Eruditorum Press

We stared into the untempered schism and all we saw was this dodgy CSO effect

Elizabeth Sandifer

About Elizabeth Sandifer

http://www.eruditorumpress.com

Elizabeth Sandifer created Eruditorum Press. She’s not really sure why she did that, and she apologizes for the inconvenience. She currently writes Last War in Albion, a history of the magical war between Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. She used to write TARDIS Eruditorum, a history of Britain told through the lens of a ropey sci-fi series. She also wrote Neoreaction a Basilisk, writes comics these days, and has ADHD so will probably just randomly write some other shit sooner or later. Support Elizabeth on Patreon.

Posts by Elizabeth Sandifer:

Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea: Captain America: The Winter Soldier, The Lego Movie, It Follows

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By rights, Moffat should have left. Sure, he’d done a season less than Davies, but it was clearly time. Each of his three seasons had been a step down from the one before, with Series Seven being an openly miserable experience. The Day of the Doctor and Matt Smith’s departure provided an occasion where he could leave on a high. His style had become exceedingly recognizable and recognized, which is the phase right before utter stagnation. It was time to go, and if he didn’t he risked—indeed, given the tenacity of his critics, essentially ensured—that there would be accusations that he stayed too long. But, of course, he didn’t. He retrenched, got a new star and executive producer, and went back to try again. This is the story of how that went, and of what may be Doctor Who’s most unexpected golden age.

But to understand that unexpectedness we must first understand the landscape that Doctor Who was returning into. Because the problem wasn’t just that Moffat’s tenure looked long in the tooth on its own merits. It was that outside Doctor Who’s window, the world was catching up. In one sense this was not a surprise. Doctor Who was onto its eighth season, and while obviously it had an unusually strong precedent for long runs, the new iteration was definitely a televisual senior citizen. But it’s worth appreciating the degree to which both Doctor Who and Moffat’s defining arsenal of tricks had been absorbed into the popular culture.

The obvious place to start is with the relentless blockbuster factory that is the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Quietly chugging along in the background since the late Russell T Davies era, by 2014 Marvel was well into Phase Two of their cinematic expansion, going back over the franchises they’d used to build up to The Avengers to give them sequels while introducing a handful of new ones alongside them. The wisecracking sci-fi action-comedy of Guardians of the Galaxy might seem the more obvious 2014 comparison, but its primary debt is clearly to Star Wars, and anyway, it’s the whole we’re interested in more than the individual parts. Because what the MCU does on aggregate is apply a relatively consistent narrative structure to a bevy of different genres.

This isn’t done in the exact same way that Doctor Who does it, of course. Doctor Who has a narrative conceit that directly fuels its genre hopping. The Doctor can drop into any sort of story they please and muck it up. The MCU, on the other hand, accomplishes its genrefluidity by having access to any character Marvel hadn’t already sold off to Fox or Sony. And so over the course of Phase Two it moves from a technothriller to high fantasy to a political thriller to a Star Wars riff to its big crossover set piece before closing out with a heist comedy. And by Phase Three it’s cycling in even more approaches. The result moves more slowly than Doctor Who—only the political thriller and the Star Wars riff come out in 2014, for instance.…

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A Rather Large Announcement

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We do psychochronography here, and so recognize that any significant piece of information has a vast root structure of paths leading up to it and an equally vast structure of implications and consequences, both of which exist in stubborn defiance of any attempt to simply present it. When this information doubles as an event such that the moment of its revelation splits time into discrete “before” and “after” periods, the complexity of these structures only becomes more important. Stripping all of this away to formulate an Announcement, then, is a desperately theatrical and artificial act.

Nevertheless, I’ll frame this simply in terms of site business: the content previously published under the name Philip Sandifer will, going forward, be published under the name Elizabeth Sandifer.

There. Now we exist in a world of implications, which open up and branch outwards instead of leading portentiously towards the singular. For the sake of clarity, first a restatement: I am a transgender woman using female (she/her) pronouns. Now for things that follow from this.

