Eruditorum Press

No nationalism but Terry Nationalism

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:

Neoreaction a Basilisk: Book Launch

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Proverbs of Hell will return next week.

Eruditorum Press is pleased to announce the publication of Neoreaction a Basilisk, my new collection of seven essays about the alt-right and the end of the world. A book of insane philosophy for our insane world, Neoreaction a Basilisk asks what the left can and should do in the face of literally apocalyptic defeats. Equal parts menacing horror philosophy and snarky humor, Neoreaction a Basilisk is less a roller coaster ride than a runaway train plummeting straight off a cliff and into a strange and tenebrous abyss beyond human comprehension. While making fun of right-wing assholes. And Eliezer Yudkowsky. In other words, exactly the book you need to make sense of 2017.

It’s currently available in a variety of formats. All with a typically brilliant cover by James Taylor, who took the DIY cover of the Kickstarter editions and classed it up a bit while retaining the basic aesthetic. Anyway, you can get it at these links:

KINDLE: US Store. UK Store.

PRINT: US Store. UK Store.

EPUB: Smashwords.

It’s also available in a variety of other national iterations of Amazon, and I trust you to find it there.

If I may brag (and what else is a book launch for), this is the best book I’ve ever written. Honestly, it could be the best book I ever write. It feels like the sort of thing one never outright tops. And I’m OK with that. But if you like my work, I cannot recommend this one highly enough. If you know people who you think might like weird and funny books about politics, I cannot recommend buying them this book enough.

And either way, *please, please, please* spread the word about it. Word of mouth marketing is what I have. Your tweets about the book matter. Your Facebook posts about the book matter. Your wandering naked down the middle of the street late at night screaming “buy Neoreaction a Basilisk” at passing cars matters and I hope that you get the psychological help you obviously need (but feel free to cover another block or two first). And if you’ve got a site where you’d run a review of it, please let me know and I’ll get you sorted with a review copy. If you’d like me to appear on your podcast or do an interview, please let me know and I’d be happy to. I want to get this book out to as many people as I can, and I am tremendously grateful for any help you can offer.

I’ll save a detailed writers notes for the $5+ Patrons, but I’ll give a quick overview of the seven essays.

Neoreaction a Basilisk: The title essay, previously published in a variety of Kickstarter-exclusive editions. This is the famous book I accidentally wrote – an exploration of Eliezer Yudkowsky, Mencius Moldbug, and Nick Land that starts from the premise “let us assume that we are fucked” and proceeds to careen through as mad a collection of topics as I possibly could.…

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The Proverbs of Hell 28/39: Primavera

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PRIMAVERA: Hoo boy. OK, so the course of an Italian menu between antipasto and secondo is supposed to be “primo.” This is often a pasta course, but can also be a risotto, a soup, or some similar hot course. One such dish certainly could be pasta primavera, which is a pasta and vegetable dish that takes its name from the Italian word for spring, which is “primavera.” This dish, however, is not actually Italian – it’s an American dish dating to the 1970s and likely first prepared in Nova Scotia. And more to the point, “primavera” on its own is not actually a food word at all. In fact this episode belongs more to the titling scheme of the second half of the season, as we’ll see in a bit.

HANNIBAL: I let you know me. See me. A rare gift I’ve given you. But you didn’t want it. 

WILL GRAHAM: Didn’t I? 

HANNIBAL: You would deny me my life. 

WILL GRAHAM: Not your life. 

HANNIBAL My freedom, then. You’d take that from me. Confine me to a prison cell. Do you believe you could change me the way I’ve changed you?

WILL GRAHAM: I already have.

HANNIBAL: Fate and circumstance has returned us to the moment when the teacup shatters. I forgive you, Will. Will you forgive me?

The lengthy reprise of “Mizumono” (the episode does not actually get to new material until around six minutes into it) serves two purposes. First, it addresses the very large “we have no money” problem that Hannibal had acquired by effectively cutting 10% of the episode and replacing it with already filmed material. Second, it reframes the end of “Mizumono” from a cliffhanger to the commencement of an action with an inevitable conclusion, a sense tacitly echoed by the quasi-palindrome of Hannibal’s final line. 

“The third season is the best one” is one of those straightforward critical opinions that doesn’t seem to need extra justification. Part of this is the doomed yet noble way that Fuller responded to the increasing pressure of the show’s declining ratings. Sure, Season Three offers the nominally saleable hook of directly adapting two Harris novels, but it also does shit like an archly symbolic shot of a shattering teacup that then reforms into Will Graham’s face, casually expecting that viewers will take this in stride. The ones that remained did. 

