#hannibal lecter . ( prose )

[bebx]

inspired by this post

[becomingvecna]

[trap-str]

[starplatinumnun]

"just maybe you really were destined to die on your father's kitchen floor."

ABIGAIL HOBBS + FATHERHOOD.

Post by Tumblr user @hvemind // Hannibal S2 E13, Mizumono // Laura Kasischke, "View from Glass Door"// Hannibal S1 E1, Aperitif // Desireé Dellagiacomo, "Origin Story"/ Hannibal S? E? // Simone de Beauvoir, "A Woman Destroyed"// Hannibal S2 E4, Takiawase

[sapphoetics]

‘  i’m always pleasantly surprised by how easy it is to kill you in my mind  ’ — will for hannibal

meme response——— long lost prompts

There was no moment where Hannibal wasn’t acutely aware of Will’s location, even as he shied toward the edges of the room, avoiding as much small talk as he could. Unfortunately, the mask of a new identity had done little to alleviate his anxieties, leaving Will to fend on his own while Hannibal glad-handed under a new pseudonym about a life that wasn’t his. Antiquities and art had always been a personal passion, leaving Hannibal to speak on the subject like he’d been working in the field his entire life, fabricating a professional background in 16th century Eastern European architecture that had lead them to Niasvizh. It felt enough like home that there was a rind of sentimentality to Belarus, despite only traveled to Minsk for a day or two at a time. In opposition to the biting weather, the people had been kind, outgoing even, as far as Slavs were concerned. Hannibal had taken little time to assimilate, folding in with his new coworkers as easily as ever, allowing both he and Will the time and space to socialize.

The pair had hopped from one country to the next over several years, lingering longer and growing roots in cities where they couldn’t be extradited back to Washington when paranoia took hold. Until the chatter following Francis Dolarhyde died down, they stayed largely under the radar, leaving Hannibal to find amusement in his art and his books like he was back in prison, entertaining himself for months on end. The key difference being that the only thing that kept him afloat then was the chance of seeing Will again and now—--

The air shifted as Will approached Hannibal from behind, prompting a half turn to regard the approach in his periphery. His breath was warm against the shell of Hannibal’s ear, prickling gooseflesh along his neck as he tilted fractionally closer. 

“I’m always pleasantly surprised by how easy it is to kill you in my mind.”

Hannibal made no outward tell to how the confession affected him, his expression stoic save the twitching of the corners of his mouth toward a smile. In the subtle language they’d developed in silence, it was Hannibal blushing in delighted arousal. He caught Will’s eyes he righted himself, making known his approval for the gesture, however underhanded. Hannibal enjoyed Will’s manipulation of him, invited it even, where it had improved and delighted him more and more as time went on. This was a ploy for abandoning the function early, baiting him back home with the promise of implied carnality.

“That’s all I’ve ever wanted for you,” he replied tenderly, hoping that when the time did come, it would be Will’s hands around his neck. For a brief moment, he turned back to his conversation, smiling in the polite way that he did when he would be bearing unfortunate news. “Doctors, forgive me, but there’s an emergency at home that cannot wait. Let me make it up to you next week.”

[meganspoetry]

🏠

'Florence is where I became a man. I see my end in my beginning.'

'All of our endings can be found in our beginnings. History repeats itself, and there is no escape.'

The Florence Apartment, from television show 'Hannibal'

We can do slightly better than forbidden fruit.

For a painting to be art, every brush-stroke must be exquisite— the Muse, most of all. I spit out her three seeds, re-plant the trees; this is a romance of decadence, a proper feast. This city is filled with pomegranate trees.

Come, follow me.

Who could think of a better setting? The sun shines more brightly; the blood falls more beautifully. Here, I first cut open a pig to set free the angel inside.

Isn't it ecstasy, soaring? By the handle or the blade, you'll find out soon enough. I won't allow a restrained response to so all-encompassing a love.

Come, follow me.

for an ask game: send me a 🏡 if you want a poem about a fictional place that your blog reminds me of 💕

[fatalism-and-villainy]

One thing I love about Hannibal is that I really like (especially visual) media that - for lack of better terminology - blends "high" and "low" culture.

That's an element present in one of my favourite films, Seven Samurai, which has the mass-audience appeal in its action and fight scenes while also displaying a high level of artistry in its visual composition. It's also one reason I love film noir - most of those films are adapted from pulpy, hardboiled crime stories, but elevate the material through the visuals and cinematography, in ways that often imbue it with a contemplative, existential weight.

