Posted in: Look! It Moves! by Adi Tantimedh, Movies, TV | Tagged:

Look! It Moves! – The Dark Comedy of Hannibal

Adi Tantimedh writes

I hate serial killer dramas.

I hate the exploitative nature of the genre, the salacious fascination it has for gore and sexual violence, usually against women, the insistence on artistically pretentious psychopaths who use poetry or artfully arrange corpses when real-life serial killers are frequently just psychopaths of opportunity rather than intellectuals. It's all bollocks to me.

And then we have Hannibal.

I was wary of this show. I suppose it's fitting that the show takes the serial killer genre as far as it'll go since the original novels it was based on, Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs (and especially its movie version) kicked the popularity of the genre into high gear back in the 1980s. The launch of the show felt like a cash-grab, a franchise-exploit, a Nu52-style reboot that seems the vogue for network TV nowadays where a famous franchise or character is recreated in slicker, prettier, more gratuitously-violent, fanfic-style version like Dracula, Bates Motel and what have you.

Then I noticed something different.

Hannibal is actually a comedy.

A very dark, very nasty comedy. It's a satire of Freudian psychoanalysis, identity and psychoanalytic theory. The first season skirted the line between thriller and comedy but the second season has been tipping its hand in more openly farcical writing and hysterically deadpan dialogue. This is due to its showrunner Bryan Fuller, who has a reputation mainly as a creator of surreal comedy-dramas like Dead Like Me, Wonderfalls and Pushing Daisies, all of which were preoccupied with the odd, extreme and dysfunctional psychological and emotional states of their characters. Hannibal continues that preoccupation and pushes it to an even greater extreme. It's a batshit-insane piss-take of psychoanalysis. It wouldn't surprise me if the entire writing staff was in therapy.

Hannibal also draws on the traditions of Grand Guignol, a French theatrical tradition that was all about depicting realistic and gruesome violence in melodramatic plots. It's a tradition that moved off the stage and onto the silver screen with horror movies, particularly Italian crime and horror movies called Giallo that were prevalent from the 1960s to their peak in the 1980s, which also set off the Video Nasty censorship furor in Britain. Slasher movies are pretty much a continuation of the Grand Guignol tradition, as are the Saw movies and Hostel and any recent movies you could name in the "torture porn" subgenre. Hannibal is a show that seems to understand the appeal of the genre for the people who love it: the punk rock sense of seeing something forbidden, transgressive. The writers of the show are also apparently punch-drunk enough to start making fun of themselves and drawing attention to their own absurdity. Fuller has admitted as much in his weekly post-show interviews with the A.V. Club.

So it becomes easier to think of the show being in a world where serial killers who like to artfully mutilate bodies as art installations, of weirdo savant FBI agents and where cops and agents always go into killers' lairs alone without backup so they can get killed and the rest of the plot can happen. People doing stupid things is the norm in melodrama. Within that structure, Fuller and his writers weave a dense tapestry of messed up characters whose identities are fluid and molded by a demonic psychiatrist who's pretty much The Devil. Hannibal murders people and molds the rest into the murderers he sees they could be just to see how things will turn out. He develops a homoerotic fascination with Will Graham that's straight-out slash fiction that wasn't in the original novel or the first movie version.

The show is full of references to the original movies and books, playing on the audience's foreknowledge and expectations of the story. It reconfigures several characters' personalities and relationships, even genders to create its own new fannish continuity different from the original movies and novels. It's also an example of how TV series tend to become their own fan fiction. Very little actual violence is actually shown. It's usually only the threat and the aftermath of violence because to actually show some of that would be the goriest and most gruesome things shown on film.

Hannibal sets itself as a dive into the deep end of the dark side. Evil as a decadent dessert, with the most beautiful, abstract, almost experiment filmmaking images on television as it dips in and out of fractured minds and murderous temptations. Its abstract depiction of dead bodies as artist, near-religious tableaus shows an obsession with body horror along the lines of David Cronenberg. Its claustrophobic, twisting plot of betrayals, manipulations, identity transference, transformations, psychosis, psychopathology and dark comedy is like the mental version mix of drugs and exotic liquor. But you might want to ask whether it's really necessary and why if you think it is. That makes for an interesting question.

With the current vogue for hit shows whose main characters are bad guys, The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Sons of Anarchy, Hannibal has not been a ratings hit. Its second season has had lower ratings than the first and it's mainly followed by a cult of horror fans and horror filmmakers, if my Twitter timeline is any indication. As the Guardian wondered recently, with The Walking Dead and American Horror Story hits, why isn't Hannibal? Maybe it's because Hannibal himself is not warm and fuzzy, does not have even superficial justification for what he does. The character kills both good and bad people alike for no real reason other than the hell of it. He has always been the ultimate bogeyman in the serial killer genre, and either he's too familiar or just too horrible for all but the most hardcore viewers to identify with. The show's biggest function is to make the viewer complicit with him, but without the connection that Dexter established with his viewers.

Now that the show has been renewed for a third season, it should be interesting to see whether it gets more popular or will continue to dwell on the edges of the cultural mainstream. To me, it feels more like the hardcore horror fan's dream series more than a breakout show.

Serial killing words at lookitmoves@gmail.com

Follow the official LOOK! IT MOVES! twitter feed at http://twitter.com/lookitmoves for thoughts and snark on media and pop culture, stuff for future columns and stuff I may never spend a whole column writing about.

Look! It Moves! © Adisakdi Tantimedh

Enjoyed this? Please share on social media!

Stay up-to-date and support the site by following Bleeding Cool on Google News today!