WILL GRAHAM: It’s hard to grasp what would’ve happened, could’ve happened. In some other world… did happen. 

ABIGAIL HOBBS: Having a hard enough time dealing with this world. Hope some of the other worlds are easier on me. 

WILL GRAHAM: Everything that can happen happens. Has to end well, and it has to end badly. Has to end every way it can. This is the way it ended for us. 

ABIGAIL HOBBS: We don’t have an ending. He didn’t give us one yet.

Compare Will’s version of the many worlds hypothesis to Blake’s Eternity – a simultaneity existing outside of time in which all things happen at once.…

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Monday Stumbling Blearily Into a Dunkin Donuts

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“Proverbs of Hell” will run tomorrow because I forgot to screenshot the images on my desktop before leaving the house for a laptop-only day. So instead we bring you a general update on where the site is, since we let the two year anniversary pass without any real mention. There’s a fair amount to cover, but let’s start with blog stuff, as it’s where things get interesting. Obviously Proverbs of Hell is my current project. It’ll run more or less uninterrupted until late February. After that, my desired next project is the Peter Capaldi era of TARDIS Eruditorum.

Yup. It’s happening. Well, hopefully. RIght now it’s the $300 goal on the Patreon, which is at $283. I’m not really worried about it hitting $300 for new TARDIS Eruditorum. But what I’m curious whether we can make the $350 goal happen. At $300 I’ll blog all the episodes from Deep Breath through Twice Upon a Time, but just those. At $350 you’ll get all the other bits – the Pop Between Realities, the Outside the Governments, and the You Were Expecting Someone Elses. (And maybe a Time Can Be Rewritten. We’ll see if there’s any rewritten time in time.) I suspect a lot of whether that happens is going to come down to where the Patreon is in early February when the big push towards the finish line happens. If we enter February well past $300, I think $350 is doable. So if you want me to write about Rick and Morty, The Lego Movie, Blackstar, Class, or the Titan comics, consider tossing a dollar or two into the Patreon now. 

Book-wise, I’m mostly in crunch on Neoreaction a Basilisk, which is now to the point where I’m out of “this book outright cannot be published in this state” issues and down exclusively to “I’d like to fix a few more things about it” issues. It’s not quite to “it’ll be out any day now,” but it’ll go to “any day now” any day now. There’ll be an announcement here, obviously. And in January or February I’ll run a Kickstarter for TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 7. This’ll be the model for all EP books going forward, for the basic reason that it’s easier to plan a workflow around and I make more money that way. 

Once Neoreaction a Basilisk is out the door, I’ll finally get back to Last War in Albion. My hope is that I’ll be able to run Chapters 7-12 of Book Two before I run out of Capaldi Eruditorum, and that Book Three will then take over as the weekly blogging project, but we’ll see how feasible that turns out to be. But Chapter 7 will probably drop in early 2018 – I expect to start work on it, like, next week. 

So basically, the theme for 2018 around here is going to be getting back to the classics.

Meanwhile, we’ve finally got Jack back from his long exile writing about the Austrian School of Economics. You’ve seen the offcuts of that essay over the past few weeks, and you can get the whole thing when Neoreaction a Basilisk drops, but if you want to read it right now, today (and why not – no Proverbs of Hell to read) you should toss some money at his Patreon, where it’s currently available for all backers.…

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The Proverbs of Hell 27/39: Antipasto

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ANTIPASTO: And so we move to Italian cuisine for seven episodes. Antipasto is the starter course, distinct from the amuse bouche or sakizuki in that it is a heavier dish, often with cold meats, as befits this unusually dense premiere.

BEDELIA DU MAURIER: You no longer have ethical concerns, Hannibal. You have aesthetical ones.
HANNIBAL: Ethics become aesthetics.

I have suggested in the past that my interest in Hannibal is that Hannibal presents a vision of the perfected man. This exchange is central to that contention. I had made an assertion along the same lines as Bedelia’s assessment many times prior to “Antipasto” airing (although its relevance was improved in shooting, where the line changed from “ethical problems”), routinely making the claim that I had abandoned ethics in favor of aesthetics. That said, Hannibal’s retort here is, to my mind, flatly incorrect, suggesting that aesthetics are a degraded (or ascended) version of ethics.