Hannibal is similar in being adapted from a book series with some killer turns of phrase in the prose (it's a surprise to me how many great and iconic lines in the show are lifted from the books), but are ultimately pretty basic crime-thriller novels. The show takes the premise and plot points and characters from the novels and applies the sensibility of high art to them. It's in the highly stylized visuals and editing (Fuller's famous "pretentious art house cinema" approach), but also the poetic register of the dialogue, and the fact that the plots unfold according to emotional and aesthetic guidelines, rather than being bound to gritty realism.

And the really brilliant thing is that this thematically aligns perfectly with the actual premise of the show, which is about transforming the gross into the beautiful. The killers on the show deliberately turn the corpses of their victims into art, and the fulcrum of the main relationship is the fact that they both possess the ability to see murder, violence, gore, etc as aesthetically pleasurable. The physical corpses, which on a more conventional crime drama would be disposable, with only the mystery surrounding them important, are central here, because Will's gaze transforms their grisly, fleshy presence into something beautiful and fueled by artistic intent. (The actual crimes are generally of secondary importance at best - the point is the gaze.) The world of the show is so governed by this alternate artistic sensibility that's only understood by a select few, and the moral system is so entirely based on aesthetics, that it bears a lot of relation to camp (part of why not only Will and Hannibal, but also villains like Dolarhyde feel sooo queercoded), but it's far more solemn and self-serious than most camp.

Anyway, I just appreciate the creative vision involved in adapting a series of popular and widely adapted crime novels, but doing it particularly in this way. (And also seeing the Lecter/Graham potential in Red Dragon and deciding to lean waaaay into it.)

[ohbutwheresyourheart]

tagged by the wonderful @redrrriott <3

Last song: Vampire Weekend - Ya Hey

Favorite color: Blood red (at risk of sounding like an edgy teen lmao), and other dark jewel tones - deep blue, purple, emerald green.

Last movie / Tv show: Last show I watched to completion was The Haunting of Hill House, which I loved and want to re-watch at some point because I only found out about the background ghost easter eggs about halfway through and I want to catch 'em all. Right now I'm watching Hannibal season 3 a mere 9 years late to the party.

Sweet/spicy/savory: SWEET. I would die without my little treats and pastries and flavoured lattes and such. But also I love savoury and spicy. And the crossover of sweet/spicy and sweet/savoury.

Relationship status: Spinster seeking cat(s).

Last thing I googled: 'garlic cream cheese pasta' because I had garlic cream cheese and I wanted to. You guessed it. Make some pasta.

Current obsession: Bedelia Du Maurier and how badly she deserves to murder Hannibal Lecter. @n0isy-gh0st's incredible novel Staying Aloft and her Wonka/OC fanfic Absinthe & Chocolate. Teetering on the edge of a full-blown Batman obsession -- by which I mean, an obsession with the Robins, in particular Jason and Damian.

Last book: re-reading Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel for the one billionth time, and I shall re-read it a billion more. I want to eat that woman's prose, with its descriptions as vivid as a freshly-painted fresco, and its winding, tangible melancholy.

Looking forward to: I'M GONNA BE A PROPERTY OWNER SOON. Exciting and terrifying. Also I and two of my best friends are all turning 30 this year so that should be three very fun events.

Tagging: @junkheaded, @sarrie, @gaywarrren, @the-dragonborn-cums, @justacatdude, @ahlivianne, double tagging @n0isy-gh0st (bc you already got tagged)

[omniversalobservations]

Spider-Man: The Gathering of the Sinister Six (1999)

The Machiavelli Club, mentioned on pages 34-35 of Gathering of the Sinister Six, as well as pages 162-163 of Revenge of the Sinister Six, was founded by Professor James Moriarty, from the Sherlock Holmes stories "The Final Problem," "The Adventure of the Empty House," and the novel The Valley of Fear.  Its members include various rogues from comic books, movies, prose fiction, and so forth:

