This exchange between Hannibal and his psychiatrist Bedelia in season three’s third episode ‘Secondo’ perfectly captures the futility in attempting to explain away Hannibal Lecter’s nature. The dialogue mirrors a similar remark from Hannibal in Silence of the Lambs in which he tells Clarice that “Nothing happened to me, Officer Starling. I happened. You can't reduce me to a set of influences…”. Despite Harris’s statement that Hannibal’s evil cannot simply be explained, he still makes the error of reducing Hannibal to a set of influences across both H and Hannibal Rising. Rising in particular serves as a lackluster origin story for the character, attempting to connect the character’s cannibalistic nature to an incident in which a young Hannibal was force fed his sister in a broth served to him by a group of WW2 deserters. In reducing Hannibal’s nature to a trauma response, Hannibal Lecter becomes no more complex than any other antagonist across Harris’s novels, with Red Dragon’s Francis Dolarhyde, Silence’s Jame Gumb, and the Verger siblings from H all stemming from similar traumas. However, the show’s grasp on the character and his enigmatic appeal shines through in its own interpretation of Rising’s events The show’s third season finds Will Graham travelling to Lecter’s home country of Lithuania to discover the events surrounding his sister’s death. He meets a Lecter family attendant named Chiyo watching over an emaciated man imprisoned below the Lecter estate. Lecter has told Chiyo that this emaciated man killed and ate Lecter’s sister Mischa. This prisoner has been left in the Chiyo’s hands after she wouldn’t let Hannibal kill him to avenge his sister’s death. However, it comes to light that this is very likely a ploy on Lecter’s part, an experiment to see if Chiyo will herself kill the prisoner eventually. It’s also heavily implied that the man below the castle is in fact innocent, with Hannibal instead having eaten his own sister. This reversal of events is summed up by a questioning Bedelia in conversation with Lecter. BEDELIA: How did your sister taste? We are left without an answer to this question, nor any clarity surrounding the hows and whys of this gruesome cannibalisation. Hannibal instead tackles Rising’s premise in a way which leaves more questions than answers, therefore keeping the central character’s mystique intact in ways which stand opposed to Harris’s butchering of the character’s inexplicable nature. NBC’s Hannibal exists as a stellar approach to adaptation which more series and films could do well to assimilate. Through a clear understanding of the series’s central character, Bryan Fuller crafted essential television which searched even Harris’s more negatively received novels for elements to revise and improve on for the screen audience. In respecting Harris’s source material while also working to improve upon more problematic elements of Harris’s later works, Hannibal presents a razor sharp interpretation of its source material, creating an essential take on the Lecter mythos which transcends all which came before.
Kane Geary O’ Keeffe
