#Alana bloom

[rocktheholygrail]

[julespsstuff]

Let God consume us, devour us, unstring our bones. Then spit us out reborn.

~ Donna Tart, The secret history

[filmsdkye]

the scene where alana is like “i feel like I’ve been poisoned” and will’s like “we’ve all been poisoned” is funny in hindsight because alana is talking about how she was being fed human meat and cartilage beer for 8 months and will is talking about how he’s kind of in love with hannibal

[flock-of-cassowaries]

So I’m not endorsing Fight Club - it’s a problematic book with a deeply toxic cultural legacy - but as a queer AFAB millennial who grew up in the sunken place of really wanting to identify with images of traditional masculinity… that shit rocked my world circa 2006.

And it just occurred to me how easily you could map Fight Club’s core plot conceit* onto NBC Hannibal (especially season 1); and that got me thinking about the parallels and differences between these two works.

Spoilers for a 28-year-old movie below the cut.

*the core plot conceit of Fight Club is that the two principal characters - the charismatic and dangerous Tyler Durden, and the story’s unnamed narrator - are in fact one person. The narrator is not aware of this until the final act.

(Also - I’ve added headings, because I know this is very long and rambly, and I feel an appropriate amount of shame about that. )

[How this idea originally occurred to me]

So what originally got me thinking about this is that in NBC Hannibal, Will is always tired, while Hannibal, mysteriously, seems to have at least 40 hours available for crafts and hobbies in every day.

This maps very neatly onto the way time seems to work for Tyler Durden, vs. how it works for the insomnia-plagued narrator.

[Main thesis]

But there’s a lot more similarities than that - most notably, the overall arc of the narrator-Tyler / Will-Hannibal relationship:

1. Both Hannibal Lecter and Tyler Durden breeze into our main character’s lives, and very quickly install themselves at the very centre of it.

2. Both become an object of unacknowledged homoerotic yearning for the main character, before finally being revealed to be extremely dangerous villains who were manipulating the main character all along, and who were instrumental in blowing up the main characters’ lives.

3. Ultimately, in both works, the main character ultimately rejects their “friend” by attempting suicide in a way that will kill both of them (and, in doing so, stops the “friend” from committing further harm).

[Bonus Round]

Other parallels include:

- that Hannibal and Tyler are both exceptionally ostentatious in their mode of dress, in contrast to our comparatively mousey main characters.

- that they both serve to invite the main character to embrace violence (something the narrator in Fight Club does easily, but which Will Graham, to his credit, resists).

- Hannibal’s ritualized sadistic physical torture of Will (in Mizumono, and the again in Dolce / Digestivo) also mirrors the scene in Fight Club where Tyler burns the narrator’s hand.

- Hannibal and Tyler also both enter the main character’s lives at a time when they are struggling with insomnia based on guilt related to their jobs. (Jobs, btw, where both of them have bosses they cannot stand and do not respect.)

[Alana Bloom and Marla Singer]

I also think the Marla Singer / Alana Bloom parallel is interesting.

In both cases, these women are implied to be the only woman who might, possibly be a match for the main character - someone who could possibly understand them enough to form a possibly-healthy relationship.

Instead, however, Alana and Marla end up forming relationships with Hannibal and Tyler (respectively).

In both works, this makes the main character despair (even as it is implied that the woman would actually rather be with the main character than with Hannibal / Tyler).

[Bonus Round II - Electric Boogaloo]

Also, on a more superficial level, both Marla and Alana have stunningly pale skin and dark hair (much as both Tyler and Hannibal are sandy blondes who seem larger-than-life in comparison to our dark-haired, ruddy-complexioned protagonist).

