Eruditorum Press

Don’t look at the future. We drew something awful on it.

The Proverbs of Hell 33/39: Digestivo

, 2

DIGESTIVO: An after-dinner (and after-coffee) drink such as grappa or limoncello. As we’ve completed the actual Italian portion of our adaptation of Hannibal in order to return to the US, this is on the whole sensible.

JACK CRAWFORD: Hannibal Lecter, il Mostro di Firenze, narrowly escapes the Questura. That how the story goes?

INSPECTOR BENETTI: Missed him by that much. The good Dottor Lecter is once more in the wind. But he left one last victim. Open him the way Lecter opened the other one. Open him all the way.

Something of a rarity in Hannibal, Benetti is an utter shithead who gets to display this act of staggering and monstrous corruption without any consequences. He disappears from the narrative entirely, having nothing to contribute past this point. Indeed, this is the last scene to be set in Italy, and there is essentially no unfinished business there, this dickbag excepted. 

CHIYOH: You’re sitting at Hannibal’s table. You know him. You know Will.

JACK CRAWFORD: I know them. They are identically different, Hannibal and Will.

This is a deeply odd time for Jack to lapse into gnomic hedging, even if it is generally his default state. “Identically different” is a particularly sub-par contribution to the genre, saying little (and nothing Chiyoh doesn’t already know) and doing so in a way that is downright ostentatious in its capacity to frustrate. He is admittedly heavily drugged, but “identically different” manages the impressive feat of not actually describing Will and Hannibal’s mirrored quality in any particularly accurate way.

MASON VERGER: There’s a hush over Muskrat Farm, Cordell, like the quiet of the old Sabbath. Smells like salvation.

As we prepare to say goodbye to Mason Verger, let’s pause to savor him dramatically unfurling Harris’s scene description as an aside to Cordell in an attempt to amp up the moment. Although his scenery-chewing “smells like salvation” is a step down from Harris’s almost Trumpian folow-up that “Privately, [Mason] compared his accomplishment to the discovery of radium.” 

ALANA BLOOM: I appreciate wanting to kill Hannibal Lecter. I am not without benefit from that.

MASON VERGER: Can’t make good on his promise to murder you if he’s dead.

ALANA BLOOM: But he’s not dead. Play with your food, Mason, and you’ll give it the opportunity to bite back.

MASON VERGER: Oh, I’m not playing, Dr. Bloom.

ALANA BLOOM: Hannibal is. He’s always playing.

Alana speaks damning prophecy here while navigating a tricky set of competing concerns; she’s previously expressed a desire to sell Mason out and get Hannibal into FBI custody. That seems frustrated at the moment, but pushing for Hannibal’s fast death undermines her stalling for time to save Will. 

MASON VERGER: You boys remind me of that German cannibal who advertised for a friend, then ate the friend’s penis with him before he died. Tragedy being, the penis was overcooked. Go to all that trouble to eat a friend, and you overcook his penis. They ate it anyway. They had to, they committed. But they didn’t enjoy it.

…

Continue Reading

Forward, to the Past! 2 – Episode 1: Mind Tricks

, 30

Spoilers

A note on formatting: I refuse to call the movie Star Wars “A New Hope” or “Episode IV”, so when I put Star Wars in italics (like just then) I mean the first movie they made, the one with Jawas and Greedo and Mos Eisley, etc.  When I put Star Wars without italics (like just then) I’m referring to the series or franchise or meta-text as a whole.

 

*

Having finally seen The Last Jedi, I was free to take a look at what others were saying about it. I’d been aware that the film was proving controversial… by which people seemed to mean that almost everyone liked it apart from a tiny sliver of white men whose disapproval was creating the artificial impression of controversy, and who – paradoxically enough – probably also deny the existence of privilege.

I won’t go into the objections of the tiny layer of voluble fanboys who decided to hate (or rather angst over) Last Jedi. I’m sure all that has been well covered elsewhere. But I will just point out one thing: the tendency to point to moments when the film took a stance or expressed a viewpoint and to see these as objective mistakes.

It was, some say, a mistake to depict Luke in the way the film did. It was also, according to some, a mistake to depict Poe the way the film did, especially in his relationship to Holdo. It was a mistake to leave Snoke unexplained, and to kill him off. It was a mistake to reveal that Rey’s parents were nobodies, of no significance to the plot or mythos. It was a mistake to see Leia use the Force impressively to save herself.  Etc.  And so on.

