proverbs of hell

TROU NORMAND: A palate cleansing drink of apple brandy, sometimes with a small amount of sorbet. Your guess is as good as mine, frankly.

One of the show’s most emphatically memorable murder tableaus – probably the only one to give Eldon Stammetz and his mushroom people a run for their money. It also serves, however, as a case study in the schizoid nature of this season. More than anywhere else in the first season, “Trou Nourmand” demonstrates the degree to which these cases of the week are a charade. The totem pole murders are barely a feature of the episode, squared away with almost comical efficiency midway through the fourth act while the plot focuses instead on Will’s psychological collapse and new developments with Abigail.

BRIAN ZELLER: The world’s sickest jigsaw puzzle.

JIMMY PRICE: Where are the corners? My mom always said start a jigsaw with the corners…

BRIAN ZELLER: I guess the heads are the corners?

BEVERLY KATZ: We’ve got too many corners. Seven graves. Way more heads.

In which Zeller, Price, and Katz demonstrate that the aesthetics of murder tableaus are not their strong suit.

WILL GRAHAM: I planned this moment… This monument with precision. Collected all my raw materials in advance. I position the bodies carefully, according each its rightful place. Peace in the pieces disassembled. My latest victim I save for last. I want him to watch me work. I want him to know my design.

This monologue, especially the bit about “according each its rightful place,” evokes one of the less explicit ancestors of Hannibal, Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s From Hell, and particularly the memorable anecdote in which Moore made an error describing the placement of a severed breast within a historical murder tableau, only realizing the error after Campbell had drawn the page and several further. His solution is to have the killer pause several pages later, look at the severed breast, think for a moment, and rearrange it to better fit his strange and awful aesthetic.

WILL GRAHAM: I was on a beach in Grafton, West Virginia… I blinked and then I was waking up in your waiting room. Except I wasn’t asleep.

HANNIBAL: Grafton, West Virginia is three-and a-half hours from here. You lost time.

WILL GRAHAM: Something is wrong with me.

As Crowley would put it, Will’s encephalitis is a disease of editing.

HANNIBAL: I’m your friend, Will. I don’t care about the lives you save. I care about your life. And your life is separating from reality.

WILL GRAHAM: I’ve been sleepwalking. I’m experiencing hallucinations. Maybe I should get a brain scan.

HANNIBAL: Damnit, Will. Stop looking in the wrong corner for an answer to this.

(Will is briefly startled by Hannibal’s passionate concern.)

HANNIBAL: You were at a crime scene when you disassociated. Tell me about it.

This scene requires that we read it in the context of “Fromage” and its resolution and thus assume that Hannibal is motivated by a sincere desire for friendship with Will.…

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FROMAGE: Cheese. Relating this directly to the episode contents is tricky – it’s most likely a reference to Franklyn’s declaration last episode that he and Hannibal are “cheese-folk,” although it’s certainly possible Fuller imagined this episode to be somehow cheesier than previous ones. I mean, it does involve opening people up and playing them like cellos.

The soft-focus montage of stringmaking plays out over an unusually harmonious bit of music, making this particular process of dismembering people and repurposing their bodies an oddly pleasant, idyllic thing. It is worth contrasting with Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, in which his (non-murderous) printmaking process is detailed as the workings of “a printing press in hell,” whereas here infernal content is presented in more sacred terms.

ALANA BLOOM: Why are you assuming I don’t date?

WILL GRAHAM: Do you?

ALANA BLOOM: No. Feels like something for somebody else. I’m sure I’ll become that somebody some day but right now I think too much.

WILL GRAHAM:  Are you going to try to think less or wait until it happens naturally?

ALANA BLOOM: I haven’t thought about it.

For the episode where the Will/Alanna sexual tension is finally grappled with Alanna, perhaps unsurprisingly, reverts to her manic pixie dreamgirl characterization. This is in many ways the least interesting available choice, and the two omitted lines from the script in which Will and Alanna talk about the difficulty of dating “ when you notice everything they do and have a pretty good idea why they do it” would have been considerably more interesting than just highlighting the lame joke.

FRANKLIN: I Googled psychopaths. Went down the checklist and was a little surprised how many boxes I checked.

HANNIBAL: Why were you so curious to Google?

FRANKLIN: He’s been saying very dark things and then saying just kidding. A lot. Started to seem kinda crazy.

