KILLER INSTINCTS
Why audiences can’t get enough of Hannibal Lecter.
Will Graham, the hero of Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon, is uniquely equipped to catch serial killers. He’s an FBI investigator with a rare gift: he can empathize with a murderer so emphatically that, standing before the aftermath of a crime, he can vividly reconstruct it. He can reverse-engineer the madness to its source. The only trouble is that the process leaves a rather menacing residue — and Graham, having concluded an investigation, is resigned to stepping back into his ordinary life with the mind of a killer still lingering in his own. One wonders whether this menace will ever leave him. And one wonders whether his mind already resembled a killer’s to begin with.
Early in the novel, Graham, beleaguered by a particularly gruesome case, deigns to consult Hannibal Lecter, a psychopath with a psychiatry degree he caught and jailed years before. En route to the hospital where Lecter remains under rigorous lockdown, a detective and local liaison asks Graham how he managed to catch the man who had eluded everyone else for so long. “It was a co- incidence,” Graham demurs. He’d dropped by Lecter’s office to ask him some routine questions about a victim with whom the doctor had long ago been associated, and, after finding little of use, he’d stood to leave and move on. Until he felt the sharp tug of doubt — a hunch. “Something bothered me,” he tells the detective. “We were talking and he was making this polite effort to help me and I looked up at some very old medical books on the shelf above his head. And I knew it was him.”
And Lecter knew he knew. Indeed, he proceeded to take a scalpel to Graham’s abdomen, carving him from hip to heart. Graham survived — and Hannibal was caught. Graham explains to the officer that it was a week later, lying in the hospital, that he realized what had tipped him off. “It was Wound Man — an illustration they used in a lot of the early medical books like the ones Lecter had.” The victim Graham was investigating was butchered and posed to resemble the figure in the illustration, and the parallel, however tenuous, proved enough to ignite his preternatural instincts.
Other than the courtroom and one fraught consultation in Red Dragon, this slashing would be the only time the story has Graham and Lecter meet. But Harris suggests a certain symmetry: Hannibal Lecter represents the murderous inverse of Graham’s aberrant psyche, a man no less methodical or intuitive but distinguished — and it is a major distinction — by his will and inclination to kill. For Graham, in Red Dragon, Dr. Lecter is a cracked mirror he can’t bear to look at long: in the murderer he seems himself, distorted but recognizable. And it terrifies him.
Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal — which returns for its third season Thursday evening on NBC — is a long-form, serialized adaptation of Red Dragon, at least according to the attribution in its opening credits. In fact it’s more like a loose prequel. Hugh Dancy plays Will Graham as a morose, taciturn scholar, withdrawn and, as someone observes in the pilot, “somewhere on the spectrum.” Hannibal Lecter is played by Mads Mikkelsen, here the debonair lunatic of great refinement. The two could hardly seem less alike.
As Red Dragon opens, Will Graham is asked to return from the early retirement he accepted after Hannibal Lecter nearly killed him. Hannibal, meanwhile, begins years earlier with Graham’s recruitment as a special investigator for the FBI, who hopes to marshal his empathic powers for use in the field. Lecter, duly murderous but not yet suspected of his already innumerable crimes, is an esteemed psychoanalyst and sometime consultant for the bureau. He and Graham are introduced in the course of an investigation into the serial killings of a man named Garret Jacob Hobbs — a killer alluded to in Red Dragon as, indeed, the first psychopath Graham tracked down.
Hannibal has always had an unusual approach to fidelity. It draws a lot from the source material, but rearranges and recombines it, by, say, assigning faithfully adapted lines of dialogue to different characters, or by having people speak aloud what in the book is omniscient third-person narration. For the most part it feels like an authentic prequel, telling, in broad strokes and in a somewhat unconventional manner, the story of Will Graham as it might plausibly have preceded Red Dragon — with one exception. In the novel, Graham happens upon Lecter’s secret quite incidentally, and after their first meeting. With Hannibal Fuller didn’t simply expand the Lecter-Graham backstory. He did the seemingly impossible: he made them friends.
The first season of Hannibal concerns Will Graham’s gradual realization that Hannibal Lecter — his psychiatrist and, he’d believed, his confidant and friend — is in fact a notorious serial murderer referred to in the papers as “the Chesapeake Ripper.” Graham had been his unwitting accessory — even perhaps his unwitting partner. It transpires that Lecter, in his capacity as unofficial consultant on a number of FBI homicide investigations, had been secretly orchestrating them, reframing other murders to look like his own and vice versa to redirect suspicion away from him.
