There’s a saying in Christian belief that tends to remind me of Hannibal. “In the world, but not of the world”— the idea that one can participate in life and society, but only through exemplifying what’s outlined by religious doctrine— a deeply disconnecting and unsustainable goal. Hannibal is a man who’s sculpted himself with a similar goal state in mind, one deeply informed by his trauma. If he’s in complete control of himself with all the skills he builds, he can gain control over others and his environment in a way that can never be taken away. The aim is to never be vulnerable again. And so he learned medicine and anatomy, had a short career as a surgeon, learned martial arts and likely subjected himself to bodily harm to develop an extreme level of pain tolerance. He mastered his body. He learned psychology and psychiatry, taught himself to read and manipulate people with ease, stole and dosed himself with psychiatric drugs to recover the memories his childhood trauma obscured as a young man and assumed a dehumanizing worldview that walled him off from the openness of connection, empathy, sympathy and typical emotional affectedness. He mastered his mind. His mastery of body and mind let him craft his “person suit”, his suit of armor. Hannibal’s armor is his weapon and his shield, but it’s also his biggest weakness. It blinds and sensitizes him to the possibility and the effects of anything getting past it. It isolates him from the world, himself and the human experience. It’s a voluntary cage.
Hannibal keeps psilocybin tea on hand in his kitchen, perhaps based on his use of recreational drugs in the novels. He allows himself teary openness at the opera. I don’t know if I’d call him an alcoholic, but he has a drinking habit. Drinks with his meals, in the evenings like during appointments with Will, with house guests like Alana and in sessions with Bedelia. Music, drugs and alcohol are all things that stimulate brain chemicals and affect the limbic system, causing “loosened” or more relaxed altered states that can be visibly differentiated from the baseline using brain scans and EEG testing. These are all things that could help loosen his armor to afford him breathers, he probably struggles massively with that by the time we meet him. He’s like an oyster. Others can’t get past his shell, trying ends in bleeding or leaving. But when someone does manage to pry it open, he’s a soft-bodied thing, pale and flinching at the touch, grown too used to living locked safely away. Will’s description of him as “one of those pitiful things sometimes born in hospitals”— an ailing, very premature infant— merely from analyzing his work as the Ripper is staggeringly accurate.
Will has the ability to fully understand and equal him. Both innately because of his “empathy disorder” (which just another example of the classic psychically powered savant trope, let’s be honest) and because of how similar he is to Hannibal in so many ways. His deep insight, his manipulative mastery, his pull to violence and power, his selfish, blasé, flexible morality, the beautiful temptation he sees in brutality— a sadist, a polymath, a strong, classically handsome man and a very lonely one. Hannibal never saw Will only as a rare experiment, a pawn for his plans or a subordinate he could groom into a dark companion. From the beginning, he is fixated on and deeply curious about his empathy, calling it out and complimenting it over and over. Whether he fully realized it in S1 or not, to him, the implication of Will’s empathy was clearly that it could allow him that understanding he so craved, it could allow his psyche and subconscious an intense release of pressure through the vulnerability, personhood and connection he’d constantly and vehemently repressed. Will, in neurological design alone if not in who he is as a person and in Hannibal’s falling in love with him, is the one to possess a proper shucking knife after all this time.
Hannibal’s immaculate stageplay life in Baltimore begins to fall apart from their first meeting. Miriam Lass was the exact same kind of threat as Will on the surface: a promising younger intellect suspicious of what they shouldn’t be, working without the credentials of an official FBI agent at Jack Crawford’s beck and call. Miriam was easily taken off the board before she could call checkmate. Will claimed his pieces as he watched, called checkmate and took his queen. He doesn’t fit his framework. He strains to smooth down Will’s square peg and cram it into the round hole, but even with a severely inflamed brain and disastrous health Will makes it clear that doesn’t work and calls his bluff. Hannibal’s willpower may be formidable, but when every challenge against you fails you tend to get a little too certain there’s no bigger fish. There always is, and by the time it comes around you’ve fallen victim to assumption and atrophy. The ability to enter Troy uninvited is as helplessly impressive as it is terrifying. Hannibal calls both Will and love unpredictable and thus uncontrollable, the antithesis of what he’s always prioritized most.