HANNIBAL: Psychopaths are not crazy. They’re fully aware of what they do and the consequences of those actions.

Hannibal’s instinctively sticking up for psychopaths is cute, as is his carefully threaded needle of what does and does not constitute being “crazy.” For Hannibal, intentionality is a warrant of sanity. It is, of course, also the case that intentionality is a prerequisite for art – it’s only when we assume an author or artist who has crafted a deliberate “design” that it becomes possible for something to be art as opposed to merely aesthetically pleasing. Artists, then, cannot possibly be crazy to Hannibal.

WILL GRAHAM: I wanted to play him. I wanted to create a sound.

It is worth contrasting the motivation here with the Hannibal-influenced presentation of the murder. What Tobias wants to do is to create an entirely ephemeral event bounded precisely in time. The tableau, however, is a decidedly different aesthetic goal – a lasting monument to the murder. This is worth considering in light of “Sorbet”’s discussions of theatricality, as many of the same issues apply, but here there’s an added tension between two very distinct conceptions of art-murder – one in which it’s visual, one musical.…

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ENTRÉE: With the episode titles in French, this does not carry the English meaning of “main course” per se, but rather refers to a transitional course between fish and meat dishes. In truth the meaning is double, flagging this episode’s status as a transitional one in the season and its status as the first one since “Aperitif” to be focused entirely on the arc plot.

“Entrée” is long on Silence of the Lambs parallels, although unlike with elements drawn from Red Dragon, the show does not actually have the rights to the book and so can’t take and repurpose dialogue per se. Instead it tinkers with the iconography (to the point of exactly matching the uniform designs of the film), doing things akin to how Budish interpolated Francis Dolarhyde. To wit, Gideon’s ploy here closely mirrors Hannibal’s escape at the end of Silence of the Lambs.

WILL GRAHAM: I’m always a little nervous going into one of these places. Afraid they’ll never let me out again.

JACK CRAWFORD: Don’t worry. I’m not going to leave you here.

WILL GRAHAM: Not today.

Gee, I wonder what the end of season twist is going to be?

DR. CHILTON: Ah, yes. That thing you do. You are quite the topic of conversation in psychiatric circles.

WILL GRAHAM: Am I?

DR. CHILTON: A unique cocktail of personality disorders and neuroses that makes you a highly skilled profiler.

JACK CRAWFORD: Graham isn’t here to be analyzed.

DR. CHILTON: Perhaps he should be.

The unsubtlety of the foreshadowing is cleverly obscured by the unsubtle reiteration of the point that Will is himself “crazy” (inasmuch as the show takes that word seriously) as Chilton eyes him hungrily as a potential patient. This is, of course, one of the characteristic techniques of the show: achieving subtlety through overlapping complete lacks of subtlety.

It’s also worth noting, however, how decisively quickly the fact that Chilton is a complete shitheel is established. Much of this is down to the clever timing here – Chilton is, if not right about Will, at least not wrong about him, but this comes so early in Will’s mental deterioration and is presented with such guileless opportunism that the thing it most directly sets up is not “Will is unstable” but rather “Chilton is the worst.”

While Will’s previous involvement with the Chesapeake Ripper case is vague, it gives every appearance of somehow never having involved imagining himself committing one of the Ripper’s crimes. Either way, this is the closest we’ve ever actually seen him come to imagining himself committing one of Hannibal’s, even if in reality he’s imagining himself committing a crime by someone imagining himself to be Hannibal. It is unsurprisingly visceral, given this.

JACK CRAWFORD: Sorry to pull you out of class. There’s nothing wrong. I don’t want to make you nervous.

MIRIAM LASS: I’m not nervous. Curious.

JACK CRAWFORD: Your instructors tell me you’re in the top ten percent.

MIRIAM LASS: Top five, sir.

Without actually using any of the dialogue, this scene reiterates the basic beats of the first meeting between Jack Crawford and Clarice Starling, setting Miriam up as a mirror of the character.…

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COQUILLES: Coquilles are shells, referring either to shellfish like oysters or to casseroles served in a shell-shaped dish. The poetic meaning would involve something about how people are just shells for the higher angelic spirit within. The crass (and likely intended) meaning is a visual pun based on what happens when you flay wings off of someone’s back.