The ways in which these things are said to be mistakes varies, but the basic idea of the mistake is a running theme in the complaints. The film is also too comedic, which was yet another mistake. It’s a comedy of errors, one might say. Though it lacks identical twins and dirty jokes.

Luke, it is said, is depicted wrongly according to his established character. The mystery of Rey’s background is squandered. Etc, etc. The mistake is either a betrayal of some established bit of lore or characterisation (a continuity error of characterisation, basically), or it’s a bug in the storytelling mechanics, a bit of faulty engineering.

This is all rather telling, and in ways that are pretty obvious really.To adumbrate the complaints is almost to explain them.

We’re often dealing with people who see storytelling in terms of correct and incorrect decisions, with these measured against a kind of ‘instruction manual’ conception of how narrative works.

This is, of course, a case of the porgs coming home to roost, since such a view of storytelling has a purchase on the ideas of a couple of generations of fanboys precisely because of the slavish (if initially post-facto) devotion to Campbellian ideas about mythic storytelling that were championed by Lucas, and which turned out to be so unfortunately influential.…

Continue Reading

The Proverbs of Hell 32/39: Dolce

, 2

DOLCE: Dessert. Nobody particularly gets their just ones here, so let’s call this a case of running out of both course names and titles in this phase of the series. 

The bath has been a fragile refuge for Bedelia over the first half of this season. Here she sacrifices this safe position, turning it over to Hannibal as she cleans his wounds after his fight with Jack. This, however, contains its own form of power, as we will shortly see.

WILL GRAHAM: Jack  .

There is an odd understatement and contrivance to this reunion – Will pops up in Florence with improbable speed and simply arrives by Jack’s side, with their reunion almost entirely underplayed. But for all that this violates scads of normative rules about how narrative functions, it’s tremendously effective. The reunion between them that mattered was in “Apertivo.” The significance of this is simply that it allows the plot to move forward, and so it does.

JACK CRAWFORD: And Hannibal would slip away. Would you slip away with him?

WILL GRAHAM: Part of me will always want to.

JACK CRAWFORD: You have to cut that part out.

A simple and moving confession on Will’s part. Jack’s response is fundamentally inadequate, asking something of Will that he cannot possibly give – the “have you tried not being gay” of addictions to cannibalistic serial killing,

HANNIBAL: I want to be able to draw these streets from memory. I want to be able to draw the Palazzo Vecchio and the Duomo.

BEDELIA DU MAURIER: You won’t be coming back here for a very long time.

HANNIBAL: Memories of Florence will be all I have. Florence is where I became a man. I see my end in my beginning.

BEDELIA DU MAURIER: All of our endings can be found in our beginnings. History repeats itself and we can’t escape it.

Bedelia’s fatalism is essentially a restatement of Aristotelean plot structure, and thus an overwhelmingly safe bet for someone currently inside a serialized television show. Her real concerns, however, are not so much Hannibal as herself and her end, as evinced by her use of the first person plural and by the next exchange,.

BEDELIA DU MAURIER: I knew you were intending to eat me and I knew you had no intention of doing it hastily.

HANNIBAL: Would be a shame not to savor you.

BEDELIA DU MAURIER: I haven’t quite marinated long enough for your tastes.

And here we see the exquisite and frankly mad brinkmanship of Bedelia’s position – her compulsion to study and observe Hannibal wedged right up against her knowledge of how that will inevitably play out. And yet in this moment at least, she navigates an escape, getting Hannibal to, at least temporarily, leave her undigested. 

CORDELL: A Buddhist singing bowl. The gong represents the start of a new day.

MASON VERGER: Buddhists don’t eat meat.

CORDELL: This isn’t meat. This is man.

Mason’s planned consumption of Hannibal is a vulgar inversion of Hannibal’s tastes. Where Hannibal eats people to show that he is more than human, Mason eats them precisely because they are human, viewing the act of consumption as elevating himself.…

Continue Reading

Wrong With Authority Podcast, Episode 6 – ‘Inherit the Wind’

0

We’re back, with a proper WWA episode.  Daniel’s choice this time: Inherit the Wind, Stanley Kramer’s 1960 drama loosely based on the Scopes Monkey Trial.  (Details here.)

Download WWA6 here

A really good episode, this one (IMHO).  Lots of laughs and silliness but also some meaty discussion about history and politics.  