My contention, on the other hand, is that aesthetics are in fact the base form of philosophy from which all other forms follow. Our sense of aesthetic pleasure is fundamental knowledge from which our wider understanding of the world is structured. Even epistemology extends from aesthetics – what we recognize as true is rarely based on logical analysis (though even if it were, rationality is little more than a sense of harmony and balance) but on a notion of truth that is clearly akin to beauty or sublimity.

What is crucial about aesthetic judgment is what Kant describes as the “subjective universal” quality of them. They are, in empirical fact, individual and private judgments. But they are made with a sense of normativity – a belief that others ought to agree with them. (Kant believed that this only applied to beauty and sublimity, as opposed to the agreeable [judgments of visceral pleasure – “this human leg tastes good”] and the good [ethics], but this is wrong in both directions. Our notions of agreeableness are clearly made with at least some normative force, whereas ethics are not nearly as objectively determined as he’d like to think.) It is from this sense of normativity that the faculty of taste – the idea that aesthetics can be cultivated and refined. Which is where the notion of the perfected man comes in. Hannibal’s ontological force comes mostly from the fact that he has better taste than anyone else, both in literally sensory terms and in the sense of refined desires. It is this, for instance, that his ability to manipulate so effectively comes from: he understands what the most exquisite temptations are. Similarly, it is what his astonishing capacity for improvisation is based on. It’s not merely a hyper-intelligence and cleverness, but an immediate instinct for what the most interesting course of action would be.

All of which raises the question of what Hannibal’s aesthetics actually are. Which, helpfully, is much of what this episode is about. We can set aside the myriad of accurate but glib answers. Yes, Hannibal detests rudeness and values the confirmation of his own superiority (his line about being “happy to sing for his supper” is particularly funny), but these are obvious details that don’t do much to reveal the whole.…

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An Accurately Named Trilogy III: The Dark Knight Rises

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The Dark Knight Rises offers something with no counterpart in Nolan’s career: it’s a hot mess. That is not to say it’s a bad film, and certainly not to say it’s the worst of Nolan’s career (that’s clearly Interstellar). But there is a mad unruliness to it that is utterly uncharacteristic of Nolan’s work. Nolan is, as I’ve said before, an enormously fussy director. His work thrives on constantly trumpeting his presence as an auteur, inviting the audience to feel smart for keeping up with him. This is not inherently a bad thing – it’s nothing that isn’t true of Steven Moffat, for instance. It’s just how Nolan rolls. When it works, as with The Prestige, the result is a gripping puzzle box. When it doesn’t, as with Inception or Interstellar, you get something more akin to a stupid person’s idea of what a smart movie is like. But The Dark Knight Rises is neither of these things. Instead it’s a film Nolan simply loses control of – that becomes a sprawling tangle of competing ambitions that doesn’t know what it wants to do even as, at any given moment, it’s doing it with characteristic hyper-focus.

To some extent this is visible just from its sense of what comics it’s adapting. Sure, Batman Begins had a vague relationship with Year One and The Dark Knight is in some tangential sense based on The Long Halloween, but for the most part they were built out of bespoke parts. The Dark Knight Rises, on the other hand, is mashing together The Dark Knight Returns with Knightfall. These already two borderline incompatible works, offering two very different accounts of Batman’s limits. Nolan, however, combines them while also including Catwoman’s plot from Year One, the introduction of Talia al Ghul, Robin, and the lingering plot threads from the other two parts of the trilogy. This is nuts. These are not parts that have any natural reason to go together – instead it’s as though Nolan, out of clear-cut ideas on what to do with his third film, just raided all the remaining bits of the mythos that sounded interesting and put them in a blender.

The result is oddly satisfying. It’s not quite that Nolan is working outside of his comfort zone – it’s nearly impossible to imagine him doing a comedy, or even something that can fairly be described a small and intimate. Rather, it’s a strange combination of Nolan letting his hair down and having something to prove. The sense is that the need to top himself twice over has finally put a bit of pressure on him, and he’s not entirely confident of how to handle it, so is spreading his bets. But his attitude towards this is pleasantly relaxed – as though he’s just letting this film happen as his big obligation between Inception and Interstellar. And as a result, it’s a better film than either, because another way of putting that is that Nolan recognizes the impossible scope of this movie and so has decided to actually have some fun with it.…

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An Accurately Named Trilogy II: The Dark Knight