* The waiter at the Macchiavelli Club is Henry from Asimov's BLACK WIDOWER stories. * Wilson Fisk (The Kingpin) * Obadiah Stane (The Iron Monger) from Iron Man. * Gruber brothers: Anton Gruber first appeared in the prose novel Nothing Lasts Forever by Roderick Thorp (a sequel to his homosexual murder mystery The Detective).  Anton Gruber was basically a Baader-Meinof/Red Army Faction-style terrorist.  He was renamed Franz Gruber for the film Die Hard, while his brother Simon appeared in Die Hard With a Vengeance. * Doctor Fu Manchu is obviously "the long-lived oriental gentleman" that the Gentleman refers to.  (Although later on it is said that the Gentleman harbors prejudice against the Chinese, he makes no snide remarks about Doctor Fu Manchu.)  The Gentleman believes that Doctor Fu Manchu is dead due to the events of Master of Kung Fu #118, though he showed up alive and well in Marvel Knights I #4.  Marvel currently refers to him as the Ghost, due to licensing issues. * Auric is Auric Goldfinger, from the Ian Fleming novel.  Auric is derived from the Latin word for gold, from which its elemental symbol, Au, is derived. * Lex is Lex Luthor. * Justin Hammer is an Iron Man villain. * "The German Herr Taubman."  An alias used by a recurring villain called "The Deaf Man" in "The 87th Precinct" novels by Ed McBain.  Great novels BTW.  (Taubman is German for deaf man as I recall.)  Here's a clip from a fan site. * The Wrightsville Diedrich Van Horn is from the Ellery Queen novel Ten Day's Wonder, written by Ellery Queen.  (Ellery Queen was a sleuth created by two cousins who adopted his name as their pen name.  He went to a town called Wrightsville for vacations.  In the movies, Ralph Bellamy played Ellery Queen-Bellamy also appeared in two Eddie Murphy movies as one of the Duke brothers.) * Ras is Ra's Al Ghul, from the Distinguished Competition. * Soze is from the film The Usual Suspects. * Hannibal is Hannibal Lecter, from the novel Red Dragon by Thomas Harris, and later Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal. * Carmen is Carmen San Diego from the computer game and cartoon show. * Mr. Glass is from the film Unbreakable, as played by Samuel Jackson. * Napier refers to the Jack Napier, the Joker, from the 1989 Batman film. * Ernst is Ernst Blofeld from the Ian Fleming novel Thunderball. * Randolph and Mortimer Duke are from two Eddie Murphy films, Trading Places and Coming to America.  While in both these films Randolph and Mortimer Duke, insider traders, were played by the same actors (Don Ameche and Ralph Bellamy), Eddie Murphy was not playing the same person in these films, which were otherwise unrelated.

Although not mentioned as a member of the Machiavelli Club, Caspar Gutman worked with the Gentleman in the past, per page 166 of Secret of the Sinister Six. Casper Gutman comes from the Dashiell Hammett novel The Maltese Falcon, published in 1929.

Source: Marvel Universe Appendix

Carmen Sandiego is part of the Machiavelli Club, along with Jack Napier, Hannibal Lecter and Mr. Glass. Among others. Moriarty was a founding member, and the Gruber Brothers and a villain from an Ellery Queen novel have been members. The Gentleman briefly converses with two brothers, Randolph and Mortimer, who made their money on the futures exchange, and wonders how they earned a place at the club as they are no more 'evil' than standard stockbrokers.

Though not mentioned by name, Clint Eastwood, Robert Downey Jr. and Sylvester Stallone are all heavily implied to be attending Brick Johnson's funeral.

The cast from Scooby-Doo shows up at the end of the final book.

The 27th Precinct's Detective Briscoe takes statements.

Dr. Christian Szell is an old associate of The Gentleman.

Quentin Beck passes Cassady and Jesse.

In the third book, the Gentleman credits the inspiration for his overall Evil Plan to be a late associate of his named Auric.

One of the police officers in the third book is implied to be the son of Marge Gunderson.

