This Is My Design: Dr. Lecter's Strong Medicine

The selection of one man over another is a preference absolute and irrevocable and it is a dull man indeed who could reckon so profound a decision without agency or significance either one. In such games as have for their stake the annihilation of the defeated the decisions are quite clear. - Judge Holden, Blood Meridian

At the beginning, the gang is all here. The demanding curmudgeon of a boss, Jack Crawford (Laurence Fishburne). The compassionate love interest who is afraid of getting too involved, Alana Bloom (Caroline Dhevamas). The technical team that doubles as comic relief, Brian Zeller (Aaron Abrams) and Jimmy Prince (Scott Thompson). The fridge-bound too-competent-for-the-show Beverly Katz (Hetienne Park). The bright, damaged waif Abigail Hobbs (Kacey Rohl). And, finally, our loveable, tortured hero Will Graham (Hugh Dancy). Our favorite tropes are securely in place.

Hannibal begins as a genre piece. We have seen flawed superhero cops done before, comically in Monk, with literary pretensions in Sherlock. Unlike those programs, however, Hannibal is named for its villain, not its hero. Even Dexter is named for the good serial killer. This is the first sign that the show is not what it appears to be.

From the beginning, the soundtrack isn't right. It shudders, clanks, and skitters. It indulges in the deep bass hits common to contemporary horror movies. It only reaches melodic cogency as Dr. Lecter finishes one of his many art projects. The images are likewise out of place. There is close-up after close-up of minute detail. The lighting casts everything in a smog. These and other seeming visual superfluities ham-handedly demand that we notice that this is no ordinary procedural. As special tv deputy investigators, this is our second clue.

From the beginning, the dialogue is stilted. It stumbles through awkward reveals. It feels most at home in Dr. Lecter's office, during his ice-cold psychiatric interviews. Compared to Hannibal's professionalism, the rest of the characters seem emotionally volatile, histrionic. Will Graham's hyper-empathy is the clearest counter-point to Lecter's glacial analysis. We scratch our chins and ponder this third piece of evidence.

Soon, we realize, everything that happens outside of Hannibal's office is simply preparation for the next scene of his "therapeutic practice". This is the fundamental reversal that Hannibal relies upon. In most cop shows, the confessional scenes are supplements put in place in order to facilitate shocking psychological reveals that spur narrative development. In Hannibal, the things that take place off the couch are entrement between Lecter's physiological, culinary, and psychological dissections.

Lecter is a psychiatric patient's nightmare; a therapist that is really as removed and inhuman as he must pretend to be in his professional function. Most mainstream variants of psychiatry are guided by a vision of the good life. It may be a life of freedom from neuroses, or of self-actualization. Dr. Lecter has emptied psychiatry of its therapeutic rationalization and stripped it down to manipulation. The end-goal of his practice is to fulfill the therapist's curiosity. Hannibal, like us, is simply interested in what will happen next.

The show, in short, is an excuse to put us on Dr. Lecter's couch. He controls the action, the characters, the dialogue. He simply hopes to help us achieve aesthetic catharsis, the highest possible achievement in his voided vision of psychiatry. In the course of his therapy, Dr. Lecter reveals to us our real role as television viewers, that of the disinterested analyst. As much as we might want to be Will, involved, emotionally engaged, and thirsty for justice, Lecter endeavors to show us that we have more in common with him than with our hero.

Lecter's "therapy" is supposed to demonstrate to Will just how much he resembles Lecter. We are supposed to go through this journey alongside him, noting the ways in which Lecter's horrifying spectacles thrill us, the way in which our hopes are undermined over and over, replaced by another one of Hannibal's aesthetic marvels. It's all part of the process; several times Hannibal escapes death just because it's not supposed to end this way. He can't die before our demons are exorcised. For him to die prematurely would destroy all of the hard work we've done together. The end-point of the show is not meant to be moral victory, but aesthetic completion. Hannibal endeavors to teach us that the two cannot coincide.

