumbing to temptation” rather than “rape,” and label it as sexy rather than violent, which makes it okay for us to watch. A guy is the victim. Both of the participants (we assume) got off. But it’s still a rape story.

In my mid-forties now, I’ve given up the hope that U.S. network television will become any friendlier to the cause of equality for women in my lifetime. But I also won’t kid myself when people feed me women’s subjection, disempowerment, and victimhood through violence against them, excuse it as “not rape stories” because it’s a mirror of what we’re used to seeing as rape, and even label it feminist. And I certainly won’t praise the mind that comes up with it.

~ by Servetus on August 6, 2015.