I would also like to rapidly recognize:

- the aesthetic similarities in Randall Tier’s death and that of Jared Leto’s character in the film version of Fight Club

- the amusing parallel of both Tyler and Hannibal creatively repurposing dead human tissue, which they then gleefully give to rich people who do not know what they are consuming (Tyler, by making medical-waste human fat into bougie soap; Hannibal, by making murder victims into gourmet meals)

- the way that the “the line between us has begun to blur” theming in Season 3 of Hannibal echoes the “literally the same person” reveal in Fight Club

[Conclusion]

With all this in mind, I think it would be very possible (and potentially quite fun) to plot out a Fight Club AU of Hannibal, wherein there is no Hannibal Lecter. (Might explain why he has such a stupid fucking name. Yeah, I said it. It’s fucking dumb that his name rhymes with “cannibal”. Fight me, Thomas Harris.)

[Appendix - Contrasts]

That said, the differences are also quite notable:

1. Whereas Tyler Durden seduces the narrator in Fight Club with the promise of validation from a male social group, Hannibal Lecter’s pitch to Will is that he recognizes that Will is is unique and special, and appreciated him as such.

2. Tyler Durden is overtly political, positioning himself as outside the system, and explicitly anti-capitalist. Hannibal Lecter, on the other hand, is apolitical, and perfectly comfortable being a member of the ruling class. There is no anti-capitalist motive to his crimes against the rich.

3. In rejecting Tyler, the narrator in Fight Club (especially in the film version) symbolically reclaims his heterosexuality, and is implied to have formed a bond with Marla; whereas Will Graham (literally) embraces Hannibal even as he rejects him, and Alana has long since been clearly shown to have adopted a position of “To hell with these gay idiots”.

4. While imperfect, Will Graham is a lot more sympathetic than the narrator of Fight Club; both because of how vigorously he resists Hannibal (as alluded to above), and in terms of what we see of him before he falls under Hannibal’s spell:

— Will’s guilt stems from an action (shooting Gareth Jacob Hobbs) that most people would consider morally-correct. In Fight Club, on the other hand, the narrator’s guilt stems from condemning strangers to die in order to save his company money.

— The narrator in Fight Club is shown to have been driven by his insomnia to the point of engaging in vampiric support-group grief tourism (which - yikes). By contrast, Will is seen calling Jack Crawford out on the inherently exploitative nature of his “Evil Minds Museum”.

— Whereas the narrator in Fight Club lives a life of hollow consumerist grasping, Will is shown to live a materially-simple life, which he generously shares with a menagerie of abandoned dogs. It is easy to imagine that he would put his dogs’ needs ahead of his own, given that we see him putting time and energy into rescuing and washing Winston, even at the end of a long, exhausting workday.

[Postscript]

I literally typed this whole-ass essay out before I remembered that Edward Norton (who played the narrator in Fight Club) also once played Will Graham (in the 2002 film Red Dragon, which I have not seen, but which I remember Bryan Fuller having credited with giving him the idea to write NBC Hannibal).

[stupidcopper]

hannibal season 2 summary

[selfconfessedfangirl]

no tv show will ever be able to resolve a m/m/f love triangle as perfectly and as weirdly as Hannibal, in which the woman kisses one of the guys, sleeps with the other one, then decides "actually, never mind, you're both awful!" and marries a rich lesbian instead - and, while this is all going on, the guys develop a weird homoerotic obsession with each other culminating in them going off a cliff together. truly unhinged and unmatched

[tethered-heartstrings]

[multifandom--mess]

[gigireece16]

happy halloween to only hugh dancy covered in blood

[super-who-locked-me-in-here]

I need everyone to know I had a dream last night about a Hannibal presentation and this was the whole presentation as it appeared in my dream

[screaming-sobbing]

Showing some love for the ladies

[rocktheholygrail]

#cannibal humor

[nhescio]

Guess who’s watching the gay cannibals in the year of our lord 2024

[hughdancybabyface]

Hannibal s3e06 "Dolce"

[atjinds]

they dont make em (tv show relationship squares) like this anymore

[garnishedcarnist]

Y'all afraid to moan during sex, I be up in his ear like "We could leave right now. Feed your dogs. Leave a note for Alana and Jack and never see either of them again. Almost polite."