Source: TV Tropes

(image via Amazon)

[bebx]

[becomingvecna]

don’t be confused by the cannibalism. I am actually a very sweet angel 🥰🫶🏻

[froody]

writing Hannibal Lecter is the only time my prose flows perfectly and poetically

[prpfs]

hello!! 🌻26 she/her seeking NBC Hannibal roleplays. i'm specifically in search of a hannibal lecter to my will graham.

i prefer to write over discord, be it in a server or via DMs. i can be fairly chatty OOC and like to share headcanons/media/etc. you know, generally enthuse about these totally chill dudes and talk some shop re: plotting.

i'm a rambler at heart, particularly where it comes to the sort of purple prose that's wont to come up with these two, but i tend to comfortably settle around the 3-5 paragraph range. i'm also always open to snappier roleplay with shorter posts, depending on the plot.

while i mention the show specifically, i'm not at all opposed to using elements from the books/movies.

i would sell my firstborn for a post-fall scenario. AUs are more than welcome however. some of my favs include modern fantasy (think: creature 'verses, i love me some werewolf!will), canon divergence (they meet earlier in the timeline, will leaves with hannibal at the end of s2, etc), omegaverse and anything that shakes up the typical power dynamic (psychiatrist!will, hannibal as a young FBI student in will's class, etc)

down for NSFW content and darker themes, ofc. it's hannibal.

please be 21+!

give a like and anon will get back to you

[notmuchtoconceal]

When I was 17 and first read Red Dragon, there was a part of me that considered it my first piece of "real" literature.

It was manly and straight.

A part of me didn't consider my formative love Clive Barker to be "real" literature, not only because he was gay, but because he was fanciful and florid. (Though also -- because his prose was middling when it wasn't phantasmagorical, and I wondered if he was leaning on subject and style to compensate for weaknesses in form. If my love of his torrid romantic grotesques was peak escapism, and I needed to learn to empathize with the professional men I never understood to live a fuller and more real life?)

Of course, now I'm smart enough to realize "straight" really isn't the best way to describe Thomas Harris. He isn't only Will Graham and Jack Crawford, he's also Hannibal Lecter, Clarice Starling, Buffalo Bill, and Mason and Margot Verger.

[nicklloydnow]

“Yet beyond content, there was always the faintly snobbish suggestion that if a book had to be good to be ‘literature’, then it had to be intellectually worthless to be downgraded to the zone of cheap ‘thrillers’, fit only for producing cheap thrills. Ten minutes reading such books usually proves such snobbery right, and we are reminded of Graham Greene’s famous division of his own works into ‘novels’ and ‘entertainments’. Yet good things can be found in unexpected places, and a particular series of books that are typically found in the ‘thriller’ section, when they are found at all, are on closer examination one of the great fairytales of our time, hinging on their creation of our great fairytale monster: Thomas Harris’ Red Dragon, The Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal. The monster? Hannibal Lecter, M. D.

(…) Yet it is here that the trilogy radically diverges from the established ‘thriller’ formula—Lecter isn’t the hero, but he isn’t the most obvious villain either, and indeed he at least appears to help speed justice along with his psychiatric profiling skills. This is the first step in elevating Harris’s trilogy—as well as Lecter’s character, who with his positions as an archival researcher in Florence and on the board of the Baltimore Philharmonic must make him one of the only fictional serial killers for whom killing isn’t their main ambition in life. Meanwhile, we find that Harris has stylistic skill well beyond that of the average thriller writer—unlike most, he avoids the howling errors of grammar, syntax and decency that give the modern genre such a bad name, and more importantly allows the prose to hold value in its own right, rather than simply as an inconvenient means for getting a cheaply pulse-raising plot across as quickly as possible. Especially with the middle book of the trilogy, it’s obvious to an alert reader that they are dealing with something far more eloquent and profound than a typical thriller.

(…)

Across the series, the spiritual unfulfillment and grubby reality of late-twentieth century Beltway America—the world of Watergate—is portrayed with a constant dark sense of humour and an inventive eye for detail, with both the author and Lecter’s distaste for modern American life (one of many parallels between Harris and Vladimir Nabokov) something of a running joke.

Split city is a bleak place the wind blows through. Like the Sunday divorce flight from La Guardia to Juarez, it is a service industry to the mindless Brownian movement in our population.

Aside from the surprising quality of the writing, a good barometer is the attitude of the books to death. As Elvis Costello knew, there’s something distinctly chic and even sexy about fictional detective work (‘I don’t know how much more of this I can take/She’s filing her nails while they’re dragging the lake…’). Yet unlike most thrillers or their ‘film noir’ predecessors, Harris never trivialises death as a colourful accessory to a ‘penny dreadful’ storyline but treats it with the maturity one would expect from a serious novel. We are given heart wrenching descriptions of the psychological damage Graham, the protagonist of the first novel, has suffered from his FBI career, and of the tragic futility of more mundane, realistic demise as Crawford’s wife wastes away from cancer. As the Doctor himself says, in an updated yet essentially repeated version of that old theological conundrum, famously described by David Hume as the ‘problem of evil’:

“I collect church collapses, recreationally. Did you see the recent one in Sicily? Marvellous! The facade fell on sixty-five grandmothers at a special mass. Was that evil? If so, who did it? If he’s up there, he just loves it, Officer Starling. Typhoid and swans—it all comes from the same place.”

