Okay but Will literally could have just gutted Hannibal and tossed him off that cliff so easily tho. He could have made good on his promise to kill him and he could have walked away and gone back to his life with Molly and Walter safely. The dragon would have been dead. Hannibal would have been dead… Logically this is what he should have wanted. This is what he claimed to want for damn near the entire episode.
But what did he do instead? He reached out for Hannibal and fucking embraced him. He looked him in the eyes and he told him “it’s beautiful,” and he wasn’t afraid of how good it made him feel, finally. And I think he almost had himself convinced for a long time that he could let Hannibal go, that he could kill him and forget about him if the time came, but in that moment he remembered that being with Hannibal is the only thing that truly makes him feel alive.
And whether Will intended to fake their deaths by throwing them off that cliff, or if he truly did just want them to die together in that moment, in each others arms, finally at peace with who they are together, he wanted them to be together, and that is the most important thing.
I don’t like to think that these two have changed each other, but rather that they have brought out things in one another they would normally suppress and fight and feel is contrary to their true natures. Will is compassionate, but he is also capable of taking great pleasure in violence. Hannibal takes great pleasure in violence, but when it comes to Will he is capable of so much love and compassion.
Hannibal called that compassion an inconvenience, but he looks at Will with such love and adoration, he touches him so tenderly, and it’s clear that he has come to terms with the fact that he does not have to fight his love for him. Likewise, Will finally came to terms with the fact that he does not have to fight the pleasure he gets from killing with Hannibal, and he does not have to fight the fact that being with him is what he truly wants.
The duality that exists within both of them when they are together is beautiful. They killed Dolarhyde with as much passion as they then tenderly expressed to one another once it was done. I think they are finally in a place where they can truly be equals now, because they have both come to understand and embrace the very best and the very worst parts of each other, and despite everything that has happened they are so very much in love…
No but can I make a serious observation about this? Because it’s easy to joke that Fuller failed in his original project but I don’t think he did.
Fuller’s original plan was to explore platonic (as in nonromantic and nonsexual) male friendship in Hannibal, right? The point of this should’ve beent to create a deep and affectionate amical love that was different than the many male friendships you see on TV and in real-life where, especially in the american model, there’s this normalized pretense of detachment. Fuller has unsurprisingly gone on record saying that he thinks bro culture is gross. That’s what he wanted to do different in his show, and that’s also why he cared about heterosexual!Will Graham. Will was supposed to be a straight character that’s far from a dudebro, who isn’t concerned with not looking gay, is emotionally available in a friendship with another man, ok with being vulnerable in it, and displays gestures of tender amical affection.
But, hear me out. Dudebro rituals and affectations are all built around the goal of distancing yourself as much as possible from the concept and the practice of male homosexuality, intended both as sexual intimacy and as same-sex romance. Dudebro culture revolves around creating a false dichotomy in male relationships between amical behaviors on the one hand, and romantic/sexual feelings and behaviors on the other. That’s artificial because in reality the two virtually always mingle, even for people we genuinely only want to be friends with. Holding hands, for example, can be both amical and romantic. But where for women it’s more acceptable to blur the line, for men much less so. In short, dudebro-style friendship is centrally preoccupied with A) exorcising the threat of homosexuality/homoromanticism, B) prevent as many chances as possible for homosxuality/romanticism to happen.
The contrary of this is also true, though. A model of friendship that’s more tender, intimate and full of gentle touch as means of affection, is a model that actively entails the blurring of lines and admits the existence of male/male romance and sexual desire. It’s a model in which those are recognized as possibilities that are not entirely other than the practices found in friendship. Homosociality and homosexuality have lots of contact points and intersections in this model; there’s nowhere near the same complex system designed to make sure one doesn’t tip over into the other as there is in dudebro-style friendship. The ‘risk’ (by dudebro standards) of ‘becoming queer’ is ever-present, but more than that, it’s actually much easier to ‘slip’ into queerness.