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It seems silly to start anywhere besides the Joker. We’ll set aside the cynical but not entirely unfounded question of whether the performance would be as celebrated as it is were it not for Heath Ledger’s untimely death and the ghoulish speculation (since refuted) that the psychological intensity of the role was a cause. Sure, it’s tough to imagine a Batman film winning an acting Oscar under less tragic circumstances, but that’s in no way what’s interesting here. What’s interesting is that Ledger and Nolan took the most oversignified character in Batman mythos (and yes, of course I’m including the big rodent himself) and offered a game-changing take on him. The hunched, disheveled figure with a Glasgow smile is a new angle, skewing the Joker towards a materialism that is generally precisely what’s discarded in other efforts to make him more grandiosely crazy. Ledger and Nolan offered a new way for the Joker to be.

By some margin the least interesting parts of this are the most often remarked upon. Yes, Ledger’s schlubby maniac was an easier fit for a certain strain of geek masculinity than the more overtly queer portrayals that came before him. But frankly, anybody who needed reassurance that the Joker’s makeup was “like warpaint” before they’d dress as him for Halloween needs to be fired into the sun. “Why so serious” is a great marketing line, but it’s a trivial part of the character’s personality – a line he uses in one of the mutually contradictory origin stories he gives – and reducing Ledger’s take to his leering transgressiveness is how you get Jared Leto’s performance in Suicide Squad.

To understand what’s going on with Ledger’s Joker, it’s necessary to understand the basic oversignification of the character. For that, let’s turn fleetingly to what is both the best comic story written about him and the low point of Alan Moore’s career, Batman: The Killing Joke. (This being where Nolan’s “multiple contradictory origins” idea originates.) For all that Moore crafts a typically symbolically rich take on the Joker, the big problem with the story, as Moore readily admits, is that he didn’t define the Joker as anything other than Batman’s archnemesis. He represents nothing save for a particular limit point for Batman – an irreducible reality of his mythos interesting for few reasons other than that homicidal clowns with good visual design are kinda cool.

This is not what the Joker in The Dark Knight is doing, although it’s easy to miss that fact. The centrist liberalism that is the default setting of most popular culture means that we’re most used to villains who are cuddly versions of fascism: Voldemort, the Empire, the Daleks, etc. It’s easy to make too much of this – the defanged fascists of popular culture villainy are generally so cartoonishly that if they have any political effect, it’s to blind us to fascists that don’t literally call themselves Death Eaters, have the Imperial March as their theme song, or shriek “EXTERMINATE” a lot.…

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An Accurately Named Trilogy I: Batman Begins

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It may be an accurately named trilogy, but its edges are both fuzzy. The Dark Knight Rises ends by gesturing forwards to an unrealized draft of DC’s film aspirations. Batman Begins, on the other hand, is inexorably tethered to the Burton/Schumacher films its title declares its separation from. Batman begins because his franchise had been driven into the ground by Batman and Robin eight years earlier. The choice of villains is perhaps the clearest remnant of this – two villains who had not been used in the previous series, including the Scarecrow, who was going to be the villain of a fifth Batman film ever since it was going to be directed by Joel Schumacher and called Batman Unchained. Even Hans Zimmer’s score interpolates Danny Elfman’s.

Even considered purely within terms of the Dark Knight Trilogy, Batman Begins is odd. Again, the title is a clue – it’s the one part of the trilogy not to have the phrase “Dark Knight” in it. But more to the point, it’s the only film in the trilogy to be directed by Christopher Nolan, promising young director coming off of Memento and Insomnia as opposed to Christopher Nolan, director of major blockbusters. And this shows. Batman Begins is by some margin the smallest of the three films. Its action sequences are considerably more restrained compared to the other two, still unburdened by the pressures of perpetually topping the previous iteration. It’s also much more rooted in the classic superhero blockbuster structure where people end scenes with lame quips. (Not even Gary Oldman can make “I’ve gotta get me one of those” work.)

And so Nolan gets a relatively blank slate to define his Batman on – one neither colored by his own brand nor by anything save for “not Batman and Robin.” And Nolan deftly avoids the one way in which that could pigeonhole him, reacting against the quasi-Adam West aesthetics of Schumacher’s film by emphasizing “dark and gritty” at the expense of everything else. Nolan’s film is comparatively dark, yes, but he avoids the Frank Miller style histrionics that one might expect from that brief. Yes, the film nicks a character and a couple of plot points from Year One, but it’s manifestly not an adaptation of that comic. Indeed, while one suspects Nolan is not enough of a comics geek to intend it, the use of Carmine Falcone as a throwaway villain defeated by the Scarecrow, who is himself not actually the film’s big bad invites reading the film as a repudiation of Miller’s puerile maturity.