In terms of this site going forward, basically nothing will change. I’ll still be starting TARDIS Erudtorum on Monday, I’m still publishing Volume 7 this year, I’m still getting back to Last War in Albion. That said, obviously this is going to shape and affect my perspective in future writing (and indeed has quietly been shaping it for some time already), including at some obvious points in covering the Capaldi era. Equally, I remain me, my interests and approaches remain mine, and this is not part of some radical revision of my basic worldview. I imagine I’ll do some very openly trans writing at some point—I’ve got the start of a storming epic in a Google Doc—but it’s not imminent, at least not here. (Twitter, on the other hand…)

In terms of books, this is the motivation behind the occasionally teased “all Eruditorum Press books are going out of print” thing: everything’s getting republished as Elizabeth. Neoreaction a Basilisk is ready to go and will be a seamless transition with no gap in availability over the next week or two. Once that’s out, I’ll be pulling everything else from sale while James works on updating the covers and I tinker the interiors. New editions will be rolled out one by one over the next few months, but if there’s anything you’re going to want, I recommend grabbing it now.

Most of the interior changes are being slated at “nice enough to reward the handful of people I know are going to rebuy them, but nothing so essential that anyone feels like they have to rebuy them.” TARDIS Eruditorum books will get a short and minor essay on a Big Finish thing or something similar. Recursive Occlusion will get something small somewhere in it. A Golden Thread will get a somewhat sizeable update that gets it caught up to the movie, while Last War in Albion may get essentially nothing—still deciding there. Guided by the Beauty of Their Weapons will be going out of print for good.…

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Outside the Government: His Last Vow

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It’s January 12th, 2014. Pharrell Williams is happily at number one, with Beyonce, Eminem, Ellie Goulding, and Pitbull also charting. In news, a cold snap in the US has all fifty states with at least somewhere below freezing, and a chemical leak in West Virginia leaves 300,000 without clean water. In the UK, the death of Mark Duggan, which kicked off riots in the summer of 2011, is ruled to have been lawful, while Keith Wallis pleads guilty for falsely claiming to have heard Andrew Mitchell call some police officers “plebs.” 

On television, meanwhile, the shooting star that is Sherlock Series Three finishes its arc across the firmament with the Moffat script. His Last Vow is an odd thing. There are days on which I think it might be Moffat’s greatest ever script. But I mean “great” in its most complexly troubled sense. Moffat has been open about the fact that Series Seven of Doctor Who and The Day of the Doctor were miserable experiences. If the latter was him hauling himself back into fighting shape, then, this is the script with which he means to take back the mantle of being one of the most essential voices on television. But that means that this story lacks the runaway sense of triumph the fiftieth anniversary had. This is the long, hard title fight in which Moffat goes the distance with a set of ideas that are right on the edge of his capabilities. The result is harder, spikier, and far less approachable. It’s also the far greater accomplishment. Chris O’Leary, writing about “Station to Station,” describes the song thusly: “One of the many lies we tell children is that there’s no limit to the imagination. Of course there is. Even the most consuming and perceptive of minds reaches its borders and retreats. Expanding the mind is dog’s work, as grueling as it’s often fruitless; few attempt it, fewer succeed in it, and those who do often come out twisted and torn. In 1975, binging on cocaine, living in paranoid isolation and making a rock record, David Bowie succeeded.” One doubts Moffat’s version of this involved quite so much cocaine, but there is a similar sense of an artist clawing his way, bloodied and stunned, to a peak he knows even as he reaches it that he will never surpass. 

But while Moffat’s script is the element that’s pushing to new heights, it comes off because he’s backed by an absolutely staggering array of talent. Cumberbatch, Freeman, and especially Abbington rise to the ambition of the material, while Nick Hurran shows why he’s become one of Moffat’s most trusted collaborators. With Moffat at the frayed ends of his powers, he needs everyone to show up. They do, and the effect is an entire show determined to see just how far it can push things. In answering that question, then, we basically have to start at the ending, in which Moffat comes down firmly on the side of shooting Rupert Murdoch in the face. …

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The Proverbs of Hell 39/39: The Wrath of the Lamb

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THE WRATH OF THE LAMB: Reframing the title scheme for the back half of the season away from “Blake paintings” and towards “lines from Revelation,” and not entirely honestly. The title drop in the proceeding episode forces single vision, such that it can only refer to Will’s vengeance against Hannibal, although it’s not as though it would have been long on ambiguity without that.

I complained on Twitter a while back that there are no good instances of the deceptive edit, in which information is withheld from the audience purely by selectively editing around it so as to obscure it. The general problem with this is that it depends on selectively and covertly breaking the basic narrative codes of the medium, which state that editing is for communicating information, not for casual lying without any hints to this effect. Hannibal likely comes closer than most to being able to get away with it by the simple virtue of its editing never really suggesting a directly communicated reality in the first place. But the real reason it just about gets away with having an unseen cadaver in the room for this entire scene is just that the deception is mercifully short-lived.

