One of the most chilling moments in The Silence of the Lambs, in retrospect, comes at the very end, when Hannibal Lecter blends in seamlessly with a crowd in pursuit of his prey, the implication being that Dr. Lecter could be anywhere, go anywhere, undetected. Reviewing the film recently in preparation for my upcoming disk-in-the-mail project, NBC’s Hannibal, I realized that I found it extraordinarily difficult to imagine Hannibal Lecter blending in as a normal person. We’re expected to believe that Lecter was a successful psychiatrist for an unspecified amount of years before his incarceration, but, played by Anthony Hopkins, his mad eyes and theatrical demeanor seem like crystal-clear indicators of lunacy. I wouldn’t go to dinner at his house, without having to know specifically his method of choice.
Many insights I’ve recently gleaned from Hopkins’s performance have been inspired or deepened by watching another actor (Mads Mikkelsen) play the same character. Although I was a little leery of the whole idea of another Lecter reboot (reviews of anything but TSOL are mixed, at best), I didn’t worry too much going in about the ability of anyone other than Hopkins to handle the performance. (I think the whole Nicholson vs Ledger debate from a few years ago alleviated many subsequent concerns about the recasting of an iconic role.) Pre-Hannibal, whenever I watched The Silence of the Lambs, I didn’t give the context of Dr. Lecter’s behavior a great deal of thought. I was initially a little dismayed by Mikkelsen’s relative restraint: I get that a lot of sociopaths display a less-than-wide array of emotion, but at first I found myself missing Hopkins, until it occurred to me that, of course, if Lecter were so successful for so many years at hiding in plain sight, he must not have behaved so flagrantly psychotically as the Lecter we see in the 1991 film. (It now occurs to me that it must have been some small consolation to Hopkins’s Lecter that he no longer had to hide his true nature.) Mikkelsen’s calm façade makes it all the more compelling when he does choose to let the mask slip: at one point, when dealing with a patient who has become too attached to him and wants to encroach into his personal sphere, Mikkelsen’s eyes dart in a rare moment of discomfort (with the bonus of excellent comic timing), and when he gives in to the infrequent temptation to drop his guard ever so slightly and contemplate his illicit activity, his self-satisfied smirk is chillingly spot-on.
Being a prequel, Hannibal does not (yet) include other memorable characters such as Clarise Starling and Buffalo Bill (although both are teased: at one point, we meet a bright young female student at the FBI academy, a protégé of Jack Crawford’s, and at another, we are introduced to a patient of Hannibal’s who brings another young psychopath to his attention), but Jack Crawford and Frederick Chilton reappear, as do such new faces as Will Graham, a bright but troubled FBI consultant; Dr. Alana Bloom, a psychiatric colleague of Lecter’s; and Dr. Bedelia Du Maurier, Lecter’s own psychiatrist. (Note: I know that Thomas Harris’s series of novels covers the time before Lecter’s arrest, but I haven’t read any of the books; in fact, on advice of friends and based on reviews, I’ve never seen anything involving these characters aside from the material I’ve already mentioned.) Although we know that Lecter will eventually be arrested, and that Crawford and Chilton survive, all bets are otherwise off. In fact, we shouldn’t necessarily expect Bryan Fuller, the showrunner, and his team to stay true to the original; if Tarantino can get away with drastically altering the course of WWII, then we live in a world where Lecter could escape and Crawford could die. However, as of the first season, Fuller and company seem to be content to stay the course and keep in line with the source material.