This assertion of incompatibility is ultimately theological. In the beginning of Season 3 when Will visits a church with the shade of Abigail Hobbs, he muses on Hannibal's relationship to God. Hannibal's Creator, says Will, has made a world in which elegance takes priority over moral order. In the world of the show, Hannibal's world, this is demonstrated again and again. Hannibal tries any number of therapeutic techniques in order to get us to realize his metaphysical picture of the world. Take the case of the great corpse sculpture of the human eye, staring up to God. Hannibal's addition is to the put the body of the sculptor himself at the center. At first glance, this is a standard quasi-Nietzschean statement; there is no God, just the inexorably violent aesthetic vision of humankind. Thus Hannibal muses: "Killing must feel good to God too. He does it all the time. And are we not made in his image?"  Aestheticizing nature, as he would have it, also entails ennobling cruelty.

But let's take a second glance, this time through Lecter's therapeutic lens, Hannibal also uses the "great eye" to remind us that he knows that we are watching: "If God is looking down at you, don't you want to be looking back at him?" This is the implicit narrative of the show made explicit. As we look down at Hannibal's design, so too does he look back at us. We have seen Manhunter, Silence of the Lambs, or Red Dragon. We know he will be caught. But the world of Hannibal the show is already a much contorted image of Thomas Harris' vision as expressed in the novels. Hannibal is not just a retelling, but a realignment. This is the most blatant moment of the show's smug self-consciousness thus far.

This puts the ending of Season 2 in context. When Hannibal is nearly killed by our heroes, he tells Will Graham that he forgives him. In so doing, he also forgives us; we wanted to see him get his comeuppance, we wanted the therapy to end in catharsis. We have reverted to identifying with Will. We have betrayed Lecter's therapeutic efforts, and, after appropriate punishment, he forgives us and continues treatment. The question of whether or not we will forgive him in return will be answered by what the circumstances are when the good doctor takes his fated fall. It remains to be seen whether it will be on his terms or ours.

In the latest episodes each of the characters struggle to deal with the aftermath of Hannibal's punishments. Toward this end, Will visits Hannibal's childhood home. There, he discovers a supposedly cannibalistic prisoner guarded by a former Lecter family servant named Chiyoh (Tao Okamoto). When Will shows Chiyoh his wounds, she tells him that he should tell her what has happened in the form of a story. "All sorrows can be borne if you put them in a story." she explains, The contextualization of a traumatic event can dampen the continuing power of the trauma incurred. When the imprisoned cannibal is eventually murdered, Will poses him in an imitation of Hannibal's artwork. Through narrative construction and a repetition of Hannibal's work, Will hopes to move through and beyond identifying with him. If the show is to end well for Will (and, by extension, for us) this may be the best way forward.

Talking About Talking About My Generation: Millennials Vs. The Zeitgeist

I'd like to center this around the infamous quote from Girls that goes, "I think I may be the voice of my generation. Or at least a voice—of a generation." Like most of the main character's bumbling hubris, it's played for laughs, the joke being the very idea of The Voice of Our Generation. Despite charges to the contrary, I think it's obvious that the characters of Girls, privileged as they are, are at least aware that they exist in a very specific milieu (young, white, New York, privileged poverty), and that there's nothing intrinsic in that milieu that makes it any more worthwhile than another. So when Hannah says she might be the voice of her generation, she immediately has to walk her claim back, which leads her to the absurd title of "A voice of a generation"—which means she's exactly like everyone else. Ha ha.

There's more to the joke, though, because Hannah's deference to inconsequentiality is a very familiar maneuver. We've been seeing it on television for years, in one form or another, from the passive-aggressive schlubs of The Office to the preening idiots of Arrested Development. These are people who, like Hannah, believe intuitively that they are the centers of the universe, but constantly find themselves in situations where they have to confront their own averageness; the only development in Girls is that we have a character who's smart enough to hold the two concepts in her head at the same time. In a supposedly pluralistic world, the pluralism of which has been drilled into her head for years by the liberal arts philosophy, Hannah desperately maintains her selfish egotism. This kind of millennial doublethink is best expressed in the old demotivator bromide that "if everyone is special, then nobody is." But Girls, in embodying that sentiment, and putting it into the wishy-washy parlance of our times, is not only proving itself formally proficient, but also truly, deeply in touch, which is to say that it's the voice of the generation.