That’s the whole point. When you construct a friendship like that, unlike what happens in dudebro culture, it’s a friendship constructed on the premise that it could turn romantic, and it’s a friendship whose practices are much more blurred with typical romantic practices. Nothing is stopping it from happening if not other factors (prefer the person as friend only, no attraction, rational decision, etc.). A factor could also be incompatible orientation, like if say at least one of the people involved were straight, but this slippery model of friendship is still based on the premise that currently identifying as an incompatible orientation doesn’t necessarily dispel the chance of evolving into romance, and still has a mode of displaying affection that easily blurs with romantic. That’s why dudebro culture is so afraid of it, suddenly there’s no safeguard. And with Hannibal and Will’s relationship, Fuller absolutely succeeded in creating a friendship of this type. Hannibal and Will are never concerned with policing each other’s gestures or their own to not ‘look gay’, and long before any realization that they’re in love they show affection in ways that can both be amical and romantic (e.g. covering the other with a blanket for comfort, touching hands tenderly…). And simultaneously they were written as coming quickly to share a deep, layered intimacy that is normally non-existent or mistified in dudebro-style friendships. Theirs is simply a slippery-type friendship that at some unclear point tipped over into romance (and likewise might tip over into sexual intimacy later).
So whether he realizes this or not, it’s not that Fuller failed in his original plan but rather it’s that, exactly like he wanted, he created a friendship that by design entails a certain romantic/sexual fluidity no matter what you identify as at the moment. And that simply happened to carry a previously heterosexual-identifying character into queerness because of how that possibility for fluidity came into being for him.
Do you ever cry because when Will broke up with Hannibal, the next we see of him he’s put his glasses back on.
These glasses which, throughout the series, have been symbolic of the barrier Will puts up between himself and getting too close to others. This is Will – regardless of the massive psychological game at play here – shutting Hannibal out.
And then in the very next episode, three years having passed, the very first thing he does as he approaches Hannibal’s cell
is take his glasses off. I always thought this was an interesting little gesture, because Will didn’t wear his glasses for the entirety of the episode. It’s only when he goes to see Hannibal that he wears them, that little symbolic front, and as soon as Will lays eyes on him again, whether he consciously realizes it or not, that barrier comes crumbling down.
Okay I’ve been thinking and where does hannibal get all his money from? Bc being a psychiatrist wouldn’t pay that much like?? Is he just living off his families money?? Is he a hitman? Does he sell his art? What else does he do?!?!
In the books, he’s said to have manipulated some of his wealthy patients to leaving him their estates.
Well he is a count, right? Despite the castle falling into disrepair, he may have had some amount of inheritance, small as it may be. He also spent a good amount of time as a noted trauma surgeon at Johns Hopkins, which is a well-established hospital and would come with a decent salary. Combined with his nature in the books and intelligent investment, I think that would set him up nicely for a good amount of money.
In the books, there is no family money left. His parents were killed by the Nazis and the Soviets confiscated the castle and turned it into an orphanage, where Hannibal ended up.
He did then go to his wealthy aunt and uncle in Paris, yes, but then Uncle Robert dies and most the estate goes to death duties.
He basically arrives in America for his studies at Hopkins with the clothes on his back.
Hmm, interesting! I think he could have potentially used his salary in combination with investment and made a solid nest egg. I know the timeline was adjusted for the show, but maybe he could have put money into a successful startup? I know a guy who invested a few grand in bitcoin when it first started and now has millions to spare. Hannibal could have done something similar.
I’m picturing Hannibal getting approached by a bunch of software bros to invest in their startup and it’s making me laugh. So many variations on the faces he makes at Mason.
I don’t see him going that route. For one thing, he likes to present the air of old money. Being seen as someone who got his money via a startup or similar venture would be too nouveau riche.
Also, because of his murderous pastimes, he needs to have his assets be pretty liquid and easy to hide. Same reason why I don’t see him ever being one who focused on creating that 401(k) nest egg. And that’s just too damn frugal. Hannibal is not frugal.
Much easier to persuade some old rich folk to leave him their fortunes. He’s old money, just not his own old money. Probably able to create fake identities to inherit that money, as well, all the better to hide it.
I also like to think of him smirking to himself that it’s a variation on eating the rude. He doesn’t eat them – too tough and stringy, these old folk. Better to eat their inheritance instead.
And that is what he used since Season 2 and through Season 3 to manipulate him.
If Will didn’t think Hannibal was “capable of love” and that’s the “explanation” about why he didn’t know Hannibal was in love with him for all that time, why would he suddenly believe it just because Bedelia said it?
If Will didn’t “realize” Hannibal was in love with him until Bedelia said he was Hannibal’s wife, why didn’t he realize it when she said it the first time?