POLICE OFFICER: Do you have a history of sleepwalking, Mr. Graham?

WILL GRAHAM: I’m not even sure I’m awake now.

The best interpretation of this line, of course, is that even Will has noticed the weird way in which the sky moves at the wrong speed and fucking stags keep showing up, and has come to realize he lives his life in a strange and murderous dreamscape. Either way, though, he’s right.

HANNIBAL: I’d argue good old-fashioned post traumatic stress. Jack Crawford has gotten your hands very dirty.

WILL GRAHAM: Wasn’t forced back into the field.

HANNIBAL: I wouldn’t say forced. Manipulated would be the word I’d choose.

Manipulation is a vital yet inchoate topic in Hannibal, and this line sets up much, both about the next episode and about Jack. Later in the episode, as Jack tells Will that he’d feel guilty about all the murders he didn’t help stop if he returned to teaching (a statement designed in part to ensure he would), the blunt reality that Jack is an exceedingly manipulative man. This does not mean that his genial and reasonable persona is a facade – he is legitimately a good person who seeks to make the world a better place by preventing murders. But his goodness is ruthless, and he does not question it, which can and does prove tragic for those pulled along in its wake.

JACK CRAWFORD: Mr. and Mrs. Anderson according to the register. Mutilated, displayed. Thought it might be the Chesapeake Ripper but no surgical trophies were taken.

This marks the first mention of the Chesapeake Ripper, setting up “Entrée,” where that plot finally begins in earnest. This is a somewhat odd decision – this plot starts up early enough to have clearly been in mind all along, and yet it’s curiously and conspicuously absent from the initial setup, in ways that, through the first four episodes, actively fail to make sense. The biggest of these, of course, is a matter of narrative necessity – Will can’t make the obvious connection between the copycat killer and the Chesapeake Ripper because the end-of-season plot hinges on him not noticing it. Nevertheless, the fact that Will has clearly been consulted on this case at some point seems like something that should have come up in his early conversations with Jack.

JACK CRAWFORD: Who’s mocking who here?

WILL GRAHAM: He’s not mocking them. He’s transforming them.

Budish’s killings are a tacit mirror of Francis Dolarhyde’s, with the person being transformed through the acquisition of wings being the victim instead of the killer. Notably, where Dolarhyde seeks to transform into a demonic figure, Budish transforms his victims into angels, furthering the sense of him occupying the negative space around the absent (and as of yet unmentionable) Dolarhyde.…

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ŒEUF: One of the least nuanced titles (and indeed episodes) of the show, œuf simply means eggs, a straightforward reference to the episode’s themes of family and parentage.

WILL GRAHAM: Sometimes at night, I leave the lights on in my little house and walk across the flat fields. When I look back from a distance, the house is like a boat at sea. It’s really the only time I feel safe.

One of the more curious interpolations of Harris’s original novels, this comes from his 2000 introduction to Red Dragon in which he describes the circumstances of writing it, working in a small shotgun house in a cotton field while taking care of family in Mississippi. Fuller’s addition (this scene having been imported from the previous episode, where it originally preceded Hannibal and Abigail’s end-of-episode encounter) is that Will feels safe when he does this. This is curious – the security and isolation of his house as a boat in the sea coming only when he is outside of the boat, lost in the darkness of the vast sea. This suggests that safety, for Will, is a sort of dissociative state, only attainable when he is outside of himself.

WILL GRAHAM: I got so close to him. Sometimes I felt like we were doing the same things at various times of the day. Like I was eating or showering or sleeping at the same time he was.

HANNIBAL: Even after he was dead?

WILL GRAHAM: Even after he was dead.

HANNIBAL: Like you were becoming him.

WILL GRAHAM: I know who I am.

The use of “becoming” foreshadows Red Dragon, but the larger point here is the clarification as to why Will requires dissociation to feel safe: because the thing he is afraid of is himself. In other words, the surface bucolic tranquility of the image (and indeed of Will) is a feint – the point is the isolation that it provides Will, an isolation that can only be completed by removing himself from the equation as well.

WILL GRAHAM: Table has been set. Family dinner. I wasn’t invited. I take my seat at the empty plate. My seat. My place setting, next to Mrs. Turner. I am the guest of honor.