There was an article on Opinionator a few weeks ago about treating prints by Andy Warhol like they were paintings by Jackson Pollock. I think Lena Dunham—and most other people who are attracted to speaking for a generation—are doing the same thing, which is to say applying a modernist concept to a world that no longer accepts it.

It's not difficult to see how the idea of "the voice of a generation" requires the exclusion of most people in that generation; the whole idea of a single, monolithic generation would be incoherent without some degree of cultural hegemony. Most Americans in the 1920s weren't alcoholic expats, but we know Hemingway in part as the voice of the Lost Generation. Being The Voice of a Generation has always necessitated both a broad understanding of the Zeitgeist and a willingness to ignore certain of its features when they contradict one another. Which is to say that it's always been as much about imposing one's will on the culture as it's been about having one's finger on the pulse. (I'd make that metaphor more consistent, but I don't have a crash cart handy.) Put differently, a prospective Voice has to focus on the semantic elements of their generation and then tell us what they mean. In The Sun Also Rises, alcohol, which was particularly prominent in the 20s, refers to simultaneous needs to escape oneself and to connect with others; we have the signifier, alcohol, and the signified, lonely self-hatred. The problem is that after the 60s and postmodernism, it's no longer easy to make a judgment about which set of signifiers to privilege, to say nothing of what's befallen those easy structuralist ties between signifier and signified, so it becomes impossible for anyone to call themselves the voice of a generation without a lot of qualification. 

Hence the joke: it's as absurd for Hannah to call her tiny, unfinished book of essays a major generational statement as it is for Lena Dunham to call her show a major generational statement. Yet that's exactly what they're doing; by putting their self-awareness on display, they're reducing it to a symbol, a soundbite that speaks to the confusion and self-consciousness that, we're encouraged to believe, are key features of the Millennial Generation. Never mind the arrogant rich kids, oblivious nerds and enthusiastic vegans we're familiar with from TV shows, books, movies, comics and everyday life; this is the real generation. Girls comes right up to the absurdity of its own raison d'être and then moves immediately in the opposite direction.

As the idea of The Voice of Our Generation becomes more absurd, we seem to want it more desperately. Girls is just one example of this; others include Scott Pilgrim Versus the World, anything by LCD Soundsystem, or Zachary German's novel Eat When You Feel Sad (the subject of our next post, which archly declares that it is "a book about a generation" on its back cover). All of these have a violent, conflicted relationship with the presumed Zeitgeist; they're obsessed with expressing it, but they either spend half their time trying to suss out what it is in the first place (Soundsystem) or they're content to hold forth about a received set of semantics (Pilgrim, German). In all of them, though, the absurdity of the concept of the Zeitgeist is the Zeitgeist; the failure of its characters to be generational makes them generational. God knows I've enjoyed all of them, but the search for a generational idiom, in every case, is misguided; I think the need to reconstruct cultural consensus, the first phase of which seems to be the airing of all our grievances about aimlessness and vacillation, must be based on a discomfort with irony that leads in its most extreme form to bullshit like Kimya Dawson.

To everyone who's looking for a Millennial idiom based on the disavowal of a Millennial idiom, I'd suggest John Campbell's brilliant webcomic Pictures for Sad Children, which performs the same fastidious analysis of Millennial semantics (privileged poverty, allergies, thin computers, cube farms and multiculturalism all feature prominently at one point or another) but takes the vacillation about a Zeitgeist one step further, turning it into all-consuming self-hatred. John Campbell's comic constantly criticizes the egotism his main characters display in being main characters at all; they're denied victory, redemption and even self-pity, and in this they're no different from Lena Dunham's characters. But Pictures for Sad Children takes the next logical step and starts killing them off, or simply abandoning them after a few pages, as if the universe's attention span was just too short. A comic that treats everybody with the same hostile apathy is the logical resolution to the problem of Girls; unless we want everything on TV to be that hostile and apathetic, we should get the Voice of Our Generation out of our heads completely.