*

Show Notes: Main Topic: Inherit the Wind. Vague plot summary. Fictionalized. Quality female characters. Familiarity breeds contempt? Chimpanzee casting. Didn’t fall in love. Connected to Mississippi Burning. Cartoonish Brady. Brady’s wife. Sexism of 1925. Pronouncement dialogue. Golden Age acting. Comic relief. Unforgiving role. The One Man Who Can Think. Educating the rubes. McCarthyism. Flouting conformity and Great-Man-ism. Village Atheist. Blacklisted screenwriter and HUAC. Slavish attachment to the USSR. At last, a Trump reference. And Nixon. Fans sponspored by the funeral home. Perspiration necessary for a proper courtroom drama. Bigwig motives. Old Time Religion Uber Alles. Lynching sequences. Black actors. Talking about civil rights without talking about civil rights. Mencken. Brady’s hypocrisy. Not William Jennings Bryan. Classism and the American South. Ditto for British regional accents. Legitimate resentment. Not even Hollywood Poverty. The “respectable poor.” Scopes and eugenics. Scientism and Social Darwinism. Nasty Nietzsche. Sociobiological implications in Darwin’s followers. Kit brings us back to the film for a moment. Rachel Brown’s impossible choice. “Just fucking listen.” Western heroine thing. Darrow calls Bryan. Interlude. Facts not feels. “If you’re explaining, you’re losing.” Williams Jennings Bryan and his place in history. Bryan’s presidential runs and the gold standard. No left in American history. Radicalism of the gospels. New Atheists revised history. Defending Dawkins? Arguing against the book. The history of the religious right. Aftereffects of the trial. Inherit the Raging Bull. Two colonels? Eugenics and evolution. Moral systems. Christianity is revolutionary. Origins of creationism vis a vis fundamentalism. Luther and divisions in the WWA crew. The Klan. Hitchens on King. “White With Authority.” Evolution in American schools. Using theology for political purposes. Non-binary thinking. Bill Nye. The Universal lot. Good American monkeys. Adapting the play. H.L. Mencken the Nazi sympathizer. Wrapping Up. Next time: Gangs of New York.

*

Daniel’s book recommendations:

Six Days or Forever?: Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes by Ray Ginger

The Creationists: From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design by Ronald L. Numbers

 …

Continue Reading

The Proverbs of Hell 31/39: Contorno

, 8

CONTORNO: A side dish, typically served with the secondo. This episode is a last chance to do small stuff before the major fireworks of the first arc of the season go off, but more to the point, as we will see, is in a meaningful sense focused on a side character. 

CHIYOH: On still evenings, when the air was damp after a rain, we played a game. Hannibal would burn all kinds of barks and incense for me to identify by scent alone. He was charming the way a cub is charming, a small cub that grows up to be like one of the big cats.

WILL GRAHAM: One you can’t play with later.

The game is more or less a direct quote from Hannibal Rising, and the nominal origin of Hannibal’s supernatural sense of smell. Although it is notable that the game is played with burnt objects, so that what is identified is not the smell of the thing, but the smell of its destruction.  In her analogy for his charm, meanwhile, we have something that’s almost diametrically opposite from Will’s “pathetic wretch that failed to die” assessment, suggesting an early and seemingly innate grandeur to Hannibal. It is difficult, as we get into the depths of the show’s third season, to argue that Chiyoh does not have the right of it.

WILL GRAHAM: He comes in the guise of a mentor, but it’s distress that excites him.

This does not in fact describe Hannibal’s initial approach to Will, in which he was largely the manufacturer of the distress. Indeed, Will appears to have Hannibal wrong here. Hannibal certainly does do this on occasion, most obviously with Abigail, but Will is wrong to treat Hannibal’s tendency towards mentorship as insincere. As Chiyoh’s incense story shows, he really does enjoy the role of teacher, which is unsurprising given that the role leads directly towards something that clearly excites Hannibal more than distress: transformation.

CHIYOH:  How do you know Hannibal’s in Florence?

WILL GRAHAM: Botticelli.

It’s interesting that Will’s answer is not, in fact, the double murder at the university, that being the thing that Bedelia assumed would bring attention to Hannibal. (Indeed, so far as I can tell nobody ever really makes anything of Anthony Dimmond’s murder at all – later in this episode, in fact, Pazzi calls Sogliato the second person to disappear.)

BEDELIA DU MAURIER: Almost anything can be trained to resist its instinct. A shepherd dog does not savage the sheep.