It’s also worth noting that fully six minutes of this episode are pulled forward from “The Number of the Beast is 666.” To my knowledge the full details of the production of “The Wrath of the Lamb” have not yet been shared, but it’s evident that it was a troubled production, a fact that particularly affects the final fight scene, and the amount that had to get moved into it to get it up to its length seems to speak to that.

REBA MCCLANE: I drew a freak.

WILL GRAHAM: You didn’t draw a freak. You drew a man with a freak on his back. Nothing wrong with you, don’t let yourself believe there is.

REBA MCCLANE: I know there’s nothing wrong with me. In making friends, I try to be wary of people who foster dependency and feed on it. I’ve been with a few. The blind attract them.

WILL GRAHAM: Not just the blind.

It’s probably not the show’s deftest handling of blindness to use it as a basis for equating Reba and Will, but equally, the moment of shared empathy is important, especially as it’s the one opportunity to interact with someone other than Dolarhyde that Reba gets. The more interesting line, however, is Will’s defense of Dolarhyde, which grants the reality of his split personality in a way that leaves Dolarhyde himself oddly blameless. 

WILL GRAHAM: Molly and I want it to be the same.

HANNIBAL: When life becomes maddeningly polite, think about me. Think about me, Will, don’t worry about me.

There’s a cut to Hannibal’s line, which is scripted to begin “Mutual assurances you try to exchange in the dark and in the day will pass through some refraction, making them miss their mark.” One assumes it’s for pacing reasons so as to get to the punchline faster, and in turn set up Will’s retaliation, but its a pity, as it’s a good line.…

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The Proverbs of Hell 38/39: The Number of the Beast is 666

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THE NUMBER OF THE BEAST IS 666: Last and in most ways least, it is to “The Great Red Dragon and the Beast from the Sea” what “The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun” is to “The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in Sun”—a drabber and less chilling counterpart. The dragon is in an awkward pose that serves to expose the limitations of Blake’s anatomy, his face flattened in profile in such a way as to lose all animalistic grandeur. It is the one of the paintings to arguably look better when Fuller and company recreate it in “And the Woman Clothed in Sun.” Its one interesting element is the lamb-like figure behind the Beast from the Sea, a point of contrast and dissonance that enlivens the whole.

BEDELIA DU MAURIER: It’s hard to predict when brittle materials will break. Hannibal gave you three years to build a family and a life, confident he’d find a way to take them from you.

WILL GRAHAM: And he has.

The blunt fatalism of this admission surprises, and doesn’t really seem to follow from any of Will and Molly’s interactions last episode. Nor is it entirely clear what’s going on here. Will asserts that he sees himself killing Molly over and over, which is consistent with his general psychological state, but feels very Season One, and kind of lazily disconnected from the show’s current concerns.

WILL GRAHAM: Bluebeard’s wife. Secrets you’re not to know, yet sworn to keep.

BEDELIA DU MAURIER: If I’m to be Bluebeard’s wife, I would’ve preferred to be the last.

WILL GRAHAM: Is Hannibal in love with me?

BEDELIA DU MAURIER: Could he daily feel a stab of hunger for you and find nourishment in the very sight of you? Yes. But do you ache for him?

Bluebeard gives his wife a key to every room in the house while forbidding her from the basement, where it turns out all his previous wives are. The story goes more or less how you’d expect from there. Bedelia’s “would’ve preferred,” however, prompts Will to consider his relationship with Hannibal in a new light, leading to the meat of the exchange. Bedelia’s definition of love is revealing of her own pathologies, reducing love to its pathological components as opposed to treating it as an affirmative feeling. This is partially because of the understandable need to frame love in terms of appetite, but also because of Bedelia’s own callous detachment. Still, it’s slashy as fuck, so that’s something.

HANNIBAL: Will’s thoughts are no more bound by fear or kindness than Milton’s were by physics. He is both free and damned to imagine anything.

The odd turn of phrase is unsurprisingly from Harris—a description of Hannibal in Silence of the Lambs. But it’s an odd line. There’s no particular connection between Milton and physics, and the idiosyncrasy of the invocation provides another faint echo of Blake.

