CD-GOLDEN BEATS Best of 60s & 70s

I am a huge Fannibal. If you don’t know what Hannibal is, you should. Or,  you probably already know some fraction of him–either from a movie, a book, or something related to the two, but you should know/see/watch the  Hannibal I am talking about. The Hannibal I am writing about is the TV show by Bryan Fuller. Fuller has a sort of cult following outside of his rendition of Thomas Harris’ cannibalistic creation-Hannibal Lecter. He is the creative mind behind numerous shows that never really made it, at all. It is his style, his M.O., to create masterpieces that never make it to the commercial level of consumption. Pushing Daisies (ABC), Wonderfalls (which actually sucked and was on FOX- related, not related?), Dead Like Me (Showtime), and he helped create the great great first season of Heroes, recently back with his consult but I haven’t watched it, yet.

I am a huge Fannibal for a number of reasons. Hannibal is in the group of television shows that I refer to as, The Dude Genre. The Dude Genre is one that is fascinated by dudes who are assholes and which receive critical and sometimes commercial acclaim. We aren’t just fascinated by these guys, we want them to succeed, despite their assholery (yes, the we includes me). Here are some examples–Breaking Bad, about an asshole; Mad Men, about an asshole; The Sopranos, about an asshole; the first season of True Detective, about two assholes. We ROOT for these men, we find them sexy, bad-ass, and capable of anything. It’s like the castration anxiety of all white men is alleviated by the representation of Tony Soprano, Walter White, and most of all, Don Draper. But Hannibal is not like these assholes. Of course he is an asshole, I mean he eats people, but the show also presents his opposite, the empath, the overly empathic, Will Graham who is more fascinating then the title protagonisthimself. He is more fascinating precisely because of his empathy. His ability to identify with anyone, anywhere, anyhow. His ability to recreate serial killers action’s in his mind is far more genius than Hannibal’s ability to get away with murder and eat his victims in the process.

Here are some other reasons I love the show:

This has been widely written about and Fuller has been interviewed as saying that he doesn’t believe in using sexual violence as a narrative trope to allure audiences. This is a hot topic, right? And Game of Thrones has been under attack because of the re-writing of Martin’s books to include some super awful moments of rape. Well, Fuller did the opposite. From the get-go, Fuller has not made any of the serial murders on the show rape related. Even in the third season, that got its storyline from Harris’ Red Dragon, he didn’t.  Red Dragon is explicitly about a sexually violent serial killer- why do you think he’s called the tooth fairy? Even though the sexual violence of Francis Dolarhyde is mentioned, there is no representation of that elemental part of his killing. It simply wasn’t even needed to create a storyline that was more than just compelling. Fuller decided that he was going to take white characters from the Harris’ books and make them explicitly not white on the show. FamousJack Crawford (remember, the main FBI guy in Silence of the Lambs? Has a thing for Clarice?) is played by Lawrence Fishburne. Beverly Katz, a crime scene investigator from Red Dragon is played by Asian American actress Hettienne Park. Here is a great blog post by her where she talks about race and Hannibal but don’t read it if you don’t want spoilers:  So many of my friends stopped watching Hannibal because of its violence but they kept watching The Walking Dead, Game of Thrones, and Breaking Bad. This always struck me as super odd. The violence in Hannibal IS very aestheticized. It is NOT however, glorified, nor is it a spectacle. While beheadings are commonplace in Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead and hacking off limbs in time of biological warfare or medieval conflict is commonplace, Hannibal doesn’t play that way. Fuller is much more interested in art- a topiary heart made out of a human body, the eye of god made through molding bodies of every human shade, a mushroom farmgrowing out of corpses; each and every crime scene is a scene of repulsion and beauty. There is no action based representation. Very few of the killings take place on screen, only the aftermath, the finished canvas of the killer’s art. Maybe that’s what is hard to watch. It isn’t action packed, its just there for you to meditate on. The show’s homoerotics is so very fun. Maybe we have a bit of that in True Detective, but its not very playful–it lacks any element of camp. There definitely isn’t any in Breaking Bad. Jessie and Walter’s relationship is a father/son dynamic. Jessie replaces Walter’s disabled son to make Walter more masculine and manipulative. I think the show promotes vegetarianism and maybe even animal activism. The idea that the meat you could be eating is human makes it hard to stomach meat at all. Humans are better sentient beings, right? So to not differentiate between human and animal levels the playing field. Admittedly, I still eat meat, #Shame. But I do have threerescue pups, #ShameFree. The play with words and philosophy. Hannibal pontificates, a lot. There are definitely some consultants on the show who got their PhDs in continental philosophy. Those lucky folks. While Hannibal waxes poetics about Freud and others, it doesn’t take itself too seriously. It is extremely self aware. It constantly pokes fun at its itself and it knows what it is doing with its art. Gillian Anderson as Bedilia Du Maurier. ‘Nuff said.

There are many other reasons to love Hannibal. But now the show is gone and I am in mourning. The other dude shows have all made it to at least five seasons and Breaking Bad and Mad Men were afforded proper endings. Hannibal was only given three. It just wasn’t compelling enough for the masses. So I sit here and mourn with only The Good Wife to soothe my pain. Goodbye Hannibal, I love you.

End note: there is a slight possibility that the show will come back but that seems to get more unlikely each day.