HANNIBAL: But it wants to.

I am not an expert on dog psychology, and far too lazy to commit to depth in researching this, but this certainly seems as though Hannibal is projecting, if only because of the research suggesting that dogs’ default behavior is in fact that of a profoundly lazy scavenger. (That and the people I’ve talked to who have pet collies that have never seen sheep, and who instead attempt to herd their families into a single room.) Nevertheless, this is a fantastic exchange, mostly because the discussion of animal psychology paints a vivid image for the real subject, human psychology, and the suggestion that human law and civilization is a thin veneer constantly threatened by an underlying savagery.…

Continue Reading

Böhm-Bawerk Doesn’t Werk

, , 2

An interlude, consisting of a much expanded treatment of a short section from the material I contributed to the Austrian School essay in Phil’s new book, which is now on sale along with his other books.

*

Amended 16/8/18 to remove a factual error.

*

The leading Austrian economist after Menger was Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk.  He was the developer of many key Austrian mainstay theories.  The interesting thing is that he spends a huge amount of his time attacking Marx.  Indeed, as noted, his attack on Marx is to a large extent the springboard which leads him to his own theories. 

His major criticism of Marx is connected to something called the ‘transformation problem’.  But it’s a bit of a twisty story.

In a polemic published not long after the posthumous publication of Capital vol.III (1894), Böhm-Bawerk claimed that volumes I and III of Capital contradict each other when it comes to the matter of how values are transformed into prices.  Marx, says Böhm-Bawerk, claims in vol.I that commodities tend to sell at their values and promises to explain later why it seems otherwise in real life.  However, says Böhm-Bawerk, when Marx comes back to this in vol.III, he fails to explain, leaving himself stuck in a contradiction.  Commodities supposedly sell at their values, yet Marx is unable to explain how values are transformed into prices.

This claim was very influential among mainstream economists for a long time because, as Andrew Kliman says in his seminal book Reclaiming Marx’s Capital, “it reflects their view that only price and profit, not value and surplus-value, matter in the real world”.  Kliman goes on to note, in his polite way, that “[i]t has also been very influential among non-economists, probably because it is simpler than the subsequent critiques”.  Böhm-Bawerk is often mentioned when people talk about long-running and serious objections to Marx’s theory of capitalism.  He often comes up when people begin talking about what is arguably the longest running – and most damaging – controversy in Marxist economics, the issue known as ‘the Transformation Problem’.  There is no doubt that, in the loose sense, he founded the controversy.

However, as Kliman points out, “the specialist literature has all but ignored Böhm-Bawerk’s critique” since the Keynesian economist Paul Samuelson dismissed him, in the midst of his own attack on Marx in 1971.  (Samuelson’s attack is another story.  It was extremely influential but also highly peculiar, and its timing was clearly politically motivated; it was an attempt to counter the increasing popularity of Marx at the time among radicalised students.)  Any idea that Böhm-Bawerk remains a powerful enemy of Marx must flounder on the fact that his ideas have had little direct influence on anyone in the major debate for more than forty years.  That does not, of course, make him wrong (Kliman admits that Böhm-Bawerk may have been abandoned partly for political reasons), but it does make him largely irrelevant.

You see, although Böhm-Bawerk began the critical focus on Marx’s account of value/price transformation, the contradiction he supposedly detects in Marx is actually not the one that formed the basis of the long-running transformation debate.…

Continue Reading

Twice Upon a Time Review

92

So that’s the Moffat era. There’s a very small number of stories we might compare this to, and most of them are unenlightening. Understood as a multi-Doctor story, it is simply perplexing. As a regeneration story, it’s similarly perplexing, but at least Time of the Doctor (and I suppose technically The Tenth Planet) provides a vague point of comparison. Which leaves The End of Time, the series’ sole other example of a Christmas special showrunner/Doctor send-off. Here to, Twice Upon a Time looks odd, but at least the contrast is consistent. Davies talks in The Writer’s Tale about his discarded initial plan for Tennant’s regeneration, which was to do a self-consciously small episode with none of the epic grandeur you’d expect. And so Moffat, finding himself with an extra episode after the bombast of World Enough and Time/The Doctor Falls, takes up Davies’s discarded idea for a story in which the Doctor waits around to die and there’s no actual villain.

