I had some extensive thoughts about Hannibal tonight while I was driving to work in the car, but I have very limited time to barf them out, so forgive grammar, spelling and general nonsense–but this is going to happen when it comes to Hannibal in general.
So there are two entertainments that will get me to put everything else aside to watch: drag queens and serial killers. There are very few shows highlighting drag queens, so that’s, you know, reduced to one, but with serial killers, there are tens of shows out there so I can afford to be pretty choosy.
The mother of all serial killers, though, is the dandy Hannibal Lecter. Now, we all agree that the definitive man on the scene for Lecter is Anthony Hopkins, but I’ll be honest, I’m looking forward to Mads’s interpretation. Not to mention my legendary (okay it’s a legend in my mind) love of Hugh Dancy, who promises to be interesting in this role. Bryan Fuller has proven to be an interesting writer/show runner, and Laurence Fishburne, yum. It has all of the elements of awesome entertainment and yet…I worry.
I don’t worry for me. I mean, this is Hannibal like momma used to make, all to my personal tastes. What I worry about is its longevity. See, for me, the seduction of criminal profile Will Graham by Hannibal Lecter is, you know, why I’m here. How male on male seduction even with the promise of gore goes over with the midwest reminds me of the second installment of the “A Nightmare on Elm Street” series.
See, it was kinda gay. I don’t mean that in a slang sort of way, I mean, it was overtly homoerotic (though at the time, studio executives apparently missed that.)
But really…
…it was very…
…subtle.
Right. So.
Hannibal. Right. Okay, looking forward to it. Maybe I’ll even attempt to recap. And hopefully it’ll be awesome and will get all renewed and stuff because I could really live with Mads & Hugh flirting weekly over someone’s liver with fava beans and Chianti.
I totally hope you do recaps. You need to do recaps. Also, thanks for drawing the parallel between this and Nightmare II… I’d never seen that series til you got me to watch, and I remember watching this one and just being in awe of the homoerotic (sub)text that wasn’t very subtextual at all. I think Hannibal is already playing to that a bit, but I think it can get away with it because the straight people in the Midwest who don’t like it will chalk it up to another way the show creeps them out. HomoPHOBIA, right? So I’ve got my fingers crossed it works out, cause I’m getting superexcited about Le Chiffre seducing Prince Charmant (even if in a non-sexual way, cause you know it’ll have really sensual undertones, overtones, and uhh regular tones)..
That was part of the theoretical thrill/fear in Nightmare 2 was that the target audience was teen boys who might have some visceral fear of their sexuality being threatened. However, the real problem with Nightmare 2, for me, was that they went straight up (so to speak) slasher (so to speak) and didn’t carry over Freddy’s charm that set him apart from Jason and Michael who said fuckall and didn’t seem nearly as excited about the killings as Freddy did.
What brought to mind Nightmare 2 was the predator/prey aspect and the way that, on some levels, the studio’s takeaway from Nightmare 2 wasn’t that humorless Freddy was disappointing but that the audience prefers a male predator/female victim trope when it comes to horror.
Of course, Will Graham is hardly a defenseless chesty teenager, and probably this won’t be as simple as that, but I’m interested in how it will play out and what the reception will be decades later.
Yeah, I get what you’re saying. I just think at this point…with a majority of people polling as A-OK with the gay…we may be in a place where the creepy is working in the same way with a handsome, vulnerable man as with say…a Jodie Foster. (And since Jodie Foster is gay, this isn’t really changing the formula much. >_>)
I’m really intrigued with the premise anyway and hope the execution will live up to it.
Hannibal is also a serial killer who doesn’t really prey on the weak and vulnerable. He wants the intellectual struggle and the fact that she saw him for what he was but allowed him in to an extent won his respect. He’s not a conventional threat in the slasher film respect and his target audience isn’t teen boys. So my comparison was flawed in the subgenre of serial killers, but I’m not sure about TV audience interest.
But on the bright side, it’s on NBC and right now their ratings are such that a borderline show may get a little more time than it might on a more successful network. Let’s hope Matt Lauer likes it.
LOL yes, let’s get Matt Lauer on board.
Yeah, it doesn’t have to be a direct parallel to be a successful allusion to a similar level of seductive behavior on the part of the villain. The charm of Freddy is, as you said, his glee in the killings. The charm of Hannibal is his urbane approach to choosing victims. If he killed willy-nilly in Freddy’s happy go lucky style, it would be a very different type of program. As it is, I think his slow, methodical MO will lend itself nicely to a weekly program format and keep tension going for the target demo.