“Œuf” occupies a strange position in Hannibal. Fuller had the episode pulled from the running order, with “Coquilles” airing in its place and the arc-relevant scenes of “Œuf” being released online. The cited reason was the social climate following the Sandy Hook Massacre, but the episode’s resemblance to those events is at best oblique. Indeed, pulling it was in many regards odd, in that it’s the episode with by far the tamest actual murders in it. One suspects that the reasoning was at least partially prosaic – “Œuf” is something of the black sheep of Hannibal. It’s the only episode in which neither Fuller nor his main deputy on the show Stephen Lightfoot have a writing credit, and it is consistently a tonal mismatch with the series. At the heart of it is the logic of the murders themselves, which are rooted in a “true crime” psychology you’d expect to see on a dozen other crime-of-the-week shows, as opposed to in the phantasmagoria of excess that Hannibal actually trades in.…

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POTAGE: A thick soup, and a rather striking shift in the heartiness of courses that would probably destabilize a meal coming before egg and oyster courses. In this case, it flags the fact that this is an episode concerned entirely with the larger arc as opposed to with a killer-of-the-week.

WILL GRAHAM: I like you as a buffer. I also like the way you rattle Jack. He respects you too much to yell at you no matter how much he wants to.

ALANA BLOOM: And I take advantage of that.

For all the problems with her character (see next note), Alana is quickly established as intelligent and competent. But even here there’s a certain drabness to her effectiveness, which stems at best from authorial fiat and at worst because he’s unwilling to yell at a woman. And given Jack’s relationships with other female characters, at worst is more likely. As for Alanna taking advantage, well, it’s tough to identify when she does this as opposed to either going along with Jack or protesting ineffectually.

ALANA BLOOM: Brought you some clothes. Thought a change would feel good. I guessed your size. Anything you don’t want keep the tags on. I’ll return it. And I brought you some music, too.

ABIGAIL: Your music?

ALANA BLOOM: If there isn’t anything you like, I got a stack of iTunes gift cards. I’ve got a stack of gift cards. I don’t do well redeeming gift cards.

ABIGAIL: Probably says something about you.

ALANA BLOOM: Probably does.

But what? To some extent this question has no answer. Alanna is after allthe show’s great cipher, a character whose purpose is first to prevent the show from being a complete sausage festival (quite the job), and second to be whatever else the show happens to need. This sort of characterization gestures broadly to the motiveless quirkiness of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, a role Caroline Dhavernas and Bryan Fuller had already explored and complicated more than a decade earlier in Wonderfalls. Hannibal, however, is not a place where pixies thrive, and these traits never quite add up to anything sensible. 

ABIGAIL HOBBS: I don’t know how I’m going to feel about eating her after all this.

GARRET JACOB HOBBS: Eating her is honoring her. Otherwise it’s just murder.

The obvious reaction to this is the oft-giffed “cool motive, still murder” bit of Brooklyn Nine-Nine, but that’s manifestly not the ethical system Hannibal means to be working under. This is played as a desperate justification, a point emphasized by the original script, which had Elise Nichols’s body visibly mounted on the wall in this scene, thus moving the revelation that Abigail knew what her father was up to forward by several episodes. But the scene also plays Abigail and her father’s relationship as one with real tenderness, affection, and love. As before, the show is taking the idea that his cannibalism is a means of honoring his victims utterly seriously. Garret Jacob Hobbs isn’t wrong to insist that what he does isn’t “just murder.” …

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AMUSE-BOUCHE: Literally “mouth amuser,” its function is much the same as an apéritif, but it is a bite-sized food item and thus more substantial, in much the same way that this episode, liberated from the amount of setup and exposition that “Apéritif” had to do, gets to be. A stuffed mushroom cap would be an entirely appropriate choice of amuse-bouche.

The tiered concrete at which his students sit give the sense of Will having retreated back into the bone arena of his skull.

The show’s distinctive establishing shots are as important as its richly saturated color palette in creating its Chesapeake Gothic atmosphere. The time lapse establishing shots, with clouds whizzing overhead, frame what happens as taking place outside of time, in a fractured dreamscape. Fractured time is a recurring motif in the show, where it serves to indicate the blurring of internal and external landscapes. Here the process is virtually literal.

HANNIBAL: You saved Abigail Hobbs’ life. You also orphaned her. It comes with certain emotional obligations, regardless of empathy disorders.