On one level, this confirms that Davies had a good idea there. Going small in regeneration stories works, as Time of the Doctor (which I’ll defend to the bitter end) demonstrates. Yes, it only works if there are also regeneration stories that go the other way (and Time of the Doctor at least had it both ways), but a small and intimate regeneration story is a move that works and works well. Indeed, it’s worth noting that the previous time Moffat thought he might be on the way out, he had similar instincts, penning a River Song farce. The trouble is that in Twice Upon a Time, the quietly striking impact of going small  works to cover up a myriad of fairly aggressive faults.

This isn’t surprising. We’re two Christmas specials past The Husbands of River Song. For all its genuine heights, it’s clear that Series 9 was the natural endpoint of Moffat’s tenure, and that Series 10 was essentially the television equivalent of a bonus disc of album outtakes and remixes. This is nowhere near Moffat’s best work, but we had no right to expect that given the circumstances. But none of that gets rid of the persistent sense of “will this do?” underlying the entire thing. There’s a persistent misjudging of weight through the entire thing. I don’t think there was anyone who, when making a list of the ten loose threads from the Moffat era they hoped got resolved in Twice Upon a Time, would have picked Rusty the Good Dalek. (Indeed, I’m pretty sure the Dalek Eternal would have appeared on more lists, if only because I’d have picked it.) Likewise, the return of Clara was an obvious delight, but going from that to the return of Nardole is clearly just sequencing the emotional beats in what’s clearly the wrong order. And it’s notable that virtually every Twitter and Tumblr quotation of Capaldi’s regeneration speech simply omits the detour about the Doctor’s name.

And then, of course, there’s the big one, which is that it’s not entirely clear why David Bradley is here.…

Continue Reading

End of Year Update

3

No proper post today. I’ve had an incredibly trying few weeks, I’m feeling rather drained and uninspired and nothing really came up to come together. So instead I’m using my last column of 2017 to take stock of the past year for me at Eruditorum Press and begin to sketch out the year ahead.
 
I began with The Elder Scrolls and Nintendo and ended with The Elder Scrolls and Nintendo (well, technically I began with the Star Trek: The Next Generation comic “The Truth Elusive”, but the audience for 20 year old Star Trek tie-in comics can be charitably described as a niche demographic). Along the way, I moored the blog project I’ve been working on every week since 2013, Vaka Rangi, reached the climax of my unexpected series on The Legend of Zelda and went crazy with what once was a humble thought experiment to write about Garfield. I wrote about Shin Gojira a year late, creeped everyone out talking about Natasha Henstridge and Species, pissed everyone off talking about Sailor Moon and annoyed everyone defaulting onto my old game journalism habits between jobs. And my favourite band came back to see out the whole sordid affair.
 
So pretty much just another year, albeit a year of transition.
 
Fittingly, the biggest thing that happened to me in 2017 is something you won’t be able to see the effects of until 2018. I’ve talked about it elsewhere (and indeed a big part of this is cribbed from a comment I wrote under one of Phil’s updates a few weeks back: I wanted to consolidate it into a proper post and report on some new developments that have happened since), but I received some surprising news last winter that cemented what the successor to Vaka Rangi was going to be. Neither of my other current blog projects were intended to fill that gap: I started writing Hyrule Haeresis for Tumblr (for a blog that no longer exists, so don’t bother looking for it) and it was never intended to get as big as it’s gotten, and Permanent Saturday was, as I said above, originally a thought experiment that wound up having legs. Neither of them are at the daft level of scale or ambition Vaka Rangi was born from. This, however, might be.
 
I’ve been planning this all year and it’s basically all outlined and ready to go already, but since there is a “fieldwork component” to this project it has to wait until I can physically make that trip. I do not want to tell you what this is or where I am going because I want you all to be surprised. Mostly, I confess, because I like appearing unpredictable. I can tell you however that I may get the chance to start writing and posting sooner than originally expected: March instead of April. But you will know when the time draws closer. Once that launches, it will almost certainly become my main weekly blogging project for Eruditorum Press going forward, but it will not be the only one.
…

Continue Reading

The Annual Eruditorum Press Post-Holiday Ebook Sale

3

It’s Boxing Day, which means it’s time for me to put a bunch of ebooks on sale at Smashwords. In all cases, just apply the coupon code at checkout to get your discount. All sales run through New Year’s. 

We’ll start with the marquee sale, which is not so much a sale as a giveaway. Guided by the Beauty of Their Weapons, my anthology on science fiction and fascism, is available for free. You can get that with the coupon code SG29J.