Religion, which along with class is one of the trilogy’s unexpected yet most salient themes, is thus expressed in a distinctly twentieth-century, post-War way: a refusal to square the idea of a benevolent God with the horrors of man, let alone the cosmic indifference of the universe. It can hardly escape our notice that Mason Verger, the hideously disfigured and utterly repulsive—indeed, probably excessively so—antagonist in the third novel, murmurs to Starling of the wonders of Christian forgiveness, even as he boasts of his predation on the innocent. The contrast could hardly be stronger with the insistently religious morality in other generation-defining works of horror: see Marlowe’s Faustus, with the titular character dragged to hell as his guardian angel laments his renouncement of God, or Stoker’s Dracula, in which the naive Englishman Jonathan Harker foolishly scorns offers of crucifixes from the local peasantry and finds himself defenceless against the vampiric Count. (…)

Indeed, the appropriately chilling ‘Chiltern’ is a good example of how Harris has an almost Dickensian ability to play with names: most obviously we have ‘Starling’, with avian connotations of weakness and vulnerability, yet also shrewdness and subtlety (‘I talk in a daze, I walk in a maze/I cannot get out, said the starling’, writes Nabokov’s most famous protagonist). ‘Dolorhyde’ gives us ‘dolorous’ (latin dolor) and ‘formaldehyde’, along with ‘-hyde’’s resonance with Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 Jekyll and Hyde, also about transformative evil. Then we have Krendler, almost onomatopoeically impling ‘rake’, ‘rend’ or perhaps Grendel. ‘Hannibal’ gives us Hannibal Barca, the terror of the Roman Republic, and the obvious rhyme with ‘cannibal’, providing a ready-made nickname for Harris’s sleazy journalists to use. Most interestingly, ‘Lecter’ (which Harris smartly chooses over the more blatant ‘Lektor’) gives ‘leer’ and ‘spectre’, but also ‘lecture’/’lectern’/’proctor’ (Latin lector), hinting at how the doctor’s main role in the series is not as a killer, but as a teacher.

(…)

One of the trilogy’s other themes is therefore perhaps that of ‘contrast’. At first glance, it seems to be everywhere. Graham’s heroic desire to protect families contrasts with the depredations of the ‘Tooth Fairy’. The grubby, seamy brutality of ‘Buffalo Bill’ contrasts with Lecter’s immaculate appearance and mannerisms, as well as the depth of his psychiatric ability. The youthful, idealistic energy of Starling contrasts with the horror into which she descends to preserve life—quite literally, with her headlong plunges into Bill’s lair, Verger’s pig farm, drug-ravaged D.C. gangland (another nod to contemporary sociopolitics, this time the corruption and hypocrisy at the heart of the war on drugs) and of course the Baltimore asylum. As metaphorised by her childhood trauma of trying to save screaming lambs from the slaughter, brought out in one of her interviews with Lecter, she exists as a desperate and determined hero. Yet on closer examination, the trilogy is actually far less Manichean than any thriller, with clearly identifiable ‘good’ and ‘bad guys’. Lecter is at once a supremely cultured intellectual, with even his imprisoned life spent publishing academic papers and sketching Florentine skylines, and a killer whose predilection is the most savage, animalistic act imaginable, as famously discussed in Michael de Montaigne’s 16th century essay ‘des Cannibales’, and as provided an anagrammatic name for Shakespeare’s ‘Caliban’. (When writing this essay I was asked by a friend if I thought the novels would work as well as they do if Lecter were ‘just’ a serial killer. I’m not sure they would). The contrast between this and the Doctor’s refined sensibilities is of course famously summarised in the superb line about liver and Chianti—though in the book, he prefers the grander Amarone. This blend of mirth, high culture, whimsical brutality and a labyrinthine battle of wits is a potent and enthralling mix indeed, which only needed Hopkins’ expression—or, for that matter, Brian Cox’s—to become iconic. Like Shakespeare’s Gloucester, Lecter can ‘smile, and murder whiles I smile’—though a more apt quote would be (amusingly) from Ignatius Loyola in Middleton’s A Game at Chess, who like Lecter, can ‘with my refin’d nostrils taste the footsteps’ of the souls around him. We have the masterfully choreographed escape scene in the Tennessee jailhouse, juxtaposing Lecter’s sadistic, animalistic mutilation of his guards with his polite mannerisms before (‘ready when you are, Sergeant Pembury…’) and after, his bloodstained hands gently moving to the strains of Goldberg’s Bach Variations. More levels of apparent contradiction are present: his jailer, a supposed ‘good guy’, is the sexist, self-serving and incompetent Chiltern, while the FBI are often misogynist creeps bathing in nepotism and mediocrity. In the third novel the true villain is Verger, himself one of the doctor’s victims, while Starling battles not a serial killer but the corrupt, self-serving Bureau hierarchy and the haughty, predatory Department of Justice attorney Paul Krendler, who with his Ivy League sweater and slick Capitol Hill mannerisms embodies the patrician disdain of the American upper classes in a way that faintly reminds us of Gatsby’s Tom Buchanan or Catch-22’s Captain Aardvark. (‘I’m going to Congress’, he groggily boasts to Starling as he propositions her across Lecter’s dinner table.) Indeed, Hans Zimmer saw his wonderful and very underrated score to the film, all dark, rumbling cellos and strains of opera, as written as much about ‘corruption in the American police force’ as ‘a Freudian archetypal beauty and the beast fairy tale’. This links heavily with the theme of class: Starling’s ‘will to power’ is her desire to escape her working-class roots and achieve something more in D.C.