JACK CRAWFORD: What’s got your attention? God, the Devil and the Great Red Dragon?

…

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Outside the Government: The Sign of Three

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We continue to count down towards the TARDIS Eruditorum relaunch on March 19th with revised versions of some old blog posts on Sherlock. Proverbs of Hell will run its final two installments on Tuesday and Thursday this week.

It’s January 5th, 2014. Pitbull and Kesha are at number one with “Timber,” and while the rest of the charts are pretty similar to four days ago, we’ve got Avicii, Jason Derulo, Martin Garrix, and OneRepublic as artists we didn’t actually mention last week. News is about as sleepy as you’d expect for four days at the beginning of the year, although there’s some flooding in Wales, Scotland, and the west of England. On television, meanwhile, the third season of Sherlock continues its twelve day blitz with The Sign of Three.

Let’s talk about what Sherlock is. Although its main character is a detective, it is not quite a detective show, in that the solving of mysteries is not its main narrative engine. One suspects that had it been comprised of six hourlong episodes a season it would have been, as it would have had several filler episodes each run that would have ended up being case of the week romps, but the reduction to three episodes a year changed it into something weirder. Nevertheless, its basic dramatic engine is still closely related to that of the detective show: the moment of Figuring It Out. Its defining pleasure is the cathartic click as the puzzle box’s mechanisms slide into place in a moment of triumphant Aristoteleanism. Over ninety minutes, this produces an interesting effect. Because ninety minutes is also more or less your basic length for a film, there is a tendency to describe Sherlock in those terms – as periodic triptychs of Sherlock Holmes films. With two thirds of the episodes set as event episodes (that is, premieres or finales), it’s easy to get swept up in this.

Nevertheless, Sherlock is unmistakably television, and The Sign of Three is a prime example. It is well aware that it has no obligation to make a stirring case for its scale and scope. Its end is a self-consciously subdued homage to The Green Death. No effort is made to tease the impending threat of Magnusson. It is confident that people who are watching it will probably do so again in a week, and so does not engage in the sort of sprawling, ambitious cliffhanger that films (and, to be fair, series finales) do in order to hold interest over the course of months and years.

Perhaps more importantly, it shares Doctor Who’s willingness to push against traditional dramatic structures. If one pauses Sherlock to ask “how much time is left,”one is almost always slightly surprised—the big plot beats never happen at quite the moment they’re scheduled. The dramatic resolution of The Sign of Three comes a full ten minutes from the end, which isn’t unheard of, except that the last ten minutes are all quite subdued and tension free, as opposed to an exploration of the consequences of the climax or setup for something else.…

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Outside the Government: The Empty Hearse

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TARDIS Eruditorum will return on March 19th. But as a prelude, we’re rerunning lightly edited versions of some old essays from the earliest days of the Patreon, now reskinned as the Outside the Government essays for Series 3 of Sherlock. I would also be remiss if I did not note that we are in the final 48 hours of the TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 7 Kickstarter, and it’s a nailbiter whether we’ll make all the stretch goals.
 
It’s January 1st, 2014. Pharrell Williams’s “Happy” has unseated Sam Bailey at number one, while Eminem and Rihanna, Lily Allen, Ellie Goulding, Katy Perry, and One Direction also chart. In the news, since Matt Smith got old and died it’s been exceedingly quiet. Obama signed a budget deal, marijuana was legalized in Colorado, incandescent light bulbs became illegal to sell in the United States, and Latvia adopted the Euro. While on television, Sherlock informed the audience that it was going to lie to them, and then went on to do just that. It had, in the tradition of fair lies, given ample warning. “It’s a trick. Just a magic trick.” And so, of course, it was. Indeed, The Empty Hearse is in effect a ninety minute exercise in arguing that the question of how Sherlock survived The Reichenbach Fall is irrelevant, or at least largely uninteresting.
To call this a bold response to one’s own iconic pop culture moment seems an understatement. And the reactions at the time are worth recalling, even if it is only a year on. First and most interesting were those who felt that The Empty Hearse was mean-spirited in its treatment of fandom, a criticism that focused especially on the depiction of slash fiction within the episode. And yet it’s difficult to quite articulate what about the portrayal of slash fans is offensive here. The only person to really mock them is Anderson, and Laura’s observation that her Sherlock/Moriarty slash is no more ludicrous than some of Anderson’s own theories is, in the context of the story’s larger attitude towards the idea of “solving” Sherlock’s survival, significant. She, at least, is in on her own joke, which Anderson never gets to be.