I’ve also got my brand new book on the alt-right, Neoreaction a Basilisk, on a modest sale of $3.99 with the coupon code FB25Q.

Next up, both of my books on comics are available for $2.99. That means both Volume 1 of The Last War in Albion, my history of the magical war between Alan Moore and Grant Morrison, and A Golden Thread, my history of Wonder Woman. 

The Last War in Albion Volume 1: TF24X

A Golden Thread: GT47P

And finally, our bread and butter, the TARDIS Eruditorum series, my critical history of Doctor Who, is all on sale for 50% off, reducing the price of each book to $2.50. Here those are with their codes.

Volume 1: William Hartnell: JD46W

Volume 2: Patrick Troughton: EE66K

Volume 3: Jon Pertwee: YV88T

Volume 4: Tom Baker and the Hinchcliffe Years: ZR36Q

Volume 5: Tom Baker and the Williams Years: RM69K

Volume 6: Peter Davison and Colin Baker: MG49Q

Most of those are available in all ebook formats, but a couple are, for whatever reason, only in epub format. If you need those in another format, there are numerous book conversion services online, though the best results will probably come from feeding the book through Calibre. If you need help, drop me an e-mail (snowspinner at gmail) and I can probably get you sorted, but it’s honestly not hard and I have faith in you.

Thanks so much for another year of support. We’ve got lots of exciting stuff planned for 2018, including the Capaldi era of TARDIS Eruditorum (the Patreon is now at $301, so that’s a go starting in March, though it still needs to get to $350 to have all the Pop Between Realities and the like) and the return of Last War in Albion. Happy holidays to all, and thanks again.…

Continue Reading

The Proverbs of Hell 30/39: Aperitivo

, 3

Check back tomorrow for the annual Eruditorum Press ebook sale, and Wednesday (probably later in the day) for my Twice Upon a Time review.

APERITIVO: The Italian equivalent of the apéritif, i.e. a before dinner drink. Eagle-eyed readers may note that this is the fourth episode of the season. The joke (and it’s a solid one) is that we’ve finally flashed back to answering what actually happened in the wake of “Mizumono,” and so this is the chronological first episode of the season. Hannibal – for all your highbrow narrative/Italian menu structure gags.

MASON VERGER: Are you wearing makeup? How long does it take you to put on your face in the morning?

DR. CHILTON: Now that I’ve got the routine down, no time at all.

MASON VERGER: Tell you what. You show me yours and I’ll show you mine.

There is something trolling about revealing Chilton’s fate from “Yakimono” before getting to Alana. Unfortunately, taken in the context of the general problems Alana has as a character, it feels vaguely mean-spirited, with Alanna being treated as an object of peril in a way that Will, Jack, and Abigail were not. Still, reintroducing Chilton opposite Mason Verger and having them bond over facial disfigurement is a nice touch.

Mason Verger, recast as Joe Anderson. The fact that his makeup is dramatically different to begin with does a decent job of masking the recasting, although Anderson is inclined to play the part with more subdued menace than Michael Pitt’s more over the top perverse relish.

The first appearance of William Blake in Hannibal. He’ll come up again soon. The painting is the Ancient of Days, and is the frontispiece to Europe a Prophecy. The figure within is Urizen, Blake’s mad demiurge of tyrannical reason. This appears to be a bespoke version of the image held at the Whitworth Art Museum in Manchester, which they suggest dates from the end of Blake’s life. (Blake did late-career versions of most of his major works with particularly ornate and detailed coloring, although the Whitworth’s version is frankly inferior to the one in Copy K of Europe a Prophecy.)

The detail of Mason owning the artwork is faithful to Hannibal, where it’s described as a “a passable print” that is nevertheless draped in black to mourn the passing of Mason’s father. Harris (or perhaps simply Starling within the book) mis-identifies it as “God measuring with his calipers,” but who’s counting? If one assumes a thorough bit of reasoning for this detail, it would point towards Verger’s role as a deranged puppetmaster attempting to control events, though to be perfectly honest it’s a pretty weird detail.

DR. CHILTON: How do you relieve the agony of waiting for Dr. Lecter’s capture? What do you fantasize about? I wonder what would happen if Hannibal Lecter was in your hands.

MASON VERGER: I worry we’re heading into territory not secured by your fee. I think I need to look elsewhere for someone to tend to my emotional well-being.

…

Continue Reading

«‹ 72 73 74 75 ›»