WILL GRAHAM: You were there. You saved her life, too. Do you feel obligated?

HANNIBAL: I feel a staggering amount of obligation. I feel responsibility. I’ve fantasized about scenarios where my actions may have allowed a different fate for Abigail Hobbs.

An endearing quirk of Hannibal’s pathology is that, while he certainly will lie when it’s required of him (“Pork,” for instance.), he prefers not to. This speech is one of the most nuanced. The second two claims are reasonably straightforward – especially “I feel responsibility,” although “fantasized” is the funniest of them. The first, however, is the interesting one, simply because it is honest. Hannibal really does feel just as much paternal attachment to Abigail as Will following what happened. Where Will (somewhat wrongly) views her as something like a human version of one of his rescued dogs, Hannibal is well aware that Jack’s suspicions of her are correct, and his paternal attachment is much more similar to her actual father’s. Which is to say, he both wants her as an apprentice and potential meal.

BEVERLY KATZ: Zeller wanted to give you the bullets he pulled out of Hobbs in an acrylic case, but I told him you wouldn’t think it was funny.

WILL GRAHAM: Probably not.

BEVERLY KATZ: I suggested he turn them into a Newton’s Cradle, one of those clacking swinging ball things.

WILL GRAHAM: Now that would have been funny.

Will’s sense of humor foreshadows his affection for Hannibal, whose aesthetic in his murder tableaus is not entirely dissimilar to making a Newton’s Cradle out of the bullets that killed Garret Jacob Hobbs.

JACK CRAWFORD: Lecter gave you the “all clear.” Maybe therapy does work on you.

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APERTIF: A pre-dinner drink to whet the appetite. In this case, it is an expansion of the Garret Jacob Hobbs case, which, in Red Dragon, is essentially presented as a precursor to a precursor, the case Will worked before Hannibal.

WILL GRAHAM: I shoot Mr. Marlow twice, severing jugulars and carotids with near surgical precision. He will die watching me take what is his away from him. This is my design.

The idiosyncratic “design” sets up the show’s defining perversity: the idea of murder as something that is aestheticized. Significantly, it is Will who introduces this term, whereas Hannibal’s only murder of the episode is Cassie Boyle, which he commits as a pastiche of Garret Jacob Hobbs’s murders. So the two characters begin as doubly opposed. On one level, Hannibal is the creator in that he commits art murders, whereas Will, as the detective interpreting those murders, is the critic. On the other hand, it is Will who is presented as the imaginative figure, whereas Hannibal is reduced to a responsive role, reinterpreting other people’s murders.

It is also worth highlighting what, precisely, the design of the initial murder was. It is not the precision of the kill shot – the technical acumen with which Mr. Marlow’s death is executed. Rather, it is the psychological configuration he wishes to bring about that is the design. There is obviously a degree of megalomania here – a desire towards the demiurgic. But there’s also a healthy dose of a good old-fashioned Ballardian “make the external landscape match the internal one” to it. Regardless, the important takeaway is that murder is about far more than mere meat.

The pendulum is extrapolated from a throwaway line in Red Dragon. It immediately serves to introduce the fractured narrative space of Hannibal, simultaneously dividing space, time, and reality, all in multiple senses.

JACK CRAWFORD: Where do you fall on the spectrum?

WILL GRAHAM: My horse is hitched to a post closer to Aspergers and Autistics than narcissists and sociopaths.

Positioning Will as on the autism spectrum is an interesting move with regards to his stated skill at empathy. In practice the show plays more than a little fast and loose with what exactly it is that Will does, and its resemblance to empathy as conventionally understood is tenuous. Nevertheless, given the common myth of neuroatypical people lacking in empathy, putting Will on the spectrum has to be taken as one of the show’s more charming conceits.

(In practice, neuroatypical people are good at understanding other neuroatypical people, just as neurotypical people are good at understanding other neurotypical people. The construction of empathy as something that only counts when it’s neurotypical serves a disturbing double purpose, both tacitly establishing that neuroatypical people don’t really count as human and routinely being trotted out as a justification for precisely that belief.)

ALANA BLOOM: Normally I wouldn’t even broach this, but what do you think one of Will’s strongest drives is?

JACK CRAWFORD: Fear. He deals with huge amounts of fear.

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