The viewer perspective walks a fine line between omniscience (unlike almost anyone else, we know what Hannibal is) and the limitations of Will Graham’s perspective: Will (Hugh Dancy) suffers from a number of mental conditions, ranging from anxiety to something the show describes a little fumblingly as “extreme empathy” to what is revealed to us (but not Will, thanks to Hannibal) as encephalitis, which (in the world of the show) is essentially a brain fever that causes blackouts of indeterminate duration. From the outset, it seems obvious that Hannibal has placed himself close to the proceedings of the FBI by acting sometimes as a consulting psychiatrist and maintaining friendships with Alana (who also consults with the FBI), Jack, and Will; however, as the series progresses, his relationship with his own psychiatrist (Gillian Anderson) is revealed to us in stages, and Hannibal confesses that he wishes to become friends with Will. While it might seem that he’s already doing a good job of pretending to befriend Will (as much as an intelligent psychopath can), we learn gradually that Hannibal may be a bit more open with Bedelia Du Maurier than with the rest of the world, and that such a statement is, to a degree, to be considered truthful. What might a friendship with a sociopath look like? For viewers who were hoping to get inside Dr. Lecter’s head and see the world from his perspective, this show will likely be a disappointment, at least in its first season (considering the events of the finale, perspectives might somewhat shift going into the second season); unlike the title character in Dexter, to whose near-first-person perspective viewers are treated, Hannibal Lecter holds us at a distance. It’s probably just as well; although Dexter’s premise had a lot of promise (for years, I insisted it was a much better program than it actually ever was), it proved extremely problematic to center a TV show around the innermost thoughts of a character who, by nature, shouldn’t have any normal emotions or attachments or compassion of any kind—what resulted was a weird, probably psychiatrically impossible (or at least extremely improbable) hybrid mess of a guy who grew to care deeply for his wife, son, step-kids, sister, colleagues, and on and on, while maintaining a ritualistic routine of murdering bad people and still supposedly needing to kill and getting a thrill out of it.
When a shark is curious, it will explore something with its mouth. That means it will bite; although the animal doesn’t actually mean any harm, it doesn’t really care if it maims or kills the object of its curiosity in the process, either. So goes Dr. Lecter’s “friendship” with Will Graham. It seems that Hannibal actually feels something between objective interest and a normal human emotion for Will (Mikkelsen will sometimes cock his head from side to side, brow slightly furrowed, like an indecisive bird, when considering Will), but it’s not enough to keep Will out of harm’s way: when debating helping or protecting Will vs self-preservation and scientific interest, Hannibal puts himself first every time, lacking any trace of that empathy with which Will is overburdened. (Maybe Will’s excess of an emotion Hannibal cannot feel is what draws him to Will.) Dexter lied to us, promising that if we’re just kind and patient enough with the sociopath, he’ll not only let us pluck proverbial thorns but will put us ahead of his own interests. If Dexter Morgan were faced with the conundrum of going to jail himself or letting a friend take the fall, he’d deliberate, but at the end of the day he’d give in to the (supposedly) brand-new impulse to nobility and protect his loved ones (or just deliberate until a deus ex machina takes care of his problems for him, as in Dexter’s second season).
The well-rounded cast, including Laurence Fishburne as Jack Crawford and Caroline Dhavernas as Alana Bloom, support excellent performances by both Mikkelsen and Dancy, and the writing of the main storylines holds up admirably against The Silence of the Lambs. However, to take up time and make a show about Dr. Lecter more palatable to primetime network TV, Fuller has added a serial-killer-of-the-week component to the show’s structure, which is probably the weakest aspect. The throwaway killers generally (and a bit too unrealistically) echo Hannibal’s own theatrical style of artistic display (which is better mirrored in the macabre, dramatically ironic dinners he regularly hosts) and while obligatorily touching on the themes of the main storyline, these B plots are often a little dry and occasionally verge on cheesy (especially one involving a killer who carves people up to display them like angels).
Going into the second season, I look the most forward to seeing how the relationship between Dr. Lecter and Dr. Du Maurier takes shape. Hints have been dropped that Du Maurier has some inkling of what kind of person Hannibal really is: after all, she appears to be very good at her job (someone so discriminating as Hannibal Lecter wouldn’t see an idiot like Chilton voluntarily), we know she covered up Hannibal’s involvement with the death of another of her patients in her office (although we have yet to learn the full story), and we know that she has no desire to dine at his home, despite the reputation of his dinner parties. Despite some B-story problems, Fuller and company have turned out a fine first season, and I suspect the second will be even better.
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