For that matter why didn’t he “realize” it when Freddie said they were “murder husbands”. He hated her and didn’t trust her as much as he despised Bedelia. If Will thought Hannibal was “incapable of love” why did he think that Hobbs was and base his entire profile around it? “He loves these girls.”
If Will thought Hannibal was “incapable of love” why did he say that Hannibal cared about Abigail as much as he did after he thought he’d killed her? “You cared about her as much as I did.”
If Will was totally clueless and had to be told by Bedelia that Hannibal was in love with him, that would mean that Bedelia knows Hannibal better than Will does.
Since Will is an “empath” who can “empathize with anybody” and he states that he is conjoined with Hannibal and only knows himself when he’s with him, how does it make any sense that this would be the case?
Will seduces Hannibal in S2 based off of this strategy. To be “aware” of each other because they love each other.
“No one can be fully aware of another human being unless we love them.”
And to “foster codependence” with him.
If Will didn’t think Hannibal was “capable of love” why did he tell himself that Hannibal had purposefully left him alive and then ran away because he was broken hearted?
If that all changed sometime in Dolce because Hannibal “tried to kill him” again, then why did he “break up” with Hannibal after that to get him to turn himself in?
Why would he think that would work? It didn’t work in Mizumono when he had betrayed him. But this time, he didn’t just betray Hannibal. He broke up with him. Their whole relationship was based on knowing each other, on “intimacy”, “awareness”. Hannibal said it straight out: “An imago is an image of a loved one buried in the unconscious, carried with us all our lives. The concept of an ideal. I have a concept of you, just as you have a concept of me.” The only way it makes sense is that the Digestivo scene was worse for Hannibal than what happened in Mizumono and Will knew it would be.
The idea that Will didn’t think Hannibal “capable of love” doesn’t make sense on any level in my opinion. It trivializes and basically retcons everything that Will and Hannibal had gone through together previously. And to accept that Will was even being honest with Bedelia about his “surprise” at her “confirmation” is naive. They are in competition over Hannibal and Will makes that clear from the get go. Bedelia plays along too. They needle at each other over their relationship with Hannibal. Will sneers that Bedelia “crawled so far up his ass” and Bedelia accuses Will of lying to his wife about his relationship with Hannibal. To think that Will is doing anything other than making her admit that Hannibal is in love with him, not her, is to severely underestimate Will as a character and as a master manipulator. He hates Bedelia and he never hides that. “If Hannibal does end up eating you, you’d have it coming.” Why would he rely on her to confirm such important information? The way that their conversations end is the key to reading all of their exchanges.
The only reason Will goes to talk to Bedelia is to find out what her relationship is with Hannibal currently, how much she knows about him and Hannibal and when he finds out there’s nothing going on between them, he gloats that he’ll come back with Hannibal. He didn’t go to her for perspective or therapy or because he trusted her or needed her. And she wasn’t involved in the case. He did it because Hannibal ran away with her and not him and he was still pissed about it 3 years later. Season 2 ends with Hannibal running away with Bedelia and Season 3 ends with Will’s answer to that.
In the 209 dream sequence with the Ravenstag Will *gives* his dream-Hannibal the line about love, in fact in the original script Hannibal even says the words:
Alana have you noticed how Hannibal’s cell is a mirror image of your
office, and he even looks like a Man In A White Coat and stuff like
that? And that your jacket looks like a prison uniform?
Wow, I never realised this. So many thoughts now. How Alana is herself imprisoned in the BSHCI because she cannot trust someone else to hold the keys to Hannibal’s cell. Those two really need each other. And once Hannibal is gone, Alana is forced from this place as well if she wants to survive…
Yes, I believe that after Mizumono, in some way, Alana tried to become like Hannibal, to catch him. More or less what Will did. But Will had it in his nature, Alana not so much.
I think she then kept that style and her new character because she believed it was simpler to control Hannibal and talk to him like that. I hear fear every time she speaks to him, even if she tries to conceal that. Even if Hannibal is locked and tied up.
That fear might come from the fact that she knows how toxic he is to her “goodness” – IMHO though, she never was a nice doctor, she was good mannered but so convinced of her own opinion (which she never questioned) that she hurt people like Will who was in need of real trust, friendship and psychiatrical help.
