#long posts for ts

[titleleaf]

Can you talk a bit about your introduction to the Hannibal Lecter tetralogy? Did you see any of the movies first or did you read the books and then watch the films? What drew you to the series initially?

Absolutely!

I was really really into Demme's Silence Of The Lambs as a preteen in the era where you could just turn on the TV and the same 20 movies would be playing on cable —it’s interesting to look back on those really naive viewings where I wasn’t really aware of the world enough to grasp the film’s themes around misogyny (or the turbo-problematic elements, never mind the literal edited-for-TV censorship) and also not really astute enough to grasp why Hannibal Lecter was supposed to be a frightening presence. Hopkins’ Hannibal is having so much fun in that movie and when you can’t really detect the layers of irony and cruelty at play it’s a really different film. (The big thing in hindsight that's strange is that I perceived the museum bug guys as much more threatening figures — and they certainly do represent an ambivalent part of Clarice’s experience moving through the world as a woman, including being flirted with when you're trying to investigate an active serial killer but Foster plays Clarice's responses to them very differently to me now. I also just took it as a given that Clarice and Ardelia were girlfriends, not in a “I ship it” way but where I didn’t understand how it would be intended otherwise. I do ship it now as an adult, ofc #clardeliahive.) Something about Hannibal's combination of prickly sparring and weird courtliness was a blast for me even at that young (and dumb) age. I watched the film Hannibal later, probably on one of the zillion illicit movie streaming sites that used to exist and only let you watch 45 minutes of video a day, pretty miffed at the actor change but enjoying the weird villain/heroine loyalty kink soooo much… cannot remember, for the life of me, when I picked up the film adaptation of Red Dragon but there's a nonzero chance it was because of a gifset of that stabbing scene back in, ugh, oh god, 2012? Still an absolutely delightful dynamic, ponytail and all. I'm meh on it as an adaptation of the novel RD now (the novel's grim ambivalent ending makes people so uncomfortable that it seems to be nerfed in every adaptation) but it really blew my little mind.

I was dubious of the NBC series when it was announced (as a big Clarice boi), then watched s1 and enjoyed it, then got as far in s2 as Beverly getting sliced up and bailed. I didn’t finish the series until some time last year, but I'm glad I came back when I did, having boned up on the books in the meantime. Some of my frustrations remain (short version, I do think the show’s writing has a sexism problem, and I'm never as enamored with Hannibal as the writing seems to be) but it’s still so compelling to me and it’s one of those things I can turn over and examine from a million angles. Also it is stacked with hotties from start to finish, and it introduced me to the finest wettest Will Graham. Brain chemistry-changing shit.

Books-wise, I think I read Hannibal Rising first, which is probably not the way people should engage with those books — I still think that book and its film adaptation have a lot of fun stuff going on with them, it’s just not necessarily… necessary. The rest of the books only came along for me after my most recent revival of interest in the NBC series. (Which… came about after I went completely off my shit about Primal Fear and joking with a buddy about Aaron Stampler's summer internship in Italy got me rewatching the 2002 Red Dragon film for the first time since college.) I think I was scared away by the way people talked about the book Hannibal, but it ended up being my second favorite of all four, it’s gonzo and turns up the Grand Guignol nastiness to 11 but it’s also terribly fun.

I was a latecomer to Manhunter also for similar reasons — people loved to call that movie cheesy or act like it was some strange early effort superceded by the obviously superior adaptation of a different book — but simply as cinema I think it’s the finest of all the film adaptations, and Demme's SOTL owes it a massive debt. Mann gives Dolarhyde a tragedy and a dignity that no adaptation is willing to give to Jame Gumb and I’m sore about that but also. Tom Noonan’s double-l Dollarhyde being the only blond Francis on film is so funny, and I love Will Graham's tiny purple shorts. I miss the things it cuts/changes, especially with the friction within Molly’s marriage and the location specificity of the book, but it also has such a wonderful encapsulation of what’s at the core of both Will and Clarice to me — you can’t save all of them, but you still have to try to save as many as you can. Brian Cox's Hannibal is his own beast, and really compelling.

The CBS Clarice procedural is such a fun idea but it gets so tangled up in rights issues and the CBS procedural-ness of it all that it really impedes things. Some of what it adds is brilliant imo (I love the character of Julia, a married trans lesbian in the 1990s corporate world who makes tough choices and brings a fun element of the novels’ boring RL forensics to the fore as well as exploring the in-universe consequences that Clarice's explosively well-televised confrontation with Gumb has for innocent people who have nothing else in common with a skin-stealing serial killer than being queer and societally despised) but other choices it makes are totally inexplicable. (Several questionable choices made wrt Catherine Martin, and also what the fuck are they doing with PAUL KRENDLER… it felt like a Mindhunter rehash, very much pejorative.) Other elements suffer from the absences dictated by the rights issues involved — not just no Hannibal Lecter but no Jack Crawford, no mention of Will Graham as the maimed and miserable failure-state for what Clarice is risking, no nothin'. I miss Jack! Also they just cannot commit to it being a full on 1990s period piece, which is a crying shame. If it were on another network, or made by a different team, it could have been really great, but it’s ultimately a frustrating watch for totally different reasons than NBC Hannibal is a frustrating watch.

I also listened to the musical parody of Silence Of The Lambs a lot in college and it's still major earworm material ten years later. I'm just trying to mind my own business and blammo, it's If I Could Smell Her Cunt on mental loop.

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Fire and Blood, p. 398:

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Fire and Blood, p. 473:

Fire and Blood, p. 561:

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Fire and Blood, p. 506:

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Fire and Blood, p. 550:

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