Instead, Nolan’s film unfolds with a sort of ruthless competence. 2005 was, generally speaking, a good year for this. The modern superhero book had been successfully kicked off with Bryan Singer’s 2000 X-Men film, but we were still three years away from the Marvel assembly line starting to roll. Competence was desired, but as Daredevil had shown two years earlier, still nowhere near being able to be taken for granted. And so much of Nolan’s work – which he was exquisitely suited to – came down to offering a detail-oriented and broadly serious take on Batman.…

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About Time Volume 8 Review

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At long last, there’s a new volume of About Time. For those who are unaware, About Time is the gold standard of comprehensive studies of Doctor Who – a towering project whose Alan Moore it has been my pleasure and privilege to serve as Grant Morrison to. This latest volume covers from The Runaway Bride through Voyage of the Damned, with stops off for “Time Crash” and The Infinite Quest. The short form is that it’s another great entry in a great series that’s absolutely worth buying if you’re the sort of person who buys massive and sprawling reference boks on Doctor Who. You can get it on Amazon right here, or on Amazon UK here. I recommend it highly. 

Now for the meaty bits. I want to start with the kind of obvious red flag the book throws up, which is the fact that the entire book is covering just one year of Doctor Who.  For one thing, this incremental progress is frustrating given that the book’s been a long time coming – Volume 7 was four years ago. For another, at 350 pages this means that About Time is spending more time on the Martha Jones era than it did on Hartnell, Troughton, Davison, or indeed Tom Baker, though I think we can all agree that Volume 4 was overly scant. These concerns are not entirely off base, but on the whole the situation is better than it might appear. Given the announcement in the back of the book that Volume 9, rounding out the Davies era, will be out in 2018, it looks like the manuscript just got unruly in size and was split.

The larger issue is simply that unruliness. While it’s apparent that their working relationship was untenable, there’s no real way around the fact that About Time was better when Tat Wood still had Lawrence Miles as a coauthor. The tension between the two seems to have tempered everyone’s worst instincts, resulting in extraordinarily good books. Solo, on the other hand (or rather, with new cowriter Dorothy Ail, promoted from her “additional material” credit on Volume 7), Wood’s approach tends to bloat. The Continuity and Things That Don’t Make Sense sections are particularly out of control by this point, with the latter even seeming to know it, helpfully marking off its more excessive sections with section breaks and italics warning readers of, for instance, the one-page discussion of the bus timetables in The Runaway Bride or the page and a half on the dodgy geography of Daleks in Manhattan/Evolution of the Daleks. Equally, when you have to set multiple sections of your book off with disclaimers that practically beg the reader to skip them, it’s maybe time to cut those sections. Certainly it leaves one with the distinct fear that Kill the Moon is going to require its own volume in order to get through that section.

But out of this over-comprehensiveness comes many of the book’s best features. The first side-essay, for instance – “Why Weren’t We Bovvered” – is an eight and a half page overview of the intersections between Doctor Who and comedy that opens by talking about writers David Whitaker tried and failed to hire.…

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The Proverbs of Hell 26/39: Mizumono

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MIZUMONO: Dessert. Unlike savoureux, mizumono is in fact sweet, suggesting that the show has allied itself with Hannibal’s perspective as opposed to Will’s.

The shooting script called for a flash forward of Will screaming in pain from the end. Instead the episode begins with a moment of quiet ritual, with Hannibal writing out, in exquisite calligraphy, an invitation to Jack, setting their eventual confrontation as a piece of theater – a staged event the shape of which is defined by formal considerations of etiquette.

The opening sequence, which cuts between both Hannibal and Jack talking to Will and enjoining him to their side in the coming face-off. This is in some regards an odd framing for the episode, in that Will is never really given the chance to take a side, arriving on the scene after Jack and Alanna have already been dispatched. But it’s such a weird and uncanny visual that one is inclined to lay the blame on the denouement for not paying off its setup than on the setup. (Even more uncanny is the reaction shot to this, a split-screen Will.)

The otherwise unmotivated reappearance of Garret Jacob Hobbs – who seems at this point slightly dated in the face of Will’s newer murderous temptations and inclinations – is mostly here to set up the unexpected return of Abigail later in the episode. 