Alana was the one to bring Hannibal into the story. And no matter how perfect his person suit, she, as a psychiatrist herself, must have felt something about him was fishy. We were told that the whole psychiatric circle of Baltimore/Washington knew each other and they talked about their cases. Will and Margot were not Hannibal’s first fun he had with aggressive impulses. There was Randall Tier and Jame Gumb and probably all kind of other patients Hannibal found interresting. He is not a forensic psychiatrist by chance, but because the criminal mind is of interest for him. So yes, I blame it on Alana that she was so closed to the idea that something might not be okay with Hannibal that she brought him in to help Will.
And she was there when the monster showed his face, she was crippled and psychologically damaged. And still she cannot understand that her own opinion is not always the best: once she didn’t look close enough and the next time she look even though Hannibal told her not, both times the wrong decision and now: beware of the consequences.
In fact she was so convinced of her own opinions (like Jack) that she was astonished to know that Will was right. And I don’t think she was sad because Hannibal was what he was, she was sad because she had been fooled.
I’m full of unpopular opinions, but this is my best one. I don’t like Alana a bit. The more I watch Hannibal and talk about the show, the more I dislike her.
I mean… She’s a great character, as Jack is, just on the bad side. There are so many characters in this tv show which are more on the bad side than the actual bad ones.
My opinion and my impressions as I always specify. @whimsy-by-joja
The reason why it was love at the first sight for hannibal is because Will is just “beautiful” i think we can all agree to that.
And hannibal just loves beauty, he appreciate the beauty in this world, poetry, art, he even turns his victims into something “beautiful” and poetic, and that time when he cried in the opera. Beauty is his weakness and that was Will graham.
I like to think it was love almost before first sight (but boy when he got a look at Will, it was a Done Deal). They don’t show us Jack’s conversation or two with Hannibal about Will that most have happened in Hannibal’s office and perhaps later, when Jack explained to Hannibal that he wanted him to do a psychological profile on Will and why, but can you imagine it? All those details about how Will is this super-prodigy with eidetic memory and huge powers of imagination and how he’s unstable and crazy intelligent and can just make leaps he can’t explain and gets into the minds of killers and there’s something about violence that he innately just gets and he won’t let anyone test him or get close and they have to be oh, so careful with him because we don’t want to break him and there’s just NOTHING on the books like Will Graham, he’s UNIQUE. (Jack Crawford, fisher of men, ladies and gentlemen.)
And just that information was probably enough to hook Hannibal and get him really excited about it, and then he finally gets to drive to Quantico to meet the new specimen, and what does he see but this gorgeous, slim, younger man with curling brown hair and a jawline like nobody’s business and the skies just tumbling from big liquid gray-blue eyes, and Hannibal just so surprised. He would have been like “I’d like to thank God and also Jesus” if he did that kind of thing, but he doesn’t so he just had to settle for “I’m gonna break out that beer I made for Alana finally because she DESERVES IT, OMGGGG.”
and what does he see but this gorgeous, slim, younger man with curling brown hair and a jawline like nobody’s business and the skies just tumbling from big liquid gray-blue eyes, and Hannibal just so surprised. He would have been like “I’d like to thank God and also Jesus” if he did that kind of thing, but he doesn’t so he just had to settle for “I’m gonna break out that beer I made for Alana finally because she DESERVES IT, OMGGGG.”
I think it’s because he reads as queer. My 2 cents in a very generalized fashion.
I’m sure that has a lot to do with it.
he’s also polite, soft spoken, and doesn’t do a lot of the posturing that’s socially expected of American men especially when they first meet each other. I’m sure he’s never tried to outsqueeze someone in a handshake in his life.
Hannibal is deferential. He opens doors for people, he steps back to let other people pass, he pulls chairs out, he yields the right of way. There are a lot of people who see that behavior and read it as “pushover” rather than “I just controlled what you did and when”
Not that I think you’re wrong about people reading him queer, but I think it’s all tied together.
Oh yeah, for sure – this is all part of it and it’s intermeshed with him being perceived as queer in really complicated ways.
Y’know, I’ve sometimes wondered about the difference between “meta” Hannibal and “in verse” Hannibal. In most shows I wouldn’t bother, but nbcHannibal has such a distinct style and works on so many multiple levels, it makes me think about shit like that.
Like, we, the audience, see Hannibal through the lens of a camera–a camera that is often perfectly, expertly oriented to make Hannibal appear imposing, with lighting that perfectly highlights his strengths.
