IS HANNIBAL LECTOR IN LOVE WITH ME?

Is Hannibal Lector in love with me?

14/2/2022

As discussed in previous articles, LGBTQ representation in horror is as significant as in any other genre or medium. Representation includes and acknowledges those who have traditionally been excluded, and opens up genre parameters to voices, concerns and subjects it might have otherwise been closed to. Both medium and audience thereby evolve through such interactions, shrugging off old assumptions and parameters, providing alternatives to traditional orthodoxy. This factor of representation is too often ignored in discussions and debates over the subject, which too often operate along proscribed lines and within established parameters. It is as healthy, productive and transcendental for the genres and mediums in question as it is for LGBTQ creators and audiences themselves for such voices to be heard, and to be provided platforms alongside those established as traditional luminaries and icons.

That said, representation in itself is not enough: it should not be an end goal, rather a means of redressing historical imbalance and exclusions. Representation is a stepping stone to greater things; to elevations of the conversation. We've already discussed this factor with regards to Clive Barker and Billy Martin (writing as Poppy Z. Brite). Now, there are numerous popular films, video games and TV shows that echo those sentiments, and seek to drag LGBTQ representation out of the political quagmires in which certain quarters would see it founder forever more.

Hannibal, Bryan Fuller's abstruse adaptation of Thomas Harris's iconic books, is perhaps one of the most powerful, prominent examples in recent history:

The choice to reimagine the dynamic that exists between Doctor Hannibal Lector and FBI profiler Will Graham (protagonist of the first book, Red Dragon), is a stroke of sincere genius: instead of being immediately antagonistic, with a freight of bleak history trailing behind them, the show portrays Will Graham as a man of peculiar capacity and psychology; a far cry from the more macho, composed and masculine archetype found in the books. The Will Graham we find in the show exhibits tendencies that are explicitly neuroatypical, though the writing takes especial care not to make him emblematic of any particular condition or state of mind. Rather, he is described as his own peculiar phenomena; a psychological rarity that has no parallel in existing understanding. Combined with this, he is almost asexual, barring one or two notable exceptions (both of which are framed in abstruse terms rather than inherently sexual; the romantic/sexual entanglements Will has with women are by-products of other agendas and situations and expressions of conditions other than what might be understood as classical attraction).

Counterpointed to Will is the show's reimagining of Hannibal Lector; a more poised, saintly/infernal figure than any found in the books or film adaptations. Like Will, he is a rare flower; a species of one, so separate from the common herd of humanity as to be alien or extra-dimensional (a factor helped immensely by Mads Mikkelsen's avian performance).

Like Will, Hannibal does not experience attraction in the classical sense; even when he engages in romantic and/or sexual relationships, they are means to an end; by-products of agendas so abstruse and bizarre as to be intentionally baffling.

The only sincere relationship they enjoy in the show is with one another. To describe their mutual attraction as homosexual or homoromantic is technically incorrect; it is a mutual fascination and obsession that transcends sexual or aesthetic desire, or even the aching need of love: it is a strange, almost indefinable species of psychosexuality, the pair not only mutually fascinated and attracted by one another's states of mind but, owing to their peculiar manifestations of empathy, psychological understanding and -fittingly enough- cannibalistic tendency to incorporate others into their psyches, a merging that occurs in the abstract: They are lovers that substitute sex for abstract entanglement. They meet in the asylums of one another's minds and engage in couplings of violent intimacy, to the point whereby assumptions of who they are dissolve, leaving them mutually in flux by the show's end.

On the rare instances physical intimacy does occur, it expresses itself with brutal intensity; through stabs, gouges, bites and trauma; the only expressions fitting for emotions of such incredible complexity and strangeness, and a very dangerous concept for the show to approach. Will and Hannibal never sexually consummate what they know to be true by the show's conclusion, but it is consummated physically, via their mutual murder of the “Red Dragon,” Francis Dollarhyde, in a moment of operatic violence whose symbolism is fittingly mythological in nature. At the climax of that violence, they cling together, bloodied, panting, breathless, and declare a love that threads beyond what any proscribed relationship could ever encompass. There is nowhere else for them to go at that moment other than to Hell together, where they can be immortalised and infernal forever.

That the show takes what begins as metaphor and implication and drags it into literal light - “Is Hannibal Lector in love with me?”- is a profound experiment, and one that could've easily failed, in lesser hands. As it stands, making the metaphor literal enhances the show tenfold, dissolving whatever fragile septum exists between metaphor and waking reality, the psychological realms of demons, angels and dragons that both characters inhabit and the ostensibly crude, artless waking world they have little time or pity for.

By operating beyond spheres of what might be considered conventional romance or interaction, Hannibal Lector and Will Graham transcend whatever humanity they might resemble in a manner not unlike many of the serial killers that the show features: almost every one of them is seeking a form of apotheosis, in his or her own way; a transformation that both Hannibal and Will perceive and appreciate in a fashion those around them cannot. Despite Will's reluctance to engage in the full darkness of their romance -hampered, as he is, by lingering shreds of assumed selves-, he is as in love with the world of demons Hannibal opens up beneath him as the demon himself; he sees intimacy and beauty and art in the violent and sadistic expressions of these otherly-inspired individuals, and aches to emulate them in a manner that Hannibal understands and desires for him. Hannibal is aware in a way Will initially is not that the latter cannot function in the proscribed world of matter and rules and restrictions that other human beings do: they are angelic and demonic forces trapped within lamentably human skins, made to dance and flounder around reality like birds in a fish bowl. They are neither of them made for the circumstancs in which they find themselves; for Hannibal, those circumstances are too rude and imperfect -symbolised by the callous and frustrating incapacity/unwillingness of broken cups to gather themselves up and repair-, whereas for Will, it is too cruel, chaotic and contradictory; a place of broken promises rather than broken cups, where nothing can be beautiful and survive.

However, they find a strange beauty in one another; a poetry that is antagonistic, violent and intense, mercurial and subject to shifts in status and expression just as their states of mind -their whims- are.

Hannibal is amongst the most perfect expressions of the gothic's influence upon the noir; whereas the setting, the narrative components, are all of the latter (crime drama, murder mysteries, police procedurals), the tone, language and aesthetics are all determinedly of the former. Despite the dirty, noirish realism of the show's settings, its characters exhibit notably gothic souls: they are almost universally eloquent, poised, insightful and elaborate in their interactions. They engage in subtext and metaphor that requires a level of interpretation and allegorical undertanding not typified by shows of its ilk. Here, we have allusions to Romanticism and renaissance, to religion, artistic and culinary tradition, to occultism and alchemy, to kabbalism and mythology.

In the midst of this, Hannibal and Will's peculiar romance percolates and efflorescences, coming to realise itself via a series of traded traumas that, in any other story, would be romantic or sexual dalliances.

Here, sex and romance are traded for a communion more akin to that found in religion or metaphysical practise: the tatters they shed are not clothing, but the raiments of former selves. The intimacies they share are psychological; meetings of mind that are as agonising to them both as they are transformative (such that part of the sincere tension between them lies in a desire to extricate or exorcise one another, manifested in Hannibal's eventual attempt to literally cut the meat of Will's mind from its housing).

The climax of their courtship is the only place in whose aftermath they allow for any kind of physical intimacy beyond the violent; a bloody embrace that occurs at the apex of pain and exhaustion, when they are both on the edge of death, and a shared transcendence that they've ached for -and been predestined to fulfil- since their first cataclysmic meeting, where fires beyond the nuclear began to spark, and rewrite definitions of heaven and hell.