Not only does Will negate his mental, logistical and situational control, it stands to reason he might test his control over his body. Hannibal has hyperactive cowper’s glands (at least according to bts details shared by Bryan Fuller), a condition that causes heightened genital sensitivity and excess production of pre-seminal fluid. No matter how perfectly he can mask his responses, his body betrays him. It becomes the opposite of what he’s groomed it for, messy, succumbing to base thoughts and cravings, even more open and vulnerable in its show of desire than that of most. In this, his internal state is demonstrated externally— he can only bottle his emotions, desires and human needs up for so long before this pruning of the self skews the balance enough for everything to tip over and spill out. It could certainly be something that feels shameful, inferior, coercive, debasing. Anything natural will feel that way when you’re used to artifice and being supremely out of touch with your body and mind and what they need instead of what you force on them. The Pink Elephant Paradox states that suppressing a thought can make it more frequent and influential instead. Because of the processing functions of the anterior cingulate cortex and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, your brain will “check up” on whether you’re avoiding what you’ve committed to, thus bringing attention back to the thing itself.
Repression only makes its subject more potent, leading it down strange and twisting pathways of pathology and preference. Hannibal clearly finds being the helpless subject of Will’s violent urges appealing to the point of encouraging a man with endless reasons to kill him to contemplate the act and a preferred method of doing so in front of him. He’s constantly eager to rile Will up, visibly titillated by being threatened, held at gunpoint, stripped of the upper hand and all control and agency. Hannibal is a serial killer who sees people in general as lesser and takes pleasure in breaking them and subjecting them to his whims. He controls and micromanages so much. And yet instead of fantasies and preferences ruled by domination and sadism as in most cases of real life serial killers with similar M.O.’s, from what we see he seems drawn being conquered, put in place, to submission and masochism. His dalliances with other sexual interests like Alana and Bedelia are physically satisfying, useful, amusing and paired with dominant, performative elements that match those of his killings and his armored persona. In the end they have no depth, they do not affect him, it’s more of the same. They aren’t fulfilling. They aren’t what he needs deep down in every sense of the word.
His connection to Will and his love for him is the only thing that meets that need. Will has the ultimate power over Hannibal’s own power, power he has come to view as being immutable as gravity. No wonder Hannibal draws him as Zephyrus, Greek god of the winds, forces tied to change, ruin and journeys. No wonder he’s the opium phantom Hannibal can’t forsake, his empathy can grasp his core even without direct awareness or intention to. Will’s subconscious shows him visions of Hannibal in the form of an emaciated beast. It cannot vocalize, only move closer and reach out. Its antlers and hooves are those of herbivorous prey animals like deer or elk, but its features conjure soft pelts skinned to muscle, nails and teeth painfully filed to points. It gorges itself fruitlessly from the shadows, blackened by keeping to them. Will doesn’t “make Hannibal more human”. That’s a starkly misleading misunderstanding that falls for the illusion Hannibal intends for everyone to. The heart of what drives his seeming “inhumanity” is the deeply human presence of unresolved grief, pain and fear within him.
Humanity has always found the most ardent and enduring sources of worship and freedom in the insignificance of one’s will in the face of a force of nature. Our limits and our fallibility have always twisted us into animals of appetite, forever caught between fearing and seeking the deepest bonds that can be formed. “But You, O Lord, know me, You see me, and test my heart towards You!” cries the Prophet Jeremiah to the ambivalent God of the Old Testament. “I let you know me, see me……. Did you believe you could change me the way I’ve changed you?” cries Hannibal to Will, laid bare by his ambivalence.
“You wanted to be seen,” Will responds.
“I already have.”