He’s usually shot from a low angle, making him appear larger, or with a lens that focuses him and makes the background fade and appear smaller. The people who meet him “in universe”…don’t get that, presumably There’s no lens, no special lighting. He’s not going to be seen from a “low angle” unless the person he’s talking to is significantly shorter than him, and even then it won’t be quite the same thing.
This might be way too meta, even for this show, but, basically, it’s possible that we’re not even seeing what the in universe characters are seeing when it comes to Hannibal. Maybe, to them, he usually just looks like this
This makes a ton of sense!
People who have only had short encounters with him – who don’t know him well enough to have started to catch glimpses behind the veil, who he has allowed to see behind the veil – are seeing a somewhat socially awkward older man, deferential and quiet.
Of course shitty people think that they can get away with pushing him around – and shit, probably the vast majority of them are essentially right, though they would be horrified to realize the risk they’d taken: look at the size of his Rolodex compared to his actual body count.
Even when you get past that layer, what you get is a warm, slightly chatty older man who is still deferential and a little awkward, who radiates concern for the people around him, and who seems genuinely interested in the people around him and their well-being.
People who know him in the context of his dinner parties see a slightly different side, of course, and Will/Jack/Bedelia/etc are privy to a larger picture, but.
Very well put, and I’m reminded that in one of the audio commentaries Bryan mentioned that from (season 2) Alana’s perspective, Hannibal is basically Frasier Crane. So, with that in mind, even the dinner parties kinda make sense. He’s smart and theatrical, dresses well, loves making a good impression, but that doesn’t necessarily contradict all the elements you described, and there’s certainly nothing threatening in that persona.
Yes, exactly!
His fastidiousness and accent help build that perception, too, so that when he’s inevitably a bit off in some of his reactions, he’s just “a little eccentric” and “not from around here” rather than an alien in a human costume actively thinking about eating your brain right now.
He’s actually in a group (older immigrants with money) who are a prime target of scam artists and other criminals because they’re seen as easy to take advantage of and unlikely to know where to turn for help or want to involve the police.
(Older immigrant with money is also a popular persona of con artists. There’s a line in Night Watch by Terry Pratchett: “I find, personally, that it never pays to be from somewhere close at hand. It makes life so much easier.“ Hannibal has been “foreign” everywhere he’s lived since he was a teenager and I think he uses it well).
From the overwrought nerd who brought you the ‘Super Concise & Sensible Hannibal Recaps’ of S3, comes this, a live-blog-esque rewatch of S1. Observs, weird jokes, meta aside thingies, so many screencaps…. it’s all here:
Plus: fabulous replies to these things can all be found in this catch-all brilliance tag, and beautiful gifs here. You all are so wonderful, oh my god.
That cripplingly devastating moment when @unpredictable-m0ngoose alerts you to the fact that Hannibal is not the only one blinded by love in regards to Will’s faults. Being the highly sensitive empath he is, it’s fair to say Will probably could have connected the dots and pointed a finger at Hannibal back in season one right? Yet he doesn’t immediately. He makes himself vulnerable to Hannibal’s influence, allows himself to be subjected to manipulation yet never questions it. True he suffers with encephalitis towards the end of the season, but even when he has clarity he still fails to see Hannibal for what he is. In short, he ignores the worst in Hannibal in order to continue enjoying the best. An unspoken pact that is clearly mutual. The more I rewatch season one, the more obvious Will’s love for Hannibal becomes. Even if it was unconscious on his part, a lot of the later dialogue that Hannibal and Will use in application to each other regarding their questionable feelings can be attributed to Will in season one. It can be attributed to Will in general but you know what I mean.
In my opinion, Will didn’t see the bad in Hannibal because Hannibal’s world view and emotional capacity don’t have to result in murder and cannibalism. Empathy absorbs feelings, vibes, aura, etc. Plus, Will DID feel the bad. Hannibal was a passive force. He got in Will’s head, partially with drugs. The bad was in the air and Will picked up on it, but there was no reason for him to attribute it to Hannibal, especially when part of him felt safer in that office than anywhere. Not until 1×13, when he finally pinpointed the bad. Maybe season 1 Will was falling in love with the good in Hannibal, and season 2 Will started to fall in love with the bad, or at least understand how both sides could coexist.
“Maybe season 1 Will was falling in love with the good in Hannibal, and season 2 Will started to fall in love with the bad, or at least understand how both sides could coexist.” This.
"Technically, you killed him." 