Worse still, Lecter had been using a bit of veiled hypnotherapy during his sessions with Graham, hoping to induce blackouts and, under the influence of hypnotic suggestion, transform Graham into a murderous psychopath himself. When Graham finally breaks free of the proverbial spell, he’s hurt most that his trust has been broken — that he could have been so deceived by a man he thought was a rare friend. What’s shocking isn’t so much that Lecter is a killer. It’s that he’s capable of such terrible betrayal.
Hannibal’s first season concludes with Graham framed for Lecter’s crimes, convinced of the other man’s guilt but unable to prove it; the second season, naturally, begins with Graham’s attempts not only to exonerate himself, but to reveal to the FBI the truth about the evil lurking within their seemingly trustworthy colleague. But then something unexpected happens: Lecter himself sets up a more plausible candidate for the crimes of which Graham stands accused, and, after mounting an identical murder, he manages to clear Graham’s name and set his former patient free.
Lecter, it occurs to us, doesn’t want to see Graham behind bars: he wants Graham to be his ally and confidant, a partner and friend. And Graham, too, once liberated, finds himself drawn inexorably to Lecter, perhaps sensing within him, as in Harris’s novel, the mirrored version of himself. As Hannibal continues, Graham and Lecter grow closer — confiding in
Lecter represents the murderous inverse of Graham’s aberrant psyche
one another, sharing fears and ambitions, each drawing out of the potential of the other. Together they talk, drink, dine. They become inseparable. And then it seems that together they begin to kill.
What’s fascinating is that, as this relationship develops, it’s never quite clear to what degree either man is being earnest about their affection. As Hannibal seems to bring Graham close, we’re left to wonder whether he has ulterior motives — whether he’s planning to set him up for another fall, say, or whether he’s planning to kill him once he tires of their time together. And as Graham seems to recede into darkness, giving into his psychopathic urges, we never know whether it’s a put-on or whether it’s for real — whether he really is becoming a murderer or, more likely, whether he’s deceiving Lecter in order to catch him in the act.
The truth is that it’s all of these things at once. Graham and Lecter truly are friends, but neither can ignore the aspect of competition: they are compelled to compare themselves to one another, and their relationship is as much founded in mutual admiration as it is rivalry. In other words, Graham and Lecter share an ordinary male friendship — that particular combination of camaraderie and hostility, impossible to avoid. I suspect Fuller understands and appreciates this.
One of the covert pleasures of Hannibal is that it works through the complicated business of being friends with another man in a way that any man can doubtless recognize — but it does so while raising the stakes, amplifying the competitive edge to a literal fight of life and death. Part of the reason the show is so affecting, perhaps, is that it shows us the male friendship taken to its logical extreme. Hannibal’s second season concludes, like its first, with an act of betrayal — though this time it’s the other way around. Graham and Lecter, suspicions having mounted around them, have conspired to kill the chief of the FBI and then abscond together. But it turns out that Graham has been playing both sides: in truth he’s working with the FBI to take Lecter down, and the plan the two have arranged is a trap.
When it occurs to Lecter that he’s been fooled — in the nick of time, saving himself — it’s clear that it’s the disloyalty, not the immediate danger, that has devastated him.
So the story of an investigator struggling to do his job becomes a story of friendship. What’s remarkable is how readily the source material accommodates this drastic change. But then perhaps that is why Harris’s books have for so long endured. Few novels have been as fruitfully mined as Red Dragon and its sequel, The Silence of the Lambs; fewer still have been fruitfully mined to such different ends and in such strikingly different ways. Thirty years before Fuller imagined Will Graham and Hannibal Lecter as two sides of the same disturbed coin, Michael Mann made their story a lavishly realized police procedural, with Manhunter, from 1986. Mann was drawn not to the mind of the charismatic murder — Lecter looms only on the periphery of the story — but to Harris’s scrupulous research and psychological rigour.
Hannibal is a macabre fantasy, a nightmare in operatic terms; Manhunter, meanwhile, is all logistics and process, fascinated by the mechanics of headline-grabbing crime. That both come from the same book — and that both are, in their own ways, totally faithful to it — is a testament to just how inexhaustibly rich the material is. Now that Hannibal has covered so much of Red Dragon, it seems likely Fuller will move on to the later Harris novels. (There are some rights issues with Lambs, apparently, but they’re working on it.) What’s exciting isn’t that we’ll see our old favourites brought to life again for the small screen. What’s exciting is that they’ll be familiar but unrecognizable. Hannibal is set to serve an old course a new way.