(…)

Yet the reality that Starling reaches the corridors of American federal power to find them stricken by corruption and closed to people like her serves only to make her—and us—more drawn to Lecter, who for all his monstrosities is by far the warmest, most courteous character of the series, albeit perhaps excluding Starling herself. The best indication that this series is far superior to traditional detective ‘thrillers’ is that the world it creates is, as Demme’s brooding cinematography in Silence of the Lambs and Zimmer’s score to the sequel show, not a traditional detective tale at all, but a story for our own, less certain times, a swirling mass of human struggles against adversity and the darkness of the mind.

(…)

As the sardonic Porfiry says in Crime and Punishment, ‘this is a murky, fantastic case, a contemporary one, an incident that belongs to our own age...in which the heart of man has grown dark and muddied’—and the actual plot is merely a part of Harris’ panoramic American vista. But through it all remains Starling as the hero of the story, striving through the horror around her and the corruption above her to save life. Together, the novels are thus reminiscent as much of Dante’s descent into the underworld as Grimm’s fairy tales. As her adversary, teacher, terror and guardian angel stands Lecter, less a ‘movie villain’, still less a human in any recognisable fashion, and more a fairytale monster:

“Is it true what they’re saying, that he’s some kind of vampire?”

“They don’t have a name for what he is”

Yet Harris makes his setting distinctly modern, despite all of the rich symbology of Blake and Dante (‘I forget your generation doesn’t read’, Lecter sneers to Starling in response to her ignorance of Marcus Aurelius, at once a social comment and a generational one). Like Dracula (also a vampiric Eastern European aristocrat) Lecter is a vision of medieval darkness loosed on the modern, western world of the novel: he may stalk patrician Baltimore and nocturnal Florence, but the FBI’s investigations are conducted by fax machine and helicopter, and Starling’s tracking down of Lecter to Italy in the third book must make the Doctor the first great villain to have been located with the help of the internet. Indeed, in contrast to the woods, castles and caves that play host to more traditional gothic monsters (those of Lovecraft or Poe, for example), Lecter and Starling’s saga is written onto a backdrop of dark modernity, with the films’ tremendous cinematography capturing the oppressive stone and brutalist concrete of the FBI’s headquarters with as much aplomb as the decaying towns haunted by Dolorhyde and Gumb, or the Appalachian trauma in Starling’s own subconscious.