 

For all that Hobbs is fairly unmotivated foreshadowing that doesn’t work on its own merits, however, it is the excuse for the episode’s best hallucinatory image, and indeed one of the series’ best, as Will’s house is projected into a thicket of branches that implicitly suggest antlers as well. It’s massively oversignified, except that every interpretation works and speaks cogently to Will’s position and state of mind.

Bella’s return and evident deterioration is an unexpected gut punch. Like Bedelia’s return in “Tome-Wan,” its effectiveness springs from a combination of inevitability and a lack of immediate setup. Of course Bella is doing this poorly – we just hadn’t had cause to think about it by dint of not seeing her since “Takiawase.” But her inclusion is a smart and compelling choice – a way of forcing the audience to remember that Jack and Hannibal’s friendship is actually substantive. Bella’s lines about forgiveness not being a verb but rather an event that happens to you are particularly phenomenal, as is her aggrieved “you moved my punctuation mark.” 

Hannibal’s demolition of his life – done, with characteristic irony, out of compassion for the patients who would be exposed to invasive scrutiny in the ensuing scrutiny – is an effective way of flagging the degree to which everything is about to burn down and the stable foundation of the show as “Will and Hannibal solve crimes with the FBI” is about to collapse in favor of something stranger and weirder. 

As may be clear by this point, I am not entirely enthralled by “Mizumono,” which I view as a contrived conclusion to a deeply underwhelming run of episodes that leads into an effective season cliffhanger.…

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The Proverbs of Hell 25/39: Tome-Wan

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TOME-WAN: A miso or vegetable soup with rice. This signifies nothing more than the approaching end of the meal.

WILL GRAHAM: Can you explain my actions? Posit my intentions? What would be your theory of my mind?

HANNIBAL: I have an understanding of your state of mind. You understand mine. We’re just alike. This gives you the capacity to deceive me, and be deceived by me.

WILL GRAHAM: I’m not deceiving you, Dr. Lecter. I’m just pointing out the snare around your neck. What you do about it is entirely up to you.

HANNIBAL: You put the snare around my neck.

This is going appreciably differently from Will and Hannibal’s previous efforts to get people to murder the other for them. Hannibal’s first line is the closest thing to an explanation – at this point they are so enmeshed in one another’s psyches that trying to kill each other is, as Steven Moffat would put it, their flirting. Will, however, misses the real takeaway, which is Hannibal’s note that he has the capacity to deceive him. Spoilers: this is going to go badly for Will. (Admittedly that spoiler is basically just always true.)

HANNIBAL: Why did you tell Mason Verger I want to kill him?

WILL GRAHAM: I was curious what would happen. It’s true, isn’t it? You do want to kill him. Or you want me to. Either way, you’d like him dead. I’m just giving you a little nudge.

HANNIBAL: Mason is discourteous. Discourtesy is unspeakably ugly to me.

WILL GRAHAM: Are you thinking about eating him?

HANNIBAL: Whenever feasible, one should always try to eat the rude.

Hannibal’s motive is at last stated explicitly, and it’s exactly what you’d expect: he eats people because they are ugly. Though in typical and glorious arrogance, he extends this to a general principle of cannibalism.

Will’s aesthetic has evolved rapidly over just a couple of weeks. There is still intimacy to his imagined murder of Hannibal – looking into his eyes as he cuts his throat. But there is an added vein of theater – Hannibal being fed to pigs, and the set piece of hanging him, slitting his throat, then dropping him to the pigs. Although we cannot reduce Will to a set of influences, it is in this case not even a little hard to track those influences.

WILL GRAHAM: Hannibal is trying to manipulate me into murdering one of his patients. Mason Verger. I can manipulate Hannibal into killing him instead.

JACK CRAWFORD: What’s Verger done?

WILL GRAHAM: Hannibal considers him rude. That’s motive enough. It’s as though committing murders has purged him of lesser rudeness.

This exchange shines light on an aspect of Hannibal’s pathology that’s usually overlooked, which is where his sense of excessive civilization comes from. Will’s hypothesis – that his murders purge him of baser instincts – is almost correct, but puts the emphasis in the wrong place (although the context begs to have the wrong question posed). It is not that Hannibal’s murders purge him of rudeness, but that they place him higher on the food chain than humans, thus rendering him more civilized than mere civilization.…

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