And it is, ultimately, the joke that’s at issue, which is where this episode’s boldness comes in. That The Empty Hearse was going to be read largely in terms of how well it resolved the cliffhanger was, of course, a foregone conclusion. You don’t get to have that kind of media coverage and then not be judged on how you stick the landing. Devoting an entire episode to it instead of, as they had with the cliffhanger of The Great Game, lampshading it with an absurdly trivial resolution was a necessity. But what wasn’t necessary was making The Empty Hearse into a ninety minute exploration of what it means to resolve the cliffhanger in the first place.

Which brings us to the second reaction, the accusation that the story was self-indulgent. Which misses the point in many ways.

…

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The Proverbs of Hell 37/39: And the Beast from the Sea

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AND THE BEAST FROM THE SEA: The one painting in the series not to have a direct representation or invocation in the series. The tense sexuality that exists between the Dragon and the Sun-Clothed Woman is replaced here by a raw homoeroticism—a theme that is not entirely uncommon in Blake. (c.f. Object 47 of Milton a Poem) The Beast from the Sea appears in Revelation 13, one verse after the Dragon, and is said to be given his power by the Dragon, creating a sense of heritage or supplanting. In Blake, the Beast rises below the Dragon, but has clear dominion over him. Of course, that’s always how supplantation begins. 

ALANA BLOOM: Maybe he’s trying to stop.

JACK CRAWFORD: You think there’s any way to push him to be self-destructive?

ALANA BLOOM: Push him toward suicide?

JACK CRAWFORD: Suicide suits me just fine.

WILL GRAHAM: If he’s really trying to stop, he’s not going to kill himself. How could he be sure his death would affect whatever’s inside him?

Will’s casual apprehension of the absurd logic of Dolarhyde’s difficulties in confronting the beast within is grimly funny. A crucial question, of course, is whether or not it would. Indeed, the metaphysical legitimacy of the Red Dragon is a point of considerable ambiguity here in a way that it simply isn’t in any other adaptation. Ultimately (and in contrast to Hannibal) the show suggests that Dolarhyde is not actually supernatural (the Dragon, notably, does not appear to survive his death), but it’s notable that Hannibal asserts his sanity towards the end of “And the Woman Clothed in Sun.”

HANNIBAL: This new twoness with the Dragon, it’s disorienting for you.

FRANCIS DOLARHYDE: The Dragon never spoke to me before. It was frightening.

HANNIBAL: What did it say?

FRANCIS DOLARHYDE: It called my name. It wants her.

HANNIBAL: If it weren’t for the power of your Becoming, if it weren’t for the Dragon, you could’ve never had her.

FRANCIS DOLARHYDE: I put my hand on her beating heart. Heard the sound of her living voice. A living woman. How bizarre.

There is a dash of incel to Dolarhyde, although this is firmly segregated from his motivation for murder. Nevertheless, his clear sense of himself as someone it is “bizarre” to imagine touching “a living woman” positions him clearly adjacent to a certain and timely vision of toxic masculinity.

FRANCIS DOLARHYDE: Will Graham interests me. Odd-looking for an investigator. Not very handsome, but purposeful.

HANNIBAL: He has a family. Save yourself. Kill them all.

It was of course inevitable that Hannibal would do this. It’s a detail from the book, but in terms of this Hannibal it’s also a functionally inevitable consequence of his declaration that Will is family in “And the Woman Clothed With the Sun.” Indeed, there’s a real sense in which the entire Abigail Hobbs plot exists to recast this action, a long and expanding context for this exact moment. Despite that, however, it was moved from being the cliffhanger of “And the Woman Clothed in Sun” to being part of the same episode as the actual attack on Will’s family, a move that downplays the moment’s importance by reducing the amount of time audience affect is expended fretting about Molly from a week to about thirty minutes. …

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New Kickstarter Flash Goal, Podcast Appearance

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So this just got announced. Andrew Cartmel and Ben Aaronovich writing a 7th Doctor comic for Titan. This is, on the face of it, absolutely landmark. Comics were a huge influence on Cartmel, who drew a lot of his style from 2000 AD while freely plundering Alan Moore’s catalog. So having him do one of his periodic returns to the McCoy era in comics is immediately interesting. It’s a shoo-in for the McCoy book. Except I’m really out of stretch goal slots. So instead I’m doing a flash goal. If we can hit $10k by the end of the weekend, I’ll cover this miniseries in the book. Here’s the Kickstarter link. This would be an excellent time either to back it or to link it. We’re at $9192 right now, so $10k by the end of Sunday is ambitious, but it’s doable.

