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Elizabeth Sandifer

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.

6 Comments

  1. mx_mond
    January 30, 2018 @ 11:10 am

    “the placement of a mirror in the labia”

    If I recall correctly, the mirror is placed in the labia, mouth, and on the eyes – those are all places through which another person can be taken in, or consumed if you will. Dollarhyde’s modus operandi points to a fear of losing his identity in another person – he blocks the paths through which that could happen so that they simply reflect him. In this instance, this fear of being consumed is very gendered, it’s a man fearing a woman’s power of transforming him (and, to prevent that, turning her into an object in which he can regard himself), but of course it will also play out in our main couple.

    (And of course Dollarhyde makes a tragic, as it will turn out, mistake in thinking that that which consumes has power over the consumed, but that’s still a few weeks away).

    Reply

    • Przemek
      January 30, 2018 @ 12:25 pm

      Very interesting! And so he seeks his own transformation, encouraged and facilitated by a poweful man.

      Reply

  2. Przemek
    January 30, 2018 @ 11:38 am

    Please don’t swap the picture of Verger choking on an eel for the correct one. As an illustration of Dolarhyde’s intense physicality it is hilariously perfect.

    Reply

  3. Przemek
    January 30, 2018 @ 12:23 pm

    “This scene ends up jarring oddly, however—it’s the only indication of Hannibal being allowed to cook while imprisoned, a decision that is both striking and ridiculous.”

    I never really noticed that but now that you point it out… utterly ridiculous. Why on Earth would he be granted such privileges? I would assume good behaviour only gets you so far when you’ve been convicted of eating people. Because of that decision later scenes depicting him affecting events despite being locked up lose their power – there’s not even a pretense of real prison sentence about his incarceration.

    “But in 2015, nearly thirty-five years later, his connection to film is dated—a connection less to modernity than to early 20th century modernism.”

    Interesting. Do you think he should’ve been updated, like Freddie Lounds was? Perhaps he could be a cell phone technician, gaining access to people’s private photos and videos through smartphones he’s repairing. That would work, I think.

    “And so Fuller creates another interesting and generally compelling female character to repeatedly underuse and treat exclusively as a peril monkey.”

    This. And what’s more, the very existence of Molly seems unfounded. She’s supposed to be this important character who anchors Will in peaceful everyday life far from Hannibal’s nightmarish realm… but we’ve never seen her before. She has no narrative weight. The mid-season time jump was probably inevitable but it still hurt the show somewhat. It’s the same problem that the famous “One year later” time jump from “Battlestar Galactica” created. It moved the beloved characters to such radically different narrative places in a matter of seconds that it’s hard not to feel thrown out of the story. And perhaps even a little cheated.

    Reply

    • Graham
      January 30, 2018 @ 4:06 pm

      Re: cooking, from what I understand, he’s obtained these privileges as a form of blackmail—since Alana and Chilton lied about his sanity in order to assure he’d be institutionalized, and he went along with the lies for his own ends, he has a certain degree of power over his confinement (power that Alana takes away when she gets pissed enough later in the series). It’s been a while, though.

      Reply

      • Przemek
        February 2, 2018 @ 9:27 am

        Eh, makes sense, I guess. I still would’ve liked to see some degree of powerlessness/frustration from Hannibal.

        Reply

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