(…)

Of course, what really matters in any fairytale is how it ends, and here I think we can really get to the heart of what makes these novels so good. In this regard, the key theme is transformation. This is established early on: the behavioural analysts of the FBI attempt to understand what transforms a human into a manhunter and unravel Dolorhyde’s fantasies of transformation into the demonic Red Dragon as the end-point of his childhood trauma. In Silence, the transformation of ‘Buffalo Bill’ is mirrored in his fascination with moths emerging from their chrysalis. That being said, I believe Harris should never have elaborated on Lecter’s early life—he appears more unearthly and far more unsettling if he simply is, without an explanation of how he came to be—that ultimately will always be more mundane than no explanation at all. Yet to return to the point, the great transformation of the series is that undergone by Starling herself. She comes to Lecter as a student, both literally and metaphorically, and his role is not that of an antagonist, but of a teacher. In this regard, the old commonplace that film adaptations are worse than the original book is actually true in reverse, because—and if you haven’t seen it, please stop reading here—the film adaptation of Hannibal upholds Starling’s heroism, having her attempt to arrest Lecter instead of eloping with him, as she does in the somewhat flippant book ending. Perhaps that ending has merit—Lecter’s hypnosis of Starling would seem to be the logical conclusion of Harris’ satirisation of psychiatry and poses interesting questions about the borders between love and revenge, right and wrong, pharmacological drugs and biological hormones which are worth thinking about, but I maintain that the more traditionally ‘good’ resolution of Starling’s story is superior. The reason why the trilogy’s film ending works so much better as a fairytale is because as Chesterton famously said, fairytales may bring monsters to life, but they also bring to life the heroes that fight them. Fittingly, in the film’s conclusion, Starling’s journey into heroism is vocalised by the monster with whom she has become inexorably tied:

“Would they have you back, do you think? The FBI? Those people you despise almost as much as they despise you? Would they give you a medal, Clarice, do you think? Would you have it professionally framed and hang it on your wall to look at and remind you of your courage and incorruptibility? All you would need for that, Clarice, is a mirror.”

It is in this moment that we realise—just in case we haven’t already—that their story is one of terror, but also one of a strangely moving beauty, and Lecter’s subsequent escape into Ridley Scott’s firework-strewn night preserves the best aspects of a fairytale: the mystery, and the magic. He has lived to kill another day, but the monster’s decision, unable to hurt Starling, to cut off his own hand rather than hers to get free of her handcuffs implies that he may have transformed her during their time together, but maybe, just maybe, she transformed him too.

Viewed in succession, as they must be, these aren’t simply ‘thrillers’. They’re a fairytale for the modern age, and it’s therefore fitting that their heart is inhabited by a very modern monster indeed. Their story conjures thrills, introspection, sorrow and joy in surprising measures, from Graham’s first, fateful call on Lecter’s opulent Baltimore study, to the gloriously melancholic sunset conclusion of the series, as time ticks inexorably on to the final dinner party and the tantalising end to this deeply amusing parable. It retains the power to leave us truly entranced, and against it, most so-called ‘thrillers’ appear juvenile and insipid. Chianti will never sound the same again.”

[meganspoetry]

Your writing is beautiful- was curious! 🏠 (naturally if you’ve got time/energy to spare!)

'This is all I ever wanted for you, Will. For both of us.'

'It's beautiful.'

The Cliff, from NBC television show 'Hannibal'

We fall.

A final shove, and now the narrative is complete; we buried bodies - beautiful - for our surrounding chorus, a ghostly viewership for a ghastly love story. Our wounds are red, and our bruises blue; you used a knife, to say, I love you.

We fall.

Where would you have preferred? Some gilded Church; an altar, arrayed with fresh grapes and fat jewels— presents for you, my deity? Perhaps before I pushed you. But I think you see the perfection in this; the steep drop, the rolling sea. Death and devotion— you, and me.

We fall.

Didn't you want to be seen? I see you. You've always been under my magnifying glass— and now, it's time to burn. We are not as god-like as you love to think; we are the sharpest swine of all— fractured, fascinating, skin still weeping from the punctures of our own blades.

Make eye contact with me, as we drop. The sea will wash away the dragon's blood: we will be entirely one another's, impossibly immortalised, perhaps - finally - gone.

But we will be known.

thank you! I hope you like the poem, and sorry about the wait ❤️

you can send me a 🏡 if you want a poem about a fictional place that your blog reminds me of, but please be aware that your response might take a while because of some ongoing health issues 💕

you can tip me here 🤍