The fact that we’re closing in on $10k also means that the next stretch goal is an interview with Kate Orman. The last two books have both had interviews with prominent creators who are openly fans of the era being covered—Gareth Roberts talked about the Graham Williams years, while Rob Shearman offered a rousing defense of Davison and Colin Baker. And while Orman wrote some of the best 7th Doctor stories, I’m not going to be asking her about those. For one thing, I already did in a podcast a few years back. I’ll probably transcribe those answers for the book too, but this interview will be about the televised episodes and Kate’s own Doctor Who fandom, with an eye towards talking about why the McCoy era was able to spawn the New Adventures.

Finally, I stopped by the Galactic Yo-Yo podcast to promote both the Kickstarter and the Patreon (which reached $350! Still, backing it helps make sure it’ll stay over $350, so it’s still a good idea). I talk a bunch about McCoy, the New Adventures, and scads of wildly off-topic shit because I’m me, and then we settle into me explaining why Kill the Moon is a thing of perfect beauty. That’s available here for your listening pleasure/endurance. 

And Jack and I will be getting in the studio Tuesday for what I assume will be a Shabcast so we can provide one last exciting promotional kick at the end of the campaign. So look for that late next week.

Thanks for all the support.…

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The Proverbs of Hell 36/39: And The Woman Clothed In Sun

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AND THE WOMAN CLOTHED IN SUN: The big one. Hannibal describes its “unique and nightmarish charge of demonic sexuality,” which is fair enough, but seems desperately insufficient. Let’s add, then, a brief discussion of gaze. As John Berger memorably simplifies it, in art the norm is that “men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.” Which at least broadly describes this picture, sure, in that we are seeing a woman being looked at. But the woman is obscured in the picture. We watch her being looked at, yes, but we do not really see her ourselves. That picture is The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed With the Sun. Here the object of our gaze is, as they say, dat ass. This isn’t so much a charge of demonic sexuality as a stunningly homoerotic vision of erotic puissance. Dolarhyde, clearly, does not miss the point nearly so much.

FRANCIS DOLARHYDE: Hello, Dr. Lecter. As an avid fan, I wanted to tell you I’m delighted that you have taken an interest in me. I don’t believe you’d tell them who I am, even if you knew.

HANNIBAL: What particular body you currently occupy is trivia.

FRANCIS DOLARHYDE: The important thing is what I am Becoming. I know that you alone can understand this.

HANNIBAL: Tell me. What are you becoming?

FRANCIS DOLARHYDE: The Great Red Dragon.

Hannibal’s initial response to Dolarhyde is interesting, in that there’s no obvious piece of information on which he should be able to base this leap. And it’s clearly a massive leap—a response that immediately affirms and reinforces Dolarhyde’s trust in him, but that in no way follows from anything in Dolarhyde’s opening line. (In Harris’s original, the line is Dolarhyde’s.) The easiest explanation is that it has been inferred from the crime scenes; that Hannibal can read a theme of transformation into the particular mutilation and mirrors involved. But the underlying reasoning is never explicated. 

The puzzled fascination with which Dolarhyde observes himself talking to Hannibal is an interesting grace note picking up off of his dual nature. The scene has a light tension as to which Dolarhyde is which aspect of him. This is eventually resolved such that the Dolarhyde watching is human, whereas the one talking to Lecter is the Dragon, but the tension is a delicious disorientation.

FRANCIS DOLARHYDE: I want to be recognized by you.

HANNIBAL: As John the Baptist recognized the one who came after.

FRANCIS DOLARHYDE: I want to sit before you as the Dragon sat before 666 in Revelation. I have things I’d love to show you. Someday, if circumstances permit, I would like to meet you and watch you meld with the strength of the Dragon.

HANNIBAL: See how magnificent you are. “Did he who made the Lamb make thee?”

One reacts, of course, with a certain irritation at the banality of invoking “The Tyger” in the vicinity of Blake. It has nothing to do with the Great Red Dragon paintings, which were painted a decade after Songs of Experience, and feels like going for the most obvious bit of Blake instead of building up anything that actually engages with his work.…

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